The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(64)

“I offer myself as surety. A hostage, even. I’ll go to your ship, if you like.”

“No,” Farah contended with one word.

He gazed over at his wife, and a silent communiqué passed between them. It wasn’t as though he commanded her compliance, but he requested it.

And she gave it. She trusted him.

The lucky bastard.

“This could be a trap,” Moncrieff cautioned.

Blackwell didn’t bother to hide his dislike as he measured Moncrieff, but he addressed the Rook. “There are questions I can answer. About the Cache. About the past. I know you. Maybe better than you know yourself. All I want to do is talk.”

Finally, the Rook nodded, then commanded Moncrieff. “You keep watch on the women. No one leaves until I say.”

“Yes, Captain.” Moncrieff followed the colorful procession of skirts out the library door. Murdoch kept a watchful eye on the pirate, sticking close to Farah Blackwell’s side.

Lorelai didn’t look back at him.

What cause had he given her to do so? I’m sorry, he thought. But I can’t let you go …

Her absence left the room colder, and without thinking, he pulled his collar tighter to him, as though protecting himself from a northern wind.

“Before I answer any of your questions, may I ask you one?” The clink of a crystal stopper harmonized with Blackwell’s voice, drawing the Rook to turn around. Blackwell held up a second glass in silent query. He could use a drink. But did he trust it? Could he surrender his wits in a place like this?

He shook his head.

So, Blackwell made his own drink a double. “How did you survive?” The amber liquid in his glass caught the firelight as he lifted it to his lips and drank away an unpleasant memory. “I’ll never erase the sight of your broken body from my nightmares. You were dead. You were basically just … meat when they dragged you out of my cell.”

“I woke in a mass grave, a pile of meat, as you say. With no name. No past. No idea where I was or who’d tried to kill me. I’d five broken bones, and lye burns over a third of my body.” He held the ruined tattoo on his forearm out for another inspection. “That’s what happened to this … and to my neck and jaw.”

Blackwell inspected the scars crawling up his jaw and into his hairline with neither pity nor disgust. “Only you could have resurrected yourself,” he recalled. “Murdoch always used to say, ‘where there is a will, there is a way.’ When we were together, I was the way, and you were the will. I’ve never met anyone more driven than you. If you decided to live, no amount of broken bones or blood lost could have taken you.”

“I had no will.” His quiet admission surprised them both, he gathered. “Not until I heard her voice.”

“Lady Lorelai? She had a hand in rescuing you?” Blackwell speculated.

The Rook nodded. “She was a child. All of fourteen. But she became my world as she nursed me back to health. I spent the better part of a year watching her play doctor to a slew of other broken, wounded animals. I went from not being able to walk, to romping about the Black Water bogs with her. And never once did she leave my side.” He remembered a question that no one else had ever been able to answer. “How old was I, when I … when you thought I died?”

“Eighteen.” He spoke the age with the warmth a good whisky lends the throat.

“So, I’m eight-and-thirty.” Somehow, having an age felt … better.

“How disconcerting it must have been not to know that,” Blackwell mused. “So, you’ve known your Miss Weatherstoke for twenty years…” Blackwell’s unspoken question was lost in the burn of whisky.

“Yes … And, no.”

“What parted you?”

“Her brother, the countess’s husband.” A familiar rage, white and absolute, rose within him. “He shanghaied me. I was a slave in the East for … for so long. With only my hatred to keep me company. With only her memory to keep me alive.”

Blackwell summarized the rest of his story. “And so, you became the Rook. You cut a path back to her door. A road cobbled from corpses and mortared with blood. Then, you murdered the man who parted you, right in front of her, and claimed her as yours, heedless of her protestations.”

It was refreshing not to hear that part spoken with censure, but respect. “How did you know?”

“It’s what I would have done.” Blackwell’s lips twitched with the threat of a smile. “Hell, it’s almost verbatim what I did do in Farah’s case, just under different circumstances. And, I might add, with a great deal more finesse.”

The Rook looked at him sharply, but any ire died when he noted Blackwell’s threatening mouth tilted in an earnest smirk.

No one dared tease him. Moncrieff sometimes attempted humor, but even he was careful not to approach certain boundaries.

The Rook found he didn’t mind. This seemed … both foreign and familiar, to share with this stranger. This stranger who called him brother.

“Finesse isn’t a skill I’ve had to acquire.” Carefully, he lowered himself to the edge of one of the monstrous chairs, letting the fire warm the chill established by Lorelai’s absence. It would be folly to allow himself to be comfortable. To let down his guard.

“Of that I have no doubt.” Blackwell claimed the chair beside him, crossing an ankle over his knee. “But with a woman like yours … it may be in your best interest to obtain some. If not finesse, at least a bit of diplomacy.”