Page 60 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

Tonight, she had broken free of their chains and paid an enormous sum to a charity that helped people like her brother. People who didn’t have or weren’t able to go home.

So why didn’t it feel… good ?

Because you’re too late. You can’t save him now.

The applause around her died.

And so too did something inside Aurora.

She clenched her hands into tight fists, the heavy handle of the gold paddle biting into her flesh.

What was the point of any of this? The dress? The shoes?

She never should have come here. Tonight meant nothing.

Not to her brother. Not really to the people on the streets her money would support.

Because this event, the people in this room, her parents, even Aurora herself, were so far removed from what her brother had lived through. What he had died enduring.

Taking a deep, pained breath, she gazed at the flamboyant bodies now being taken into the ballroom. Into a room where they would smile and nod, pleased with themselves for attending an event that would do good for people they would never see, never recognise as human.

In a minute, maybe an hour, they would forget why they had come here. Who tonight should be benefiting. They’d forget the people lining in queues to receive a bundle of fresh underwear and blankets so they could huddle, still cold, under a sky that would show them no mercy when the winter came.

A sky that had showed no mercy to Michael.

Did she really think a donation would make it all better? She was no better than any of them.

Aurora dropped the paddle. She needed out. Out of this room.

Blinded by grief and regret, she pushed herself through the crowd and through the doors, hurried along the wood-lined halls, and down the floating staircase. The bow on her hip, too big and obscene, she realised now, caught the vase standing in the alcove at the head of the staircase.

It fell. Smashed in to a thousand pieces of ceramic green. But on she ran without looking back. They could add it to her bill. She didn’t care.

Her body urged her to go faster, as fast as her heels would allow. At the bottom of the oak stairs, she unhooked the silver straps around her ankles and slipped her heeled sandals free, one at a time.

Barefoot, she ran through the silk-lined corridor until she came to the first door that led outside.

She yanked down the silver handles and pushed open the French doors.

Cool air greeted her flushed skin as she stared up at the starless sky.

She dropped her shoes where she stood on the terrace.

Eachus House was behind her, the grounds sprawled out before her, a perfectly manicured lawn, with trees on either side blocking out the skyline of New York.

And she did the only thing she could. She kept running.

It didn’t matter which way. If she took the stairs leading down to the gardens on the right or the left.

It didn’t matter that shadows lay at the end of the lawn.

It didn’t matter that beyond the shadows were two hundred acres of woodlands, ponds, and landscaped meadows.

It didn’t matter where she went, only that she kept moving. As fast and as far as she could.

The bare soles of her feet tingled from the crush of the damp lawn, but she didn’t stop. Not even when the grass turned to stone beneath her feet. She followed the softly lit path, through the man-made tunnel of tall firs, interlaced with swaying weeping willows, until she reached a dead end.

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.

She cleared her throat. ‘You like to watch?’ she asked, her voice a pained husk of too much air spent from her lungs.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, because he did. It was what he did. His only purpose. To watch, and transcribe what he saw to whatever canvas he had to hand, in whatever medium was closest. And he found no shame in watching her before. Or now.

She gasped. ‘And who gave you permission to look?’ Her eyes left his and scanned the space they shared.

‘Do you not like to be looked at?’

‘No.’ Her gaze locked back on to his. ‘Not the way you look at me.’

He inched closer, pulled by some invisible steel thread. But he resisted. Planted his feet. ‘And how do I look at you?’ he asked, but he knew the answer.

He knew his anger had been misplaced. Illogical. But still, he’d felt it, and she’d known it.

She’d understood his eyes, watching her in the auction room. The determined thrust of her chin, the frivolous wave of her hand as she’d bid on his artwork, had not been complimentary.

His sister would’ve been older than she clearly was.

But his sister would never know the pleasure of waving one’s hand and getting the object of her desire simply because she wanted it.

She would never sit in a ball gown, or dance in a room full of people who would have once walked past her on the street and ignored her hardships. Her suffering!

This woman was not his sister.

Sebastian’s sister was dead.

But this woman was alive . Breathing the same air he breathed.

‘Like you know,’ she whispered.

‘Know what?’

‘That I don’t belong here.’

‘You don’t,’ he agreed. He despised them all, but tonight, he’d despised her most. But he’d been wrong. She wasn’t one of them. The masked elite who felt no pain or empathy. She was hurting.

‘Is it so easy to tell?’ she asked. ‘So easy to see?’

‘It is.’ He swallowed. A mistake, because all he could taste was her.

‘What gave it away?’ She placed her hands on her hips, palms open, and his gaze followed the movement. ‘The dress,’ she concluded. ‘My mother would have hated it, too. She’d never have let me choose it.’

He locked his jaw. He didn’t hate it. It was a perfect choice. He liked it far too much.

‘I wouldn’t be here if she were alive.’ Her hands waved at nothing in particular. ‘I’d still be in the Cotswolds, smiling and nodding at things that did not make me want to smile.’ The muscles in her throat tightened. ‘They made me want to—’

‘Scream?’

‘Yes.’ She flushed from the neck up, and he wanted to see beneath the mask. See the heat meet her cheeks and flood it.

‘I thought screaming would make me feel better.’