How the hell can a guy who runs a bakery afford all of this?
The thought had crossed my mind multiple times that night, and there were only a couple possible explanations. Either he came from money or he used his gifts for profit. Whatever those gifts might’ve entailed besides lighting candles.
It was a little scary how easily he’d hidden his power from me, how he’d felt mine and waited so long to tell me he was different, too. I hadn’t met many others with a magical presence, but Loki was the only one I knew who could hide it. So was Sam that powerful, or did he just have a unique gift like mine with fire? It was enough to put me on edge about the whole thing, and I wasn’t sure what else he was capable of hiding.
I needed to be on my toes with someone like him. There was a reason I’d only dated guys I didn’t get any power readings from. Maybe it would’ve been easier to resist, though, if he wasn’t so fucking hot. And if the room we’d walked into didn’t exist.
Holy shit.
My wandering gaze landed on a glass display case in the middle of the room, an open book inside. It looked ancient with wooden boards for the front and back covers, the thick paper—parchment or vellum, maybe—aged by time but fairly well-preserved. My fingers hovered over the glass as I processed the handwritten words. Sam stood beside me , hands folded behind his back, watching me with a raised eyebrow and the barest upturn of his lips. He was waiting for some kind of response, I assumed, since I hadn’t said the first word about the jaw-dropping room yet.
“This is Greek,” I mumbled, more to myself than to him. “Book of Psalms. Is… Sam, is this a Bible?”
He took half a step closer and nodded. “Yes, it is. You certainly know your stuff.”
“Th-the dialect, the textual variation—hell, the formatting here is all similar to the Codex Vaticanus, but it’s been stored in the Vatican Library for centuries,” I said, looking up at him. “How could you possibly have something like this?”
“You can read this?” he asked. There was no hint of skepticism in his voice, which I appreciated.
I nodded and gave him a wry smile. “Wouldn’t be much good in Religious Studies if I couldn’t do that much.”
It got a laugh out of him. “There are parts of the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus codices that differ from this version.” Sam tapped lightly on the glass. “This predates them both by at least a hundred years and, unlike those, it’s complete. All three are a far cry from what the Book has become today.”
I blinked at him, words failing me again. His wealth would make sense if his family collected and preserved ancient religious artifacts, but didn’t explain why he was running a bakery instead of continuing the Sophiee path. I looked around at the other displays, awe replacing the earlier paranoia.
There was a large gold menorah between two bookshelves full of hand-bound Hebrew texts. An enormous black and reddish-orange vase, ancient Greek by the looks of it, sat on the other side of the room. The black figures circling it looked like others I’d seen of Hades and Persephone, but the style was slightly different. Hanging on another wall, encased in a shadow box, was an old Roman spearhead with a flicker of power around it.
What the hell did I just walk into?
“This place is a fucking museum.”
I clapped my hands over my mouth, my brain apparently having turned my filter off. Sam chuckled and led me around the room, past a row of tablets covered in hieroglyphics, to a staircase. Before I ascended to the second floor, I caught a glimpse of a vault tucked into an alcove on the far side of the room.
“What’s in the vault?”
“Scrolls, mostly.” He winked at me over his shoulder. “It’s hermetically sealed to prevent further decay, but everything in there has already been translated and copied into books. A lot of those were saved from the libraries at Nineveh, Alexandria, and Babylon and a scholarly archive found in Aššur.”
Whoa. His family must’ve been doing this since… well, since the beginning of recorded history. They must have assigned themselves keepers or preservers of time. I was about to ask to go back, look around more, maybe examine the bookshelves, but the second floor came into view. It was set up similarly to the first floor, but the time period had changed dramatically.
Paintings hung on the walls, and I knew without asking they had to be “lost” relics of some of the greatest Renaissance artists. Between them sat pedestals with various instruments, both musical and scientific. Weapons were encased in glass. It really was like a fucking museum.
I pointed behind me to the stairs. “You said the—holy shit—theancientscrolls were copied into books. Have any of those books been digitized? Or even translated into English or any other common language of today?”
Sam eyed me, the smile on his face growing wide. “This stuff really makes you happy?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I flinched at my loud tone and lowered my voice, running my hands over my braided hair. “The only thing I love more than baking is ancient civilizations and old religions.”
I wasn’t going to tell him just yet I’d only gotten into it to learn more about myself and my dad, but it became a genuine love. With my gift for languages, it only seemed natural. I didn’t have the inherent knowledge Loki did, but I learned them quickly enough that it’d seemed that way. To dive into those things, to be able to translate books and scrolls and tablets the world probably didn’t know existed… it was something I didn’t know I wanted so bad until now.
Everything about this screamed “too good to be true.” My excitement needed a cold, hard reality check, but this was too much, even for me. It was throwing me off-balance, and that was dangerous territory. Why was he letting me see all of this?
Unless he wanted something from me.
“My living area is on the top floor.” Sam held his hand out and I took it. “There’s actually an elevator in the garage that would’ve taken us straight up, but I thought you would enjoy the tour.”
“Enjoy it?” I scoffed. “You can have my apartment and my roommate and I’ll keep this place. I would bury myself in here.”
The top floor was more what I'd imagined the main floor would look like. Open living room, a huge wall of windows, a big kitchen with all the gadgets, and a hall leading to more doors. He had a giant TV, which would've surprised me less before I walked through history, and a couple game consoles, which I hadn’t been expecting at all.
