Page 179 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
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 fromhim.
‘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…thishappen.’ 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…thatwas 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.’
