The Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins (Mia and Kyle) novel Chapter 205

Kyle's POV

Pain. Unimaginable pain.

My consciousness came in waves, each one bringing a fresh torrent of agony. The bullet had torn through me like fire, leaving devastation in its wake. I could hear voices around me, urgent and clinical, but they seemed to be coming from underwater, distorted and distant.

"BP dropping again!"

"More blood, now!"

"We're losing him!"

I felt myself slipping. The pain began to recede, replaced by a strange weightlessness that should have alarmed me but instead felt oddly peaceful. Was this what dying felt like?

The operating room faded around me. The harsh lights, the metallic clink of instruments, the desperate commands of the surgical team. All of it dissolved into a soft darkness.

And then, unexpectedly, light.

I was small again. Six years old, terrified, huddled in the corner of a damp warehouse. The ropes had cut into my wrists, leaving them raw and bleeding. I could still feel the ache of hunger, the desperate thirst that had made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.

But I wasn't alone.

A little girl emerged from the shadows, her eyes luminous in the darkness, despite the rope burns on her wrists that matched my own. A quiet strength that radiated from her small frame like heat from a banked fire.

I remembered the softness of her palm as she reached for me, dirt smudged across her knuckles but her touch gentle as butterfly wings. The scent of strawberry candy still clinging to her breath as she leaned close.

"Don't cry," she whispered, her small hand finding mine, fingers interlacing with a certainty that anchored me to the present.

The memory shifted, fragments of our shared past flooding my consciousness. How had I not recognized her? How had I failed to see what had been right in front of me all along?

I remembered the exact moment Mia had walked into my office for her interview. The sunlight from the window caught in her hair, creating a halo of amber and gold around her face. Her scent reached me first—something subtle, like rain-washed jasmine.

And other day, Mia at her desk, the delicate curve of her neck as she bent over her work, the way her teeth would catch her bottom lip when she concentrated. The light from her computer screen casting blue shadows across her collarbone. The slight furrow between her brows that I'd secretly wanted to smooth away with my thumb.

Mia in the kitchen of our shared home, her hair caught up in a messy bun with tendrils escaping to caress her neck. The way her hips would sway almost imperceptibly when she thought I wasn't watching, humming melodies.

Small moments I'd never properly valued, now crystallized with excruciating clarity. The way she would absently tuck her hair behind her ear when nervous, revealing the delicate shell-like curve I had once brushed my lips against, feeling her pulse jump beneath my touch.

I recalled the texture of her skin beneath my fingertips the last time I'd truly touched her. The sensation of her fingers entwined with mine, tentative at first, then gripping with surprising strength. The soft sigh that escaped her lips when I'd enter a room, so subtle I'd pretended not to hear it. The scent of her hair after rain—earthy and fresh, with notes of lavender from her shampoo. The taste of her skin, salt-sweet against my tongue in rare moments of shared passion.

And then the darkness—the night she'd fallen, blood pooling beneath her on those marble stairs. Her pale face as she lost our first babies. The emptiness in her eyes when she'd asked for a divorce.

I'd lost her a thousand times, just as she'd said.

"Mr. Branson? Can you hear me?"

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