Page 138 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

Shame heated her cheeks. He was willing to change his whole life, the way he’d lived inside these walls, for her and their baby.

It was humbling.

Sebastian’s life had been hard. He’d lived on the fringes of society looking in. All he knew was how to survive. He’d built walls so high around him that they were endless. But life was about more than survival. She’d lived safely inside too high walls, and still she’d been alone, and sheltered from the life she wanted to live now. One without compromise.

But Sebastian had been alone too, living a life no one should live by choice.

Aurora watched him walk away without a backward glance.

And the truth hit her.

She’d let him take her because she didn’t want to be alone.

And he’d locked her inside, because neither did he.

CHAPTER SIX

THE CASTLE WALLShummed with noises Sebastian had forgotten.

Chatter and whispers of the new staff he’d employed floated into his ears. The drag of unopened boxes slid across floors. The shuffle of feet moving in and out of rooms he hadn’t opened in years got louder and louder, until the single definable noises became too loud to distinguish individually.

And the scent ofherlingered in every corridor. In every room that had remained closed and untouched, she’d opened every door, and parted all the curtains, lifted every dust sheet.

For seven days, he’d watched her invade his home and fill it with…life. And it was too bright. Too loud. Too interesting. Because his feet took him closer to the hum.

Closer toher.

He knew why he didn’t command his feet to stop, to turn around and stay away, keep watching her from a distance. It was because of the compulsion to see her, watch her. And because for two days she’d stayed inside a room, far away from her own bedroom, and claimed it. He wanted to know why she’d locked herself in there and what the noises he could not define were coming from.

On silent feet, he approached the oak door. He stopped outside it, listening. But the noise from within was too soft, too gentle for him to hear right now.

As he reached for the handle, another memory hit him. The memory of a younger him with a smaller hand, reaching for a handle, and opening a door to find his mother.

His chest tightened at the recollection of what he’d found.

He had not looked for his mother again.

He’d stayed in the basement with the others.

He swallowed down the memory of the taste, too real now on his tongue, too hot and bitter. He closed his senses to the past infiltrating his present with the lewd sounds his tiny ears should never have heard. Of sights he never should have seen.

The handle he was holding now was tugged free from his grasp.

The door opened.

And she stole the air in his lungs.

Her plum lips parted to reveal perfectly white squared teeth.

‘Sebastian,’ she acknowledged, and her smile was too wide, too innocent, to greet a man who had brought her to his castle and then left her to fend for herself.

And yet she’d chosen to stay.

She’d found her way without him anyway. Claimed her place in a world far away from her own and made herself at home.

Would you have let her go if she’d asked?

No.