My Billionaire Wife Starved Me

Three months after the gnawing ache in my stomach turned chronic, I took a part-time shift as a barback at a downtown lounge. That was where I ran into my wife. Mallory was draped across a velvet booth in the VIP lounge, her long legs crossed, lazily swirling a tumbler of amber bourbon. Her childhood friend, Morgan, sat across from her under the dimmed club lights. "Is three hundred thousand a month really not enough for him?" Mallory asked, taking a measured sip, her brow furrowed in genuine perplexity. Morgan nearly knocked over her glass. "Three hundred grand a month? And he thinks that’s pocket change? What the hell is Connor doing with that kind of money? Is he keeping someone on the side?" The lounge booth fell dead silent. A shadow passed over Mallory’s tailored, aristocratic features. "Last night, he claimed he was short on cash again," Mallory murmured, her voice tight. "So I had another hundred thousand wired to his account. And then this morning? He texts me asking for a divorce. Said I was starving him out." Outside the glass partition, I stood frozen, a tray of polished glasses shaking violently in my hands. A sharp, familiar cramp seized my lower ribs—a white-hot blade of acid that had haunted me for weeks. Blood rushed to my ears, pounding so hard my vision blurred. I couldn't take it anymore. I kicked open the heavy door. Before she could even register the crash of the door hitting the wall, I was across the room. My hand cracked across her cheek with a sickening, hollow pop. "Tell me, Mallory," my voice cracked, raw and shaking with pure fury. "Just how many husbands do you have?" Mallory clutched her burning cheek, her knuckles stark white against her skin. Her eyes welled with stunned, humiliated disbelief, but through clenched teeth, she whispered, "Only you. You’re the only one." The rage in my chest hit a freezing wall. I stared at her, hollowed out. "Then why the hell am I only getting a hundred dollars a month?" 1. After my stomach burned uninterrupted for an entire month, I finally dug into my scraped-clean savings and bought three packs of generic over-the-counter antacids. A week later, the nausea had only worsened, forcing me to swallow my pride and sit in the drafty waiting room of a municipal clinic for an endoscopy. The doctor held the imaging report against the light, his mouth pulled into a grim line. "Chronic atrophic gastritis accompanied by extensive mucosal erosion. If you leave this untreated any longer, you're looking at gastric ulcers, perforation, and eventually malignant neoplasia. You need to be admitted for aggressive treatment immediately." He handed me the itemized estimate. My vision swam. Huddled in the sterile hallway, I snapped a picture of the bill and sent it to Brett, my closest friend since college. "What am I supposed to do, man?" I texted. "I'm in the worst financial shape of my life, and my body is falling apart." Brett’s reply arrived in seconds. "That cold-hearted bitch Mallory. Her own husband is coughing up stomach acid and she doesn't give a damn?" Before I could type back, another message lit up my cracked screen. "Wait, didn't you keep your private insurance plan? Are you an idiot, Connor? File the claim!" I could practically hear his exasperation through the glass. It wasn't that I didn't want to use insurance. It was that I couldn't even afford the upfront co-pay, let alone the diagnostic deductible. With the measly hundred-dollar allowance deposited into my checking account every thirty days, I barely had enough to eat two meals a day, let alone front an inpatient deposit. Mallory was always buried under corporate mergers, red-eye flights, and boardroom politics. She was never home. She had no idea I was wasting away. And so, untreated, a minor digestive ache had festered into open, bleeding erosion. A violent cramp pulled me back from my thoughts. Clutched in my fist were thirty dollars Brett had just sent me through Cash App. I walked down to the discount grocer on the corner and bought a loaf of day-old clearance bread and a carton of milk near its expiration date. Marked down fifty percent. That was the only luxury I could afford. Leaning against the peeling brick exterior of the bodega, I forced down the dry, chalky bread, washing it down with lukewarm milk while my stomach violently rebelled. A bitter, hysterical laugh caught in my throat. Here I was, the legal husband of the CEO of Bishop Enterprises. I lived in a multi-million-dollar architectural penthouse in the city's most exclusive zip code, yet I was timing my grocery runs to buy dented cans and yellow-sticker clearance carbs. After choking down the last bite, I dialed Mallory’s private line. Predictably, it wasn't Mallory who answered. It was Damon. Her executive assistant. The man tasked with managing the household logistics—including my monthly allowance. "Mr. Bishop," Damon answered, his voice smooth, professional, and dripping with thinly veiled contempt. "If my records serve me correctly, this month’s living stipend has already cleared." I squeezed my burning stomach with my free hand, fighting to keep the tremor out of my voice. "My condition took a turn. The doctor says I need to be admitted. I need an emergency draw this month." A brief pause hung on the line, followed by a theatrical, mocking sigh. "Last month you claimed you fainted from low blood sugar, and I went out of my way to approve an extra fifteen dollars for your vitamins. Now you're fabricating an inpatient stomach crisis? Mr. Bishop, Mrs. Bishop’s fortune isn't an open tap. You really ought to learn some restraint." Before I could speak, he hung up. When we got married, Mallory had sat across from me in our sunlit kitchen, her eyes soft, promising she would take care of everything. She’d told me to rest, to let her carry the financial weight, to heal from the trauma of my childhood. Yet all that care amounted to was a hundred-dollar handout every four weeks. A few months back, desperate to stop begging, I took a shift at a neighborhood coffee shop just to earn a few tips. When Mallory found out, she bought the entire building by the end of the week, terminating the owner's lease. "Do I look like a woman who forces her husband to bus tables?" she had confronted me that night, her voice arctic. "Do you have any idea how that reflects on the Bishop name?" She was a titan of industry. A woman worth tens of millions. But she hadn't increased my allowance by a single dime. Brett’s earlier question echoed in my mind: "You can't sit on this. What's the plan?" Truth was, I didn't have one. Maybe, I thought naively, if Mallory saw the official medical documents with her own eyes, she’d remember we were once partners. Maybe she’d finally spare enough to keep me alive. 2. The next morning, I returned to the clinic to consult a gastroenterologist. The specialist gave it to me straight: the lining of my stomach looked like raw meat. Without intensive IV therapy, medication, and clinical nutrition, I was headed straight for a full perforation. On top of that, blood panels confirmed acute malnutrition. I hesitated in the vinyl chair, my fingers nervously fraying the hem of my jacket. "How much would the initial hospitalization and therapy cost out-of-pocket?" The doctor looked up from his chart, startled. "Hospitalization? Son, looking at you, you’re on the verge of collapsing. Doesn't your wife know about this?" I lowered my eyes, finding no words to offer. With a sympathetic sigh, he scribbled on a pad. "Conservatively, with tests, bed rest, and specialized IV infusions... around fifteen hundred to two thousand upfront." I glanced at my phone. After maxing out my low-limit credit card on the diagnostic scans, I had forty-two dollars of credit left to my name. Clutching the medical report, I left the clinic and caught the bus directly to Bishop Tower. I needed to see Mallory face-to-face. I had to show her the cold, hard medical truth. Outside the executive suite on the sixty-second floor, Damon intercepted me like a guard dog. "Mrs. Bishop is in an executive committee meeting. Do you have an appointment, Connor?" I gripped the crinkled diagnosis sheet, feeling the heat rise in my hollow cheeks. "I'm sick, Damon. It's real. Extensive gastric erosion. I need to be admitted. I just need enough to cover the admission fee..." Damon barely glanced at the paper before flicking it back against my chest, letting it flutter toward the plush carpet. "You really don't quit, do you? Now you're forging medical letterheads?" He sneered, loud enough to cut through the quiet hum of the open-plan office. "What's the plan for next month? Faking an organ transplant so you can squeeze another payout from her?" Around us, several junior analysts and secretaries glanced up from their dual monitors, their whispers sharp and carrying. "Isn't he the one who married into the Bishop family?" "Doesn't Mrs. Bishop give him a massive personal allowance every month? Why is he pulling fake hospital stunts?" "He treat her like an ATM, honestly." With every word, I sank deeper into myself, the ground threatening to swallow me whole. Damon stepped around me, smoothly pressing the elevator call button. "Mr. Bishop, let’s not disrupt real business hours. Have a pleasant afternoon." I bent down, retrieved my wrinkled report, and stepped into the descending elevator amidst the murmurs. In the marble lobby on the ground floor, I caught Damon’s voice echoing through the security desk headset via the intercom: "Going forward, don't let that freeloader past the turnstiles." I hurried out the revolving doors into the crisp autumn air, clutching my stomach as a dry, breathless sob escaped my lips. "How am I going to survive this?" Catching my reflection in a shop window, my eyes fell on my wrist. The rose-gold Patek Philippe. Mallory had given it to me for my birthday earlier that year—a limited-edition piece sourced through an international broker. A collector’s dream. Desperation made the decision for me. I hailed a cab to the nearest high-end watch buyer in the luxury district. The dealer took one look at my pale face and frantic eyes and immediately smelled blood. He offered me ten thousand dollars—a tenth of what it was worth. I knew I was being robbed blind. But I was starving, and my stomach was bleeding. I took the wire transfer. For the first time in an entire year, seeing four digits in my mobile banking app made me exhale. I finally had the money to see a specialist. By that evening, however, the gossip pages had already picked up the scent: "Bishop Enterprises Heiress's Husband Seen Pawning Luxury Timepieces." A blurry paparazzi shot showed me pushing the watch box across the velvet counter. Online commenters had a field day, branding me a secret degenerate gambler burning through his wife’s family fortune. My phone vibrated violently. It was Mallory. Her voice was like dry ice. "Are you really that broke, Connor? Desperate enough to pawn my birthday gift?" "Mallory, listen to me—" "No wonder Damon told me you tried shaking him down with fake hospital bills this afternoon," she cut in, cold, exhausted, and deeply disgusted. "If you need money, you ask my office through proper channels. Why do you have to humiliate me with these pathetic lies?" Her disappointment was a physical weight, pressing the air straight out of my lungs. Every explanation I had gathered withered in my throat. All I managed was a hollow, "...Understood." I hung up, staring blankly at the wall, wondering how I was going to schedule my clinic admission for the morning. Then my phone pinged with a banking alert. The ten thousand dollars from the watch—along with the thirty dollars Brett had lent me—had been completely debited out of the account. A text from Damon popped up immediately: "Mrs. Bishop feels you lack basic financial self-control. I have transferred the funds to an escrow sub-account. I will be managing your liquidation on her behalf." 3. By noon the following day, everything of value had vanished from the penthouse. The Italian leather sofa, the smart appliances, the designer audio setup, even the rare fiddle-leaf figs on the balcony. Damon stood in the marble entryway with a tablet, ticking off line items as two uniformed movers loaded the final crate. "Make sure the inventory matches," Damon drawled without looking up. "Otherwise, Mr. Bishop might find a way to pawn the drywall before Mrs. Bishop gets back." I stood barefoot against the cold hardwood, hollow, powerless to stop him. After the heavy door clicked shut, leaving only an echo in the cavernous space, I stared at the blank walls and let out a broken laugh. My phone buzzed with a local gig-economy alert: "Urgent: Barback needed for weekend night shift. Cash pay, $150 per night." If I worked in secret for ten days, I could scrape together enough for the clinical treatment on my own. I took the bus to the bar that afternoon. The floor manager eyed my thin frame and pale face, but seeing how desperately I nodded to every condition, he hired me on the spot. Shift starting in three days. Stepping out onto the pavement, I pulled out my phone to text Brett. My fingers barely typed his name before the world tilted violently on its axis. A wave of blackness rolled over my eyes, the pavement rushed up to meet me, and everything went silent. When I opened my eyes, the smell of bleach and antiseptic hit me. I was in a hospital ward, an IV line taped to the back of my hand. A young nurse noticed me stirring and adjusted the drip rate on a bag of pale yellow fluid. "You passed out cold on the sidewalk from severe hypoglycemic shock and systemic malnutrition. This is high-concentration glucose and amino acids." She shook her head, her eyes brimming with disbelief. "I've worked the ER for five years, and I've never seen an adult with medical insurance starve himself into a coma. Where is your wife? What kind of spouse lets someone get like this?" I tightened my fingers around the thin hospital sheet. "I don't have a wife." Her face softened with pity. "Your health is all you have, sweetheart. Don't punish yourself like this." I nodded numbly. I had spent an entire year thinking that being provided for meant I would at least be fed. When it came time for discharge, I called Mallory three times. Each call rang twice before clicking straight to voicemail. Left with no choice, I had to call Brett again. Within twenty minutes, he covered the discharge bill via wire. "You literally collapsed on the street, and she won't even pick up the damn phone?" Brett raged over the line. "Does she have a heart made of granite? I’m going to her office right now—" "Brett, please," I choked out. "Let me handle it. I've made up my mind about the clinic. I'll talk to her tonight." To my shock, when I unlocked the front door of the barren apartment, Mallory was actually there. She wore an apron over her silk blouse, carrying a steaming dish out of the kitchen. Seeing me walk in, her expression remained guarded, void of warmth. "Why is the fridge completely bare?" she asked, setting the dish down. "Is this how you’ve been living while I’m away?" Before I could form a sentence, an acidic wave surged up my esophagus. I clamped my hand over my mouth, sprinted into the guest bathroom, and fell to my knees, dry-heaving violently over the porcelain bowl until my ribs felt bruised. Footsteps stopped at the threshold. Mallory frowned down at me. "What's wrong with you? Why are you so pale?" She handed me a paper cup of water, her tone laced with mild irritation. "Since when did you become so fragile?" I rinsed the bitter bile from my mouth, leaning my head against the cold tile. "Give me some money, Mallory." The bathroom fell completely silent. Mallory let out a cold, sharp breath. "So this whole theatrics... it's just about money again?" Her eyes hardened. "Those three missed calls this afternoon. Money?" I used the edge of the sink to pull myself to my feet. "Yes." Mallory looked at me as if I were a stranger she had picked up off the street. "You really are incurable. You'd do anything for a payout, wouldn't you?" She tore off her apron, grabbed her designer trench coat, and headed for the foyer. At the door, she paused, her back to me. "I'll have Damon wire you a discretionary sum." The front door slammed, rattling the empty apartment. I dragged my feet to the dining table. She had made glazed short ribs—my favorite thing in the world once upon a time. But just catching the scent of the grease made my stomach twist into painful, violent knots. The next morning, my phone buzzed with an alert from Damon. "Mr. Bishop, greed has a way of ruining everything. These incessant demands are only driving Mrs. Bishop further away. Mrs. Bishop has instructed that if you reach out for unscheduled funds again, next month’s stipend will be cut by half." Below the text was a twenty-five-dollar transfer. I stared at the twenty-five dollars for a long, quiet minute before tapping "Accept". At least it bought me breakfast. Sitting in the empty living room, the quiet felt suffocating. Begging for scraps in a marriage that was supposed to be a sanctuary had finally drained the last drop of dignity out of me. My fingers moved over the screen, typing out the words I should have said months ago: "Since keeping me alive is an inconvenience, let's just get a divorce." 4. That evening, I showed up at the lounge for my first official shift. Dressed in the venue’s black button-down and red tie, I sat in the staff breakroom, chewing on a cold bagel I’d picked up from a deli. The floor manager walked in, holding up his phone, glancing between the screen and my face with narrow eyes. "You know, from the side, you look an awful lot like that guy married to the Bishop heiress. You’re not here on some undercover investigative piece, are you?" I offered a tired smile, chewing slowly. "You've got the wrong guy, man. I'm just looking for hourly work." He studied my worn sneakers, my sunken collarbones, and laughed. "Yeah, fair enough. The husband of Bishop Enterprises wouldn't be wiping down bar tops for minimum wage. Finish eating and get on the floor." The Friday night rush hit fast. Trays piled high with crystal tumblers, mixers, and premium champagne kept me moving constantly. Around eleven, the lead bartender nudged my shoulder. "Connor, take this bottle of Macallan up to VIP Room 8. Don't keep them waiting." I grabbed the tray, carefully navigating the crowded, neon-lit corridor, ducking past stumbling patrons. At the end of the hall, I reached Suite 8. The heavy mahogany door was cracked open an inch. Through the gap, I saw a figure lounging on the emerald leather sofa. Mallory. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the alcohol, her dark silk slip dress catching the ambient glow. She looked breathtaking, effortless, and entirely out of my reach. She tapped her crystal tumbler with a manicured nail, looking at her best friend. "Is three hundred thousand a month really too little for a husband?" Morgan sat bolt upright. "Wait, did I hear that right? Connor blows through three hundred grand a month?" Mallory gave a dismissive shrug, tucking a loose lock behind her ear. "I thought his rough background with his deadbeat father would make him cautious with money. But Damon pulls the monthly statements—he's burning through it at high-end clubs, private concierge suites, every single week." Morgan covered her mouth in shock. "Mallory... could he be funding a sugar baby? I mean, he looks quiet and introverted, but you know what they say about the quiet ones." Mallory set her glass down with a sharp "clink", her gaze darkening. "These past two weeks, it's gotten worse. He started inventing this story about a severe stomach condition, claiming he needs hospitalization just so Damon will approve advance wires. Last night he was groveling to me, crying about being broke. I gave in and had Damon send another hundred thousand." She took a long, burning swallow of her drink. "And then this morning? He sends me a text telling me to go to hell, demanding a divorce because I 'won't take care of him.'" Standing outside the door, every single syllable drove into my temples like a nail. If I hadn't checked my own bank account every single morning, watching that solitary hundred-dollar balance tick down, I might have actually believed her. Three hundred thousand a month? An extra hundred thousand last night? If that money wasn't reaching me, where was it going? The blood in my veins turned to molten fire. The humiliation, the starvation, the weeks of biting down on my lip while my stomach bled—it all collapsed into a tidal wave of blinding rage. I kicked the door open. Mallory froze, the glass halfway to her lips. "Connor? What are you doing here?" Morgan gasped, instinctively stepping in front of her. "Connor, back off!" I was beyond reason. I had survived on dented cans and tap water while she genuinely believed she was subsidizing a playboy prince. I raised the thousand-dollar bottle of scotch and slammed it onto the hardwood floor. Amber liquor and shattered crystal exploded across the carpet, splashing against their designer heels. Neither of them dared to move. I closed the distance in two strides, my palm swinging with everything I had left, cracking violently across Mallory’s cheek. "Tell me," I roared, my vision shaking. "Just how many husbands do you have?" Mallory cupped her cheek, her eyes glistening with shock and pain. Her jaw set, she forced out each word through trembling lips: "Only you." The room went dead. My chest heaved, my throat constricting until I could barely breathe. "Then why the hell am I only getting a hundred dollars a month?"