The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(57)
“My wife remarked upon how shamefully one of them was attired. Flannel and muslin rarely flatter each other.” He slid him a sly look. “Had she landed anywhere else, she’d have made quite the scandal…”
“Ye’re wasting time, Blackwell.” A stout, middle-aged Scotsman at Blackwell’s left elbow was as eager for blood as Haxby. “Let’s gut them before they get their land legs.”
Blackwell held up a staying hand. “I’m a businessman first, and a warrior second. Tell me what you want with Walters, and perhaps we can still strike a bargain.”
The Rook’s skin burned everywhere. His skull, which had gone numb but for the ache in his head, pulsed with the accelerating rhythm of his heart.
One didn’t earn a title like the Blackheart of Ben More by showing mercy. What would he do to Lorelai?
Suddenly Walters no longer mattered. The treasure. His past. The men behind him.
He lowered his gun. “You’ll give her back?”
Blackwell nodded, pointing his own gun at the ground. “If you give me cause.”
“Captain—” Haxby protested.
He held up his own fist, silencing all dissent.
“I need Walters to identify some of his work,” he muttered. “A tattoo.”
“That might be difficult,” Blackwell admitted after a cautious hesitance. “He was injured in an attack in prison. His memory isn’t what it once was.”
“Neither is mine,” the Rook said wryly.
“I was his cellmate. I watched most of his work. Perhaps I can be of assistance.”
The Rook scanned the ever-ready faces of Blackwell’s forces. Feeling the tension of his own crew slam into his back like the waves battering at the black cliffs below Ben More.
Moving slowly, as one does in the presence of so many primed pistols, he took a few steady steps forward, rolling his sleeve back from the underside of his scarred forearm. “It was— I was damaged twenty years ago. I don’t remember what it means.”
Dorian Blackwell gazed down at the webbed flesh of burns on his arms, becoming unnaturally still. “The dragon,” he breathed. “The map.”
The Rook’s temperature spiked once again. “You know it?”
With lightning speed, Blackwell’s pistol leveled right in between his eyes. His own chest heaved beneath his fine wool jacket. “Take. Off. Your. Cowl.”
For the first time in years, the Rook followed another man’s orders.
A raw sound erupted from Blackwell’s throat. Then another. The first carried disbelief, and the second a tortured form of sorrow.
To see such a fearsome man tremble astonished the Rook into bewildered silence.
“You’re … You’re dead.” Blackwell depressed the hammer on his pistol before it landed in the grass.
“Buggar me blind,” groaned the Scotsman as he frantically pressed the arms of his cohorts down, pointing their pistols at the ground. “It’s a ghost ship.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you a ghost?” Dorian reached for him, but the Rook lunged first, grabbing Blackwell by the collar.
“You think you know me?” He brought his face close, ignoring the metallic clicks of weapons. “Did you think you’d killed me?”
“Yes.” A strange and discomfiting moisture glittered in the Blackheart of Ben More’s one good eye. His smooth voice was now hoarse with barely leashed emotion. “You’ve haunted me for twenty years. All this time I thought your death was my fault.”
A band tightened around his chest. He looked at Dorian Blackwell differently now. The ebony hair. The marble-black eye. The height and breadth and scope of the man.
It was like looking into a mirror. Almost. Could they be…?
“How is this possible?” the Scotsman marveled. “Dorian—?
“They made us scrub your blood from the stones.” Blackwell’s hand curled over the Rook’s wrist with a gentleness that bedeviled him. “So much blood. How could you have survived? I watched them take your body away. I’ll never forget…”
His other hand gripped the Rook’s shoulder with a ferocity he hadn’t expected. “I avenged you, brother. We avenged you, Argent and me. We killed them all, Dorian. Every Newgate guard who put his hands on you. Know they died screaming.”
“Brother? Argent?” The Rook pressed a hand to his temple as an ice pick slammed into his eye, nearly buckling his knees. The pain. His head. He couldn’t …
The Blackheart of Ben More supported him with an anxious hand on his arm. “You … You don’t remember? You don’t know who I am?” Concern mingled with increasing alarm in his voice.
The Rook pushed him away, weaving as a wave of dizziness threatened his composure. “We’ve never fucking met,” he growled. “What are you saying? What are we to each other? Are you or are you not Dorian Blackwell?”
“No.” His one dark eye sparkled, welled, and a tear streaked down his cheekbone as torment etched into the brutal lines of his oddly familiar features.
“I am not Dorian Blackwell,” he whispered. “You are.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The moment the Rook darkened the doorway to Ben More’s magnificent library, Lorelai found it almost impossible to look at him for a myriad of reasons.