Page 4 of The Black Lion
“Yes, Drew. I am yours and could never belong to another. I need no outside force to approve or make our love more real.”
Opening his palm, Drew met her gaze while unsheathing the stiletto he always carried in his belt. Arabella gasped when he dragged it across his palm, but he didn’t so much as flinch as a thin slash appeared through the skin and blood welled within.
“Now you,” he murmured, his voice low but heavy with meaning and purpose.
She understood what he asked for without explanation, and suddenly Arabella wanted this too badly to worry over fleeting pain. A moment of oneness, a ritual grounding them in the moment and to one another, was more important than the possibility of a leftover scar.
Offering her hand, Arabella kept her gaze on Drew’s face rather than the place where his sharp blade slid across her palm. The brief sting faded to a dull annoyance as he pressed his palm to hers, his fingers tight against the delicate bones of her hand. Arabella gripped him back, trembling with the weight of the moment as he looked deep into her eyes and spoke the words that would bind them together for eternity.
“Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh … I am yours and you are mine. Only death can part us now, Bella. No matter who or what may try to come between us, know that I will not allow it. If I can draw breath, there is no force in this world that can keep me from you.”
She had pressed her cut and bleeding palm against Drew’s and repeated the words binding them together for life. It hadn’t mattered that their little ritual could be considered pagan and sacrilegious, that their union was no real marriage and it meant nothing to anyone but them. Arabella wouldn’t have cared, for that night she and Drew had been the only two people in the world. If it was real and true to them, what did it matter what anyone else thought?
Now, he was gone, leaving her to grapple with the loss of her hopes and dreams. There would be nothing for her but this yawning pit of grief and abandonment that had opened within her. Arabella wished it would consume her, obliterating her very existence in the same way the treacherous sea had wiped Drew’s away.
“Oh, Drew. How can I be expected to live without you?”
Reaching into her bodice, she took hold of the wooden talisman she kept tucked out of sight. The surface of the circular pendant had been carved with the face of a lion in startling detail—a luxurious mane surrounding a majestic face, complete with a snarling mouth and sharp, pointed teeth. Drew had made it himself, taking painstaking care with the delicate carving tools—so different from the instruments he employed when making barrels and pieces of furniture. It didn’t matter whether a task required the brute force of his back and shoulders, or the finesse of his slender, dexterous fingers, Drew had worked magic and miracles with wood. When he finished whittling the piece, she had begged him for it—a part of Drew to always carry on her person.
“Why a lion?” she asked him when first laying eyes on the piece.
Drew offered her his vibrant smile, smoothing his thumb over the mane of the carved beast.“Lions fiercely protect what they love. They do it with pride and unflinching courage. I saw one in a traveling menagerie at Port Royal once. I pitied the beast for the cage it was forced to inhabit, but as he paced and prowled, I watched him and realized … despite the iron bars, he hadn’t lost the majesty of his bearing, nor the pride that made him hold his head high. Then, he looked me right in the eye, as if we were the only two creatures in the world.”
“That must have been frightening!”
“It was. But it was also … special, I suppose. I cannot describe it. I felt as if he wanted me to know I had no need to pity him. He was still strong, still brave, still the king of beasts. Mankind could trap him in a cage and strip him of everything it means to be what he was … but they couldn’t take away the fact that he was a lion. They could never strip him of his regal dignity, or the strength within. The moment the cage was opened, he would be free once more … an unstoppable force of nature.”
“What a lovely sentiment. I love it even more now, knowing what the lion symbolizes for you. I shall treasure it always.”
He had smiled and placed the talisman into her palm, against the thin, faded scar left behind from their private ritual. From that day on, Arabella was never without the wooden disk.
Every morning, she tucked it into the space between her shift and her skin, the tight cinch of her stays keeping it pressed against her sternum. With every breath, Arabella could feel it, and with every beat of her heart she was reminded that she belonged to Drew, body and soul.
Only now, she belonged to a dead man, a ghost. Arabella would never hear the deep, rumbling tones of his voice, feel the touch of his callused hands or the tight bands of his strong arms around her. She would never become his wife or bear his children.
Closing her fist around the talisman, she gritted her teeth around a sob, the sound akin to that of some wounded animal. How fitting, for that was how she felt—like a felled beast torn open from gullet to groin and left drowning in agony and blood.
A warm, firm hand fell on her shoulder, and the stroke of a thumb along the back of her neck had her going stiff. Swiveling on the man who had intruded upon her solitude, Arabella parted her lips to give him what for. But, when her gaze collided with a familiar one, the fight went out of her. She came swiftly to her feet but then stumbled, and William caught her up.
“Will,” she mewled into his coat, shoulders shaking as sobs overtook her again. “Please tell me it isn’t true … tell me he isn’t dead?”
His hand touched her back, rubbing in a slow, circular motion meant to soothe. All it did was remind her that she’d never again feel the touch she most craved.
“I am so sorry, Bella, but it’s true. He is gone.”
Her knees gave out, the weight of her soaked skirts dragging them both to the sand. Will went down on one knee, keeping a tight hold on her as she wept into his shirtfront. She squeezed her eyes shut to keep from looking at him, for he resembled Drew far too much.
He had been such a faithful friend, sticking close by her side after the fateful night Drew had been taken from them and pressed into naval service. Will blamed himself for not being there to protect his younger brother, but Arabella had done her best to assuage that guilt. It was no one’s fault that England’s Royal Navy allowed impressment of unwilling men into service.
They had begun to lean on one another, hoping and praying that Drew would eventually be allowed to return to Falmouth. Only, it would seem their prayers had been all for naught. There would be no homecoming or a reunion with the man who was so dear to them both.
TheHMS Hannibal—the ship upon which Drew had served these past two years—had been lost as sea with all hands. Not a single body had been retrieved from the watery depths.
“The hour grows late,” Will murmured. “Let me see you home before you catch a chill.”
The soft breeze of the early evening had begun to quicken, the air cooling as the sun disappeared on the horizon. Still, Arabella couldn’t bring herself to move.
“Leave me alone. Let me die here by the sea, near him.”
