The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(55)

“You’re letting us go?” She found that hard to believe. Could he be playing some sort of terrible game with her? “Y-you would do that to your captain?”

His hazel eyes turned gray with the threat of a storm. “I do this for my captain.” He gestured to Lorelai, who still slumbered unnaturally deep. “Whoever this woman is to him, he forgets that he is the Rook around her. He becomes someone else.”

“Who?”

Moncrieff scowled. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know, not until we find the Claudius Cache.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In his tenure as the Rook, he’d only been outmaneuvered … well … never. He’d plotted a successful invasion at best, and a slightly protracted siege at worst.

In no scenario he could devise would Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, be meeting an ambush with an invitation to open battle.

Yet there the bastard stood, yards away with twelve men to the Rook’s ten, matching him pistol for pistol. Brute for murderous, bloodthirsty brute.

Almost.

Moncrieff had offered to take Barnaby and another rifleman to the other side of the isle to approach from behind, in case such an occasion should occur. They would offer long-range cover from the hills.

So, where were they?

From beneath his cowl, the Rook scanned the jagged peaks beyond which Ben More Keep settled in the distance, lording over a crystal cove. They were the castle’s only weakness, these treacherous, mossy moun tains. Even from the keep’s tower, it was impossible for a lookout to see over the black stone knolls to the swath of beach where they’d moored the longboats. Just above the ridge closest to Ben More Peak, the charred stone skeleton of burned Jacobite ruin told of a century-old British invasion.

The Rook had brought his most fleet-footed men, and they should have been able to navigate the perilous mountain terrain and reach the ruins of the castle before needing to concern themselves with discovery.

When the Blackheart of Ben More and his men had melted from the shadows of the ruins upon the Rook’s approach, his astonishment turned into anticipation.

Better a battle, mayhap, than an invasion. Castles had fortifications, hiding places, armories, and corners in which to be trapped. Out beneath the sky, beneath the sunset to the west and the threatening clouds above, he could take full measure of the men before him.

And calculate exactly how long it would take them to die.

With luck, Moncrieff and his riflemen were in position to provide cover. But when had luck ever been on his side? Never. Fate was an enemy with which he waged a constant war. He’d carved his own destiny out of the flesh of his enemies.

His men were trained more for naval combat, but they’d overwhelmed many an opponent on land. Today would be no different.

The Rook kept his pistol leveled on the raven-haired, black-eyed bastard standing in the exact same position as him. Several yards away, out in front of his men, who took a similar formation as the Rook’s own crew.

He could have been looking in a mirror, but for the eye patch over his adversary’s left eye.

The handicap would make Dorian Blackwell a weaker shot.

That shouldn’t matter. It didn’t usually. But … what if Blackwell’s bullet found its mark this time? Death possessed a particular repugnance today, as the thought of leaving Lorelai unprotected on his ship produced a foreign thump against his ribs.

“Which one of you goes by the name of Frank Walters?” he called across the divide. His crew needed to know which man not to kill. Not until he gleaned the information he came for. “If you give him over, I’ll grant the rest of you your lives.”

No one moved. No one spoke. So, he cocked his weapon, aiming for Dorian Blackwell’s infamously black heart.

A shimmer of electric sensation tensed the very organ neither of them claimed to possess. This paroxysm had long since ceased to astonish the Rook. Every time that name crossed his mind, a slight impression of recognition or revulsion came with it.

Dorian Blackwell.

To chase the emotion or the memory the name evoked was like searching for shadows on a moonless night. Impossible.

It haunted him, though. A specter of dread. The ghost of some long-forgotten pain.

Had they been enemies, once?

He’d gleaned that Dorian Blackwell and the prisoner known just as “Walters” had become acquainted in Newgate.

He’d also learned that his half-ruined dragon tattoo was undeniably Walters’s work. Which meant Walters had answers. Not just about the Claudius Cache, but about his past, as well.

No one, not even this fearsome one-eyed blackguard, would stand in the way of that.

After a moment fraught with impending aggression, the Blackheart of Ben More took a step forward in the manner of a man after parlance rather than violence.

“I’ve spent the better part of an hour trying to imagine what would bring the notorious Rook to my island.” His voice slithered through the space between them with a sinister, serpentine grace. “I thought, perhaps, the King of the Seas sought to usurp the King of the London Underworld. Tell me, Rook, have the vast oceans become too small for you? Do you seek to conquer the empire, as well?”

That voice. Something … something beneath the cultured British accent and the leashed menace. Smooth as silk, and yet it raked at his skin with the soul-flaying swipe of a jungle cat.