The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(79)

Lorelai frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Some distant relative of Mr. Gooch’s, I suppose.”

Veronica made a wry sound. “A dowager at my age, can you imagine?”

“No more than I can a pirate at mine.”

They shared a laugh until Lorelai sobered and turned to her sister. “You don’t have to return to your family, you know. You’ll have a dowager stipend settled on you and, of course, whatever money is granted me by my unconventional marriage to the Rook will be offered as recompense for this entire … adventure. Though I know nothing comes close to remuneration for the past couple of years. When I think of how you suffered…” She had to swallow past a lump of guilt.

“Let’s not mention it again,” Veronica offered with a false brightness that didn’t reach her haunted eyes. “Upon second thought, I don’t think I shall return to my family.” She put her head on Lorelai’s shoulder. “But I’ll make my own way in this world. A widow has far more social freedoms than wives or maidens.”

“Where will you go?” Lorelai asked.

“I’ve always wanted to lose myself in the fashion salons of Paris,” she replied dreamily.

“Then you should.”

“I believe I will.”

Lorelai clung to her for a desperate moment. “Each of us starting a new life … why does it feel ominous? Like an ending?”

Veronica thought on it for a while. “Not all happy endings are without a modicum of sadness.”

“I suppose not.” Lorelai gazed out toward the two similar men at the ship’s bow, their dark heads now bent over their map. From this vantage, they could be twins. It would be difficult to tell them apart but for Blackwell’s eyepatch.

“I wonder which of us are truly more jealous creatures,” Veronica mused. “Men, or women?”

Speculating as to what prompted the question, Lorelai followed Veronica’s gaze out over the deck to see Moncrieff, Barnaby, and several others posturing and scowling at a few of the Blackheart of Ben More’s men.

The effect was somewhat ruined by romping kittens.

Lorelai laughed merrily, drawing the attention of a pair of dark eyes, which heated her skin with the memory of the previous night. “I hazard that women would answer men, and men would answer women.”

“I expect they’d both be right.”

Off the starboard bow, the little port town of Easton-on-Sea clustered beneath the gray stone grandeur of South bourne Grove. Three islands, Mersea, Osea, and Tersea, hunkered like sentries in the tidal causeways. Mersea and Osea were flat islands with miles of tame sandy beaches. She supposed, if one squinted, Tersea could appear like the back of a sleeping dragon, half submerged, curled around its treasure. Waves breached the rocks, sending a white spray of warning to those who would dare approach.

What would they discover there on the morrow? she wondered. An ancient Roman cache? A tortured man’s past? Or something infinitely more dangerous?

*

The Rook finally understood why people begged for their lives.

Even the most coldhearted villains, the ones who turned a blind eye to the suffering of the weak, still pleaded with desperation before he ended them.

He’d distantly wondered why over the years. They had to have known, hadn’t they? That if God or the devil didn’t find them, he would. And when he did, they’d be praying for hell by the time he finished with them.

But still they tried. They cried. They bargained. They supplicated.

He’d thought them pathetic.

Until now.

He didn’t need to puzzle over it anymore. Everyone, he learned, feared death when they had something to lose. Their hearts had attached themselves to life, to something that mattered, and the thought of separation became untenable.

For his part, he’d taken it all from those men—power, money, land, titles, revenge—and had truly desired none of it for himself. That was his genuine tragedy. He’d started as a thief, became a slave, then a conqueror, a lord, and finally a pirate king. All the while, he’d been plagued by ambivalence. By a lack of fear. A part of him always assumed should a blade, a bayonet, or a bullet find purchase in his chest, it would do no damage.

Because he didn’t have a heart. Just a body built around a fathomless black void that no amount of endless acquisition could fill.

God help him, he’d tried.

He’d been so wrong. He could see that now. It wasn’t that his heart didn’t exist. It was that it had resided elsewhere all this time …

He’d left it here. At Southbourne Grove.

Little by little, Lorelai was returning it to him, shard by shattered shard.

Did he want it back? Not especially. But he wanted her enough to suffer whatever she asked of him.

He’d ached for her for twenty years. Now that he’d tasted her, claimed her, made love to her … his vocabulary didn’t extend far enough to form the word for what a separation would do to him.

He stood in his old room at Southbourne Grove and pondered the gloaming as it darkened the Black Water Estuary and the sea beyond. He understood the name now.

Nigrae Aquae. The Black Water.

Facing east, the branching rivers of the estuary became inky, labyrinthine ribbons of chaos beneath a sky quickly draining of all color. Stars already began to prick the dark canvas of the firmament on this side of the manor, though a line of gray still clung to the horizon in the west.