The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(86)

“Gentlemen, please contain yourselves.” Lorelai tucked tighter against him, and he miraculously drew strength from her nearness.

But why did he need it? What was happening?

Blackwell regained his equilibrium with impressive speed, lunging for the inspector with murder etched into his features and blood dripping from his nose.

Ash barely reached them in time, placing his body between the two men who’d apparently lost control of their faculties. “Someone kindly explain just what the fuck is going on here,” he ordered.

“I’d like to know, as well!” Blackwell snarled. “I’ve never in my life confessed a death to you, Morley.” He surged against the shoulder Ash employed to hold him back. “This lack-wit has been trying to see my neck stretched by a rope since the day he became a lowly constable.”

“And why do you think that is?” The carefully composed London accent slipped a bit in the inspector’s homicidal state, hinting at a dose of Cockney.

“Any number of reasons. I made you and your bobbies look like fools. I have noble blood and you couldn’t be more ordinary. I pulled myself out of the gutter where you’re convinced I belong. Or … perhaps because you loved Farah, my wife, to distraction, and the moment I kissed her she forgot you even existed.” A dark triumph laced through Blackwell’s cultured voice. “You never had a chance, Morley, she was always mine. The better man won. Admit it and begone!”

To everyone’s utter astonishment, the inspector merely laughed, though the sound was laced with enough hostile bitterness to sour the air. “You sanctimonious, arrogant bastard. I’ll grant that you took the most important person from me. You appropriated the last hope I had for family years ago … but Farah didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with it.”

“Horseshit!”

“Dorian Blackwell was my best mate!” Morley roared. “Furthermore, he was engaged to my twin sister.”

Lorelai made the choked sound they all were too astounded to echo.

“I was there the day they released Dorian Blackwell from prison, did you know that?” the inspector boomed. “I stood at the gate, waiting to take my friend, my brother, home. I’m the one who buried his mother when influenza took her not a year after his incarceration. We’d never had the chance to properly grieve for Caroline, the woman who meant more to us both than life. And you!” He shoved a finger in Blackwell’s face. “You sauntered out of Newgate like you owned the name, and you’ve been throwing it in my fucking path for the better part of two decades. That. That is why I’ve hated you all this time.”

It was a good thing that Blackwell had ceased to struggle against Ash, because the pronouncement stunned the strength right out of him. He turned and gaped at the man whom he’d somehow known wasn’t a stranger.

But a brother? Another one?

“You knew I wasn’t Dorian Blackwell?” The Blackheart of Ben More gaped. “Why didn’t you ever let on?”

Morley’s features tightened with a mélange of wrath and agony. “Because I had secrets of my own. Ones that died with Dorian … Or I thought they did.” He speared Ash with an accusatory glare, one underscored by ancient wounds. “Where in the ninth level of hell have you been for two bloody decades?” he demanded.

The ninth level of hell … about covered the whole of it.

“How cruel of you, after what we were to each other, almost brothers-in-law, that you would let me believe— God!” Morley plunged his fingers in his hair, interrupting the perfect sheen created by his pomade. “And to think that both of you black-hearted bastards were in on this poxy farce.”

“He didn’t remember.” Lorelai rushed to Ash’s aid, as though sensing he’d lost the ability to form coherent sentences. “There was a terrible incident in prison,” she explained. “When my family found him, he’d no memory of his past.”

“I don’t believe that for a blessed moment.”

Ash didn’t like the way Morley stared at his wife. Hard. As though she invoked a memory he’d rather not suffer again.

“Why not?” Her eyes darted around nervously. “I can attest to it. I was there.”

Whirling on Ash, the inspector’s lips curled in a sneer of disgust. “You claim your memory is damaged?”

“It is,” Ash managed.

“Then why did you select a wife who resembles my twin sister, Caroline, in almost every respect?”

All sense of time and place fell away into some auditory void as Ash’s gaze collided with Lorelai’s.

Blue. Blue like the Baltic Sea.

Like the inspector’s.

Like … Caroline.

The wall in his mind began to crumble, along with his sanity and the strength in his knees.

On Lorelai’s beloved face, a gaunt ghost began to superimpose herself.

Young. Pale. Gold …

Gold hair glinting in the gas lamps. Sometimes short, other times waist length.

Caroline … she’d sold it. For him. To pay his bail when he’d been nabbed for stealing a loaf of bread and cash from a local baker.

“You shouldn’t’ve done that, Caro.” His own young voice filtered through the past. “I deserve to rot for a dirty thief.”

She’d pushed him into a grimy alley behind crates full of skinny Spitalfields chickens. Her fingers had been cold on his chest. “You owe me now,” she’d whispered.