The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(3)
In the early days … they had.
In the days before Dougan and Argent. Before the Blackheart Brothers.
The ominous creak of the cell door brought him to his feet, the knife he’d fashioned from obsidian he’d found in the tunnels at the ready.
Lanterns blinded him in the windowless room. He slashed out at the men spilling into his cell, his power and speed wrought by days of backbreaking work digging railways beneath the city. He cut something. Someone. The warm rush of blood slicked over his hand.
Fuck. Now his knife would be difficult to wield.
His vision cleared in time to see the back of Walters’s head connect with the stones, leaving so much blood and some of his skull behind when he fell.
Five guards cornered the boy in a room hardly big enough for two grown men to stretch across.
“Dougan Mackenzie?” The sergeant sneered, close enough that the boy could count the flecks of tobacco in his teeth.
“No! I’m not Dougan Mackenzie. I’m Dor—”
“Your father sends his regards.”
The boy blocked the first blow with his fresh tattoo, the pain turning him feral. He didn’t see the cudgel arcing toward his temple until it was too late. Nor the boot that snapped his ankle, dropping him to the ground.
Now he counted time with impacts. With the snaps of bones and spurts of blood.
The boy’s last thought was that Walters had been right to doubt him.
He’d never hunt for his treasure. He’d never return for his friends.
For no one could come back from the dead.
CHAPTER ONE
If Lorelai Weatherstoke hadn’t been appreciating the storm out the carriage window, she’d have missed the naked corpse beneath the ancient ash tree.
“Father, look!” She seized Lord Southbourne’s thin wrist, but a barrage of visual stimuli overwhelmed her, paralyzing her tongue.
In all her fourteen years, she’d never seen a naked man, let alone a deceased one.
He lay facedown, strong arms reached over his head as though he’d been trying to swim through the shallow grass lining the road. Ghastly dark bruises covered what little flesh was visible beneath the blood. He was all mounds and cords, his long body different from hers in every way a person could be.
Her heart squeezed, and she fought to find her voice as the carriage trundled past. The poor man must be cold, she worried, then castigated herself for such an absurd thought.
The dead became one with the cold. She’d learned that by kissing her mother’s forehead before they closed her casket forever.
“What is it, duck?” Her father may have been an earl, but the Weatherstokes were gentry of reduced circumstances, and didn’t spend enough time in London to escape the Essex accent.
Lorelai had not missed the dialect while at school in Mayfair, and it had been the first thing she’d rid herself of in favor of a more proper London inflection. In this case, however, it was Lord Southbourne’s words, more than his accent, that caused her to flinch.
As cruel as the girls could be at Braithwaite’s Boarding School, none of their taunts had made her feel quite so hollow as the one her own family bestowed upon her.
Duck.
“I-it’s a man,” she stammered. “A corp—” Oh no, had he just moved, or had she imagined it? Squinting through the downpour, she pressed her face to the window in time to see battered knuckles clenching the grass, and straining arms pulling the heavy body forward.
“Stop,” she wheezed, overtaken by tremors. “Stop the carriage!”
“What’s bunched your garters, then?” Sneering across from her, Mortimer, her elder brother, brushed aside the drapes at his window. “Blimey! There’s a bleedin’ corpse by the road.” Three powerful strikes on the roof of the coach prompted the driver to stop.
“He’s alive!” Lorelai exclaimed, pawing at the door handle. “I swear he moved. We have to help him.”
“I thought that fancy, expensive school was supposed to make you less of an idiot, Duck.” Mortimer’s heavy brows barely separated on a good day and met to create one thick line when he adopted the expression of disdain ful scorn he reserved solely for her. “What’s a cripple like you going to do in the mud?”
“We should probably drive through to Brentwood,” Lord Southbourne suggested diplomatically. “We can send back an ambulance to fetch him.”
“He’ll need an undertaker by then,” Lorelai pleaded. “We must save him, mustn’t we?”
“I’ve never seen so much blood.” It was morbid fascination rather than pity darkening her brother’s eyes. “I’m going out there.”
“I’m coming with you.”
A cruel hand smacked Lorelai out of the way, and shoved her back against the faded brocade velvet of her seat. “You’ll stay with Father. I’ll take the driver.”
As usual, Lord Robert Weatherstoke said and did nothing to contradict his only son as Mortimer leaped from the coach and slammed the door behind him.
Lorelai barely blamed her passive father anymore. Mortimer was so much larger than him these days, and ever so much crueler.
She had to adjust her throbbing leg to see the men making their way through the gray of the early-evening deluge. Just enough remained of daylight to delineate color variations.