Page 78 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
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 didyou 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. “Onlyyoucould 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 heardhervoice.”
“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 onedaredtease him. Moncrieff sometimes attempted humor, but evenhewas careful not to approach certain boundaries.
The Rook found he didn’t mind. This seemed… bothforeign and familiar, to share with this stranger. This stranger who called himbrother.
“Finesse isn’t a skill I’ve had to acquire.” Carefully, he lowered himself to the edge of one of the monstrous chairs, letting the fire warm the chill established by Lorelai’s absence. It would be folly to allow himself to be comfortable. To let down his guard.
“Of that I have no doubt.” Blackwell claimed the chair beside him, crossing an ankle over his knee. “But with a woman like yours… it may be in your best interest to obtain some. If not finesse, at least a bit of diplomacy.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean,a woman like mine?”
“Bit shy, isn’t she? Tenderhearted.” Blackwell swirled the contents of his glass, inspecting the caramel liquid with unnecessary absorption. “It’s difficult not to notice her damaged leg… her brother’s doing?”
“Part of why I killed him.”
“Just so.”
Blackwell didn’t ask another question, and antithetical to his nature, the Rook felt a need to fill the silence. “I spent twenty years thinking of nothing but getting back to her, and now that I have…”
“You realize you are no longer the boy who loved her. You’re…”
“Someone else,” he finished, pleased to have found a sympathetic soul. A heart as black as his own. “All I know is the sea. How can I navigatethesewaters when the sky is opaque? When the stars do not shine to light my way? How do I behave? How do I make her care for me? How do I stop her from fearing me?”
