Page 12 of The Sin

“She came around yesterday morning,” Roman said, his gaze narrowing on me. “The guard at the kiosk logged the entry and sent her away.”

“What reason did the guard give?” Jessie wasn’t my father. She would have asked.

“That you were under an order of reprimand.”

Humiliation burned through me. “So the guard at the kiosk knows I’m being disciplined by my husband? You couldn’t have made up some other excuse?”

“The Guard reports to the council, Georga. It’s imperative they know exactly why you’re not receiving visitors. Or would you rather they decide I wasn’t fully committed to rehabilitating you at home?”

Of course not. That didn’t make any of this any more palatable. “When were you planning on telling me that Jessie had tried to visit?”

“I wasn’t,” he said honestly. “You’ve been in such a crabby mood, I didn’t think either of us needed additional aggravation. Do you?”

His calm voice, the intensity of his gaze as he watched me—looking for what?—lit the fire I’d been trying to dampen.

“Jeez, I wonder why I’m in such a crabby mood,” I muttered sarcastically.

“Georga, I’m trying to do—”

“No!” My fork landed on my plate with a clang as I dropped it and stood, so abruptly, my chair rocked over. I caught it, my fingers gripping the back so tightly, my knuckles whitened. “I have just learned that my entire world is a lie and you decide to placate my crabby mood by keeping more secrets from me?”

Roman stood with me, his fingers pressed to the table. “Your whole world is not a lie. Certain information has been withheld, I agree, but that doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “The Outerlands isn’t a dead, empty wasteland. There are people there, men and women andchildren. Children, Roman! Those men and women aren’t citizens who were removed from society. They’re conceiving children.”

That was the impossibility of it all. The crumbling beneath my feet. The big lie that the Eastern Coalition was founded on.

Roman shoved a hand through his hair. “It isn’t what you think.”

“You have no idea what I think.” I had no idea what I thought. The lie was too big for my thoughts to reach around. Too big for any kind of comprehension.

But I did know this. “Those women are chattel, cattle forbreeding, that’s what you said,” I told him. “Children are being born out there.”

He put a hand up, as if to calm my rising storm. “I promised I would explain everything, and I will.”

I’d forced that promise out of him. I’d refused to leave Sector Five until he swore he’d tell me everything.

I stared at him, stared into his stone-cold eyes, and my heart pinched. Roman had touched me in a way no other man ever had. Not a physical touch, although I didn’t—couldn’t—discount that one kiss that was barely even a kiss, just a brush of his mouth over mine. The kiss was over almost before it began. The devastating affect still shadowed my pulse whenever I thought about it.

But whatever Roman was to me, an indulgent husband, a flutter of butterflies, a man who defied my doubts again and again—he may be all that, but he was still a stranger. He was part of the lie.

I glanced passed him to the room where he kept his secrets under lock and key. “I don’t want your truths.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

I looked at him and said sadly, “I don’t want you to explain anything to me, because I wouldn’t know if I could believe a word of it.”

His features darkened. “I have never lied to you.”

“You have kept truths from me, though,” I said. “Maybe you think there’s a difference, but I don’t. You could answer all my questions without a single lie, and still it wouldn’t necessarily be the truth.”

“That is a harsh judgment.”

Without another word, he left the table, left me standing there, staring at the locked door that kept his secrets.

I heard him move around, then I heard the water running in the bathroom, and I tried to imagine what the rest of my life—our lives—would look like.

I couldn’t.

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