Page 109 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
Black iron gates, bracketed by headed stone pillars, barred her way. She reached for the gold square in the centre, the key hole empty, and pushed.
Aurora stepped inside. Into an overgrown walled garden of wild flowers.
The trees outside the gates, and the high brick walls covered in ivy, hid this place from the windows of Eachus House.
The gate creaked as she closed it.
A rebellious mist of grief and guilt pressed down on her chest. It urged her to release the ugly truth threatening to consume her whole.
Her flesh goose pimpled. She shivered. How cold had her brother been? How scared had he been before the cold took him?
She’d never outrun it. Not her regret. Not her grief. Aurora’s guilt was hers to carry forever, because she needed forgiveness from the one person who could never give it to her. She raised her face to the sky and closed her eyes. She wouldn’t be worthy of it, even if he’d lived.
What she had done was undeniable. Unforgiveable. For twenty-one years, her silence, her complicity, her fear of standing up to her parents had killed him.
She didn’t want to deny the truth anymore. The roar of it, so thick in her throat it was choking her.
Aurora opened her mouth, and she screamed.
Sebastian Shard watched her.
He stood under the domed roof, inside the walled garden, unseen in the shadows of the colonnade, but he saw her nestled in the wild flowers. He heard her. Not the woman who had been in the auction room, but the creature concealed within.
A creature in pain.
A mask of gold, and the perfect shade of oceanic blue, concealed her face and adorned it with shells and pearls of the sea.
She looked like a mermaid. A siren who’d lost her tail. Stranded on land, with two bare feet, coated in moisture and dirt. Her dress clung to her body like a second skin, and she shimmered.
Her elongated neck strained towards the sky. Towards the gods, begging them to hear her song. Calling to those who created her to collect her from where she stood and take her. But they wouldn’t hear her. They never did. No matter how raw the prayer. How honest the roar.
The gods had forgotten them all.
He should know. He recognised the sound pulsing in his ears. And the sound unlocked the memory he’d buried deep—reminded him of a time long ago when he’d stood all alone in the dark, begging those same gods to take him too.
It was too intimate, too dangerous to listen to the rasp and curl of her voice, because it moved him. Enough that he stepped out from the shadows and into the soft light.
A dozen hidden lampposts discreetly placed in the foliage hugging the walls lit the space as if they were fireflies herding together inside the plants themselves.
He approached her on silent footfall. His leather shoes were cushioned by the vines spreading across the well-worn path of broken stone.
He did not want to get closer, he told himself.
He didn’t want to watch her lips kiss the air.
He did not want to know why she sang to the dark sky.
He wanted her gone. Wanted to be gone from her presence.
But still he moved. Lured in by her siren’s call. Its raw and uncensored melody.
He reached her. No more than two feet of distance between them. And she smelled of the night sky and the promise of a reckoning.
She stopped screaming then. But her breath came in short, ragged bursts. Her bodice pulled in tightly with each breath, pushing against her small breasts, making them strain against the fabric.
Black lashes swept upwards to reveal eyes too dark—too deep. Her eyes flew wide open beneath her mask.‘You!’
‘Me,’ he agreed, owning who he was. The man who had stared at her in the auction room. Coveted her youthful grandeur, which reminded him of someone. Wishing she was that someone else. That his sister could take her place and be there with him. In a room of opulence, her every desire, his wish to grant.
