The Unwanted Wife Is A Genius Zillionaire

Aurora POV:

"Clear this entire floor. Now."

The roar came from the VIP doors at the end of the hall, and I knew the voice before I turned around. I had been listening to that voice for seven years.

I was standing at the triage desk with my phone in my hand. The screen showed a calendar reminder I had set three hundred and sixty-two days ago.

Marriage Contract Expiration: 3 Days.

The heavy doors crashed open. Darrel Stark walked into the fluorescent light of a Chicago emergency room with a bleeding woman in his arms.

His game-day suit was rumpled. His tie was gone. The woman's face was buried under his wool peacoat, so all I could see was one bare leg hanging over his forearm and the dark wet stain spreading down her skirt.

The whole department stopped. Nobody moved. That is what fame does to a room.

I looked at his cufflinks instead of his face. Platinum, custom, engraved. I bought them for our third anniversary.

Then a gurney came through the ambulance bay, loaded with a screaming drunk covered in his own blood, and the room started moving again, because a Chicago ER does not stop for a franchise player.

The head nurse looked at me across the chaos. I snapped on gloves and went.

The drunk was crashing. The attending was two beds down with an incoming code. I read the monitor, called out his pressure, and got a line in his arm while he thrashed. A fist came at my face. I ducked and used his own momentum to strap the arm down.

The monitor shrieked. I pushed sedative through the line and watched the lines flatten out into something survivable. His head rolled to the side.

When I looked up, the attending was staring at me. So was the head nurse. They exchanged a look over the top of the bed.

I had seen that look before. It came up maybe twice a year, and it always said the same thing.

That is not how a nurse moves.

I peeled off the bloody gloves, took a fresh triage clipboard, and walked to the far end of the hall.

I stopped two feet from my husband.

"Patient's name and symptoms," I said.

His head snapped up. He knew my eyes above the mask instantly. Something flashed through the ice-blue and it looked a lot like panic. His arms tightened around the woman and pulled her against his chest.

She made a small sound under the coat. A whimper.

My lungs quit working.

I knew that sound. Jayme Silva. Sports reporter for the network that carried his games.

Landon's fiancée. His own brother's fiancée.

"Relationship to patient," I said, because the form has a box and the box has to be filled.

Darrel didn't answer.

Behind him, one of the residents had already picked up a pen and was filling out the intake sheet with the efficiency of a man who watches hockey. He looked up at Darrel, then at the woman in his arms, and wrote a single word in the box.

Spouse.

Nobody corrected him.

I was standing four feet away in scrubs with Stark on my hospital badge, and nobody in that hallway corrected him.

"I need to remove the coat to assess the bleeding," I said, and reached out.

Darrel shoved my hand away hard enough to move me.

"Shut your mouth and get me a private trauma room," he said through his teeth.

My lower back hit the corner of the nurse's station. Pain shot up my spine. It did not compete with anything.

They wheeled her into Trauma One. I followed, because I was still on shift, and I stood at the counter with the clipboard while the attending pulled back the coat.

Her clothes were torn. Her thighs were covered in red marks, the kind that come from hands.

The ultrasound hummed.

"Massive free fluid in the abdomen," the attending said, frowning at the screen. "Ruptured corpus luteum. With this bruising and the pelvic trauma, the usual cause is intense, vigorous sexual intercourse." He looked up. "Has she had rough sex in the last few hours?"

Jayme turned her face into Darrel's arm and sobbed.

Darrel's face went gray. His fingers went to the platinum cufflink and twisted it, once, the way they always did.

"Yes," he said.

The word went into the chart. The chart went into the system. Time-stamped, physician-documented, attending-witnessed.

Seven years, and he had just handed it to me in a room full of medical professionals.

I gripped my pen so hard the tip went through the triage paper.

The head nurse leaned in. "Do you know them?"

I looked at my husband holding his brother's fiancée. "No," I said.

Darrel was already on his phone, snapping orders at his publicist about the helicopter and the private facility. He was going to bury this with a checkbook by sunrise.

Jayme groaned and twisted. Darrel kicked the red biohazard bin across the room.

I walked over, picked up the bin, and set it upright. Then I pulled the critical condition consent form off my clipboard and pushed it flat against his chest.

"Sign."

He glared at me. He hated my face when it had nothing in it. He snatched the pen and scrawled his name so hard the ink bled through to the second page.

I tore off the carbon copy, folded it twice, and put it in my scrub pocket.

Then I turned my back on him and walked out.

The doors clicked shut and the noise cut off behind me. I leaned against the cold wall and took out my phone.

Marriage Contract Expiration: 3 Days.

I pinned the notification to the top of my screen.

Three days. He thought it was a countdown to getting rid of me.

He had never read the thing he signed seven years ago. In three days he was going to find out what was going to fall out of his hands, and there was not going to be a single thing he could do about it.

Sirens came up the drive. I dropped my gloves in the trash and went to the locker room, and I looked at my own face in the mirror for a long moment.

Three days.