20. The Painful Pact #2
“I won’t say anything about your secret. You have my word.” Her voice trembled slightly, betraying the emotion she was trying so hard to contain.
He didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. What words could possibly be adequate for this moment? He simply held her gaze.
“But I need time.” Kate’s jaw tightened, her hands twisting in the shawl. “Time to think. To… to make sense of what you’ve done. And of who you are.”
Jason lowered his gaze to the floor, shame burning through him. “I never wanted you to learn the truth this way.”
“Did you never?” The words were sharp, bitter. “How exactly did you envision me learning it, then? What perfect moment were you waiting for?”
He looked up quickly, meeting her gaze again. He saw the hurt there, so raw and visible it sent a spike of pain through his own chest, through Gina’s chest. He opened his mouth to respond, to explain, to defend himself somehow—
“I did learn it, anyway,” Kate cut him off before he could say anything, her voice rising before she caught herself, forcing it back down, pressing her lips together for a moment.
“And it hurts.” She shook her head sideways lightly.
“I won’t pretend it doesn’t.” Her hand tightened on the shawl. “I trusted you more than anyone, Ja—”
She stopped herself abruptly, closing her eyes for an instant and pressing her lips together again.
“No.” Her eyes condemned him with a cold gaze. “Gina,” she said the name for the first time. Her real name. The sound of it made Jason flinch, but Kate continued, “I trusted you. More than I have ever trusted a soul in this world. And now…”
More tears welled up in her eyes, but refused to fall, as stubborn as she was.
“…now I find that trust broken in ways I can hardly measure.”
The words hung heavy between them, each one a condemnation. Gina felt them settle over her like a shroud. Her own breath stuttered in her chest, but she held Kate’s eyes, refusing to look away even though it hurt to see the pain she’d caused.
“I never meant to hurt you,” she said quietly in her own feminine voice, the words inadequate but true.
“But you did.” Kate’s voice broke on the last word, and she looked away quickly.
The fire crackled loudly in the silence that followed. The tension in the room was so taut it felt as though even the walls were holding their breath, waiting to see what would break first.
Or who.
Kate turned away completely now, looking into the flames instead of at him—at her—at whatever Jason was supposed to be now. Her profile was illuminated by the golden light, beautiful and terrible in its grief.
“Here is what I propose,” she said after a long moment, her tone steadier now.
This was the voice of the woman who commanded ships and men and fortune, who negotiated contracts and faced down dismissive partners.
“We continue as we were. To the world, we remain husband and wife. The masquerade holds. That is the pact I offer you.”
She inhaled deeply before saying more.
“But between us… intimacy ends. Whatever passed in private, whatever… warmth, whatever… touches—”
She paused, adjusted the shawl over her shoulders, and slowly took another breath.
“—it is over.”
The impact of those words was instantaneous and devastating.
It wasn’t just rejection. It wasn’t just the pain of betrayal. It was what Kate was rejecting.
Gina felt something inside her chest cave in completely, a hollowing out that left her gasping.
The hope she’d been clinging to, fragile and foolish and held aloft like a flag in a hurricane, finally tore free and scattered into nothing.
That tiny, desperate hope that maybe, maybe , when Kate learned the truth, she might… that she could possibly…
But no. Kate had drawn a line, and the message behind her words was unmistakable:
I won’t be with a woman. This is wrong. You are wrong.
Gina’s breath left her in a shuddering exhale.
Her lips parted, trembling, then pressed shut as shame flooded through her, hot and toxic.
She felt dirty suddenly. Disgusting. The very fact of her womanhood, the body she’d been born into, the desires she’d harbored—all of it was wrong, repulsive, something to be rejected and pushed away.
Kate didn’t want her . Didn’t want Gina. Would never want a woman touching her that way, kissing her that way, loving her that way.
Her shoulders sagged, her entire frame collapsing inward.
The masculine bearing she always maintained dissolved completely, leaving only Gina, small, ashamed, and completely exposed.
Her hand pressed against her chest, fingers clutching desperately at the shirt fabric as if trying to reach the source of the pain, to somehow ease the crushing weight inside.
The movement gaped the shirt open, making the binding clearly visible beneath, but she was beyond caring about all that now.
What was the point? Kate had seen the truth, and the truth was unacceptable. Unlovable. Wrong.
She wanted to disappear, to sink into the floor and cease to exist. Because existing as she was—as a woman who desired another woman—had just been deemed impossible by the one person whose acceptance she craved more than breath itself.
She remained like that for a moment, her hand still pressed against her chest, feeling her own heart pound against her fingers as if it wanted to escape. The silence between them weighed as heavily as words.
She closed her eyes then.
“I need… I need to know…,” she said then, not because she expected something good, but precisely because she didn’t.
Still, she needed to hear it, needed to hear it from Kate’s mouth, like a sick person who needs confirmation of their illness. Something masochistic, even.
Kate didn’t turn away, didn’t say anything. She simply waited, unaware of the emotional breakdown of the person behind her.
“Not what you feel for Jason, for the man I created.” She swallowed hard, as a river of tears freely streamed down her cheeks. “What do you feel for me? …for Gina? …for the woman underneath it all?”
And even as she asked, she already knew the answer.
She could see it in Kate’s rigid posture, in the way she adjusted her shawl as if protecting herself from contamination.
But a terrible part of Gina needed to hear it out loud, needed the definitive confirmation that she was as repulsive as she felt.
Kate felt her entire body going rigid. Her jaw clenched, muscles working beneath her pale skin. She turned to Gina at last, and her eyes were fierce and pained and burning with something that might have been anger or confusion or grief or all three at once. Or even more than that.
The question had struck too deep indeed, exposing something she wasn’t ready to examine at all.
“That…” Kate struggled with the words, unable to unravel the coil of emotions inside her. “That is a question I cannot presently answer,” she paused to take a breath, “I don’t quite know how I feel about you being—” the word caught in her throat. She swallowed dryly then, “…a woman.”
Her shoulders slumped the moment the word left her mouth, as though saying it aloud had drained every last bit of strength from her body. She looked away, blinking furiously. Tears glinted in the firelight, clinging to her lashes before finally spilling over to trace slow paths down her cheeks.
Gina did not move toward Kate. Did not reach out, did not argue, did not try to defend or explain.
She only stood there, frozen in place, shirt half-unbuttoned and revealing the binding beneath, hands hanging slack at her sides.
She carried the ache of what had just been spoken like a stone in her chest, heavy and immovable. Or, rather, what really wasn’t said.
The fire popped sharply, sending up a shower of sparks, as if the flames had their own remark on the matter. The two of them remained there in the aftermath, bound by a pact neither wanted, bound also by a secret neither could break now.
“Do you even understand what ruin this brings to us both?” asked Kate at last.
Gina’s head lifted slightly, eyes glistening a lot now. “I do,” she whispered. “And I would give my life before I let harm come to you.”
Kate flinched, visibly, not out of fear exactly, but maybe from the sheer intensity of the vow. For a heartbeat, they stared intently into each other’s eyes, the fire’s insistent hiss and their unsteady breathing the only proof that time had not stopped altogether.
Then Kate moved. She crossed to the door with her usual stride. And Gina stepped aside immediately, pressing herself back against the wall to give her space. She watched Kate’s hand reach for the handle, watched her fingers close tight around the brass.
But she froze there, her hand on the handle, her body angled away from her.
Gina waited, barely breathing, not missing a single gesture, a single shift of Kate’s shoulders.
Kate refused to look at her though.
“I’ll return to London tomorrow,” her voice was flat, emotionless. “You can finish here alone.”
For a moment Gina couldn’t process what she’d said, couldn’t believe she meant it. Then understanding crashed over her, and she had to fight for control, had to force herself not to reach for her, not to beg her to stay.
“Vikram can accompany you,” she said instead, “so you don’t have to travel back alone—”
“No,” Kate interrupted, her tone sharp. Still she wouldn’t look at her. “I’m looking forward to traveling alone. I certainly need the solitude. For the sake of us both.”
She pulled the door open and stepped through without a backward glance.
Gina moved as if to follow her but no, she just stood there, one hand pressed against the wall for support, watching her disappear into the darkened corridor.
Kate vanished from sight.
But the door remained open, a rectangle of dim light from Gina’s chamber spilling out.
Gina stared at that empty space for a long moment, unable to move.
Then, slowly, she reached out and pushed the door closed.
The soft click of the lock echoed in the chamber once more as Gina turned the key, sealing the door again after Kate’s departure. For a heartbeat, the room felt still, as though the very air had grown heavy with absence. And with a slow exhale, she let herself collapse to the floor.
Hands curled over her chest, clutching at the place where the ache was deepest, while a tremor ran through her. Tears came unbidden now, blurring the firelight into streaks of warmth and sorrow. She let the pain wash over her, untamed, unapologetic.
In that moment, Gina felt a hurt she had never known before, rawer than any insult, any societal rejection, any battle lost in the relentless fight to be recognized for her skill, her strength, her very existence.
Alone and rejected.
It wasn’t the world that cut deepest. It wasn’t the whispers of society that stung.
It was Kate. The woman whose presence had become a necessity, whose trust and acceptance she had craved more fiercely than any victory, had withheld herself.
Even in silence, even in agreeing to preserve her secret, Kate’s rejection reverberated through every fiber of her being.
For the first time, all the struggles, the disguises, the battles to claim space in a world that refused to see her for who she was, none of it mattered. What mattered was Kate’s acceptance, and the denial of it burned hotter than any affront the outside world could deliver.
Gina pressed her face to the floor, letting the tears soak into the carpet beneath her.
Every whispered hope, every longing, every dream she had allowed herself in fleeting moments with Kate now felt suspended in unbearable tension.
This was no victory. This was a defeat unlike any she had ever known.
And in the quiet of her chamber, with the firelight flickering against the walls, she felt the full weight of it, utterly human, utterly exposed, and achingly, painfully alone and dismissed.