Page 180 of The Scandal You Started
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 betrayingyou? 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.
