Chapter 32 #2
A faint sting prickled across the back of Rayna’s nose and eyes. They weren’t as a result of tears but rather an overwhelming sense of happiness in the memories Dominic spoke of, combed through with nostalgic sadness of a time that would never come back.
It made a lot of sense why he was the way he was.
He was the product of being the eldest child and brother in a tight-knit, affectionate family. Confident and responsible. Persistent and protective. Caring and romantic.
It was sweet, but an odd, crawling sensation thinned her smile.
Likely, Dominic imagined having a similar family himself one day. Am I stopping him from having that?
She erased the thought the second it appeared because it was absurd. She wasn’t stopping him from doing anything. They were just having some fun, and then he’d return to his place in history, and he’d have the family he was meant to. Without her.
Not that she wanted to have a family with him. No, no. Gosh, no. That—that wasn’t it. Rayna couldn’t. Obviously. But…
It was…weird. Thinking about him lying with another woman the way he was with her in just over two months’ time. He wouldn’t remember a single moment of it either.
But she’d remember it all.
Swallowing down what she didn’t want to think about, she shifted against his arm until she was looking up at him again. “Your mum passed away giving birth to Art, didn’t she?”
He nodded. “Yes. I was only two, so I do not remember her. But Father always spoke fondly of her. Though they had more of a friendship than the kind of love he shared with Mother Penny.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Who? Father and Mother Penny? Or do you mean my mother?”
“All of them.”
“I suppose I miss the idea of my mother, but I do not remember her, so it is hard to say.” His tone grew wistful.
“But there is not a day that passes where I do not miss my father or wish I had somehow been able to change the outcome of the accident, maybe stopped him from getting in the carriage altogether.” After a moment, he smiled.
“Mother Penny and my siblings, however, I miss not being able to share this experience with them.”
He moulded the back of her neck in the gentle cushion of his palm.
“I believe they would have enjoyed meeting you. Especially Patricia. She is rather fed up with the way men are allowed to dictate so much in the world. I think she would have liked knowing that in two hundred years’ time that would no longer be the case. ”
“I would have liked meeting them too. Especially Patricia,” Rayna echoed. And she meant it. She meant it with everything in her.
His irises glittered pale and bright before he laid a heavy kiss on her forehead. “What about you, my darling? What other mischief did you get up to with George and Benedict?”
“Too much to tell you all in one night, but you’ve heard a lot of the stories from them already.”
“I would like to hear them from you.”
“Well, like they said, I was a bit bossy. Not in a mean way, but I liked being the leader.” Dominic’s grin spread from ear to ear as she waved a hand around.
“I mean, Benedict cried all the time anyway, and George was happy to follow along, so it’s not as if I forced them to let me decide everything.
They were fine with it, even though now they pretend like I bullied them and got them into trouble all the time.
They always pointed the blame on me anyway. ”
“And did you take the blame?”
“No,” she said impishly, and he laughed. “I mean, yeah, when it was my fault, I owned up to it. But when it was their fault, I used to yell at them for lying. That’s how a lot of our fights normally started. But we never stayed angry at each other for more than a few minutes.
“We never fought at school, though. Everyone knew how Benedict was a cry-baby, but his older brother and sister were already in secondary school, so George and I basically made it our mission to protect him.” She puffed out a humorous sound.
“At one point, I was known in primary school as the girl who punched a year-six boy for bullying Benedict. I think I was in year four, so I would’ve been what? Eight or nine.”
“Bloody woods.” Dominic gaped in disbelief. “I do not think I have ever heard of a little girl punching a boy before, and that of one older than her too. What if he had hit you back?”
“Then I would’ve hit him again.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“I got suspended from school for three days. But I remember Uncle Declan picked us up that day, and he took the three of us for ice cream and told me I did a good job for standing up for my family.”
He shook his head slowly. “So your thuggery was rewarded?”
“Yup. Basically,” she said. “It wasn’t the same in secondary school, though.
They went to an all-boys school, and I ended up going to the all-girls equivalent a year later where I became friends with Kelly.
By that point, the Griffins had already moved to the farmhouse, so we mainly spent holidays together, but we had a lot of fun in that house. With Kelly too.”
“I imagine so.”
In the silence that followed, old shouts and laughter played as a blurred reel through the back of her mind, and an unfocused glaze slipped over Dominic’s gooey stare.
“May I ask you something?” he said, his arms wrapping around her in a loose hug.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Mr Griffin mentioned something in passing a few days back that I cannot stop thinking about.” He paused, his throat bobbing slowly. “Something about your parents.”
All the contentment oozing from Rayna’s muscles evaporated. Gone. All of it. Just like that.
No wave of emotion replaced that happiness. No coldness, or shock, or discomfort. Just a still tightness.
“He seemed to suggest you had lived with them once,” he added, so obviously trying to approach the subject with care. “You never mentioned them, so I had assumed you did not know them. But did you?”
It wasn’t as if she’d expected it to be kept a secret from Dominic—it inevitably came up in conversation eventually. Neither had she expected him to never question her parentage.
But knowing the topic would come up didn’t make it any easier to actually speak of it. It wasn’t exactly an easy subject to talk about to begin with.
Now that he’d broached it, though, she wouldn’t avoid it. She’d tell him the truth.
She nodded. “Yeah. I did know them. Do, actually.”
His lips pinched in confusion, but he waited patiently for her to continue.
“My mum passed away when I was twelve. But my dad’s still alive. He lives in Jahandar with his wife and my half-brothers, Sameer and Timothy. I spoke to them the other day, actually, when you were having a lesson with River and I popped out to the shop.”
It took Dominic a few seconds to piece together her explanation, at which point heavy puzzlement weighed on his features. “I do not understand,” he said. “If you have a relationship with your father and his family, why did Victor adopt you?”
She opened her mouth. And clapped it shut. Then exhaled as she smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile per se. But it helped ease her own discomfort.
“So, uh…” she started. “My parents were married once upon a time. But when I was five, they ended up getting divorced.
“To put it simply, my mum worked as a research scientist at the POTeM lab, and my dad was—is still, actually—a dentist. She wanted to focus on her career, but he wanted to slow down and have more children. It led to a lot of arguments, and eventually, they decided they loved each other but wanted different things in life, so it was better to get divorced.”
Her vision of Dominic’s throat went hazy as she focused on the unpleasant taste of her last sentence washing around her mouth. “I’m not sure I’ve ever believed that, though. I think they were just two people who realised they’d married the wrong person.”
She blinked the cloudiness away. “Anyway, they got divorced, and I lived with my mum and saw my dad every week, and it was fine. They both seemed a lot happier after a while too. Then, after two or three years, my dad started dating his current wife, Isha, and around the same time, V joined the lab.”
“I remember when Benedict told us V was his uncle, George and I were so excited.” She smiled to herself. “He was younger than most of the other scientists—about thirty—so in our minds, he was basically our friend, so the three of us stayed glued to his hips for weeks.
“He never complained, though. Even though he clearly didn’t know what to do with us at first. But we adored him. So when my mum told me she was dating him, I made George and Benedict help me plan a wedding for them. We even presented the plan to Mum and V.”
She chuckled, but, fuck, it hurt.
Thinking about the wedding that should have been but never was gouged deep into old wounds and made them bleed like they’d never healed.
But did that kind of pain ever really heal when the what-ifs never seemed to stop?
Maybe Dominic heard the ache in her voice, because he cupped her jaw in his palm and gently raised her chin like she was made of the finest porcelain.
Sadness and sympathy drooped his eyes and mouth, and he radiated with a tenderness that should have swept reassurance through her veins.
Instead, it knotted a thorned rope around her rib cage, not tight enough to cut, but it was discomforting.
That unease led to a panicked, almost frustrated need to rip the rope to shreds, no matter if it bloodied her hands.
Rayna didn’t like it. The feeling. She wasn’t good at dealing with it.
That was why she avoided talking about it. Moments in her life she didn’t want to relive. Heavy emotions she didn’t want to feel. Not then, not ever again.
Feelings that ran too deep hurt. That’s why she kept most things surface-level and easy—conversations, plans, relationships. No-strings was safer. It was fun. It never hurt. It was better for her.
But Dominic…
Rayna clasped his wrist, needing to get his hand off her, but when she pulled, his hand lifted.
Easily. Too easily.