Chase was gone… and if I was ever to find his heart again, this was the only way.
I’m coming, Chase. Save a place for me behind those pearly gates. I love you….
KNOCK. KNOCK.
Chapter One
Seven months ago
“Is he okay?” Zodiac shouted, but I couldn’t hear him. Everything in the room had suddenly dulled, replaced with an insistent ringing in my ears.
My chest felt tight, and a pain so excruciating ricocheted through my bones, stopping inside my chest as the muscle that pumped life throughout my body stalled and constricted.
The ground came fast, smashing into my face as I hit it with a sickening thud and everything ceased up. There was no moving. All I could do was grasp at my chest, willing my heart to keep going.
“Cap! Jesus, fuck!” someone shouted to my left. “Archer, get the fuck over here. Something’s wrong with Cap!”
Black dots dotted my vision and my head swam in a sea of pain that was drowning out my ability to think and speak.
Hands pressed into my chest, violently pushing into my sternum in four angry thrusts.
“Cap, stay the fuck with me,” a voice said, but it was muffled and sounded so far away. “Goddamn it! Stay with me.”
“What’s wrong?” another voice asked.
“Call an ambulance! I think he’s having a heart attack.”
Heart attack? Me?
There was no way. I was only thirty-two. I survived two tours overseas, and now I was lying here on the cold ground, life slowly leaking out of me as my heart, that was once so strong, gave out on me for no reason.
I didn’t remember shit after that.
Not the ride in the ambulance. Not the hospital stay. Nothing. I shouldn’t have survived, but someone was looking over me that day, and I was spared, even though my heart was left barely hanging on.
Present day
The doctors said I had a massive heart attack that night, which caused severe scarring to the point I needed a transplant. A TRANSPLANT!
The thought still seemed so surreal to me, just like the four weeks of life they gave me after it happened. I was rushed to the top of our state’s transplant list, but I had little hope. The likelihood of surviving and finding a donor was slim—especially for a guy like me. I had a rare blood type, one that needed to be matched perfectly in order to get a heart.
My club helped me the best they could, keeping my life as dull as possible. The slightest excitement could be that final nail in the coffin, and I already felt six feet under in my head. For three miserable weeks, I sat at home, waiting for the hospital to call me. Sometimes the stress got so bad that the doctors discussed admitting me and putting me in a medically induced coma in hopes that a donor would somehow magically appear, but I lost hope the second I woke up from my heart attack.
Everyone thought I was gonna die. The doctors, my club, even myself. Hope never found me after that. It was just the waiting game—a game I was losing all desire to play. I ended up rushed to the surgical unit after the doctors informed me that they had found a match. I was shocked. Everything inside me felt like it was failing, and I knew I didn’t have much time left. The doctors knew that too. There was no more waiting for me. It was either my body accepted the new heart, or I died.
When my eyes finally opened again, the heart I once knew was no longer inside my chest. A foreign vessel sat in its place. It was still a muscle. It still pumped blood through my body, but it wasn’t mine. How I knew that, I didn’t know.
Sure, the pain and the gigantic wound on my chest, stapled from my sternum down to my stomach, should’ve given it away, but it was the unfamiliar beat—the peculiar way it seemed to be out of rhythm with the rest of my body that clued me in.
The doctors said I got lucky, that some kind of guardian angel must’ve been looking out for me that day because my heart literally died while they were removing it, and I started to code, only to be revived when the new heart was inserted and brought me back to life, likeDr. Frankensteinreviving his monster. The only way to fix my broken heart was to replace it altogether, and that’s exactly what they did, utilizing a perfectly matched organ donor whose healthy heart could replace the poisoned one inside my chest.
The recovery was fucking brutal. The pain I felt as my body tried to adjust to my new organ was indescribable, and I didn’t wish that kind of pain on anyone. All I could do was thank the mysterious donor who gave me my heart, wishing his or her fate wouldn’t have ended in such a tragic way. Their sacrifice saved my life, and I was eternally grateful to them, even though I had no clue who it was that donated it and never would.
All I knew was that I was alive, and because of it, I had a new purpose in my life. Almost dying had opened my eyes differently to the world. All around me I could see the signs of people who were suffering internally, the ones who kept their dark thoughts hidden away from the world, the ones who were ready to just give up. I could see the despair in their eyes, sparking my need to help those who might be suffering from depression, and the people who endured tremendous losses in their lives—losses that brought them to the brink of ending it all.
Suicide was a silent killer—one that often went undetected by most. People never saw the signs before they happened, and always missed the silent cries for help that were only said through sad eyes and unspoken words. I missed that cue when Nathan passed away. He was my brother, a fellow comrade that took the battlefield beside me while on a tour overseas. He always seemed so happy, living behind a fake smile that people actually believed. I sure did. I had no idea that on the inside, he was crying out for help. He lost everything while he was away, and returned to an empty house with no one there to support him. If only I had known, maybe I could have intervened and protected him before he bit that bullet and it ricocheted through his skull. Damn. Thinking about it now still haunts me. The signs were all there… I just missed them.
It’s sad because I see those same signs in Leo. His bitterness and depression were only getting worse the longer he sat in a puddle of his own misery and rage. I wasn’t going to give up on him. I wasn’t going to give up on any of them. It’s why I created my own non-profit called The Guiding Light, something outside the club that I could call my own. As long as it didn’t interfere with the club’s comings and goings, Zodiac didn’t care. In fact, he was the one who encouraged me to follow my dream. He knew, more than anyone, what it was like to sit in a puddle of despair because he festered in his for almost twenty years,until fate brought Tess back into his life. Now he was as happy as can be, newly married to his high school sweetheart, raising a beautiful little girl like she was their own. It’s funny how life sometimes intervenes, deterring our paths so the right people get placed in them. It was the whole point of my non-profit, placing myself in other people’s paths to help them circumvent their grief and pain, hoping they don’t choose that same dark road Nathan chose when he took his life.
