Blackwell lowered his long frame into one of the chairs, and laid the open book on the coffee table.
This time, it was Moncrieff who made a choked sound of utter disbelief. Seized with excitement, he expelled a victorious laugh and clapped his stunned captain on the shoulder. “Captain. Can you believe our bloody luck?” He put his hand on his forehead, as though checking his own temperature. “I’ll be goddamned.”
Unfolded in the carved-out pages of the tome was a thin, rusted sigil. The figure of a serpentine dragon, with four claws and a tongue snaking between fearsome teeth, snarled beneath the etching of two words. NIGRAE AQUAE.
“Your tattoo.” Lorelai gasped.
The Rook collapsed into the other chair, wrenching up his sleeve. Only the dragon’s head and front claws crawled from beneath the web of scars surrounded by additional tattoos. The first time Lorelai had seen this, it had been the only ink on his body.
The letters remained the same, if somewhat faded with time. RAE. UAE.
The NI and the AQ had been burned away by the lye along with half of the dragon’s body.
“What about the lines behind it?” Lorelai asked, reaching across the table to trace the ink breaking from the dragon like the branches of a dead tree. “Did you ever figure out what they are?”
He gazed down at the tip of her finger as it stroked across the tattoo, his eyes closing for the softest of moments, as though savoring her touch. “Yes,” he finally answered. “It’s a map.”
“It’s this map.” Blackwell untucked an ancient leather scrap from a separate fold in the book and stretched it flat.
Lorelai reeled, stunned so profoundly, she couldn’t find words.
“This is the Scythian Dragon,” Blackwell said. “The night you were … attacked, you had Walters ink this to your body.” He grinned up at the Rook, and Lorelai could see how they must have been as boys. Their dark heads together dreaming of treasure and adventure. “Are you still looking for the Claudius Cache?”
“Captain.” A note of warning lanced through Moncrieff’s usual good humor.
“There’s no use denying it.” The Rook flexed his forearm, and the veins beneath his skin rolled over the taut muscles beneath his scars. “Once I figured out what the Scythian Dragon meant, my crew and I began searching Britain, but it’s not easy working from half a map with no marker.”
“Nigrae Aquae.” Veronica finally broke her silence, leaning in with the rest of them. “It’s Latin.”
“For what?” Murdoch asked.
“Black Water,” Veronica and Moncrieff revealed in tandem, blinking at each other in surprise.
The Rook’s eyes burned into Lorelai’s with an onyx fire. “As in…”
“The Black Water River,” she confirmed. “I’d recognize these waterways anywhere now that I can see the whole of them. They’re part of the river’s tributaries.”
“And this?” Moncrieff pointed to the small, hastily drawn dragon on the leather map.
“That is a very small island to the left of the mouth of the river. Tersea Island. You can see it from the shore, but the coast is naught but rocks and cliffs, it’s nigh impossible to land on.” She sat back, her entire frame quivering with equal parts excitement and alarm. “But if you can figure out how … I think … I think that’s where you’ll find your treasure.”
“All that time you spent on the Black Water, Captain, we could never make sense of it.” Moncrieff bent his knees to inspect the rudimentary drawings of the waterways. “Even though you couldn’t remember, you must have known it in your bones, that the treasure you’d sought your whole life was hidden there.”
“Yes. I knew it in my bones.”
Lorelai didn’t look up from the map, but a strange ache lodged at the base of her throat at his words. He’d come for her, to fulfill a vow he’d made as a boy. But … what took him so long?
And what did they do now? What if he found his treasure? The one that’d meant so much to him, he’d left her at Southbourne Grove for how many years to chase it. He’d mentioned suffering and servitude, but the Rook had been in the papers for the better part of five years. The sun had risen one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five times, at least, since she’d first heard of his exploits as the Captain of the Devil’s Dirge.
In an age where a fast steamship could cross the Atlantic to America in six days and circumnavigate the globe in a matter of weeks … why hadn’t he come for her?
And why come for her now?
Was it this? Her gaze traced the lines of the familiar waterways of her home. The Claudius Cache? Maybe a part of him wanted her, but this was his real quest.
Treasure.
He was a pirate, after all.
Veronica stood, startling everyone and obliging all gentlemen to do the same. Everyone, that was, but the Rook. “Now that you have what you came for, may we be released?”
“Absolutely not.” Moncrieff’s hazel eyes shouted silent warnings at her. “You are now privy to our plans. It wouldn’t do to have you contact the authorities and tell them where we are whilst we’re pilfering the treasure.”
“Released?” Farah echoed, a worried frown deepening her cherubic dimples. “As in … from captivity?”
“Yes,” Veronica hissed. “We’ve been the Rook’s prisoners for days.” She put her hand on Lorelai’s shoulder. “We just want to go home.”
“Prisoners?” Blackwell turned to Lorelai, whose thoughts and emotions were as unruly as a litter of curious kittens. “I was told you were his wife.”
“She is my wife.” The Rook stood, towering over her.
“Why didn’t you mention your captivity before?” Farah pressed.
“Because we weren’t certain we hadn’t simply changed one captor for another when we were beset upon at the beach by your guards,” Veronica answered.
“That was more for your safety than anything else,” Dorian said.
“No one is a prisoner here,” Farah reassured them. “You are free to leave at your leisure. Though I’d suggest prevailing upon our hospitality until the morning.”
“She goes nowhere,” the Rook stated in a voice hard enough to shatter diamonds. “She is my wife.”
A new tension sliced through the library, robbing it of air. All the moisture deserted Lorelai’s mouth, but she had to wipe freezing, clammy hands on the skirt of her borrowed gown, unable to look up from her lap.
Lord, she hated this. Detested it when people stared. When their voices rose in both pitch and sound. She loathed aggression or conflict of any kind.
Pain always followed.
She could feel their gazes, heavy with expectation. They were waiting for her to pull the rope on the guillotine. Veronica. The Rook. The Blackwells. Even Moncrieff.
Air. She needed air. Where had it gone? Had the black void in the Rook’s chest swallowed it all?
Her lids began to flutter. If she were lucky, she could just leave. Sleep. And wake when the carnage was over.
Escape. Like the coward she’d always been.
Farah Blackwell’s abidingly soft voice whispered through the atmosphere thick and hot with suspicion and challenge as she rested a hand on Lorelai’s shoulder. “Lorelai, dear. Are you…” She paused. “Do you consider yourself married to the Rook?”
His gaze burned a hole into the crown of her head. She didn’t have to look up to fathom the possession and demand in his eyes. “I—I don’t know. I couldn’t say that our ceremony was exactly legitimate.”
“It was by the rules of maritime law,” the Rook insisted.
“It’s true that I’ve been more of a captive than a wife,” she confessed, her cheeks burning with mortification. “And … the marriage hasn’t been consummated.”
“Thank God.” Veronica sighed with more relief than Lorelai, herself, felt.
“Do you want the Rook for your husband?” Farah urged.
“That is inconsequential.” Her would-be husband pushed the table between them aside with one swipe, advancin
g until his knee boots were planted before her. “She belongs to me, and where I go, she goes. End of fucking discussion.”
Fearing the chaos he might have stirred by removing the physical barrier, Lorelai made to stand, but Farah beat her to it.
Lorelai was once again stunned speechless when she reached up to save Farah. Instead of fear, or aggression, or even caution, both the Blackheart of Ben More and his pretty wife shared an odd, secret smile.
“The discussion ends when you answer one question, Captain.” Farah stood between her and the Rook, and Lorelai thought her braver even than Joan of Arc.
“What’s that?” he asked in the voice of a wolf at the end of his tether.
“Do you love her?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was one of a million questions the Rook didn’t know the answer to. The one word he hadn’t a definition for.
Love.
He only understood possession. There were laws about it. Wars fought over it. Countless souls martyred in its name.
But love? How did a man feel what he did not understand?
How did he convey what he’d never been shown?
Was he expected to love when Lorelai didn’t? She wouldn’t even look at him. He’d not allowed her to answer Lady Northwalk’s question because her rejection might have deflated the tiny bloom of humanity he’d begun to sense within himself since he’d claimed her.
And even he couldn’t predict his reaction if she’d denied him now.
Blackwell threw him a lifeline. “What is she to you?”
It was as if he knew. As if he understood that love was a fragmented hypothetical to men like them.
A tranquility shimmered inside of him. Were she not there, an arm’s length away, he’d have done monstrous things already. She kept his beast at bay. It was for her that he spoke instead of struck. And because of it, he’d discovered a piece of the puzzle from his past. Before her, he’d have taken the offensive. He’d have destroyed any possible enemies, before he’d the chance to find an ally.
What was Lorelai to him? What had she been since the first time she’d bade him to live? “She is my wife. She … is my … peace.”
Gasping, she struggled to her feet. He reached out to help her, but she slapped his hands away with shockingly uncharacteristic temper.
“I am not your piece, you—you … mercenary … scalawag!”
He tried not to find it endearing that she had to search her infinitely gentle mind for an insult, and had possibly come up with the most benign one in existence.
“I’ve begged you again and again to let poor Veronica go!” Her eyes sparked with an azure flame he’d never before witnessed, and it roused something inside of him that didn’t even resemble ire. “Hasn’t she been through enough? You murdered her husband!”
He shrugged and swatted her accusation away like a troublesome gnat. “I did her a favor and both of you know it.”
Neither of the Weatherstoke women argued the point, but they glowered at him with identical, mutinous expressions. One glare emerald, the other sapphire.
The Weatherstoke Jewels, indeed.
Blackwell made a pithy sound of consternation. “We find ourselves in a rather complicated predicament.”
“How’s that?” Moncrieff stepped to his captain’s side, his hand in his jacket, presumably on a weapon.
Blackwell’s eye speared the first mate, glittering with reservation, his own hand reaching behind him. “I cannot, in good conscience, allow innocent women to be held at Ben More against their will.”
Farah snorted. “Since when?”
It was a line in the sand, drawn by a man who claimed to be his brother. A line the Rook would gladly leap across and spill blood to keep Lorelai at his side.
Whether she wanted to be or not.
His hand found his own weapon, secure in the knowledge that he and Moncrieff could gut Blackwell and his valet before they could call for reinforcements.
But would he do such a thing? In front of the man’s wife? In front of Lorelai?
“Try and take her from me.” His warning was a mercy, he hoped Blackwell understood that. “And I’ll send your black soul to hell, you son of a—”
The Blackheart of Ben More held two empty hands up in a gesture of capitulation. “Dorian.”
“Don’t call me that,” he barked. It was his name. And yet … it wasn’t. He didn’t know the Blackheart of Ben More. He hadn’t seen any documentation to validate anyone’s claim to the name Dorian Blackwell.
But the emotion in the man’s eye was hard to ignore, and the story he told not only possible, but plausible.
Probable even.
He had the Scythian Dragon.
“Very well.” Blackwell glanced speculatively at the women gathered to the Rook’s left. “Permit my wife to show the ladies and your first mate to their chambers. I wish to speak with you, alone.”
“How do I know you won’t spirit them away?” More than anything, the Rook wanted the offer to be genuine. But very few men in this world could be believed, and none could be trusted.
“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.
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 19