Page 61 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

‘Did it?’ he asked, because it had not made him feel better. It had drained him until he’d collapsed on the street and stayed there for a decade. But she was standing, and that intrigued him.

‘It didn’t.’ She shook her head. The stalk of pearls rising from her mask danced. ‘None of it has. Not coming here.’ She reached up behind her mask, her fingers fumbling. ‘Not this stupid mask!’

‘Leave it on,’ he commanded, because he would not give in to the temptation to see her face.

‘ Why ?’ she asked. ‘When you can see straight through it? You know who my parents are, don’t you? You know what they did? What I did?’

Questions he had no right to ask fought to be asked. He did not want to know her. Yet this creature fascinated him. And he couldn’t help it. He asked, ‘What did you do?’

Her nose twitched beneath her mask. ‘I left my brother to die.’

His throat closed. Like he’d left his sister to die, too. Unprotected. Alone.

‘I came here,’ she continued when he didn’t speak.

Couldn’t speak. ‘Hoping, despite my parents’ view of homelessness.

Their ugly view that those who end up alone and on the streets somehow—’ her slender shoulders rose and fell, drawing his attention to her taut collarbone and the hollow in its centre ‘—deserved it. Like my brother.’

‘Your brother?’ he asked. ‘Was homeless?’

She nodded. ‘I thought investing money—their money—would help.’ She scraped perfectly white teeth across her bottom lip.

‘But it’s not enough. It’s too late. My rebellion here, taking a stand against my parents’ views on the world means nothing.

Not for Michael.’ She sucked in air through flaring nostrils. ‘He’s dead.’

‘When did he die?’ Sebastian asked. And it was raw in his throat. Not the question, but the similarity of their fates.

He’d donated the art tonight, and all the proceeds would be going back to the community he’d lived with for a decade. But she was right. It wasn’t enough. Not for the people on the streets. Not for the dead.

‘A year ago,’ she confessed. ‘And I left him there to die, on the streets, because my parents said it had to be that way. That he couldn’t be saved.

That they’d tried. But they hadn’t tried, not really.

They disinherited him. Turned their backs on him.

And so did I.’ Her slender throat convulsed.

‘I… I should have been there for him.’ Her black lashes swept down. Shutting him out. ‘But I wasn’t.’

His stomach dropped.

He hadn’t been there for his sister either.

‘Why not? Why weren’t you there for him?’ he asked, echoing the questions he’d asked himself too many times, over too many years, and always his answers were too weak—too selfish.

Her mouth grappled with what to say next.

‘Why were you not there for your brother?’ he pushed, because he wanted to hear it.

Her justification for her failures. He’d never been able to justify his.

His guilt was his punishment. A punishment he deserved.

And he wanted no parole. No early release.

This was his life sentence. To allow himself nothing but the pain, without reprieve.

‘I wanted to believe them,’ she admitted, and her eyes opened.

‘Believe who?’

‘My parents. I wanted to believe that their tough love—’ she said, the word love in inverted commas ‘—would wake him up, bring him back, the old Michael. But it didn’t. It brought him back in a coffin.’

His throat closed. Amelia never had a coffin. She didn’t have a grave.

‘He’d broken so many promises,’ she continued, ‘and the night my parents put him out on the streets, I didn’t believe him when he said he’d change.

I didn’t believe in him. And I… I…if I’d stood up for him, if I’d sided with him, and he’d broken another promise to my parents, to me…

My parents, they would have…’ She expelled a heavy breath.

‘Your parents would have what?’

‘Taken me off the pedestal that they’d put me on,’ she confessed. ‘They would have kicked it out with both feet and left me on the floor too. And I was scared. I wasn’t brave. I’m not brave. I’m still hiding behind this mask, in this hideous dress.’

‘It isn’t hideous.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No.’ He swallowed thickly. ‘I don’t know who your parents are. I do not know who you are. When I said you didn’t belong here, I meant here, with me. Because I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I’m in no position to help you.’

‘Who did you lose?’ she asked.

He frowned. Was it so obvious?

‘Everyone,’ he confessed. The word was a heavy thing in his mouth. On his tongue.

‘ Everyone ?’ she husked.

He wouldn’t tell her. He would not unload his burden onto her. The horrible thing he’d done. No. Besides, he’d held it close to his chest, kept it to himself, for so long, he didn’t know how to tell it. The fire. The crib. Amelia.

‘It was a long time ago,’ he dismissed, but the words scraped against his throat. ‘Twenty-five years ago. Tonight.’

‘Does it still hurt?’

‘Every day.’

‘How do you survive it?’

‘You don’t,’ he said honestly. ‘You accept it.’

‘Accept it?’ she asked, and he heard the frown in her voice.

‘You live with it until it becomes as much a part of you as the blood in your veins,’ he told her, because her grief was brand new, and his was old.

He knew how to navigate it. Whereas she…

‘But you never forget. You keep your mask on. You armour yourself against your feelings. You never get attached to anyone again, and you never get hurt again.’

‘That’s terrible advice.’ Her mouth turned down at the edges. ‘I don’t want to live like that. No one should have to.’

He shrugged. ‘My advice stands,’ he said. ‘What you do with it is your choice.’

She dropped her gaze to her hands knotted at her middle.

‘My choice?’ she repeated softly. Carefully.

‘I’ve spent my life making the wrong choices.

’ She swallowed, and his gaze locked to the motion.

To the tendons stretching taut in her throat.

‘Choices I didn’t really want to make, choices my parents wanted me to make.

And they made me believe if I made them, they would love me.

But they didn’t. They didn’t love anything but themselves.

They only pretended, called their cold presentation of affection, love, because I made myself the pinnacle of goodness—the golden child they only desired to display for public respectability. ’

A roar built in Sebastian’s chest.

Respectability. It was all the elite cared for in their gated communities, in their sky-high mansions.

But it was all a lie, a cover-up, because the rot was already inside their communities, inside their mansions, in the very wood that held up their pretty homes, and yet they ignored it, until it all fell down.

And she was a damaged product of their selfishness to maintain a falsity.

Like you.

He stepped back. Heard the vines breaking beneath his feet.

He could not help her.

‘Find your shoes and go back inside.’

Her hands dropped to her sides. ‘What if I don’t want to go back inside?’

The mask on his cheeks dug into his cheekbones. ‘It isn’t a choice.’

She stepped closer to him. Too close.

She stopped and lifted her gaze to his. ‘I don’t want to go back inside with them,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to stand in a room full of people who don’t know me, don’t care if I’m hurting.’

‘I don’t care either,’ he told her, because he didn’t care. At least, that’s what he told himself, was convincing himself of. Not for her bare feet, not for her flesh covered in goose bumps. He did not want to carry her back inside to shelter, to warmth.

‘Do you really want to be alone?’ she asked. ‘On the twenty-fifth anniversary of all you have lost?’

His spine stiffened. ‘I do.’

She shook her head. Her high bun of twisted black silk loosened. His fingers itched to release it completely from its knot and watch it tumble to her shoulders. He curled his fingers into fists. ‘Go.’

‘You shouldn’t be alone tonight. And I don’t want to be alone,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never had such a frank discussion with anyone. About anything. But we are talking. Connecting. And I—’ She looked up at him. ‘I don’t want it to end.’

‘Why would I care what you want?’

‘If you really wanted to be alone,’ she countered softly, ‘you would have waited for me to leave without revealing you’d seen me.’

‘But I did see you.’

‘And here we are.’ She inched closer until her scent, her softness, washed over him. ‘Together.’

‘Geography,’ he said dismissively.

‘Kiss me,’ she said, and it snatched the breath from his lungs.

‘Kiss you?’

‘One kiss.’ Her lips parted slowly, revealing the silken muscle in her mouth. ‘And then if you still want to be alone, I’ll leave.’

He didn’t want to kiss her. And to prove it to his body, his brain, his neck dipped. Until the space between their lips became too close. And he said, ‘No.’

‘We don’t even have to take our masks off.’

‘No,’ he said again, but the hard edge to his voice was lost.

‘I want tonight to be more than a painful memory.’ Her breath, warm and sweet, feathered his parted lips. ‘I need it to be… more .’

He pulled away.

‘ Please ,’ she said, and the word, rasped from her lips, punched him in the solar plexus.

The gods hadn’t heard him twenty-five years ago. But if , twenty-five years ago, someone had heard his cries, his plea, the night they’d all died, would he have stood up from his knees and walked out of that alley?

He’d never know. He was too old to change. Too scarred to heal. But she was young. She would know if a connection with a stranger could soothe . Change things for her.

And what was one kiss? There was no harm in giving her that. A little help. A little softness, when her pain was still so new, so raw, and the world beyond tonight offered her nothing but loneliness.

This was not for him, he told himself. It was for her, and for the boy, who had not been given the same kindness.

His hands lifted from his sides, and he pushed the golden edge of his mask upwards with steady fingers. Just enough to reveal his lips.

‘One kiss,’ Sebastian agreed.