Chapter 45
Rayna
There was a key buried in the stuffing of the teddy bear her dad had given her when she’d moved in with Victor. The one he’d told her to keep safe no matter what.
The small, dark brown plushie sat on her chest of drawers in the bedroom of the house she shared with George. Unfortunately, Rayna had to slit him down the back enough to dig two fingers in and pull out the silver key attached to a round, leather keyring.
“It’s a safe deposit locker key,” Victor said. “Carlos knows the locker’s location.”
Her dad messaged her the address. It was in another city, right at the edge of the region, about a two-hour drive from Redworth. But it was Sunday. The place was closed. They had no choice but to wait to find out what was in the locker.
“Go back to the farmhouse and rest for today,” Victor insisted afterwards. “We’ll head to the locker when you come back from the museum tomorrow.”
“We only have ten days, V,” she reminded him. “There’s no time to rest.”
“There is. I promise there is.” He kissed her hair. “Go home with Dominic. Please.”
Dominic seemed just as reluctant as Rayna, but they went back to the farmhouse. Except after a light lunch, she jumped on the computer in the office-library with Dominic sitting close and restless next to her.
She searched up his title, and right off the bat, they ran straight into their first hurdle.
The Tanbridge City Hall, where the Norland family’s births, deaths, transfers of title, and marriages were registered, had nearly completely burned down in an arson attack in the middle of the eighth century.
Their main family estate hadn’t fared much better.
It’d suffered a terrible collapse while renovations had been underway two decades after the city hall fire.
Meaning a lot of Dominic and his family’s history had been destroyed.
It might have frustrated Rayna more had the devastated slant of Dominic’s expression not broken her heart. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for him to suddenly learn that so much of his family’s legacy had been lost.
She immediately, with an ache of sadness and guilt gripping her chest, turned the computer off.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he gazed emptily at her.
His lips lifted in a ghost of a smile. “There is no reason for you to apologise, sweetheart. It is not your fault.”
Without hesitating, Rayna slid onto his lap and cradled him. He buried his face in her neck with a shuddering breath, his arms locking around her.
Victor had been right, and she should’ve just listened.
Rest today. Begin tomorrow. Especially now that they knew knowledge about Dominic wasn’t going to easily be found in public domains. They’d have to submit a request to Khaas’s National Archives to see what other sources they could find.
The building itself was in the Royal Capital of Tanbridge, in the Region of Vindal, where Dominic was originally from.
But each regional central library had an online platform of the archives that could be accessed.
Still, they wouldn’t be granted a slot until a few days’ time, so what was one day of rest then when they had to wait anyway?
She trusted Victor, and if he said ten days was enough, then it had to be enough.
But sitting idle brewed fear in the back of her mind, and even as she tried not to think about it, there was a dull question lingering there.
Is this really going to work?
Rayna and Dominic spent Monday morning at the museum to begin wrapping up their work within the project. The lingering excitement amongst the team from Saturday night’s gala was a nice distraction, but it was hard to emulate fully.
Dominic was better at laughing and reminiscing the evening with Hania and Matt than Rayna was.
She focused more on confirming and checking with Cassie that all the notes and documents were in the correct folders, which letters needed further studying, and what was left to be scanned and catalogued from two of the diaries and a handful of letters.
They left the museum after midday and went straight to her and George’s house, where Victor was already waiting. Then, in two separate cars, the four of them made the two-hour drive to find out what was in the safe deposit locker.
“What are those?” Dominic asked once Rayna and George showed him and Victor what they’d found in the deposit box.
Only she and George had been registered with fully authorised access to the safe, so Dominic and Victor had had to wait in the lobby while they’d gone to the basement of the building.
“They’re the backup hard drives Yasmin, Frank, and Samara made of the Rupture research,” Victor muttered.
“There were three,” George said, showing the three slim black drives he held in his hands.
Rayna then opened her palm to reveal a gold key. “There was this too.”
“Good,” Victor said, then nodded towards the deposit’s front desk. “Ask to close the locker; you won’t need it anymore. And then we have one more stop to make.”
“Where?” George asked.
“A storage unit.”
The drive to the storage unit took another hour, but it led them closer and to the west of Redworth. The bright green building sat on an industrial estate with a car park and loading bay right in front of its big yellow entrance doors.
On the second floor, they found the small unit the key unlocked, revealing stacks of cardboard boxes piled upon grey plastic boxes filled with papers, files, and manila folders.
“Your parents weren’t sure if the drives would ever become corrupted,” Victor explained, “so they made paper copies of all the research, including Wilson’s initial theories.”
With Dominic and George carrying a cardboard box each, Rayna worked with Victor to move the bigger plastic boxes out of the unit and down the lift to their cars. It took a few journeys until both the backseats and boots of her and Victor’s car were full.
Once they made the hour-and-ten-minute drive back to their house, the four of them restarted the process of transferring the boxes inside.
They were scattered all around the open-plan downstairs of the house, through the double-doors at the end of the square entrance hallway.
They were lined along the varnished wooden banister of the stairs along the right and between the two fabric sofas and matching armchair that boxed in the TV hanging above the exposed fireplace.
But rather than opening any of them after eating dinner, Victor instructed Rayna and Dominic to go back to the farmhouse.
“What? No,” Rayna argued. “We should start looking through the files—”
“I need to check the drives to make sure they’re still fine first, Rayna,” he said. “Tomorrow—”
“No, V,” she said almost angrily.
“Tomorrow,” he reiterated as he cupped her shoulders, “after you two come back from the museum, we’ll create a plan on how we’re going to do this. We can’t all just attack the research. We need to find out more about Dominic too, so we have to work out a proper strategy first.”
She understood, she did, but this sitting around waiting while time slipped through her fingers was making her agitated. Fearful and frantic and frustrated. She couldn’t do it for another day.
Not when her hope was already beginning to show signs of fracturing.
Dominic’s hand snaked around her waist, pulling her into him when Victor let go of her. “We will come back tomorrow,” he said confidently.
Rayna didn’t particularly like that he’d made the decision for her, but unable to logically argue with either him or Victor, she said her goodbyes and let Dominic take her by the hand to the car.
“I hate this,” she muttered as she slumped in the driver’s seat.
“I know,” Dominic whispered, giving her thigh a squeeze. “As do I, but Victor is correct. We need a plan. Otherwise, we shall blindly be searching for answers that may not even help us.”
“I know, I just…” She drifted off and sighed.
“Do not fret, my love.” He shaped her jaw and kissed her temple. “This will work. We will find a way. All shall work itself out.”
It wasn’t working itself out, though. At least it didn’t feel like it was.
Especially not when Rayna read a string of messages from Victor the next day as she and Dominic were leaving the museum.
V:
Some of the files on all the drives are corrupted
I’m going to take it to someone I know who’ll take a look at it immediately
Don’t worry we still have all the physical copies if this doesn’t work
“We do not need the hard drives, Rayna,” Dominic said confidently after she showed him the messages while they stood by the car. “Perhaps it might have made this easier, but everything we need is in those boxes of papers.”
He was so sure, while she could hear faint sounds of the ground under her feet cracking and snapping and crumbling. So she clung to his certainty, metaphorically and physically, letting him hold her flush until the unease settled and her pulse softened.
Then Rayna drove them straight to her and George’s house again, and not long after they arrived, so did River and Kelly.
They all gathered on the two sofas, while Victor took the armchair, as they decided on a course of action.
“I’m going to head to see Lamar later today again and find out if he’s made progress with the hard drives,” Victor explained, and then glanced at Rayna and George sharing a sofa with Dominic.
“In the meantime, we’ll begin unboxing the files and sorting them out so we can find everything on Rupture reduction. ”
“I’ll help too,” Kelly quickly added with a raise of her hand, River’s arm lying across her lap.
Victor smiled. “Thank you, Kelly.”
“You should be at the café,” Rayna muttered.
Kelly flapped her hand about. “Girl, I have people who work for me. As long as I’m there in the morning to make our cakes, I can use the rest of the day to help you.”
Rayna’s lips quirked, soft and grateful, and Kelly kissed the air in her direction.
Then Victor continued, “That leaves Dominic and River to work on discovering your history.”