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.

Aurora POV:

A dozen men in black suits came through my emergency department like a raid.

Darrel's private security moved as a unit. They yanked the privacy curtains shut across every glass panel, cutting off the waiting room.

One of them, a slab of a man with a shaved head, stepped into my path.

"The chart," he said. "Mr. Stark's instruction. Every page, every copy, and the duplicate book. Then your phone."

"No."

"He wants it in his hand before that woman leaves this building." He put out his palm, flat, the way you do at a stray dog. "Don't make this complicated, ma'am."

And there it was.

Not the woman. Not the bleeding. The paper.

Six hours ago my husband walked in here with his brother's fiancée in his arms and a publicist on speed dial, and the very first thing he did once she was stable was send a man to take the record away from me.

Because Darrel Stark has never in his life been afraid of a story. Stories get killed. He has three people on payroll whose entire job is killing stories, and by morning every outlet in this city would have been told that Ms. Silva slipped on ice outside the arena.

Paper is different.

Paper is a physician's findings, and a time stamp, and a question asked in front of four medical professionals, and his own answer written down underneath it.

He is not burying a rumor. He is burying a document.

And a man who has spent six hours at a hospital and thinks about the document first is not a man in love. He is a man who has been told, by somebody, that a document is the dangerous thing.

Somebody in that family got to him already.

Which meant they were closer to understanding what I was holding than he was.

I stepped back.

He scowled and unclipped the baton off his belt. Behind the counter, Claire, one of our younger nurses, made a small noise and ducked out of sight.

I did not blink.

"Federal law," I said. "Touching a patient's medical record is a federal offense. And the record is already in the system. You can take every piece of paper on this floor and it will still be there Thursday morning. Try it."

The trauma doors opened. Darrel came out, waved the man off, and came at me himself. Behind him the hospital director was sprinting down the corridor in a suit, sweating through the collar.

He bowed his head to Darrel before he turned on me.

"Give him the chart, Aurora. Now."

I let my fingers open. The clipboard slid out of my hands, and I watched the director carry it to Darrel like a retriever.

Take it. It's the top sheet. Name, vitals, arrival time. It says almost nothing.

The carbon copy was folded in the pocket over my hip, and it had the attending's findings, the time stamp, and my husband's signature on it.

He watched the director hand it over and his shoulders came down half an inch.

That is how little he knows. He thinks it's over because he's holding cardboard.

Darrel pulled a leather checkbook and a gold pen out of his jacket and wrote a number fast enough to scratch the paper. He slammed it down on the counter.

"One hundred thousand dollars," he said. "Keep your mouth shut."

The check slid off the laminate and drifted to the floor.

I looked down at it and something pulled at the corner of my mouth that was not a smile.

The doors opened again. They wheeled Jayme out on a transport bed, pale, eyes fluttering. Her gaze went across the whole crowded hallway and landed on me, precisely, like she had been waiting for the angle.

She smirked. Weakly. Deliberately.

I looked at her the way I look at a bag of medical waste.

Darrel turned his back on me, leaned over the bed, and cupped her cheek with one enormous hand, and his shoulders blocked my view entirely.

They pushed her toward the VIP exit and he walked beside her the whole way. At the door he threw one last warning glare over his shoulder at me.

Then he was gone. The Bentley pulled away, and the ER went quiet.

The director wiped his forehead and scurried off.

Claire popped up beside me with her eyes shining.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "Was that Captain Stark? She has to be his soulmate. They must have been going at it so hard to end up in here."

I bent down and picked the check up off the floor and crushed it into a ball.

Then I turned to Claire and lowered my voice into the flat, careful tone we use for bad news.

"I read his chart," I said.

Claire's mouth opened.

"Severe organic erectile dysfunction," I said. "It's documented. He can't perform. The injuries you saw came from illegal oversized mechanical devices, because that's the only way he can do it at all."

Her hands flew up over her mouth. The romance died in her face and disgust took its place. "Ew. Oh my god. Ew."

I patted her shoulder. "Patient confidentiality, Claire. Not a soul."

Claire could not keep a secret if you paid her rent. By morning, Darrel Stark's impotence would be the hottest thing in every break room in this building.

I went into the staff kitchen and fed the crumpled check into the shredder. It whirred and chewed it into confetti.

Then I stripped off my scrubs, put on my coat, and walked out through the corridor toward the parking garage.

Two techs were leaning against the wall by the elevators, talking with their heads together, and I heard it as I passed.

"—no, my cousin's on the transport crew, she said the Stark woman lost the baby—"

"Which Stark woman?"

"The reporter. The pretty one. And I heard the wife did something."

I stopped for half a second.

That is not what I said. That is not remotely what I said.

That is what a rumor does. You put a thing into a hospital and it comes back out with a different face on it, and this one had my name stitched into the side.

I could have gone back and corrected it.

I looked at the elevator, and I thought about a man in a trauma room saying yes into a chart, and I decided that I did not care.

I kept walking.

The doors slid shut. The freezing lake wind hit me on the street, and for the first time in seven years, I could breathe.

Aurora POV:

The penthouse lights came up on their sensors when I opened the door, throwing cold white light across forty feet of marble.

I kicked off my heels. The rug was thick and warm and the apartment still felt like an empty rink.

I walked past the portrait in the foyer without looking at it. Half a million dollars of custom oil paint, the two of us during his first Cup run, my hand on his arm and my face doing exactly what the publicist had told me to do with it.

In the study I pulled the hockey encyclopedia forward off the shelf, and a keypad lit up behind it. I punched in the sequence and the safe door clicked.

I ignored the velvet boxes. Diamonds, emeralds cut to match the team colors. I reached past all of it to the very back and pulled out a yellowed manila envelope.

Prenuptial and Fixed-Term Marriage Agreement. Duration: Seven Years.

I flipped to the last page and put my thumb on the signature at the bottom. Not Darrel's.

Baron Stark III. His father. The man who built the franchise, and the man who brokered this marriage two months before he died.

Darrel had signed the front page in a hotel lobby without reading a word of it, because his father told him to, and because he had never in his life believed that a piece of paper could cost him anything.

I copied it on the printer in the corner, stapled the pages, and set the stack in the exact center of his desk.

The keypad at the front door beeped. Heavy footsteps came across the marble.

Darrel came into the living room yanking his tie loose. The hospital's VIP candles were all over his suit, that cloying vanilla, cut with sterile alcohol.

He saw the light in the study and came in.

"You left your shift early," he said.

I pushed the stapled contract across the desk until it stopped at his fingertips.

He glanced at the cover page and rolled his eyes.

"Another trust fund amendment?" He laughed, put both hands on the desk, and leaned over me. "That performance in the ER was a negotiating tactic. You want more money."

I looked up at him.

"I want a divorce," I said. "The contract expires in three days."

He went still. Half a second, maybe less. Then he threw his head back and laughed at the ceiling.

"You're pathetic. This is getting old, Aurora."

He backhanded the stack off the desk. The pages went up and came down all over the rug like snow.

He never opened it. Seven years, and he has never once opened it.

"I don't have time for your games," he said, and turned to go.

Two steps, and her ringtone went off in his pocket. He had given her a custom one.

He picked up, and his voice dropped into something soft and sick.

"I'm here, baby. Does it hurt?"

I could hear her through the earpiece. Breathless. Frightened. "Darrel, the doctor said there might be a complication. I'm scared. Please come back."

His face went tight. He spun around, already moving.

And at the doorway he stopped and looked back.

Not at me. At the paper on the floor.

Half a second. His hand went to his cufflink and twisted it, once.

Then he grabbed his keys off the side table and was gone, and the front door slammed hard enough to echo off the ceiling.

I sat in the leather chair and listened to the sound die.

Then I got down on the rug and found the page I wanted. The signature page.

Baron Stark III, in fountain pen, in that old man's hard slanted hand.

I sat on the floor of my husband's study holding it, and I said a few flat words for a marriage that had never actually existed.

Then I pulled the burner out of the lining of my bag, powered it on, and dialed a number that does not appear in any directory in this country.

It connected on the first ring.

"Start," I said.