The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(31)

Lorelai puzzled over his use of the name in the third person as the Rook held his large, callused hands out to her, as though to demonstrate their filthiness.

“Now there is blood. Enough blood to stain this Channel a red no less than biblical. But that is not why it was so easy to kill your brother.” His hands curled to fists. “Mark me, Lorelai, had you not been watching I would not have been kind enough to grant him such a painless death.”

She closed her eyes against the sight of the blade skewered through Mortimer’s open mouth. “His death did not seem so painless.”

He gripped her chin, forcing her to look at his savage features. His other palm feathered over her hair with a confounding gentleness. “That is because you do not know enough of pain.”

“Are you about to teach me?” She’d meant it as a challenge, but it escaped as a whisper. “Is that what this is? This so-called wedding night? Am I to suffer for Mortimer’s sins? Do you want to stain yourself with the blood of two innocent people in one day?”

“Blood … innocent…?” He released her, brows drawing together as though her words had confounded him.

She leveled him a speaking glare. “Virgins usually bleed, do they not?”

His eyes dipped to her lap, then closed for the space of one cavernous, never-ending exhale.

“You are still … innocent.” He drew the word out on a hiss. “After all this time?” His fingers curled into talons before abruptly letting go.

He was at the door before Lorelai could form a reply.

Bracing one hand against the door frame, he clung to the handle as if at any moment someone might drag him away. The curious dark shapes of the tattoos beneath the thin white of his shirt rose and fell with three heaves of his shoulders. Feathers maybe? He turned the latch. Paused. “You cannot be so blind as to think Mortimer was innocent.”

Lorelai wiped at her tears with trembling hands. “For all his atrocities, he was not a murderer. No one deserves to die like that.”

“He was a murderer.” The Rook didn’t look at her, but the creases of his fists turned white. “And he deserves to die seven thousand deaths.”

Stunned, Lorelai almost dropped the edges of her bodice. Seven thousand was a very specific number. “What are you saying? Why seven thousand?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She flinched as he wrenched the door open. “Your enterprising knee has saved you from a wedding night.” He’d still yet to look at her, and for some untold reason, Lorelai was glad. “Get some sleep, Lorelai, but suffer no illusions. I’ll not be denied. I will have you.”

“Never,” she vowed as he closed her in and locked the door behind him.

In an unprecedented moment of weakness, the Rook pressed his forehead against the barrier of wood and steel separating them. On a harsh breath, he repeated the same word he’d whispered at the end of every infernal day for twenty long years.

“Always.”





CHAPTER EIGHT

“Fucking hell,” the Rook muttered as he braced his legs against the bow and ripped his shirt open, allowing vicious nails of rain to drive themselves into his flushed, overheated skin.

It hurt.

Everything hurt. The icy water against his flesh. His muscles stressed to their limit by herculean restraint. His cock, where Lorelai’s resourceful knee had struck. The disused muscle palpitating against his ribs like a wild beast, hoping to splinter the iron darkness locking it away.

Never matter. He welcomed the pain. Pain was the closest thing he had to a friend.

Hell. He’d had a great deal of time to consider the venue. To contemplate its walls. Its origins. Its meaning. Twenty years, in fact.

To him, hell was taking a drink with Mortimer Weatherstoke at an inn in Heybridge and waking up twelve hours later out to sea on a merchant ship, leagues away from the only person who’d ever meant anything to him. Hell was years upon years of working on a deck like this one, in just such a storm, the seawater stinging the open whip wounds on his back. It was sleeping in so many chains, in holds stinking of filth and despair, starving, freezing, and dreaming of his precious few months in paradise.

Of Lorelai.

His very own paradise lost.

Hell was the vast, merciless oceans spread between himself and her. The hoary horizon had been his perdition for so many years until, one night, he’d had enough. What had Milton said in Paradise Lost? “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”

But to reign in hell, one must become the very Devil.

And so he had.

Because he thought he’d explored every corner of hell, that he understood its every torment.

God, what a fool he’d been.

For tonight, he’d found a fresh depth of the abyss.

Hell. True hell … had been standing at the door to his cabin, the memory of her warmth still fresh in his hands. The scent of her branded in his nostrils. Knowing that her lush, soft body was there for the taking …

And walking away.

Hell was looking into her beloved visage made only comelier by time, and finding the gaunt shadows of misery etched there. It was the denial on her lips. The refusal in her eyes.

Hell was becoming a devil for the sole purpose of claiming his very own angel.

Christ, the irony. The pure fucking tragedy of it all.