The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(60)

“Farah.” Her name escaped as a raw sound from her husband’s throat. “That is Dorian Blackwell.”

She snatched her offered hand back to cover her mouth. “My God,” she breathed. “You’re not dead.”

Lorelai’s breath became trapped in her lungs as her throat closed around a multitude of emotions. He had a name. He had … another man’s name?

“W-what is going on?” She lamented the tremor in her voice. The pity in Farah’s eyes as she turned back to her. The malice with which Moncrieff regarded her.

She hated that he still refused to look her way. What did she call him in her mind now? The Rook? Dorian? Ash? Husband?

Did it matter?

He stared at the Blackheart of Ben More with a mixture of speculation and skepticism. The man who’d lived with his name for twenty long years. Would he take it back? Would there still be violence?

Farah returned to Lorelai, sinking into the place beside her as though she’d lost the starch in her knees.

“I was born Dougan Mackenzie, the unwanted bastard of the hated Laird Hamish Mackenzie,” the man at the mantel revealed as firelight played across his stark, pallid features. “Farah and I were children in the same Highland orphanage where I killed a priest to protect her honor.”

From beside her, Farah gave a watery sniff, and Lorelai found her hand clutched in hers again, though she wasn’t sure just who reached for whom.

“I was sent to Newgate Prison. Where I met him.” Blackwell’s savage features melted into something that looked like fond nostalgia. He looked over at the Rook, who’d yet to move a muscle but for the unsteady rise and fall of his chest. “Gods, how we hated each other at first. You threw a rock at me once, and we fought like devils. Beat each other bloody.” His lip quirked as though visiting a fond memory. “I’m the reason your nose is crooked, though it seems to have become more so over time.”

Lorelai glanced over, noting the slight imperfection of the bone just below the Rook’s eyes. She’d thought that had been wrought from the damage he’d sustained the day she saved him.

“We became inseparable after that, and together we ruled Newgate Prison by the time we turned fifteen. I had the use of both eyes then, and you’d no scars or tattoos. They called us the Blackheart Brothers. Partly because of how we resemble each other, and partly because … of the merciless means we used to wrest power from those who wielded it before us. Against us.”

The Rook opened his mouth, but it took him several moments of indecision to speak. Everyone waited. No one breathed. “The Blackheart Brothers,” he echoed. “Then we … are not related … by blood?”

Lorelai wondered if anyone else caught the note of dejection beneath the monotone voice. It tore at her heart and produced an aching lump in her throat. He’d hoped he’d found family.

And those hopes had been dashed.

The man known as Blackwell pushed away from the mantel and turned to him. “There is plenty of blood be tween us. Enough to make us brothers. But to your lineage, I cannot speak.”

“Why did you steal my name?” The question hung in the air like a sword.

It took several fraught moments for Blackwell to produce the answer, and when he did, it was with a voice roughened by a dangerous masculine sentiment. “One night, when we returned from digging the tube tunnels, you asked if we could switch cells so you could pay Walters for a tattoo.” He shrugged. “We did this sometimes. Covered in dust as we were, it was nigh impossible to tell us apart, and the guards rarely bothered. We all looked the same to them. What I didn’t know was that that night, my malevolent father had paid four Newgate guards to finally be rid of me. They invaded my cell in the middle of the night to beat Dougan Mackenzie to death … and as far as anyone ever knew, that’s exactly what they did.”

“And you never corrected them?” Lorelai spoke without thinking.

The regret in his gaze seemed genuine as he addressed her. “Dorian only had one more month to serve for his sentence as a thief. Dougan Mackenzie had years for his murder of a priest. As much as I mourned my brother, his death provided me a very singular opportunity for freedom. The only thing that mattered was finding Farah. I was safer if my evil father thought he’d succeeded in ridding the world of me. And so was she.” He looked over at his wife, seeming to draw strength from her. “She was all I had left. She is all that matters.”

Lorelai suddenly felt like an interloper, sitting as a barrier between two such bonded lovers.

A prickling on her neck drew her notice back to the man she’d named all those years ago. A man she’d known had been possessed of a name before she’d found him, but as a girl, she’d selfishly wished him not to remember it.

What about now? What did it mean for him?

For them?

“Ye really doona remember us?” Murdoch asked the Rook from where he stood behind the settee.

The pirate summarily ignored the Scotsman as he locked eyes with Lorelai. His nostrils flared, and his arms surged in time with his hastening breaths. The rest of him remained still, his features hard as stone, as though one tap with a hammer and chisel would shatter him.

His name had been Dorian. Dorian Blackwell.

And she hated it.

As unfair as she knew she was being, that’s not who he was to her.