After My Brother Ripped Out My Heart for the Fake Heiress

The day I received my Harvard acceptance letter, my brother Joziah tore apart my future with his own hands—and ripped my beating heart right out of my chest along with it. He claimed Emmeline, the fake wealthy daughter raised in our family, was born with a fragile heart. He accused me of deliberately provoking and hurting her just because my exam scores were three hundred points higher than hers. He transplanted my healthy heart into Emmeline’s chest, fitted me with the cheapest artificial heart money could buy, and abandoned me in the slums of Roxbury. For four long years, I never received the monthly three thousand dollars he had promised me, nor did I ever meet the guardian he’d sworn would look after me. All I endured was endless darkness, brutal beatings, humiliating insults, and overwhelming despair—slowly wasting away, little by little, until I had nothing left. After I died, my soul was trapped, forced to follow him everywhere. I watched him finally come looking for me, only because he needed me gone to make way for Emmeline’s grand celebration banquet. He grabbed my dirty, terrified little son Kylen and demanded he tell him where I was. But Kylen could only cry brokenly and answer, “Mommy’s already been beaten to death.” Joziah refused to believe it. He believed every single lie that fell from Emmeline’s lips, yet he had never once chosen to believe a single truthful word I’d ever said. It was not until the police found my decaying body, until he saw with his own eyes that my cheap artificial heart had long stopped beating, and until the abusers confessed that Emmeline had been the mastermind behind every bit of my suffering—only then did he finally realize that he alone had destroyed his own sister with his own hands.