The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(24)
Mutely, she nodded.
“Then get in the carriage, Lorelai.”
Something about his order broke the stricken chains of traumatic astonishment. “The sun has set in the west every day for twenty years.” The words tumbled out before she could think better of it. Before she could call them back.
If she’d thought his eyes black before, she’d been wrong. They’d been dark, surely, but now they were little more than desolate, abysmal mirrors in which she could divine her own dire fate.
“You do not want me to put you into the carriage,” he informed her pleasantly. “I still have your brother’s blood on my hands.”
Was he threatening her? Or showing her an unimaginably macabre form of courtesy?
He held out his gloves, demonstrating that he was in no way being figurative.
Swallowing the acid crawling up her throat, Lorelai complied, allowing Veronica’s clutching hands to pull her in.
Lorelai had expected him to lock them in and mount the driver’s seat in order to race away from the growing pandemonium.
Instead, he climbed in behind her, settling his bulk across from them.
“Who—who are you?” Veronica whimpered. “What do you want?”
He leaned forward, dark and sinister as death himself, and bowed his head in a strangely cultured mockery of tradition. “Allow me to properly present myself, Lady Southbourne. In the Orient, they call me the Black Dragon. In Africa, I am known as the Sea Panther. A warlord along the Persian coast once granted me the title the Djinn of Darkness. I have many names, and even more titles, but first I am captain of the Devil’s Dirge, more commonly known in this part of the world simply as … the Rook.”
CHAPTER SIX
“They’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” Veronica reasoned as she and Lorelai clutched at each other in the captain’s quarters of the selfsame dark steamship she’d admired not an hour prior. “I mean, we were abducted from your wedding after he stabbed … after Mortimer…” She swallowed as a visible shudder ran through her. “Several people witnessed the murder and would have contacted the authorities by now. Probably the whole British Navy is after us. The Rook has been a quarry of theirs for ages. They’ll rescue us and hang him for a pirate. And we can go home.”
Lorelai knew Veronica meant well. She did nothing without the best of intentions, but the desperate words tripping on Veronica’s shallow breaths did more to keep herself calm than anything.
“They’ll be looking for us, but I don’t think anyone can identify our captor by sight,” Lorelai said gravely. “He wore that cowl and large coat, if you remember, and no one has had much of a chance to recognize him. He’s not known to leave witnesses … alive.”
“He seemed to know you.” Veronica narrowed a questioning glance in her direction.
“Yes,” Lorelai murmured through lips blanched entirely numb. “But he wasn’t the Rook when I knew him.” When I loved him … she finished silently.
Veronica’s mind tended to work quickly, especially in times of crisis. During her tenure as the Countess Southbourne, she’d learned to deftly manage danger, as well as establish and implement evasion and problem-solving techniques learned through painstaking trial and error.
Lorelai fancied she could see the gears of her sister-in-law’s mind whirring like a timepiece wound too tightly. Veronica had yet to cease trembling, though she hadn’t shed a tear for her dead husband.
And why should she?
The ship lurched, chugged, and shuddered with a fantastic effort as they gathered strength and speed. Crystal tinkled from the shades of several hanging electric lamps, and exotic tassels swayed from the canopy of the monstrous bed upon which they huddled. A book slid off the table by the widest porthole, startling them both.
The ship had only two masts, and they’d not been unfurled when they’d boarded. But even a steamship was rarely so nimble as this one.
“You can swim, can’t you?” Veronica asked. “If we hurry, we might be able to fit through these windows before they come back. Without the weight of our skirts, there’s a chance we could make it to the estuary in time.” Standing, she used the furniture to steady herself as she stumbled for the surprisingly wide window.
“We’re too far out. We’d never make it, especially not in a storm like this.” Lorelai’s arms itched where rain still dried on her skin. Her torn, soiled gloves had disappeared, though she couldn’t remember where she’d discarded them now. Funny, that she’d worry about such trifles at a time like this. She’d rather think of anything, she supposed, than the dangerous pirate who’d come for her. Distantly, she wondered if this was all a dream. A nightmare caused by extreme prewedding anxiety. Would she wake back at Southbourne and be forced to relive the tedium and terror of her wedding day all over again?
This time, without murder.
Without Ash.
If he’d come for her … did she want to wake?
She dug her nails against her palm, wincing when the pain lanced her. No, she was fully conscious.
But unconvinced that the man who’d kidnapped her was the boy she’d loved.
Veronica grappled with the porthole latch. “I think I’d rather drown than endure what awaits us on this pirate ship.” Hysteria edged out the reason in her voice. “How can you be so calm?”