Page 82 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER TWELVE

T HE GROUND OPENED beneath Sebastian’s feet. One step in the wrong direction, one step closer to her, and he knew he’d fall. Straight back into hell.

He released her hand.

It hurt, everywhere, to know he’d never take her hand again. Never hold it. Never feel the softness of her flawless skin press into his much rougher callused palms.

Because he had to let go.

He had to let her go.

‘Don’t.’ Her grip tightened on his splayed fingers.

He would not close them.

‘Don’t shut me out,’ she said. ‘Don’t… Please. Sebastian…’

Another broken promise.

He’d sworn never again would she beg. But here she begged him. With her big brown eyes. With her fingers holding on tightly to his.

His heart hurt. Its erratic thump was a raging beast inside him.

Because here she was, begging for his love, and he couldn’t give it to her.

He would not. The type of love she spoke of had lived within him once, lived in his core.

Love had been his purpose. And he’d needed it so much that it had destroyed him.

He wasn’t so naive. He felt it again. Now. Love.

But saying it aloud, acknowledging, was different.

And he loved her too much. Too hard.

It was the same and yet different. It was a rush of warmth, of want, of need. And his hands itched to wrap themselves around it, grasp it and not let go. But he knew if he did, he would squeeze too tightly. Crush it, crush her.

He would not crush her.

‘Talk to me,’ she demanded. ‘Scream at me. Tell me this isn’t what we agreed to. This isn’t what either of us wanted. But it has happened. Love. This is love,’ she whispered, and it fell over his skin, draped over his shoulders. It was a heavy thing. A comforting weight.

A lie.

His love was dangerous, and to accept hers… To give her his in return, his love…

It would be a curse.

‘Please, don’t close me out.’

He never should have let her in.

‘This was a mistake, Aurora.’ Bile rose in his throat. ‘I never should have listened to you scream. I never should have come out of the shadows. I never should have shown—’

‘Shown me who you are?’ she interrupted. ‘You never should have shown me the man beneath that mask? You never should have brought me here and shown me the man inside these castle walls is a man who deserves to be loved? You deserve to be cherished, Sebastian. You deserve to be loved, and I love—’

‘Stop,’ he said, but the demand sounded hollow, flimsy.

‘I will not stop,’ she said, her other hand locking around his wrist. ‘We both deserved to be loved. We were made for each other. You were made for me to love you.’

His chest caved in on itself.

If she was meant for him, if he was meant for her, then why did it hurt so much?

Because love was pain.

His love was agony.

And he would not give it to her. All this love inside him. He would not drown her in his feelings, his attachment.

He would not kill her, too.

‘Aurora, release me.’

‘No.’

He had to make her, didn’t he? He had to make her hate him. Run from him and never look back. It was the only way to keep her safe, because now she had named it, the love they both felt, he could not protect her. Life, love, could be ripped away in an instant. It would devastate her as it had him.

It would kill him to lose her love. To lose her to the same hands of fate that had taken Amelia. But better to lose her now than fall deeper.

He moved. Stepped forward into her air. Her scent. So warm, so pure. So innocent . And those deep brown eyes looked up at him.

He had brought her here and locked her inside. Shut her away from the world and made her his prisoner because he thought it was the only way to keep her safe.

But he had not been keeping her safe. He had not been protecting her.

He had been protecting himself.

The world sat in the room behind them, in a great hall, and he had dragged her outside. Closed the doors on the people inside.

If he kept her here, she would always be lonely, because he did not belong with people. He did not belong in great halls.

But she did.

He had to make himself do it. For her. He lifted his hand and cradled her cheek. Stroked the pad of his thumb across her sculpted cheekbone.

‘Sebastian…’

He leaned in until her dark lashes fluttered closed and her lips parted.

It would be so easy to close his eyes, too. To lean in those few last millimetres and claim her kiss. Claim her. Keep her here with him. But he couldn’t. He knew this now.

She deserved everything.

Everything he couldn’t give her.

What kind of life would she have with him? If he put his ring on her finger, what kind of life would his child have?

They deserved to live their life fully. Free. And he’d only shackle them. Keep them on the fringes, on the outside of life. Where he belonged.

But they didn’t.

She didn’t.

He would set her free.

‘I will never love you,’ he breathed, the words between her parted lips.

Her eyes flew open.

‘Sebastian—’

He tightened his fingers, held her face, made her look at him.

‘You think this is love?’ He laced his voice with mockery, but he was only mocking himself. Because he loved her. Needed her like air.

‘It was never love. It could never be love. Not between us. I brought you here to imprison you because of my baby. Never for you. Only the child. You mean nothing to me.’

‘ Liar !’ she spat into his mouth.

He was a liar. It was never all about the baby. It had always been about her. But he would tell a thousand lies to save her from a life with him. He now knew it wouldn’t be a life at all.

Not the life she deserved.

‘I do not love you,’ he said again, each word raw in his throat, his body, his mind, rejecting them as false.

It would be the only truth she knew. The only truth he would give her.

‘All you are to me,’ he said, and his heart raged in protest, ‘is an incubator for my heir.’

She gasped, and he felt the agony in it. But it was nothing compared to the agony she’d experience if he told her his truth. That his love would suffocate her.

She loosened her hold. Released his hand. And he felt the loss of her grip deep in his bones, as if her small, delicate fingers were the only thing holding him on his feet. But he did the same. He dropped his hand from her face. He stepped back. Away from her.

He would not take her with him.

‘It was all a game to you?’ she said, her eyes weeping angry tears. She swiped them away with a stiff wrist. ‘You played me to get the baby?’

‘Yes,’ he said, his body urging him to drop to his knees and beg her forgiveness. To tell her he wasn’t worthy. He was sorry.

But he couldn’t.

‘Was it all a lie?’ she asked.

And the answer in his mouth was instant.

That she was the only real truth he’d ever known.

She was all he wanted.

But instead of telling her that, he took another step away from her, and he knew what waited behind him as he readied himself to tell another lie.

The only lie that would protect her from him .

‘Yes,’ he said.

The hole opened wider behind him.

‘It was all a lie.’ he confessed the lie she needed to hear, and Sebastian took the final step.

He plunged.

Straight into hell.

And he took his love with him.

Aurora trembled. A shudder spread from deep in her abdomen until her whole body throbbed with it. With rage and confusion.

She swiped at her traitorous eyes. But she knew they revealed the truth. That beneath it all, beneath the anger heating her cheeks, it was sadness that overwhelmed her A bone-deep sadness.

It had felt so natural to tell him, to confess her love. It was the next logical step. The natural progression in their relationship. And yet…

She looked at him. Standing so close and yet feeling so far away from her.

She swallowed. Tried to stem the tremble.

He stood before her, as himself, but he was not himself.

He was cold, detached.

He was not the Sebastian she was in love with.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said out loud to herself, but he answered.

‘What have I not made clear, Aurora?’ he asked.

‘What do you not understand?’ His jaw pulsed.

‘I made a mistake. We were doomed from the start. I…we…are too different. It was an error on my part. A fatal mistake to let my guard down in New York. To let you… this happen.’ His neck corded.

He shook his head. ‘I was wrong. We cannot work. And I cannot pretend any longer. I can no longer perform this… show .’

She searched his eyes. Vacant but for the colour of his green-and-amber irises.

And suddenly it clicked.

‘You were the boy in the painting, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘In New York. Divinity. ’

He frowned deeply. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘I see you.’

‘I am standing right here.’

‘No,’ she corrected him. ‘You’re not. This—’ she waved at the entirety of him ‘—is not you.’

‘There is no one here but you and I.’

‘It was only you and I in New York. In your studio. In my bed,’ she told him.

‘In the forest, by the river…’ She waved at the closed doors.

‘On that stage… that was you.’ She pointed at him with trembling hands.

‘This person standing in front of me is nothing more than a shell of the man I love. It is a copy of you. Wearing a mask made to deceive. But I am not deceived.’

‘You deceive yourself, Aurora,’ he said. ‘You do not know me. You only know what I have allowed you to know.’

‘I know you. I know this. These cruel words you’ve said to me, are…

’ She waved at the walls, looking for a way to explain that she knew what he was doing and she wouldn’t accept it.

‘Your words are nothing but a defence. Arrows you’re choosing to fire at me,’ she summarised for him and for herself.

‘But you have missed. They have only nicked the surface. They have only inflicted flesh wounds. I am not scared. I will not run away.’

‘Then you are more naive than I thought.’

‘I am not naive,’ she said. ‘I see you.’

She would not accept this fake Sebastian when the real one, the real Sebastian, was just beneath this cruel exterior of detachment.