Thirteen.

Thirteen has always been an unlucky number. 

Judas was the thirteenth at the last supper, the one who betrayed Christ. 

The Templars were massacred on Friday thirteenth. 

A year with thirteen moons means disturbance. 

Perhaps most importantly, psychologists say the average person at any one time is keeping thirteen secrets. 

Thirteen. 

Thirteen secrets they have never told another soul. 

Thirteen secrets that eat them up from the inside day after day, hour after hour. 

Thirteen secrets that threaten the very life that they knew to be true. 

Thirteen secrets that will inevitably come to light.

Thirteen is a feminine number, and women can be trouble, women can be unlucky. Especially women like Regina Capone. They didn’t come much more unlucky than her. 

Regina was no exception. In fact, she proved the rule. 

For as long as she could remember she had lived a life riddled with secrets, had lived every second fuelled with fear that one day everything would come to the surface. She wasn’t the same person she had always been. She wasn’t even close, and she was okay with that. In her twenty-nine years she had known nothing but heartache, struggle, and doubt. She had done things that she wasn’t proud of, buried those things in places she cared to forget, and that was okay. She knew who she was and made no attempt to hide it. 

It had been thirteen years to the day since her biggest secret had been conceived, designed, and executed.

For thirteen years she had thought of little else. 

For thirteen years she had denied herself the truth and in doing so denied those around her to truly know her.

For thirteen years she had locked away that part of herself, tried to live her life whilst it ate away at her, consuming her piece by piece until she couldn’t take it anymore.

Until now. 

Regina’s unravelling had started when she met him. Theo. He was everything she had never known she had been looking for. He was everything that she wasn’t. Regina by her own design was loud and commanding and dominant. Theo was gentle and sensitive and understanding. He completed her in ways she never knew possible. She had tried her hardest not to let him in, to deny herself of him as she denied herself of everything else in her attempt to run from who she was, to punish herself for what she had done, what she had given up. From the moment she met him she knew he meant trouble for the person she pretended to be. He had a way of seeing through her, of making her see herself. Yet she let him in all the same.

When they had first met she had been wary of him for this very reason. He had fallen for her the moment he had set his eyes on her. She had a way of commanding a room, making herself the focus of everyone's minds and thoughts like a siren to a sailor, drawing them in until she could manipulate them into not asking too many questions about her. Theo didn’t buy it for a second. He had seen it all before. It was all an act and Theo knew it, he had seen through it from the first moment because it was everything he had ever wanted to be. He had secrets too, ones he had never told another soul, not until he had met her. 

They had been thrown together on the grounds of their work. Both Regina and Theo worked for powerful players in the monopoly of their own small towns. They were pawns as much as they wanted to be the King and Queen of their own story. Their work had taken them to a busy setting and Regina, predictably, had commanded the room whilst Theo stood in the corner and watched her just like everyone else. Only he had been watching her for a different reason. Where everyone saw the light in her smile, he saw the darkness hidden in it. Where everyone saw the glint in her eyes, he saw the dullness behind them. Where everyone had been hypnotised by her curves, her command, her laughter, Theo had seen the loneliness, the mask, the tears. 

After the party was done Theo had sought her out at the bar. He had kept his distance to start with, knowing she would not respond if he asked her outright. He had watched as she flirted, as she told the woman behind the bar a very eloquent story, as she had finished several drinks in an attempt to cover how scared she was, to hide the secrets she kept. She fascinated Theo with every fibre of her being. He found himself questioning whether she had indeed hypnotised her as she did everyone else, only with him it was the hypnosis of truth and not the disguise she used to pull people in. He kept his distance until the bar was almost entirely empty and he watched her silently sob into the bottom of her drink. Only then had he approached her, introduced himself, patiently waited as she had reapplied the cloak of her character, and grinned at him as she introduced herself back, holding out her perfect hand and speaking with that characteristic accent. He had accepted her offer to join him, let her flirt. 

He was handsome and he was kind-hearted. Regina let him in, let him laugh at her stories and she giggled at his own in return, marvelled that he had grown up close to where she had, lightly touched his arm when he had told her about his father deserting him. They had bonded late into the night and she had found herself letting him in as she had never let anyone in. 

It had never meant to happen. Neither of them had planned it. It was organic, magnetic, necessary. 

Somehow they had found their way to her hotel room and had ordered champagne and strawberries as she found herself telling him about her childhood. She had never known her parents, not really, and had grown up living as close to ‘on the streets’ as she could get. She had known poverty. Her upbringing had been rough and she had never made good choices, had got involved in the wrong things, had dated the wrong people. As it turned out the wrong person had been the one to change her life forever. She had been sixteen years old and it had been thirteen years ago. That was when her life had changed, when she had made a decision that she would carry for the rest of her life, used it to escape that life, and build a new one for herself. She had taken on a new persona, escaped who she used to be, left that secret, and everything it meant far behind, had never told anyone. Not a soul. 

Yet, after thirteen years, here she found herself wanting to tell Theo everything. They had known each other for a few hours and already she felt like she knew everything about him. He hadn’t held back on the stories of his own troubled past, on the way he had raised his sister when his mother had died, how his father had abandoned the family. It was all the truth, she could see it in the pain in his eyes. He was perhaps the first and only truly honest person she had ever met. 

It was infectious and she was scared as hell. 

They had spent the night in her hotel room. He had woken first, showered, and ordered room service for breakfast. The smell of it filled her nostrils and she opened her eyes, blinking blearily as she tried to make sense of the night she had spent with him. She had never been this sure about anything. She had let him in in ways she had never thought possible, ways she had never let anyone else. She tentatively dressed and took a seat opposite him as they shared breakfast. He talked about work and the friends he had back home. It was natural, inviting, and Regina felt her guard drop second by second. She was more sober than she had ever been in more ways than one. He seemed to know how much she was struggling with revealing the parts of herself she kept locked away. He set down his coffee and simply sat in front of her, his brown eyes patiently set on her own bright green, waiting. He had a demeanour about him that screamed reassurance and acceptance. Regina had never met a man like him. She had never met anyone like him. 

Was it time to release her burden?

Here he was right in front of her and she didn’t know how much more she could deny the urges inside her, the words knocking at the door she had locked them behind, forcing their way through. She wanted to tell him everything, felt it welling up inside her, and threatening to burst free. 

Thirteen years she had carried this burden and he was going to unravel everything in thirteen minutes.

Regina knew this was why she never let people in. This secret was her own, her deepest, her darkest. She had plenty more secrets, at least a dozen, that she would rather people found out than this. They could find out about the ways in which she had made money, the people she had cheated, the times she had spent behind bars. She would rather they knew about those than this.

“The name,” Theo prompted as Regina seemed to be struggling to find the words. “The name tattooed on your hip, the one beside the scar.” His voice was soft as he looked at her, giving her space to run if she wanted. “Donatea. Who is she?” 

Regina couldn’t run anymore. For thirteen years she had denied the truth, had hidden her guilt and swallowed it, hidden it behind a brick wall of flirtation and false confidence, all to hide her biggest regret. All the years of her empty heart, of the remorse for what she had done when she had been only a kid herself, of the hollow lullabies she had sung into the darkness at night when she couldn’t sleep, all the times she had looked for her in the faces of kids in the street, wondered if she was out there somewhere asking for her mother, wondering why she had been abandoned.

“Theo,” Regina said quietly. It was time. She had to let it out, to let it go, to allow herself that courtesy and that freedom. Thirteen years she had carried it. No longer. She took a deep breath. “Can you keep a secret?”