“Did you ever see war?” Ash tried to picture the lanky lad he’d known in regimental reds.
“I did,” he answered. “I served in Egypt and Afghanistan. I never lost the designation Dead Eye” He mimed looking down the barrel of a rifle. “I’ve more confirmed kills than any rifleman in the Queen’s Army.”
Blackwell never seemed to cease shaking his head, staring at Morley with one wide, disbelieving eye. “I still can’t seem to think past the part where you were a thief.”
Ash surveyed the reclining assemblage in the parlor. Perhaps three of the most intimidating, powerful, and somber men in the empire, natural enemies in every way, drinking identical snifters of Scotch whisky as they laughed and reminisced about the skills acquired by means of their misspent youths.
“I—suppose this means we have to make peace.” Blackwell extended his hand to Morley, who regarded it like one might a proffered soiled linen. “Oh, come now, Morley. We’ve made a tenuous connection over the years, haven’t we? Dare I say, an armistice of sorts? You have poached my favorite assassin for your own employee.”
“I’ve always maintained criminals make the best coppers.” Morley clapped his hand into Blackwell’s and shook it, firmly. “I suppose since we share a past with this one, we’ll be sharing a future, as well.” He shoved a thumb toward Ash. “Though befriending the notorious Rook would most certainly cost me my job.” The chief inspector glanced toward the door through which Lorelai had disappeared. “There is the trivial matter of the late earl…” A new anger narrowed his eyes to slits of wrath. “Though, after hearing your tale, I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead.”
It had taken some time, but after Morley and Blackwell had untangled Ash’s memories of his first two decades, he had then filled them in on the subsequent twenty years. Waking up in the grave, being healed by Lorelai, then shanghaied by Mortimer, becoming the Rook. The Claudius Cache. All of it.
Blackwell’s eyes brightened, as though struck by an ingenious idea. “I don’t suppose you can claim your wife’s brother was killed by the Rook and, in turn, you hunted the pirate down and took your revenge…”
A twinge of displeasure twisted inside of him. “You mean … Ash Weatherstoke should kill the Rook?”
Morley gave a rather Gallic shrug. “You’d be a national hero. People would be less likely to consider your past, or investigate the origins of your dukedom.”
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 obtaining 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?”
“That’s the beauty of all this, you see.” His winsome smile might have blinded most women, but Lorelai had long since decided his pulchritude was superfluous. “If the captain ‘comes for you,’ as you say, he’ll end up in Marseilles. I’ve
left him a letter informing him that I’ve sent you there, and are a damsel in need of rescuing.”
“What compels you to have done such a terrible thing?”
“Because if he chases you to Marseilles, that gives me and the lads, here, enough time to plunder the Claudius Cache, and get away.”
“Did you allude to the fact that you’d be on the ship with me to Marseilles?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then where are you supposed to be?”
His smile widened from mildly amused to wicked delight. “Why, here, of course, plundering the Claudius Cache.”
Lorelai gaped. “You can’t be that senseless, to let him know where to look for you.”
“I can be that ingenious,” he corrected. “And, if you think about it, I’ve done you a great favor.”
“And how, pray tell, could you ever claim for that to be the case?”
“Because I gave him a choice.” His smile became a sneer, twisting his handsome lips into something sinister. “If he goes after you, you’ll know that he was weak enough to give you his heart. If he comes to the caves, as I invited him to do, he’ll have proven that he’s a pirate at heart and that you mean less to him than his crew and this treasure.”
The implications of either choice lanced Lorelai through with fear. What if Ash went to Marseilles and left her to the mercy of this heathen? And yet, what if he found her in the caves?
It seemed, whichever scenario was more likely, she’d be the one to suffer.
“He trusted you,” she accused. “It makes no sense that you would so violently and irreparably shatter this legacy you’d built together. This is, for all intents and purposes, a mutiny. Don’t most mutinies end in death?”
“They do, indeed.” Moncrieff’s generally mild features darkened with livid shadows. “The moment your husband decided that love was worth more than treasure, he no longer deserved to call himself a pirate captain. He’d be the first to admit that. It’s not like a commission of admiralty in the Queen’s Navy. A man becomes captain of a ship like ours out of sheer ruthless force and unwavering capability. If that is no longer the case … then a crew will do what it must.”
A chorus of hearty agreement met his proclamation, driving Lorelai into silence. Moncrieff had assured her when she’d woken on the longboat halfway to Tersea Island that she’d remain unharmed if she made no trouble.
But the closer they came to the caves, the more palpable the dangerous anticipatory aggression seemed to leach from the men at her back, buffeting her with as much tangible force as the wind.
Even Moncrieff couldn’t save her if they decided she wasn’t worth the trouble and pitched her over the cliffs.
Or worse.
“There it is, the mouth of the dragon.” Moncrieff pointed to the jagged opening only accessible at low tide.
Lorelai decided it was a bit fanciful to have interpreted a dragon into the blunt stones, but she wisely kept her thoughts to herself. At this point, even the wet sand she was forced to stumble through was uncomfortable, and by the time they’d found some even stone within the caves to tread upon, her sore ankle had become less than useless. She’d resorted to dragging it behind her more often than walking upon it.
Moncrieff gave some terse commands for a few of the men to stand watch at the cave’s mouth over some crates of excavation tools. The remaining contingent lit lanterns and followed them inside.
Moncrieff’s excitement only seemed to intensify as he hauled Lorelai into a cave almost as wide as Buckingham Palace and maybe half as tall.
Despite her discomfort, Lorelai marveled at the immediate change in the wide cavern as opposed to the outside. Where the island was dank, mossy, and inhospitable, the cave walls sparkled like onyx diamonds shot through with a foreign coral lace colored a vaguely pink hue.
Had she not been terrified, she’d have been awestruck.
However, excitement quickly turned to a frantic disappointment as the mutineers found their treasure cave stark and utterly empty.
“Where is it?” one demanded, running his hands over the gritty walls. “Could it be something that needs mined? A vein of gold or gems, perhaps?”
“You’re telling me you’ve been after a treasure all this time, and you never even knew what it consisted of?” Lorelai marveled.
Moncrieff shoved his hand over her mouth. “Looks like we’ll have to do a little digging, lads. The cache might have been lost beneath the sand over a thousand years of tides.”
Grumbles of disappointment were laced with hope as several of the men trudged back toward the cave opening to retrieve their tools.
“If the Rook’s been lying about the cache all this time,” Moncrieff muttered, “I’ll be angry enough to kill you, myself, and leave your corpse for him to find.”
Lorelai swallowed around a dry tongue. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” she contended. “There’s no need for such aggression.”
Moncrieff began to conduct his own examination of the cave. He ran his hand from one side of the walls to the next, holding the lanterns up to the fantastically shimmering wall. A large hole in the ceiling of the cave provided one steady stream of daylight that didn’t reach the dark walls.
“I’m not generally an aggressive person,” he said conversationally. “I don’t often have to be. I merely make the suggestion of violence, and find that’s sufficient to get what I want.”
“Lord, must you be so arrogant?” Lorelai wrenched the rope out of his hands. Or, rather, he allowed her to.
It wasn’t as though she could make any attempt at escape.
“Arrogant is a bit severe, don’t you think?” he asked. “I imagine I’m merely confident.”
Her decidedly unladylike snort echoed off the stones. “Confidence is quiet. And you, sir, are not.”
“I’ll grant you that.” He dug at the soft cavern floor with his boot and came away with packed sand. Picking up a black rock he’d unearthed, he hurled it at the wall.
A great chunk of it crumbled away and dissolved when it hit the wet sand.
“What’s this?” Moncrieff retrieved the rock again and chipped away some of the black substance, which he caught in his palm. He sniffed it, and stuck his tongue out and touched it.
Then spat it out.
“Christ.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “It’s salt. Pure black salt.” Frowning, he gave the entire cavern a second look. “Why would both Emperor Claudius and the Danish king leave treasure in such a place? Surely, they understood the corrosive properties of salt, even back then.”
“What if there is no treasure?” Lorelai speculated. “You’ll have risked all this for nothing.”
“So many men risk so little.” He advanced on her, his eyes becoming iridescent in the lanternlight. “I risk it all to get what I want.”
“And what do you want?” she challenged.
“My desires are simple.” He brought his face close to hers. “I only want everything.”
A ruckus from outside pierced the darkness of the grotto. Gunshots. Then metallic sounds. Or, rather, the echoes and thuds of metallic objects hitting other softer, fleshier substances created a symphony of gruesome ricochets in the cavern. The grunts and calls of combat, along with wetter sounds. Final cries.
Ash! He’d come for her! No … no, he’d come for the treasure.
She just happened to be here.
Moncrieff seized her abruptly, hauling her against him. “It seems our captain has picked logic over love, after all,” he said against her ear.
“Then why is there violence?” Her voice shook with equal parts hope and devastation as she listened to the sounds of chaos.
“We are pirates, darling. There is always violence.” She wouldn’t call the emotion in Moncrieff’s voice distress, but neither would she call it calm. He produced a pistol from his belt and trained it on the cave entrance. “I suppose one cannot love the teeth out of a shark.”
Nor the avarice out of a p
irate.
A body flew through the portal, and Moncrieff pulled the trigger.
Lorelai’s ears rang so loudly, she barely heard her own scream. A scream that died when she realized that Moncrieff had inadvertently killed one of his own mutineers. Or perhaps the poor pirate had already been dead. That was a lot of blood on his shirt, more than one bullet could produce.
Another man screeched as he was propelled through the opening, and thrust directly at them.
Moncrieff shot him, as well.
A simultaneous bullet of unknown origin hit the lantern, which shattered. Flames flared, devoured the fuel, and then sputtered out.
Leaving the only light in the cave from the fissure above.
“Your aim is improving all the time, Captain,” Moncrieff taunted as he levered them farther into the shadows, to avoid the spotlight of sun.
“Do you really want those to be your last words, Moncrieff?”
Lorelai’s blood quickened at the unholy resonance of Ash’s voice slithering through the darkness of the cavern. It surrounded her, enveloping her in hope.
Two twin shadows appeared at the mouth of the cave, and dove in opposite directions as Moncrieff’s pistol flashed with another deafening shot.
“Be careful to let your bullets fly at me, I’ve a pretty shield.” Moncrieff lifted her more tightly against his vital organs. “Though I suppose she means less to you than I’d expected, seeing as you came for the treasure and left her to the flesh peddlers.”
Lorelai wanted to be more courageous, hated the tiny sound she made as his arm slid from her chest to her throat. She didn’t want Ash to remember her last sound being a whimper.
“Let her go, Moncrieff.” Blackwell’s sinister command echoed from somewhere behind them.
“Give her to me,” Ash echoed Blackwell, while adding the caveat, “and I’ll let you have whatever else you find in this cave.”
“The cave is empty, you capricious bastard.” Moncrieff pulled the hammer back with an ominous click. “There’s no Claudius Cache here, as you can see. No Roman treasure worth a soldier’s weight in wealth.”
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 27