The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(48)



He closely watched those around him, their hearts on fire with greed and lust and so many other human emotions. It made them reckless and illogical, but that fire also made them strong, tenacious, and brave.

Were he capable of envy, the Rook would have coveted that very human heat. But he realized early on his heart was made of other stuff. His internal workings emulated the complications of gears and cogs found in a watch. His was a clockwork heart. Where others’ beat and burned, his only tick, tick, ticked away the hours, the minutes, the seconds that separated him from one other soul on this enormous globe.

Lorelai.

Every year he suffered, every chain he broke, every possession he took, and every man he killed, he’d done it in her name. Knowing all the while, she’d not want any of it. That she’d reject who he’d become the moment she laid eyes on him. It’d occurred to him she might even have moved on. Fallen for someone else, some gentle, pretty lord, and given him a brood of children.

Would he have taken her if that were the case? Stolen her from a happy life?

Probably.

He’d become a monster, after all, and monsters did monstrous things, despite the consequence to anyone else.

In fact, he could scarce believe that he’d found her just as he’d left her. Untouched by another. Unloved.

And unwilling.

Touch me. He silently yearned as she just stood there, paralyzed, doing her best not to glance below his navel where his sex jutted toward her, erect and throbbing, impatient to claim his mate.

He dimly realized part of the reason he’d finally come for her was because of this moment. This ultimatum.

This offering.

Here was the final threshold between man and monster. In his tenure as the Rook, he’d taken things from men and women who’d sobbed and pleaded for mercy and he’d felt … nothing. No scruples. No hesitation. No remorse.

They were weaker than he. And in this world, weakness was not rewarded. It was exploited. He’d known that even before he’d lost his memory. He’d understood it the moment he’d woken on that bed in the Weatherstoke mansion, broken and lost. His vulnerability had battered at him, taunted him. For no one protected the weak. No one rewarded the innocent. No one was kind to the maladroit.

If you wanted something, you took it, and then you fought to defend it, or someone would take it from you.

In every kingdom, either of man or animal, this was a fundamental truth.

Only one person had ever consistently contradicted that certainty.

Lorelai.

Kind, patient, tender Lorelai. Champion of the weak and wounded. She took beasts who should have suffered their fates with all the brutality nature could devise, and she healed them, taught them to thrive with their impediments.

She was what he desired above all else. He’d thought he could take her. Whether she wanted him or not. He’d told himself that he deserved her, that he was owed the one thing that had ever delighted him in twenty years. He’d given himself, and her, every reason why he should claim her as his right. Why he could. Why he had.

And yet … here she stood. Waifish and delicate, innocent and untouched.

Even by him.

Because here was the one threshold he could not seem to cross into his final damnation. The one thread that tied him to a flickering vestige of humanity. His one island in an endless ocean of unforgiveable depravities.

No matter how cold and cruel and inhumane he’d become … he physically could not bring himself to face a weeping Lorelai Weatherstoke. He could not stand to be the cause of those tears. He, who could burn all of London to the ground and not lose a blink of sleep over it, trembled at the sight of her distress. Quivered for one tick of his heart to be spent basking in her touch.

He simply could. Not. Hurt. Her. Even if it meant denying himself the one thing he’d lived for.

And so, the problem remained. How did he get what he wanted? What he deserved? How did he find the sanctuary he knew only existed in the circle of her arms? In the bliss of her caress. In the depths of her warm body.

He’d been up all night considering that very thing, until the answer had struck him with all the might of a rogue wave. Instead of forcing himself upon her, like the heartless fiend that he was, he could offer himself to her.

She could do the taking.

It was the perfect solution. All he wanted was her touch, in whatever form she could offer it. She’d only just proven that a sharp slap delivered by her palm was better than an intimate massage by any one of a thousand well-trained whores.

When he’d become the Rook, he’d vowed to slaughter anyone who’d ever dare raise a hand to him again.

And yet, when she’d done it, he’d wanted to purr. He’d wanted to growl, but not with his teeth. With his throat. With that bestial part of him who’d come to enjoy the blow. To crave the pain. For in the impact of lash against flesh, he did sometimes find his lost humanity.

Only to lose it when the pain subsided.

Would she hit him again? he wondered. And had to bite down on the inside of his cheek against an unbidden groan of anticipation.

“I—I don’t understand.” Her voice shook with a husky emotion he couldn’t identify. Somewhere on the spectrum between terror and temptation. “You claim to possess me in one breath, and then proclaim that I own you in another. What … what am I supposed to do with that?”

You’re supposed to heal me. Or hurt me. To save me. Or condemn me. To remind me that I’m human.

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