The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(89)

Ash considered the idea for the space of a drink.

The parlor door burst open, and Veronica rushed in brandishing a hastily scrawled letter.

The pallor of her skin and the panic with which she flung herself at them drove Ash to his feet.

“She’s gone!” the former countess cried as she shoved the paper into his hands.

“Lorelai?” Ash seized Veronica, shaking her slightly. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

He’d known Lorelai had been upset by the revelation of Caroline, and his first inclination had been to go to her. However, Blackwell had reasoned it was best for him to unravel his emotions about the past for himself before attempting to present the future to his wife.

It had seemed like wise advice at the time.

“Did she leave?” he demanded as the fraught woman blanched at the sight of his provocation. “Was she angry? Where would she go?”

“This is your fault!” Veronica spat, a righteous verdant fire blazing in her wide eyes. “You never should have brought him into our home!”

Him? A pit of dread opened beneath Ash’s stomach as he glanced down at the letter. He had to force his hands not to shake as he scanned the familiar writing. His rage threatened to blind him, but he forced himself to devour every word.

To count every syllable.

For that was the number of times he’d drive his blade into Moncrieff’s body until the blighter hadn’t a drop of blood left.

“What is it?” Blackwell prompted.

“My first mate is displeased with my taking a bride,” he said in a dispassionate voice that belied the rage stoking inside him. “He’s sent me an ultimatum of sorts. He’s taken a large contingent of my crew and gone after the Claudius Cache. Conversely, he’s appropriated Lorelai and placed her on a flesh-smuggling ship full of foreigners bound for Marseilles, from which the cargo will be distributed to places unknown.” At the thought of Lorelai, this very moment, sailing farther and farther away from him, the note crumpled in his fist. She was delicate, fragile. He knew the conditions people were forced to endure on just such a shop.

If one of Lorelai’s eyelashes were out of place, he’d carve every inch of skin from Moncrieff’s body. “He’s left me with a choice. I can join him and my crew and plunder the Claudius Cache as was our original plan, or we can chase Lorelai to Marseilles and save her.”

“What’s it going to be, brother?” Blackwell asked. “Your treasure, your crew, and your kingdom … or your wife?”

It took every one of the years he’d spent ruthlessly ob taining a powerful iron will to clutch a sense of calm around his shoulders like a mantle.

If he lost his mind, Lorelai could lose her life.

“The treasure doesn’t matter to me,” he gritted through his teeth as he glared down into Veronica’s colorless features. “The men don’t matter to me. Every bolt and fixture on that fucking ship would have been meaningless to me if I didn’t need them to reach her.”

Veronica’s eyes widened as she finally grasped the veracity in his words.

“She. Matters,” he gritted out. “She is all that has ever mattered. And I’ll kill every man on my crew, I’ll circle the globe, hell, I’d set the fucking ocean on fire to get her back.”

Morley strode to the door, turning to lock gazes with Ash for a protracted moment.

He saw Caroline in those sky-blue eyes.

But all he wanted was Lorelai.

He’d loved Caroline, but he’d loved her for Cutter. Because she was an extension of his very best friend.

She’d always be a tragedy to him, a hole in his young heart. But that heart belonged to Lorelai.

Somehow, Morley read all of this in his gaze. “Come on, then.” He wrenched the door open. “What are we waiting for?”

*

To navigate uneven terrain was difficult for Lorelai with her blasted ankle. She’d never thought to discover how impossible it could be with her hands bound. Every time she looked down the cliff, her stomach took a dive, as her balance threatened to tumble her at any moment into the late-afternoon tide.

By some miracle, her captor seemed able to support both her weight and his own without slowing down the handful of men who followed them toward a cave set below a treacherous rock face. Her skirts molded themselves to her legs in the tempestuous wind, further impeding her progress.

“Think about what you are doing! What if you don’t live to regret this?” she forced through a throat drawn tight by a strong gust. She knew the threat was cliché, but her life had ill prepared her for not just one, but two separate instances of pirate captivity.

Sebastian Moncrieff glanced back from where he pulled her along by a rope secured to the silk bonds at her wrists. The island wind tossed strands of his thick hair from its queue, and he secured it behind his ears.

“I regret this more with every moment I’m forced to listen to you, my lady,” he said in an indulgent tone that belied the cruelty of his words. “Take care not to tempt me to gag you, as well.”

He helped her over a particularly jagged outcropping of rock across the Tersea Island terrain before consulting a map he’d copied from Ash’s original.

Lorelai still couldn’t process her astonishment at the sheer boldness of his actions. “Are you not terrified of what the Rook will do to you once he comes for me?”