Read The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins novel by Artemis Z.Y. Updated 2025 -26 - The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins Chapter 206

The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins Chapter 206

The Edge of Darkness

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.

tion We

“She’s hemorrhaging,” Dr. Levine’s voice cut through the haze. “Looks like a partial placental abruption. need to get these bables 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.. Original content can be found at Find1Novel.net

“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, hist 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.”

The Edge of Darkness.

“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.”

I drifted deeper into memory, reaching further back. Kyle as a boy in that dark warehouse, terrified but trying to hide it. The surprising gentleness of his touch when he’d given me his pendant.

And then forward again, to Kyle bursting through the door at Porter’s penthouse, gun raised, eyes blazing with a fury I’d never witnessed before. Kyle stepping in front of me, his body absorbing the bullet meant for me. Kyle crumpling to the floor, blood spreading across his chest, his eyes finding mine with desperate intensity even as

consciousness fled.

“Why?” I’d asked him once, in the early days of our arrangement. “Why me?”

He’d looked through me rather than at me, his expression distant. “You’re… suitable.”

Not “You’re beautiful” or “You fascinate me” or “I can’t stop thinking about you.” Just “suitable“.

I’d accepted it because I loved him. Had always loved him, from that first moment in the sun–drenched quad, through the years of watching from a distance, through the cold arrangement of our marriage, through the heartbreak and betrayal in that three years.

Why had I fallen in love with this man? This complicated, damaged, brilliant man who could be so harsh and so

The Edge of Darkness

tender in the same breath? Who could ignore me for days but notice instantly If I changed my perfume? Who could look at me without seeing me and then risk his life to save mine?

Was this fate? This tangled web of love and pain

, no matter how hard we tried to pull away from each other, only find circling back to each other despite everything

“Second twin delivered–another boyl APGAR 7,”

Another small cry joined the first, slightly stronger but still worryingly faint. My sons were here, both of them. I wanted desperately to see them, to hold them, but I couldn’t seem to open my eyes. The darkness was too tempting.

“She’s still hemorrhaging. Blood pressure critical at 60/30. We’re losing her.”

“Start vasopressors and push more blood products. We need to perform a B–Lynch suture immediately.”

I was so tired. It would be so easy to let go, to slip into the waiting darkness where there was no pain, no struggle, no complicated love that hurt as much as it healed.

“Mia.” The

Kyle?

“The voice was distant, distorted, as if traveling across a vast divide to reach me.

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 wall of a monitor–the sound of a flatline.

And then, nothing.