The Immortal Emperor Returns to Work the Museum Night Shift novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: Not Her
"Ruthanne says the empress has my nose," I said.
It was two in the morning on Thursday.
I was standing in Gallery Four with my arms folded in front of the marble bust of the empress.
She sits on a plinth by the mosaic wall, a woman of about thirty with a long straight nose and a stern, amused mouth.
The label says she was the Empress of Tessar for twenty years.
It says nothing about her personality, because nobody knows it.
Sam stood beside me in his uniform, with his hands clasped behind his back.
He had been looking at the bust for the last ten minutes, and then at me, and then at the bust.
"Ruthanne is wrong," he said.
"She's said it three times this week. She says every curator ends up looking like their collection."
"She is wrong."
"Sam."
I turned to face him, and made myself say it.
"Am I her?"
He didn't answer.
"I'm not asking if I look like her."
"I'm asking whether that's why you took this job."
"Whether you walked in here six weeks ago, and saw some woman with a pencil in her hair, and thought it was her coming back."
A muscle moved in his jaw.
He looked at the bust, and then at the floor, and then at me.
"No," he said.
"No?"
"You are not the empress. You are not her come back. I have never once thought so."
I had braced for him to say yes.
I had braced for the speech about destiny and a thousand lifetimes.
I had been holding my breath for three days.
What came out of me was, "Oh."
"I will tell you about her," he said. "Because you are afraid of her, and you should not be."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Immortal Emperor Returns to Work the Museum Night Shift are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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