Chapter 16
Dominic
Two days later, on Wednesday morning, Dominic got to see what the future looked like past the boundary lines the farmhouse sat on when Rayna drove them, rather expertly, down country lanes and town roads into the city to Fronis Museum.
He stared wide-eyed out the passenger side and front windows, both unnerved to be riding in a car for the first time and amazed by how the world he’d known had changed so significantly in over two hundred years. He hadn’t enough eyes on his head to take it all in.
From the variety of vehicles of all shapes and sizes, driving in civilised synergy rather than full steam ahead, with no care for whose path they impeded.
To the different architecture of buildings and shops, some stacked so high in the sky Dominic had to crane his neck to catch a glimpse of the top.
He was trying not to feel overly dismayed by the general lack of clothing on the people walking the streets, but damn on Neves, Rayna hadn’t been kidding about society’s comfort with showing body parts that would have had people from his time clutching their pearls and neckcloths with shaking hands.
Eventually, they reached the museum, where Rayna walked him through a carved stone archway into a massive courtyard. There were vast groups of people, some waiting around, the majority walking between metal barriers towards the large staircase entrance of the building.
It was a beautiful structure built from weathered grey stone, intricately carved with animals, plants, and geometric designs, and covered by a flat-top pyramid roof of black tiles.
The entrance was lined with tall, chiselled columns, where a group of excited children all uniformly dressed, walked between them into an open set of glass doors.
Rayna led Dominic along the left of the building on the opposite side of the barriers, allowing them to skip the long queues. They reached a plump lady wearing a bright yellow, shiny waistcoat at the end of the last metal barrier.
Rayna pulled a small rectangular card, similar to the company credit card River had given him to use, from the cream bag across her shoulders and showed it to the lady.
“He’s new, so I’m escorting him to have his badge made,” she said when the plump lady asked to see his card too. The woman smiled and let them pass.
“Normally, we’d go through that side door, there,” Rayna said, pointing to the door in the left corner by the stairs. “But because you don’t have a badge, and I need to get mine reinstated, we’ll be going through the reception today.”
He hummed absently as he looked all around them, trying to take in every detail as if it were the first and last time he’d see the place.
“How are you feeling?”
He lowered his gaze to her and flashed her a wonky smile. “Amazed, if I am to be honest. It feels rather dreamlike all over again.”
“Yeah, it’s showing,” she said, a teasing slant on her supple lips.
Dominic’s heart pattered a little harder, and he wished he could have stopped her just for a second to feel her smile against his mouth.
“Remember,” she added. “No flirting or touching. And forget everything you know about the machine or the lab.”
Her timely reminder almost made him laugh. He rubbed a set of fingers over his grin and nodded. “Yes, I remember, sweetheart.”
Her face fell. “Dominic.”
“Ah, apologies,” he said, realising his mistake. “I meant Rayna.”
Rayna
“Gosh, where on Neves did you find him?”
Rayna side-eyed Maleeka with light-hearted judgment when the receptionist sighed out the question, dreamily eyeing Dominic.
The tanned woman, with green eyes and straight brown hair, was in her forties and had been behind the Fronis Museum reception desk for as long as Rayna could remember.
It probably wasn’t more than a decade, but Maleeka had witnessed Rayna go from being a regular visitor to a historian who showed up often to work on various projects. They’d become friends as a result.
The other receptionist was Clifford, an olive-skinned man with a kind but awkward demeanour, who was helping Dominic fill out a form at the other end of the seamless marble desk.
Behind Rayna was spread out the rest of the grand entrance hall, tiled in rustic, square slabs of marble with a stone balustrade gallery that ran along three sides on the first floor.
“He applied for the role like everyone else,” Rayna deadpanned.
Maleeka scowled. “You know what I mean.”
“He was meant to work with River, actually, but River’s taking a short break, so they asked me to take on the project instead. The three of us are working on a different case study together, though.”
“Lucky you,” Maleeka murmured. “I wish someone had assigned me on a project with a gorgeous curator hunk.” She quickly perked up. “Wait, is he single?”
Rayna gaped. “You’re married, Mal. To a curator!”
“Oh, honey.” She waved her hand around with a dismissive scoff. “My Rumi swings both ways too, so she’d be admiring Dominic just as much as me, if not more. But I wasn’t asking if he was single for me.” Her mouth tipped to a mischievous angle. “I’m asking for you.”
“Me?” Rayna practically choked out, a flood of heat rising to the surface of her skin.
“Oh, come on, look at him.” Maleeka gestured discreetly towards Dominic. “Tell me you don’t think he’s a fine specimen of a man.”
She didn’t mean to actually look at him, but when she did, she couldn’t stop herself from quickly analysing him.
From the piercing glow of his eyes to the way he’d combed his flowy hair back over his head, with the sides falling over his ears and temples.
And the way his off-white T-shirt was snug around his thick shoulders and arms, and how the navy-blue chinos River had found really suited him.
Plus, he’d shaved in the morning, so his cheeks were smooth and crinkled gorgeously when he smiled.
“You do see it,” Maleeka said, snapping Rayna out of her thoughts.
She blinked dumbly at the smirking woman. “See what?”
Maleeka wiggled her brows. “That he’s a fine specimen.”
For some annoying reason, Rayna blushed again, but she rolled her eyes. “I’m not blind, Mal. He’s objectively attractive. But so what?”
“Mm-hmm,” she hummed, crossing her arms over her chest. Rayna scowled in return, but Maleeka bent closer. “A piece of advice, honey?”
“No—”
Maleeka poked her arm with a manicured finger. “Make him yours before someone else does.” She thumbed in Dominic’s direction. “You don’t find a man like that every day, you know.”
Rayna choked on an indecipherable noise of shock but shot straight as she recovered. “You don’t even know him,” was what she said because she couldn’t tell Maleeka the real reason she couldn’t make Dominic hers.
Not that she wanted to claim him anyway.
It wasn’t even so much that she couldn’t as much as it was the fact that they wouldn’t work.
He was so different from her.
He likely wanted marriage and kids, and Rayna?
That wasn’t her. She didn’t want to get married, and she’d never thought about having children as a result.
So no. No.
Enjoying his cheesy flirtation was one thing. But anything more? No.
Maleeka narrowed her eyes, and the perceptive sharpness of her green irises made Rayna stiffen. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” the older woman said.
“Of course not.”
“Rayna.”
“There isn’t,” she said with more force. “And there isn’t going to be anything either.”
Then why didn’t she sound a hundred percent sure?
“Oh, wow,” Rayna said in awe, eyeing the age-worn letters and open leather notebooks laid upon a glass table. “How many are there in total?”
After sorting out the issue of their badges with the Facilities team, Rayna and Dominic were collected by Matt, Cassie, and Hania—the three curators they were going to be working with for the next three months.
When they found out it was Dominic’s first time there, chaos broke loose, and they insisted on a quick tour around the museum first. Eventually, that led them to where they were, down in the archives in one of the research rooms.
“Two hundred and four letters, four diaries, and three accounts books,” Matt said, nudging his round glasses up his nose.
Of a similar height to Rayna, Matt was a quiet man with brown eyes and brown hair and looked like he was both twelve and forty years old. But when it came to historical knowledge, his mind was a brilliant mill that could churn out unique facts and clever theories very quickly.
Next to him was Cassie, a curvy woman in her late fifties with a blonde pixie cut. She was the head of the Tregency curation team and an academic historian with three PhDs under her belt, and who Rayna had known the longest of the three.
“Thankfully, our main focus will be the letters,” Cassie said, “in order to ensure they’ve all been catalogued before being displayed, ready for the opening gala of the revamped Tregency exhibit.
” She smacked her lips together. “It might be a bit of an ask, but if we stick to a reasonable target per day, it will hopefully be doable.”
“Can you tell Cassie’s stressed?” Hania said with a cheeky glance at the older woman.
Rayna and Matt grinned. Cassie shook her head with tired amusement. And pretty, slender Hania with golden-brown skin and a golden heart, set a blushing smile on Dominic as he lifted his humoured gaze from the letters to her.
Something about it nagged at Rayna.
No, not nagged. That was too strong of a word.
It was more like a teeny tiny, mega small, very little, minute, odd…
feeling. Like that slight numb sensation when, as children, she, Benedict, and George had seen how many of Winnie’s sewing pins they could stick into the callused skin around their fingernails.
That kind of mute awareness that something about the way Hania looked at Dominic didn’t sit right with Rayna.
“Of course, I’m stressed,” Cassie said with a huff.
“Sometimes I feel like the museum Board forgets that the actual purpose of a museum is to facilitate the study of artefacts and our history, rather than to display them just to impress their funders and members.” She waved a dismissive hand around.
“Well, it’s not that they don’t want us to do our study.
But gosh are they being demanding this time. ”
“Some of these are encrypted,” Dominic said as if he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. He was the only one who’d been doing a slow circle of the table, inspecting the letters intently.
Cassie’s face immediately lifted into a beaming grin. “They are. I’m glad you noticed that, Dominic.” She did a little shoulder jiggle. “Isn’t that exciting? It means someone had secrets to hide that we get to discover.”
Rayna leaned over the glass table to peer at the letter Dominic was looking at, and from upside down, she could make out jumbled letters that resembled coded words.
“Who did you say donated these?” she asked.
“Rupert Something Bastille the third,” Matt answered.
“Apparently, he was renovating his family’s ancestral home in Central Khaas, and the construction workers stumbled upon a sealed box when they made a hole in the wrong wall,” Cassie explained.
“He took them to the Jillian and Sophia Museum, but as you know, they don’t have a Tregency research team, so they sent them up to us. ”
“I’m assuming some of the letters will go back to them then,” Rayna said.
“Oh, yeah. They’ll be distributed amongst the regions’ biggest museums.” Cassie rolled her hand around with every museum she counted. “So us, the J and S, Lord Chambers, etcetera, etcetera.”
Rayna nodded thoughtfully as Dominic stopped by her side. “Many are written by and to an I.Y.B.. Do you know who that is?” he asked.
“It’s Lord Ian Young Bastille, the fourth Earl of Hanin,” Hania said. “Rupert Bastille’s five times removed great-grandfather.”
Dominic’s brows rose. “Earl of Hanin?”
“You recognise the name?” Rayna asked, conscious that what he said or gave away could cause a potentially difficult problem for them to explain to the other three.
But clever man that he was, he realised his mistake and shifted on his feet.
“Well, I have heard—read, rather, of him.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth and shrugged.
“Off the top of my head, he was a government figure who did not have much of a central role. But there were rumours he had an army of Street Runners who reported to him, and the secrets he gathered allowed him to pull more strings amongst his peers than anyone truly knew.”
At the end of his explanation, a quizzical silence settled through the room.
Rayna looked to Cassie. Cassie peered at Matt. And Matt glanced across to Hania.
Then the four of them stared at Dominic.
“Well…” Cassie said with a smack of her lips. “I think I speak for all of us when I say, we are incredibly glad to have you on board for this project, Dominic.” She grinned joyfully. “Looks like you’ll be helping us with more than just cataloguing them.”