Page 85 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
“No.” He shook his head in perpetuity, as though convincing his own body as well as her. “In taking you, I always knew I would corrupt you. Break you. Destroy you. That’s what I’ve been telling you. It’s why I waited so long. Perhaps it was better if I never came at all.”
“Don’t say that.” She threw the covers off her, struggling with her long nightgown to free her legs and stand. To follow him as he retreated.
“What kind of life would you have with me?” he demanded. “With Nemo, a man obsessed with and possessed of power and infamy? You were right, Lorelai. I have everything in the world, but nothing to offer you.”
“But…” Finally, her feet touched the floor and she struggled to put weight on them as he reached the door. She hobbled around the bed, too unsteady to let go of the bedpost.
Sorrow touched his gaze as he watched her, but he made no move to help. “You are an angel in a world full of devils. And I have made myself king of them all.”
He opened the door and turned away.
“Wait!” she cried. “Stay! Please stay with me. We can discuss this.”
He violently shook his head, gripping the door handle as one would a lifeline. “I thought I deserved you… thatI’d earned you through suffering somehow.” His throat worked over a wretched swallow. “I find that I cannot take your purity from you, Lorelai. That I cannot claim the years you have left, shackling you to my side. I willnot. I’ve come to realize it’s the one sin I cannot commit.”
“But what if I—”
“I used to love you because I thought you were weak, but I understand now, your goodness makes you stronger than us all.”
She froze. His words like daggers slicing through her heart until it bled into her extremities, turning them numb.
Used to love you.
“You may leave in the morning when it is safe. Take poor Veronica with you. I will make certain both of you are cared for but… I will no longer be your jailor. I will not keep you in chains.”
Lorelai slid to the floor in a puddle of tears to the sound of the bolt securing her door.
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
Lorelai woke with a jolt, even though the hand on her shoulder was gentle.
Farah Blackwell’s gray eyes and silvery hair shone like a Fae creature’s in the sputtering lanternlight. “I’m sorry to wake you, but there’s something—”
A primal sound rent the night, full of both terror and warning. It was the sound a wounded lion might make when cornered by a tribe of hunters.
Lorelai had heard the sound before. On a stormy night much like this one some twenty years ago.
Ash.
Farah had a silk wrapper at the ready as Lorelai flung off the covers and slid from the tall bed. She belted the robe and limped after the Countess Northwalk, cursing the storm’s effect on her leg.
Sensing her distress, Farah offered her arm and they hurried as fast as they were able into a lavishly decorated, dark wood hallway. The plush burgundy carpets cushioned her bare feet as she made her way two doors down fromher own, where the Blackheart of Ben More stood with a lone candle dancing gold over his bleak features.
Lorelai found the sight of him without his eyepatch disconcerting. A gash dissected his left brow down to the cheekbone, and the wound had left his right eye a milky blue instead of deep brown. The effect was stunning, on many levels.
He speared her with a desolate gaze upon her approach, and Farah left her side to go to her husband.
They all had scars, Lorelai realized. The pain they wore on their skin warning of deeper, more dangerous wounds within.
They stood for a moment as a crack of departing thunder overshadowed the roar of a man held prisoner by desperate nightmares. It chilled her to the bone and tore at her heart. It strained credulity to think that such a piteous, tormented sound could come from such a sinister and self-possessed man.
Blackwell put his hand on the wood of the door, as though testing it for the heat of a fire on the other side. “We all have them,” he said through a voice made husky with sleep. Or maybe with the lack thereof. “All of us who came of age in Newgate. It is hard to find rest, when sleep makes you vulnerable to the cruelty of others.”
The connotations of that sentence tore at Lorelai’s insides every bit as much as the raw, low cries of agony on the other side of that door. She truly couldn’t comprehend the depths of suffering a man must have borne in his waking hours to battle such demons in his dreams.
“We used to take shifts sleeping. He, Argent, and I. One of us would stay awake, take watch against the older men who would…” Blackwell’s hand slid to the latch. “He always fought them off the best. But we none of us won the battles all the time. Not until we were older. Stronger.”
Lorelai’s gaze collided with Farah’s, and the confirmation she read there finished turning her heart into a puddle of pain. She’d not have been able to conceive of such things as a girl. She’d not known the real demons he fought in the night when she’d woken him all those years ago.
