Page 152 of Ghost Ribbon

My body had entered a new phase of decline, one that the doctors had warned me about but that I hadn’t fully understood until I was living inside it. My legs were weak.

I made it to the hallway wearing one of Alexei’s shirts. I was halfway to the room when I saw him.

Dimitri.

“I was hoping you’d wake up first.”

“Alexei is… still sleeping.”

“I know.” He pointed at the chair.

The armchair near the window, the one Alexei usually sat in when he was watching me. “Sit down,” Dimitri ordered. “You’re shaking.”

I swallowed and sat.

A bit further from him than the chair suggested. I pulled the chair slightly, angling it so that there was more space between us.

“Marco,” he sighed. “I have a request from you.”

“F… from me?” The stutter always came back when I was nervous.

Dimitri nodded. “Alexei had a compatibility test done. Do you know this?”

“Test for what?”

“For his heart,” he paused. “For your heart transplant.”

I felt like the entire building shifted and came down on me, all at once, my body suddenly shaking as if I was freezing under ice. Dimitri went to the kitchen and came back with a cup of water.

He set it on the table beside me, within reach but not pushed at me. “I take it you didn’t know.”

Tears blurred my vision, the world smearing into wet shapes that made no sense. Everything dissolved into an all-consuming fog of grief that arrived so fast it overrode every other function.

“Wh… but he would die.”

The idea of his heart beating inside my chest, keeping me alive while he lay in the ground, was the kind of thing that would destroy me in a way no illness ever could.

“Yes, he would.” Dimitri sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “My request, as selfish as it is, is for you to stop him. Take the idea out of his head.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “I wish you survive. Rei would be sad without you, but Alexei is…”

Alexei was his cousin. His blood. The person he had grown up beside, fought beside, bled beside.

Dimitri didn’t want to lose him.

“I would never allow him to do that.”

I would rather die a hundred times than let Alexei Morozov give me his heart.

I would rather stop breathing than breathe with his heart inside me.

Dimitri nodded. “I’m glad you think so.”

The relief in his voice was subtle but present. Then he looked toward the bedroom and his eyes narrowed slightly, hearing the noise. “I have to go,” Dimitri said, already moving toward the door. “Take the idea out of his head,” he repeated, pausing at the threshold, turning back to look at me with an expression that was serious and underneath all of it, desperate. “I mean it, Marco. Stop him.”

Then he was gone.

My hands were in my lap, trembling. I heard footsteps coming from the bedroom. Moving through the hallway, getting closer.