The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins (Mia and Kyle) novel Chapter 206

Mia's POV

Pain unlike anything I'd ever known tore through my body, a white-hot blade slicing from my spine to my abdomen. The contractions were relentless now, coming one after another without respite, each one stronger than the last. I could feel myself slipping, the edges of my consciousness growing dim.

"Her blood pressure is dropping again—80/40," a nurse called out, her voice tight with tension. "Heart rate 135."

"She's hemorrhaging," Dr. Levine's voice cut through the haze. "Looks like a partial placental abruption. We need to get these babies out now."

A mask was placed over my face, the rush of oxygen cool against my skin. The room swam before my eyes, faces blurring into indistinct shapes as blood loss pulled me closer to unconsciousness.

"Type and cross for four units of packed cells, two units of fresh frozen plasma, and one unit of platelets," Dr. Levine ordered. "And get me an OR. We're doing an emergency C-section."

My body felt foreign to me now—heavy and light simultaneously, as if I were floating while being crushed under an immense weight. Another contraction gripped me, and I heard someone scream. My voice, though it seemed to come from somewhere far away.

"Fetal heart rate for Twin A is dropping—110 and declining," someone announced. "Twin B is showing late decelerations."

"We don't have time to wait for the OR. We're delivering here."

The urgency in the room intensified, bodies moving with practiced efficiency around me. Someone cut away my hospital gown. Cold antiseptic painted across my distended abdomen. The sharp sting of a local anesthetic barely registered against the backdrop of all-consuming pain.

Strange how in this moment of crisis, with my life and the lives of my children hanging by increasingly fragile threads, my thoughts turned to Kyle.

I remembered the first time I saw him. We were fifteen, and he was sprawled on the grass outside school, his long legs stretched out before him, head tilted back to catch the September sun. The light had gilded his profile, caught in his dark hair and transformed it into a crown of midnight and amber. He'd been laughing at something his friend said, the sound carrying across the quad to where I stood, frozen and transfixed.

Even then, he'd seemed to exist in a different world as unreachable to me as the stars. I would position myself in the library so I could see him through the windows during football practice, the fluid power of his movements as he ran making my heart stutter in my chest. I'd hide behind my textbooks, watching him in class, the sharp intelligence in his gray eyes as he answered questions, the elegant strength of his hands as he wrote.

A metallic scent brought me briefly back to the present. Blood. My blood, pooling beneath me on the delivery table, soaking through the sheets faster than they could be changed.

"BP's still dropping. 70/35 now."

"Push another round of fluids and start the transfusion. We can't wait for the full crossmatch. Give O-negative."

The room tilted again, and I was back in memory, watching Kyle stride through the corridors of Branson Industries years later. The boy had become a man—harder, sharper, his edges honed by ambition and something that looked almost like loneliness if you caught it in the right light.

I remembered the careful distance I'd maintained as his secretary. The shock when he'd proposed our arrangement.

"Her uterus is hypotonic—not contracting properly after the first twin's delivery," Dr. Levine's voice penetrated my fading awareness. "Start bimanual compression and give 800 micrograms of misoprostol rectally."

"First baby's out—it's a boy! APGAR 6 at one minute."

A tiny, strangled cry reached my ears, so faint it might have been imaginary. My son.

More memories flooded in, uncontrolled now. Kyle in our shared bed, his body moving over mine with practiced skill. The cool efficiency of our encounters, satisfying in a purely physical sense but leaving an aching hollowness in their wake. The small, stolen moments I'd lived for—Kyle asleep, his face softened in unconsciousness, the hard lines of his mouth relaxed into something almost vulnerable.

"Second twin is presenting transverse. I need to do an internal version."

I felt pressure and movement inside me, but it seemed to be happening to someone else, my body now just a distant vessel I was barely tethered to.

"She's losing too much blood. Uterine atony isn't responding to treatment."

"Start the Bakri balloon and infuse oxytocin directly into the myometrium."

"We may need to consider an emergency hysterectomy if we can't control the bleeding."

Kyle?

No, it couldn't be. Kyle was in surgery.

"Mrs. Branson," Dr. Levine's voice was sharp, urgent, directly above me now. "Mia, I need you to stay with us. Your boys need you to fight. If you give up now, they could lose both their parents today."

Both parents? So Kyle was...

I couldn't complete the thought. The darkness was too close now, too encompassing. I felt myself falling, drifting, floating away from the pain and noise and desperate activity around my body.

"BP dropping further—50/25."

"She's in hypovolemic shock."

"Start chest compressions."

The voices were fading, growing more distant with each labored beat of my heart. But just before consciousness slipped away entirely, I thought I heard it again.

"Mia. Don't leave me."

Was I dreaming?

I tried to answer, to reach toward that voice, but the darkness was complete now, swallowing everything in its path. The last thing I registered was the high-pitched, urgent wail of a monitor—the sound of a flatline.

And then, nothing.