Chapter 52
Rayna
Rayna hadn’t slept the previous night after packing all her stuff back into a suitcase in the farmhouse and collecting together the evidence of Dominic’s existence.
She’d tossed and turned, her heart aching, tears coming and going, her eyes feeling scratchy as she stared up at the ceiling, contemplating the fact it was truly, completely over.
She couldn’t do it again. Another sleepless night filled with the torture of regret and longing, wishing he were still lying next to her. So the next night, she knocked on Victor’s bedroom door.
“Come in,” he called from inside.
She opened the door enough to step in halfway.
Victor was sitting against a pillow on the right, along the same wall as the door. The lamp was lit on his bedside cabinet, and he held an e-reader in his hand.
He lowered the tablet from his face, the lamplight reflecting off his glasses. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
She shook her head softly, tugging at the sleeves of her button-up pyjama shirt.
He beckoned her with a nod. “Come here.”
Rayna closed the door and plodded over to the bed, already able to feel a lump forming in her throat.
Victor shuffled over, making space for her to climb in next to him, under the blanket.
The moment he wrapped his arms around her, tears seeped between her lashes, and she buried her face in his chest, trying to hide from the pain.
But there was no way of hiding from the gaping, infected wound inside her chest that throbbed and burned.
The only cure was Dominic.
But he was in his time, with his family. With no memory of her. Of the love and pain he’d left her with, and she hated him for that. She hated him for making her feel and suffer so deeply when she’d never ever wanted to.
But gosh, she missed him more. She missed him with her entire soul.
Rayna wondered constantly if, even without the memory of her, he remembered her the way he’d said he would. Just some sense that he was missing something. Or if doing or seeing something triggered a thought about her that he couldn’t quite place.
Then she remembered Lady Claire, and why would he think about Rayna even unknowingly when he might have already met the woman who’d give him everything he wanted?
That hurt the most. Knowing he was going to find someone better suited to him.
Rayna wanted to be the only one who suited him. It didn’t matter if they were opposites in nearly every way, she understood him better than anyone. It made her consider the idea of asking Victor and her dad to let her go back to Dominic’s time and meet him there.
But then what?
How was she supposed to apologise and tell him how wrong she’d been for letting him go when he wouldn’t know who she was? Could she make him fall in love with her again? Chase him the way he’d chased her? And do so up against Lady Claire?
Wouldn’t that still make Rayna selfish for trying to steal him from where he belonged?
But what was she supposed to do with her broken heart? How was she supposed to forget him and move on like he hadn’t done the unthinkable and made her believe in love? She wasn’t sure she’d survive the effort of trying to live a life without him.
“Does it ever stop?” she whispered through a sniffle. “The pain.”
Victor pressed his cheek to her hair. “It gets easier to manage. And eventually, it does fade. It becomes a sad thought that stays dormant in your mind until something pokes it awake.”
So…no. The pain never really faded was what Victor was saying.
Great. She was going to be stuck as a bawling mess for the rest of her life.
At the very least, Rayna knew Dominic was alive and well. She couldn’t imagine how much worse it would have hurt if she’d lost him the way Victor had lost her mum.
The thought was sobering, and her tears slowed to a stop.
“Do you miss her?” she said after a while.
“Every day.”
“Do you think you could love anyone else as much as you loved her?”
Rayna felt the slow bob of his throat against her temple. “I don’t know. I think…I think I’m too scared to find out.”
“Why?”
“For so many reasons. Am I allowed to love someone else? Would I be betraying Yasmin if I did? Would I be betraying you? What if I do fall in love? Does that mean I didn’t love Yasmin enough?
And what if I can’t really ever move on from her?
Wouldn’t I be hurting someone else if I were constantly thinking of or comparing them to Yasmin? ”
Surprised by his answer, Rayna didn’t know what to say, so she said the one thing she knew she was sure of. “Mum would’ve wanted you to be happy. Even if it was with someone else.”
Just like Dominic will be with Lady Claire, her mind taunted.
“I know,” Victor whispered. “Maybe I’ll try one day.”
He kissed the top of her head before weighing her under his cheek again. “What about you? You let Dominic go so he could be happy with someone else. But are you going to be able to be happy yourself?”
The question rubbed salt on her lacerated heart, the pain looping around her throat.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I shouldn’t have let him go. I regret it so much. If I could go back and change what I did, I would.”
She’d sell half her soul to change the way he looked at her in the POTeM room before he told her to leave. She wouldn’t have left. She would have run to him and clung to him and told him she didn’t want him to go.
“I would have told him I loved him,” she croaked, a single tear slipping across her nose. “But I can’t now. And I don’t…I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for not telling him.”
Victor settled his hand against the back of her hair. “He knew you loved him, Rayna.”
“It’s not the same—”
“No, Rayna, I mean…” He sighed and loosened his arms. “Open the bedside cabinet drawer.”
She blinked dumbly, not understanding what he said at first. Then, cautiously, she rolled over and lifted onto one elbow.
When she opened the drawer, her heart hiccupped, and her muscles froze.
There was a thick silver ring with a rounded stamped face sitting atop a pile of opened letters with a strip of painkillers, pens, and other random bits scattered around them.
A signet ring.
Rayna picked it up with shaky fingers and looked at it closely against the lamplight.
The crest stamped on the rounded face had worn with age, but the swirly N printed in front of two crossed swords with a garland around it was very clear.
She whipped her attention to her adoptive dad. “Is this…is this Dominic’s?”
“He wanted you to have it,” Victor said softly. “To show you that he knows you didn’t send him back because you didn’t love him.”
She couldn’t hear over the hammering of her heart until her brain snagged on what Victor said.
Knows. He said, “knows.”
Present tense. As if…as if Dominic hadn’t forgotten her.
That was when she remembered.
I love you. You’re not allowed to forget that. You’re never allowed to forget me. Promise me you won’t.
Those had been his words as he’d made love to her for the last time.
In the moment, she’d thought he meant that he didn’t want her to forget what they’d had. But what if…
The ring, his words, hit note. It was like Dominic knew…
“What did he do?” Rayna rasped apprehensively.
Victor held her stare for a long second, then shook his head. “He didn’t go back because he wanted to leave you.”
Raw hope and unease gripped her chest. “V. What did Dominic do?”