Page 20 of The Scandal You Started
Impossible. It’s impossible. Time travel is impossible.
Those words kept circling in Dominic’s mind as he listened to her speak. He wasn’t a fool who naively trusted whatever someone told him, far from it, but there was something about her calm, assured demeanour that was making it hard to doubt her words.
His lips pulled apart, but only a silent puff of air came out, so he closed his mouth again. “What do you mean by ‘present’?” he found himself asking. “What is today’s date?”
“It’s the twentieth of May 876 PR,” she answered. “You’ve been here two weeks, so you arrived on the sixth.”
More than two hundred years. Two hundred and forty-one, to be exact. That’s how many years he’d supposedly time travelled. That was…
“Do you have proof?” he said.
Rayna nodded, then stood up and turned towards the black screen opposite them. “Can you send in the digital clock?”
He followed her gaze and realised his guess that the screen was a window of some sort had been correct. “Is there someone on the other side?”
Her cheeks coloured and jaw rolled stiffly. “Yeah. Several.”
“We saw everything,” a young man’s voice abruptly echoed around the room, making Dominic jump in his skin. The same confused fear of the past fortnight ripped through his chest as he threw his head around, searching for where the sound was coming from.
“I suggested we give you two some privacy, but—oomph.”
As the man’s voice turned into a grunt, a clank came from the slot in the wall by the door through which trays of food and other bits had been given to Dominic daily.
“Thank you to whoever hit George,” Rayna said, sauntering towards the door.
She opened the slot and pulled out a black box of some sort. She swivelled around to return to him but quickly stuttered to a stop.
Her indecipherable gaze zipped all across his person before her shoulders softened, and he realised he was sitting as stiff as a boiler pipe with his heart in his throat, his hands digging so deeply into the mattress that his fingers were aching.
Shame burned at his pride, and he locked his jaw over his alarm, forcing himself to let go of the bedding.
The last thing he wanted was for Rayna to pity him or think him less of a man for his fear. Neves knew she’d probably already seen or heard about his outbursts before she’d experienced it firsthand, and he was trying not to dwell on it, but that was humiliating enough.
Whether she genuinely didn’t feel sorry for him or was simply good at hiding it, she walked over with an almost tired look in her eyes.
Stopping before him, she nodded her head to the side. “Move over, please.”
His gaze slipped to the space next to him, then back up to her. After a moment, he nudged the tray closer to the end of the bed and shuffled over. She plonked herself on his left with a sweet little wriggle of her derriere, her thighs filling the fabric of her trousers in a way that had him rapt.
“You’re an intelligent man, I presume,” she then said, throwing the full force of an audaciously quirked brow at him. “Or am I presuming too much?”
Dominic felt a riled grin tug at his mouth. He was beginning to question whether she was here to help him or simply insult him repeatedly. But it was oddly amusing.
He stared her down playfully. “What is your point, little witch?”
“My point is, assuming you’re a clever man, then while I understand the idea of time travel seems impossible, you’d realise I was telling the truth from all the clues around you.” She gestured to the room, and he took the chance to look around him.
She wasn’t wrong. There were a number of things that didn’t look at all like anything he’d ever seen before. For one, the flooring was made of a material he had no name for, but it almost looked like stiffly waxed leather. Except it was blue. And the toilet had a button to empty it, while the water that came out of the tap in the bath was bubbly as if it were fizzy.
Not to mention, the circles of light on the ceiling were neither candlelit nor gaslit. One, they were basically white in colour, and two, they didn’t flicker like a flame should. There were other things too, materials of things like his toothbrush, and the items the men in white clothing—“guards”as Rayna had called them—carried as they put him to sleep.
“What is that?” he asked, nodding to the box in her hands.
She lifted it up and showed him the face of the cuboid where rectangular numbers and words were printed. “This is a digital clock. It doesn’t work like a normal clock with cogs and a face but has little hairlike wires in it that change the digits as time passes.”
She pointed at the big white numbers. “That’s the time. One twenty-nine in the afternoon.” Then she tapped the smaller ones at the bottom. “And that’s today’s date. Here.”
Dominic took it in both hands as she offered it to him. He rapidly traced the numbers and words of the date with his gaze.
