The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  “Are you about to teach me?” She’d meant it as a challenge, but it escaped as a whisper. “Is that what this is? This so-called wedding night? Am I to suffer for Mortimer’s sins? Do you want to stain yourself with the blood of two innocent people in one day?”

  “Blood … innocent…?” He released her, brows drawing together as though her words had confounded him.

  She leveled him a speaking glare. “Virgins usually bleed, do they not?”

  His eyes dipped to her lap, then closed for the space of one cavernous, never-ending exhale.

  “You are still … innocent.” He drew the word out on a hiss. “After all this time?” His fingers curled into talons before abruptly letting go.

  He was at the door before Lorelai could form a reply.

  Bracing one hand against the door frame, he clung to the handle as if at any moment someone might drag him away. The curious dark shapes of the tattoos beneath the thin white of his shirt rose and fell with three heaves of his shoulders. Feathers maybe? He turned the latch. Paused. “You cannot be so blind as to think Mortimer was innocent.”

  Lorelai wiped at her tears with trembling hands. “For all his atrocities, he was not a murderer. No one deserves to die like that.”

  “He was a murderer.” The Rook didn’t look at her, but the creases of his fists turned white. “And he deserves to die seven thousand deaths.”

  Stunned, Lorelai almost dropped the edges of her bodice. Seven thousand was a very specific number. “What are you saying? Why seven thousand?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She flinched as he wrenched the door open. “Your enterprising knee has saved you from a wedding night.” He’d still yet to look at her, and for some untold reason, Lorelai was glad. “Get some sleep, Lorelai, but suffer no illusions. I’ll not be denied. I will have you.”

  “Never,” she vowed as he closed her in and locked the door behind him.

  In an unprecedented moment of weakness, the Rook pressed his forehead against the barrier of wood and steel separating them. On a harsh breath, he repeated the same word he’d whispered at the end of every infernal day for twenty long years.

  “Always.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Fucking hell,” the Rook muttered as he braced his legs against the bow and ripped his shirt open, allowing vicious nails of rain to drive themselves into his flushed, overheated skin.

  It hurt.

  Everything hurt. The icy water against his flesh. His muscles stressed to their limit by herculean restraint. His cock, where Lorelai’s resourceful knee had struck. The disused muscle palpitating against his ribs like a wild beast, hoping to splinter the iron darkness locking it away.

  Never matter. He welcomed the pain. Pain was the closest thing he had to a friend.

  Hell. He’d had a great deal of time to consider the venue. To contemplate its walls. Its origins. Its meaning. Twenty years, in fact.

  To him, hell was taking a drink with Mortimer Weatherstoke at an inn in Heybridge and waking up twelve hours later out to sea on a merchant ship, leagues away from the only person who’d ever meant anything to him. Hell was years upon years of working on a deck like this one, in just such a storm, the seawater stinging the open whip wounds on his back. It was sleeping in so many chains, in holds stinking of filth and despair, starving, freezing, and dreaming of his precious few months in paradise.

  Of Lorelai.

  His very own paradise lost.

  Hell was the vast, merciless oceans spread between himself and her. The hoary horizon had been his perdition for so many years until, one night, he’d had enough. What had Milton said in Paradise Lost? “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”

  But to reign in hell, one must become the very Devil.

  And so he had.

  Because he thought he’d explored every corner of hell, that he understood its every torment.

  God, what a fool he’d been.

  For tonight, he’d found a fresh depth of the abyss.

  Hell. True hell … had been standing at the door to his cabin, the memory of her warmth still fresh in his hands. The scent of her branded in his nostrils. Knowing that her lush, soft body was there for the taking …

  And walking away.

  Hell was looking into her beloved visage made only comelier by time, and finding the gaunt shadows of misery etched there. It was the denial on her lips. The refusal in her eyes.

  Hell was becoming a devil for the sole purpose of claiming his very own angel.

  Christ, the irony. The pure fucking tragedy of it all.

  For an angel she still was, even so far as to have maintained her virginal purity. After all this time.

  He’d made a fatal mistake. One he never could have prepared himself for. He’d assumed that enough of his humanity had been beaten out of him by torture, tragedy, and treasure-hunting that he could claim her while remaining unaffected by her protestations.

  But time did strange and dreadful things to memory, and he’d underestimated what her touch would do to him after all this time. He’d forgotten about her power over him. The girl whose voice could raise the dead.

  He pressed a hand to the tattoo over his heart, willing the organ beneath to still as a familiar hatred welled within, smothering all softer sentiments.

  He’d had a plan, goddammit. One he’d painstakingly shaped since making his way back to England. And, once again, Mortimer fucking Weatherstoke had bungled everything. By forcing Lorelai to marry, he’d likewise forced the Rook’s hand.

  As he’d stated, he’d left Lorelai in peace at Southbourne Grove because the Rook had ascertained through the spies he’d installed there that since the earl had married Veronica, he’d all but forgotten his sister existed.

  A tragedy for the Countess Southbourne, to be sure, but it bought him the time to craft his revenge to correlate with his reclamation of Lorelai.

  In order to claim any kind of life with Lorelai, he’d wanted to retrieve his memory.

  His identity.

  In the twenty years it’d taken to make his way back to her, he’d lost himself. Again. Not just his memory this time, but his humanity, as well. And he’d gained quite a few things along the way. Not just unimaginable wealth and infamy, but innumerable enemies, and a crew of men who would also make powerful adversaries should he not fulfill his duty to them.

  To beat a metaphor to death, if he were the king of hell, they were his demons. Demons with an insatiable appetite for blood, women, and above all … wealth.

  So, he’d devised a plot in which he might satisfy all involved.

  The Claudius Cache.

  If he could find the fabled treasure, not only could the Rook and the crew of the Devil’s Dirge retire, but the answer to the gigantic question mark in his past might be buried alongside it. Even if he found nothing regarding his lost childhood, he’d have mercifully granted Lorelai time without him.

  Because the devil in him was a dark and needful thing. Selfish. Lustful. Oh, so lustful. He’d known that once he’d gotten his hands on Lorelai … he might lose all control. He might take if she didn’t offer.

  Tonight, he’d come so close …

  It’d been so long since he’d even had a temper to lose. He’d learned that the most useful fury was a patient one. And that was why he hadn’t ripped Mortimer Weatherstoke apart the moment he’d had the chance.

  No. He’d had a plan. One that would have fed the devil’s own sense of justice. One that fit the crimes Mortimer had perpetrated.

  But the second word had reached him that Lorelai had been gambled away, that Sylvester Gooch had kissed her and was preparing to claim her.…

  The plan fucking altered as swiftly as the ocean winds. That is to say in the course of a single day, he wrenched his ship around the island, made quick work of Gooch and Weatherstoke, and did the one thing he could think of that would irrevocably tie Lorelai to him until death did they part.

  Perhaps … in hindsight … he mig
ht have been a touch hasty.

  But for twenty years he’d been a man obsessed. A man possessed of a woman whom he could no sooner let go of than he could abandon his own appendages. She was a part of him. Perhaps the only part of him that mattered anymore.

  And now she was his, for better or for worse.

  So why did he feel worse instead of better?

  Because, as he’d predicted, she wasn’t particularly keen to attach herself to the devil.

  To the Rook.

  She wanted Ash.

  A pity, he thought. Because, just like her brother, her beloved Ash had been murdered.

  More than once.

  And now his black soul occupied the shell of the boy who’d loved her. The body of the man who’d lay claim to her. He was the devil who’d returned to fulfill the promise of a ghost.

  Because despite everything, the sun still set in the west.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sebastian Moncrieff had sworn allegiance to the Rook four years ago chiefly out of sheer disbelief at finding a man who truly gave fewer dusty fucks than he did. About anything.

  Or anyone.

  Until now.

  Sagging against the door frame of the galley, a fine cigar lodged in his teeth, Sebastian squinted against the spray of relentless droves of rain and frenzied white-capped storm surges breaking against the ship. The sea did its best to crawl onto the deck, and his captain stood with both legs planted against a widow-maker gale. One hand gripped the rigging, as the other was flung wide, daring the innumerable gods of the sea to strike with whatever they could. Fire. Lightning. A rogue wave.

  Moncrieff saw this for exactly what it was.

  A shower of ice to quench the flames in his blood. Or loins, as the case may be.

  Sebastian had nearly taken one, himself, after a grapple with a writhing, spitting countess left him as aroused as he was bedeviled.

  However, he had orders to leave Veronica Weatherstoke untouched, and so he’d not seduced her, regardless of how badly he’d ached to do so.

  If ever a woman was in dire need of a good … seducing, it was that one.

  Thrusting the priggish countess from his thoughts with greater difficulty than he was comfortable with, Moncrieff considered his captain carefully. He’d taken a bride, but he’d obviously not taken her.

  Why the fuck not?

  Frowning, Moncrieff blew a perfect smoke ring into his whisky glass before drinking deeply. How many drinks did this make? Six? Seven? Didn’t matter. He’d keep drinking until he’d puzzled this conundrum through. For what self-respecting pirate made decisions whilst sober?

  None he’d want to know.

  Inelegantly, he poured his seventh—eighth?—dram and decided to sip this one as he measured the only man he’d ever obeyed.

  Together he and the Rook had turned apathy into an art form, and avarice into a religion.

  For so long before his tenure on the Devil’s Dirge, Sebastian had thought himself immune to fear. Until one glimpse of the quiet and ruthless brutality of which the pitiless Rook was capable taught him more about himself than did a lifetime spent in self-discovery.

  Sebastian had realized he wasn’t immune to fear, but addicted to it.

  And no one frightened him like the Rook.

  Did he not know better, he’d have thought the Rook some dark incarnation of Typhoon, the ancient god of chaos and the sea. The captain was possessed of a sense he’d never before encountered. Several, in fact. And before long, Sebastian had become convinced that the Rook was either a great friend or a mortal enemy of Death.

  Because the demon had left him alone—left him alive—more times than should be humanly possible.

  In time, Moncrieff’s curiosity had become a grudging respect, and then—astonishingly—kinship. He was as close to the Rook as anyone dare get without his balls shriveling to the size of sun-ripened grapes. His general insouciance became the perfect counterpoint to the Rook’s own brand of terrifying tranquility. They each had their parts to play. The Rook violently obtained things, and Moncrieff violently enjoyed those things. It went beyond treasure now. Titles. Power. Prestige. Land. They had so much. More than any one crew of ne’er-do-wells deserved.

  But it was never enough.

  Pirating for Sebastian was about pleasure. The rush of life-affirming exhilaration unparalleled by any other experience. The freedom of calling no man king, and no country home. Certainly, he followed the Rook’s orders … usually. It was his ship, after all. But for all his brutality, the Rook was no tyrant. His crew consisted of men who were at one time or another hired to do some mercenary thing and liked either the work or the reward so much that they begged to stay.

  Attrition caused from death by the Rook’s own hand was astoundingly rare for a pirate ship. In the four years Moncrieff had known him, the Rook had only killed three of his crew. One, for turning state’s evidence after his capture in Morocco. Another, for alerting the British forces of their cache beneath the catacombs of Inverthorne Keep. And what a fucking debacle that had been.

  And, most notably, Jeremy Smyth, who’d snuck an eleven-year-old girl into his quarters.

  An oily shudder oozed down Sebastian’s spine at the memory, and he took a larger drink than he’d meant to. He’d never forget how the captain had reacted to that. He didn’t punish Smyth so much as … dismantle him. Without a word, without the frenzy of rage, the captain had simply shoved the trembling child into Sebastian’s hands, and gone to work on the man.

  Not wanting the girl to see, Sebastian conducted the child back home with a bit of recompense, grateful Smyth hadn’t had the chance to relieve her of any clothing. He’d returned to a ship so eerily silent, one could hear Samuel Barnaby muttering obscenities as he mopped up the blood.

  What was left of Smyth had been displayed on the aft railing of the quarterdeck until the smell became untenable.

  That was how the captain operated. Most often, no order need be given. No law need be written. The men just knew what was expected, and when they didn’t, they stepped very lightly.

  No one had quite discovered what drove the Rook. Greed? Perhaps. His own legend, maybe? Or blood. There was always plenty of blood. Though the crew often hazarded as to the captain’s proclivities in careful whispers, it had never truly mattered before.

  Until now. Until … her.

  With no warning at all, they’d paused in the middle of the grandest treasure hunt since the Copper Shuttle had been uncovered, to kidnap a crippled spinster and murder an impoverished earl.

  This behavior of the captain’s was not only eccentric in the extreme, it was … troubling. And since the enigmatic Rook never explained himself, Sebastian and the rest of the crew were left scratching their heads, speculating as to what, if anything, Lorelai and Veronica Weatherstoke had to do with the Claudius Cache.

  Lorelai had seemed to know him. She’d called him Ash.

  Sweet Christ, did the Rook have … a name? A past? That didn’t sound at all right.

  It’d been easiest for the world—for Moncrieff, himself—to perceive the Rook as some sort of mythical character. Birthed by an ancient forgotten god in some ridiculously brutal way. A curse or a scourge of the seas dredged from beneath Poseidon’s fingernail or Neptune’s nut sac … or whatnot.

  Could it be possible that he was … a mere mortal? That skill, cunning, strength, and sometimes blind bloody luck had seen him through all this fucking time?

  When it seemed the storm had driven enough needles into the Rook’s flesh, the captain drifted back toward the galley, navigating the sharply pitching deck with a curious hitch in his stride.

  He accepted the towel Sebastian offered him and dragged it over his face before scrubbing at his hair. A small muscle tic appeared in his jaw, which was the equivalent of a temper tantrum for such a self-contained man.

  “I’ll never claim to be an expert on wedding nights, Captain, having only ever ruined a few, but I’ve operated under the impression they’re not gene
rally so abbreviated as yours.”

  “I’m in no mood.” To describe the glare he received as threatening, was to call the Sahara dry or ocean wet.

  Applicable, but not enough.

  Sebastian suspected they were both stricken with a similar distemper. Driven to the same volatile, frustrated place by two appealing—yet unwilling—Weatherstoke ladies. “Very well, may I offer you some of this obscenely expensive Ravencroft Scotch? Top-shelf, worth every penny … or would be … had I actually paid for it. It’ll warm you up enough to put your nipples away.”

  “No.”

  Moncrieff couldn’t decide which of the two captains currently occupying his whisky-induced double vision was the right one, so he gaped at them both, his cigar nearly dropping from his slack jaw. “I’ve never known you to turn down a drink or five. What’s gotten into you?”

  Folding the towel, the Rook draped it over a basin, glancing in the direction of the captain’s quarters. “If I drink, I might forget.”

  Sebastian snorted, dropping into a high-backed chair next to the galley fire. “I rather thought that was the point of drinking.”

  “I might forget all the reasons I left her alone. I … might go back.”

  “I see,” Sebastian lied, kicking out the chair across from him for the captain. “Still a reluctant bride, then? Can’t imagine why.”

  The Rook’s silence spoke volumes, as did his posture when he lowered his impressive, dripping body into the chair.

  Dangerous enough to warrant another drink.

  “Since when have you ever allowed someone to deny you?” Sebastian challenged.

  “She’s different,” his captain murmured.

  “I know she’s bloody different. We’ve never risked such an intricate shore excursion before for something so inconsequential as a woman. I mean—”

  The Rook held up a hand to silence him, and something in the rigidity of the gesture lifted fine hairs all over his body. “It wasn’t just for her, and you know it.”

  He knew nothing of the sort, but he wisely kept his own counsel. Even he, who continually spat in the face of the fates, found it difficult to meet the Rook’s sharp, eerie gaze. They’d barely rounded Cape Wrath in their cartographical search of Scotland’s rivers. This little side venture put their whole fucking scheme in peril. But the Rook was right, capturing the captain’s new bride hadn’t been their only mission in Maldon. They’d also abducted a countess, murdered an earl, and the wealthy Mr. Gooch …