“He loves none so much as himself.” Ash stared after Moncrieff until he disappeared up the back stairs. “Though I suppose I should remind him of his place.”
“Perhaps you should, instead, assure him that his place at your side isn’t threatened,” Lorelai suggested, casting a surreptitious glance at his new coconspirator.
“A wise woman, your wife,” Blackwell approved.
Ash glanced down at her, enjoying the way her small hand felt in his as he tucked her against him and sojourned the long marble hall from the library to the front parlor.
A part of him had expected an army. Or the fall of an executioner’s ax upon entering. Maybe even the devil come to call him home. Because today he’d awoken with an angel in his arms. Her soft curls draped over his torso in a waterfall of spun gold. Her breath warming him and her lashes fluttering against his chest as she slumbered.
For the first time in twenty years, he’d felt settled. No, more than that.
He’d felt as if he’d come home.
Even when her head had rolled to his shoulder, and eventually blocked the feeling in his arm, he found he’d rather chew off the limb than disturb her.
Instead, he navigated the downy curve of her cheek, and the slope of her patrician nose, the peachy fullness of her generous mouth.
Generous, in every possible sense of the word.
He’d found grace in that moment. True enjoyment.
Dare he say … happiness?
So, he’d approached the rest of the day with a sense of caution. Contentment led to complacency, and that was a condition of which to be wary.
Which was why he advanced on the parlor expecting the absolute worst.
Only one man awaited him, however, surrounded by arabesque wallpaper and anachronistic objets d’art acquired by generations of deceased Weatherstokes.
One lean, elegant male with golden hair and eyes the color of the Adriatic Sea. He wore his affability like armor. His handsomeness was approachable, his strength politely contained within a lean-cut jacket patently crafted to make him appear less threatening.
Ash’s heartbeat erupted into hundreds, imprisoning both his boots to the ground. His chest filled with rocks and his mouth with sand, weighing him down with an almost bone-crushing sense of impending doom.
An abrupt and absurd image transposed upon the man … Nordic features smeared with grime. Sharp incisors bared in a snarl as sharper fists flew. Hidden blades. Lock picks. Patchwork clothing. He was a … cutter? Strange word … A dead eye.
Had they met before?
He flinched as the sound of shattering glass echoed in his head. Shattering glass, and the crunch of bone. And … blood?
So much blood.
That infernal ax came back to pick at the nerves behind his own eye as he swung his gaze to look at Blackwell, who regarded the man with a friendly sort of recognition.
“Chief Inspector Morley.” Blackwell strode forward and exchanged a familiar but wary handshake with the man. “May I introduce my longtime friends Their Graces, Ash and Lorelai Weatherstoke, Duke and Duchess of Castel Domenico. The Comte and Comtesse de Lyon et de Verdun. Though, on English soil, I suppose they’re most lately the Earl and Countess of Southbourne.” He swung his arm expansively at them. “Your Graces, this is Sir Carlton Morley, chief inspector of the London Metropolitan Police.”
Ash fought the overwhelming urge to press his fingers to his throbbing temples, keenly aware of Lorelai’s reassuring squeeze on his arm.
He almost missed the way the inspector’s hand went loose in Blackwell’s grip. Virtually as slack as his angular jaw as he stared at Ash as though he’d been cuffed in the mouth by a ghost.
“Dorian…”
“Are we finally on unofficial terms, Inspector Morley?” Blackwell smirked. “I’m not certain I’m comfortable sharing the intimacy of first names with you just yet.”
Ash’s brows drew together as he studied the pair. They’d an obvious past, one not unoccupied by enmity.
Without warning, the inspector’s composure completely splintered, and he struck Blackwell in the nose with one lightning-fast jab, causing the Blackheart of Ben More to stumble back several steps. “All this time!” Morley bellowed. “All this time you lived as him. You let the world think he was dead!”
The pain in Ash’s head intensified. His missing seventeen years pounded on the inside of his skull with a sledgehammer. The world beneath his feet became as unsteady as his ship when tossed about in a storm, and he fought the urge to grasp onto the high back of a chair to acquire stability.
“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.
“Any’fing,” he’d vowed, fighting for breath against a young lad’s lust. “I’ll give you whatever you ask.”
“A kiss.” It hadn’t been a request, but a command.
The kiss had been his first, but not hers. Not Caroline. She’d been kissed too early and too often. They’d been sixteen in that alley, and she’d been charging money for her favors for two years.
Cutter hadn’t liked that. There had been a new frenzy to their theft after she’d taken to the streets. A sense of urgency. If they could make enough to pay for a regimental commission, their lives could drastically improve. They could send their wages home.
Cutter. Cutter “Dead Eye” Morley. Caroline’s twin brother. The stickiest fingers in Spitalfields. Maybe in all of London. He could throw a pebble in a pail at fifty paces and break a window with his slingshot from down the row. He’d been light and fleet-footed, scaling buildings and scanning the city from rooftops while Ash—then called Dorian—had been the brute on the ground. Lifting, beating, or breaking what he had to.
“You could marry Caroline,” Cutter’s young self suggested earnestly as he balanced on a dock rail while they’d dawdled through the markets smelling worse than the wares of dead fish. “Then we’d be brothers. If you died, she’d get a widow’s pension.”
“Could do,” Ash had agreed. He could marry the pretty Caroline. He could save her from the streets. If he excelled, she’d be an officer’s wife. “Could do,” he’d repeated, liking this idea more and more. “But if I was supporting your sister, who’d get your pension if you were killed?”
“Easy.” Cutter’s slim shoulders shrugged as he slid his friend a sly look. “Your mother. She’s still got her charms, hasn’t she? Think she’d marry me?”
“Buggar off!” Ash had snagged at Cutter and he’d jumped away, laughing.
“Don’t be sore at me. I won’t make you call me Papa.”
They’d chased through the markets, upsetting both crates and fishmongers in their mad dash. Ash had been fast, but no one could catch Cutter. If he had, he’d have done the boy no true damage. They’d have grappled and brawled, as brothers are wont to do, before one of them cried peace.
Theirs had been a merry threesome. Cutter, Caroline, and Dorian. He couldn’t remember all their years together. He couldn’t recall their meager meals or their magical moments. But an innocent, boyish love speared his chest with a point so exquisitely sharp, it robbed him of breath.
They’d been family.
Until there had been blood.
Blood and water. Always blood and water.
And gold.
Gold hair waving like reeds in the soot and soil of the Thames.
Caroline.
With a raw sound, Ash’s knees gave out. He pressed both his palms to his temples as he groaned her name with the same anguish he’d felt the morning they’d lost her.
Word spread that a body had been pulled out of the river by Hangman’s Dock, so he and Cutter had drifted to that part of Wapping to catch the spectacle and maybe pick a few pockets.
Once they’d lazily made their way to the front of the crowd, he’d amassed nearly two shillings’ worth.
Then Cutter had screamed. A pitch of agony which he couldn’t believe he’d ever forgotten. A sound like that left scars on one’s soul.
Caroline. Saucy, seductive, resourceful Caroline. Her wit and smile had both been quick as her brother’s feet.
Quick enough to draw the attention of a killer.
Cutter had gone mad. He’d knocked out two bobbies and had to be restrained by seven more to keep away from his beloved sister’s body.
A part of him had died that day.
As inconsolable as Cutter was, that was Ash’s first taste of cold, calculating fury. He didn’t want to grieve. He didn’t want to talk to the coppers. He wasn’t interested in justice.
He wanted vengeance. Blood for blood.
He’d dragged the disconsolate Cutter around the city, asking the right questions, sussing out the exact customer who’d enticed her home that night.
They’d found him at the docks not two days later.
And Ash had held the fucker down while Cutter … well, he did the cutting.
It had been a first kill. For both of them. And the screams had drawn the constable from his watch. To protect Cutter, Ash had broken a window and nabbed something valuable in plain view of the police. He’d taken off, leading the patrolman away from the site of their revenge.
He’d even allowed himself to be caught.
For Cutter.
For Caroline.
They’d thrown him in Newgate for a handful of years. He hadn’t cared. Justice had been served with a blade in the dark. As it would ever be for the subsequent two decades.
“Caroline,” he groaned, wiping at his face, startled that his hand came away wet, though whether from sweat or tears he couldn’t tell.
His first love. His first blood.
The memories began to flood him like a dam breaking. The cold overwhelming his veins as year after year returned in fragmented images and broken emotions. Faces. Names. Scents. Sounds.
With a raw breath, he reached out for his anchor. For the one soul he needed to ground him back to this time. To this place.
Lorelai.
He reached, almost to the point of flailing, and it was Cutter … Carlton? Who took his hand and hauled him to his feet before he and Blackwell settled him into a chair.
Because Lorelai had disappeared.
* * *
Lorelai blindly stumbled out to the back garden, gulping in breaths of sea air that were exhaled as broken sobs.
She’d never forget the way Ash had said another woman’s name. His eyes had been glossy, his voice reverent. His ever-placid, forbidding features had crumpled with a sentimentality she’d never before witnessed. She’d thought, until now, Ash was incapable of experiencing the depths of such emotion. It was all right, she’d reasoned. She could love enough for the two of them.
What a fool she’d been. Because it wasn’t that he couldn
’t feel. It was that he didn’t feel those things for her.
He felt them for Caroline.
If the girl had been half as handsome a woman as Inspector Morley was a man, Lorelai could certainly understand Ash’s love for her.
Catching her reflection in a window renewed the torrent of Lorelai’s tears. What had she to offer a man like him now that her youth had faded, and her hope had waned? Was she only the stonewashed specter of his first love? Had his eyes caught the sight of a familiar girl some twenty years ago, and evoked the forgotten passions he’d cultivated for another?
Did he seek to return for her, to claim her, so intensely because he thought he’d regained some semblance of a love long dead?
The tragedy of it was a thousandfold, for them both.
“Do not weep, lovely,” a deep voice soothed from the shadows. “It will all be over soon.”
She was drawn against a hard, muscled body from behind. A sweet scent cloyed through her senses, and then the earth became sand beneath her feet as she gratefully sank into the beckoning darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two brothers. Ash stared at the men who’d once been the boys upon whom he relied. Two brothers not of his lineage. What a tangled connection they all made.
He’d remembered nearly everything, and what little he could not, Morley and Blackwell had spent the better part of a morning piecing together for him.
It was exhausting, to say the least, reliving two entire decades in one day.
How incredibly strange that Cutter Morley, the boldest thief in the empire, had, because of the death of his sister, become one of the most powerful men in London. The chief inspector at Scotland Yard.
Ash still couldn’t fathom it.
“Why the name Carlton?” he queried, making a face. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such a toff moniker.”
Morley shrugged, adopting a rather sheepish smile. “I knew I had to reinvent myself, but as a grief-stricken lad, I hadn’t exactly thought it through. When I showed up looking to enlist in a regiment, I knew that if I were to attain anything in life, I couldn’t be Cutter anymore. When they asked me my name, I panicked, and read Carlton off an advertisement for the Carlton football club.”
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