The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  That is to say, she only peeked twice before wrenching her eyes upward.

  The muscles winging from his back beneath where his arms spread were ugly shades of darkness painted by trauma. The ripples of his ribs were purple on his left side, and red on the other. Blunt bruises interrupted the symmetrical ridges of his stomach, as though he’d been kicked or struck repeatedly. As they dragged him closer, what she’d feared had been blood became something infinitely worse.

  It was as though his flesh had been chewed away, but by something with no teeth. The plentiful meat of his shoulder and chest, his torso, hips, and down his thigh were grotesquely visible.

  Burns, maybe?

  “Good God, how is he still alive?” The awe in her father’s voice reminded her of his presence as they scurried to open the carriage door and help drag the man inside. It took the four of them to manage it.

  “He won’t be unless we hurry.” The driver tucked the man’s long, long legs inside, resting his knees against the seat. “I fear he won’t last the few miles to Brentwood.”

  Ripping her cloak off, Lorelai spread it over the shuddering body on the floor. “We must do what we can,” she insisted. “Is there a doctor in Brentwood?”

  “Aye, and a good one.”

  “Please take us there without delay.”

  “O’course, miss.” He secured the door and leaped into his seat, whipping the team of fresh horses into a gallop.

  As they lurched forward, the most pitiful sound she’d ever heard burst from the injured man’s lips, which flaked with white. His big arm flailed from beneath the cloak to protect his face, in a gesture that tore Lorelai’s heart out of her chest.

  The burn scored the sinew of his neck and up his jaw to his cheekbone.

  Pangs of sympathy slashed at her own skin, and drew her muscles taut with strain. Lorelai blinked a sheen of tears away, and cleared emotion out of her tight throat with a husky sound she’d made to soothe many a wounded animal on the Black Water Estuary.

  His breaths became shallower, his skin paler beneath the bruises.

  He was dying.

  Without thinking, she slid a hand out of her glove, and gently pressed her palm to his, allowing her fingers to wrap around his hand one by one.

  “Don’t go,” she urged. “Stay here. With me.”

  His rough, filthy hand gripped her with such strength, the pain of it stole her breath. His face turned toward her, though his eyes remained closed.

  Still, it heartened her, this evidence of awareness. Perhaps, on some level, she could comfort him.

  “You’re going to be all right,” she crooned.

  “Don’t lie to the poor bastard.” Mortimer’s lip curled in disgust. “He’s no goose with a defective wing, or a three-legged cat, like the strays you’re always harboring. Like as not he’s too broken to be put back together with a bandage, a meal, and one of your warbling songs. He’s going to die, Lorelai.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said more sharply than she’d intended, and received a sharp slap for her lapse in wariness.

  “And you don’t know what I’ll do to you if you speak to me in that tone again.”

  Most girls would look to their fathers for protection, but Lorelai had learned long ago that protection was something upon which she could never rely.

  Her cheek stinging, Lorelai lowered her eyes. Mortimer would take it as a sign of submission, but she only did it to hide her anger. She’d learned by now to take care around him in times of high stress, or excitement. It had been her folly to forget … because she knew exactly what he was capable of. The pinch of her patient’s strong grip was nothing next to what she’d experienced at the hands of her brother on any given month.

  Ignoring the aching throb in her foot, Lorelai dismissed Mortimer, leaning down instead to stroke a dripping lock of midnight hair away from an eye so swollen, he’d not have been able to open it were he awake.

  Across from her, Mortimer leaned in, as well, ostensibly studying the man on the floor with equal parts intrigue and disgust. “Wonder what happened to the sod. I haven’t seen a beating like this in all my years.”

  Lorelai schooled a level expression from her face at the reference to his many perceived years. He was all of twenty, and the only violence he witnessed outside of sport, he perpetrated himself.

  “Brigands, you suspect?” Sir Robert fretted from beside her, checking the gathering darkness for villains.

  “Entirely possible,” Mortimer said flippantly. “Or maybe he is one. We are disturbingly close to Gallows Corner.”

  “Mortimer,” their father wheezed. “Tell me you haven’t pulled a criminal into my coach. What would people say?”

  The Weatherstoke crest bore the motto Fortunam maris, “fortune from the sea,” but if anyone had asked Lorelai what it was, she’d have replied, Quid dicam homines? “What would people say?”

  It had been her father’s favorite invocation—and his greatest fear—for as long as she could remember.

  Lorelai opened her mouth to protest, but her brother beat her to it, a speculative glint turning his eyes the color of royal sapphires. “If I’d hazard a guess, it would be that this assault was personal. A fellow doesn’t go to the trouble to inflict this sort of damage lest his aim is retribution or death. Perhaps he’s a gentleman with gambling debts run afoul of a syndicate. Or, maybe a few locals caught him deflowering their sister … though they left those parts intact, didn’t they, Duck?” His sly expression told Lorelai that he’d caught her looking where she ought not to.

  Blushing painfully, she could no longer bring herself to meet Mortimer’s cruel eyes. They were the only trait Lorelai shared with her brother. Her father called them the Weatherstoke jewels. She actively hated looking in the mirror and seeing Mortimer’s eyes staring back at her.

  Instead, she inspected the filthy nails of the hand engulfing her own. The poor man’s entire palm was one big callus against hers. The skin on his knuckles, tough as an old shoe, had broken open with devastating impact.

  Whatever had happened to him, he’d fought back.

  “He’s no gentleman,” she observed. “Too many calluses. A local farmhand, perhaps, or a stable master?” It didn’t strain the imagination to envision these hands gripping the rope of an erstwhile stallion. Large, magnificent beasts pitting their strength one against the other.

  “More like stable boy,” Mortimer snorted. “I’d wager my inheritance he’s younger than me.”

  “How can you tell?” With his features beyond recognition, Lorelai was at a loss as to the man’s age. No gray streaked his midnight hair, nor did lines bracket his swollen lips, so she knew he couldn’t be old, but beyond that …

  “He’s not possessed of enough body hair for a man long grown.”

  “But he’s so big,” she reasoned. “And his chest appears to have been badly burned, the hair might have singed right off.”

  “I’m not referring to his chest, you dull-wit, but to his coc—”

  “Mortimer, please.”

  Lorelai winced. It was as close to a reprimand as her father ever ventured. Mortimer must have been very wicked, indeed. It was just her luck that he did so on perhaps the first occasion Lorelai had actually wanted her brother to finish a sentence.

  A rut in the road jostled them with such force at their frantic pace, Lorelai nearly landed on the injured man. His chest heaved a scream into his throat, but it only escaped as a piteous, gurgling groan.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whimpered. Dropping to her knees, she hovered above him, the fingers of her free hand fluttering over his quaking form, looking for a place to land that wouldn’t cause him pain.

  She could find none. He was one massive wound.

  A tear splashed from her eye and disappeared into the crease between his fingers.

  “Duck, perhaps it’s best you take your seat.” Her father’s jowly voice reminded her of steam wheezing from a teakettle before it’s gathered enough strength t
o whistle. “It isn’t seemly for a girl of your standing to be thus prostrated on the floor.”

  With a sigh, she did her best to get her good foot beneath her, reaching for the plush golden velvet of the seat to push herself back into it.

  An insistent tug on her arm tested the limits of her shoulder socket, forcing her to catch herself once more.

  “Lorelai, I said sit,” Lord Southbourne blustered.

  “I can’t,” she gasped incredulously. “He won’t let me go.”

  “What’s this, then?” Mortimer wiped some of the mud away from the straining cords of the man’s forearm, uncovering an even darker smudge beneath. As he cleared it, a picture began to take shape, the artful angles and curves both intriguing and sinister until mottled, injured skin ruptured the rendering. “Was it a bird of some kind? A serpent?”

  “No.” Lorelai shook her head, studying the confusion of shapes intently. “It’s a dragon.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  He inhaled agony, and exhaled anguish.

  Just as he’d done for an eternity, at least.

  Swallowing the constant hysteria and confusion evoked by the waves of discomfort and pain upon waking, he lay in the absolute darkness behind the bandages on his eyes and began his list. A pitiful list he frantically added to with stubborn determination.

  What he knew: he’d been born a man in a mass grave. His midwives were named fire and torment, delivering him into an unfamiliar world. His siblings had been ravens, feasting on the dead.

  The fire had been lye, a chemical poured on the corpses to help them disintegrate faster.

  The torment had been everything else.

  He suffered from amnesia. The word meant nothing to him. But disembodied voices repeated it with increasing astonishment.

  The damage to his head had been such that they’d wrapped all but his mouth. Constant headaches plagued him, and a particular pain in his temple throbbed ceaselessly.

  He lived in England, but knew not where.

  He’d broken five parts of himself: a left ankle, two ribs, a collarbone, and his nose.

  Something in his eye had ruptured, turning it red and swollen.

  He’d sat up yesterday, and could lift his previously dislocated shoulder a little higher than before, though it remained secured to his chest by a sling.

  His burns had stopped oozing, then scabbed, and were beginning to scar.

  Though he could not see, his ears worked just fine.

  Thus concluded the sum total of what he knew about himself.

  For weeks now, he’d slept among strangers.

  An attentive doctor: Dr. Holcomb. A man more concerned about efficiency than kindness, with a rough voice and a gentle touch. Holcomb had supplied most of the information on his list whether the good doctor had meant to or not.

  A doddering old fool: Lord Robert Weatherstoke, the Earl of Southbourne. Anxious. Dejected. Weak. Constantly shifting and fiddling with something that made hollow, tiny clicks. A watch? His footsteps shuffled like sandpaper against the floor, and his voice often shook when he spoke in whispers.

  A man he wanted to kill: Lord Mortimer Weatherstoke, the Viscount Munthorpe. Someone who communicated in jibes and sarcasm. Every observation curious and morbid. Every reply an insult. His footsteps fell like hammers, and jangled nerves already taut with pain. A furious temperature rose on the rare occasions Mortimer visited. And the heart pumped with hatred, lips twisting into a snarl.

  Then … there was her.

  The girl he kept waking up for.

  Dr. Holcomb called her my lady. The other two called her Duck.

  When he could do something about it … they wouldn’t call her that anymore.

  Lips parting on a constricted breath summoned at the thought of her, he rested the hand unencumbered by a sling against his heart.

  He desired to know her name more desperately than he desired his own.

  A flushing sensation conjured a troubling heat into his cheeks.

  Her beatific voice had brought him back from the beckoning abyss above which he’d floated those first feverish days.

  Don’t go, she’d murmured. Stay here. With me.

  And so he had.

  He’d lived only because she bade him to.

  Whenever death seduced him with an end to the agony, he waited to hear the soft timbre of her admonishments just one more time. And once more after that. The slide of her fingers against his palm somehow banked the terror of an empty past. It suddenly didn’t matter who he’d been. Or what would become of him.

  He measured time in the increments between her visits.

  When he’d been reassembled, bathed, stitched, or simply had a bandage changed, she’d been there. Touching him. Crooning reassurances and praising his progress. Promising recovery.

  She sang to him sometimes, her voice high and sweet and … unencumbered by talent or pitch of any kind. Christ, she really was terrible. But every time she finished, he promised the devil his soul for one more song.

  What did heaven and earth even mean if not for her?

  Not a single thing.

  She was his prayer in the night. His song in the dark. His past and present.

  His future.

  And he hadn’t even laid eyes on her yet.

  It wouldn’t matter what she looked like. His heart had already decided to beat for her.

  Ears pricking as he heard the sound of her uneven gait coming down the hall, he fought to control his breath against a belt of eagerness tightening across his ribs.

  He gulped as the door whispered open on well-oiled hinges. Her footsteps mirrored the thumps of his heart. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk.

  She set something on the stand to his right, then the slight depression of the mattress told him she’d perched on his bedside. It took everything within him not to roll into her. To wrap himself around her.

  His hand on his chest curled into a fist. He quivered, knowing she would touch him, but not knowing when.

  Those moments between her appearance and her caress were the most agonizing of all.

  He’d never spoken to her. Never reached for her. Not only because his wounded body wouldn’t allow it, but because he was fair certain his hands would sully her perfection, somehow. He imagined they were filthy. Tainted by the kind of shame one couldn’t wash off. Whenever he opened his mouth to speak, a dread of her repulsion, of her retreat, wrapped their icy fingers around his throat. Choking him into silence.

  If he stayed very still … she wouldn’t leave. If he said nothing, he’d not offend her.

  If he didn’t breathe, maybe she’d touch him.

  To his everlasting astonishment … it worked.

  Like an answered prayer, her fingers closed over his wrist and lifted his good hand to clasp between her two smaller ones.

  “Exciting news,” she sang in the enthusiastic whisper of someone with an incredible secret. “Dr. Holcomb is taking the bandages off your head today.”

  It took a full minute for her words to permeate his slack-jawed amazement. Not because of the chance that he might see again. Or breathe through his nose. But because she’d hugged his hand to her chest.

  Just below her throat.

  Lace rasped against his knuckles, and a row of tiny buttons indented the meat below his thumb.

  She dropped her cheek against his fingers and he felt her smile.

  Lord love a goat, he could die a happy man. He’d caused one of her smiles.

  Dr. Holcomb entered with sure, confident strides. “I say, old boy, do you think you can sit up again?”

  He’d answered Dr. Holcomb before. Verbally. When they were alone. But he’d never before had to form words with “my lady’s” bosoms grazing his forearm.

  He must have nodded, because Holcomb’s strong arms slid between his shoulders and the pillow. It took the three of them, but they wrestled him into a sitting position once more.

  The darkness spun, and the world tilted.

  She didn’t let go.
Her hold on his hand anchored him to the world. And eventually, the dizziness abated and the ringing in his ears, vibrating like a plucked wire, dimmed and died.

  “Are you ready?” Holcomb asked.

  He swallowed and nodded.

  The snick of the scissors echoed inside his head rather than against it. He held his breath as the pressure of the wrap released, and the grip of her hands intensified. He didn’t know which of them trembled. Maybe they both did.

  The cotton patches unraveled from beneath his nose, then lifted from his eyes, which he immediately peeled open.

  Sapphires danced in a blur of gold.

  “Can you see me?” she whispered breathlessly.

  He should answer her. He really should. But nothing seemed to obey him. No words could escape past the thickness in his throat.

  “Close, if you please,” Dr. Holcomb clipped.

  He impatiently submitted his closed lids and tender nose to a warm wash with a cloth, then blinked them open the moment he could. His gaze starving for her.

  “You can see me!” she exclaimed.

  See her? He absorbed her. Devoured her. Committed every detail to his empty memory with inhuman precision. In fact, he could see nothing else. And never wanted to.

  The downy curve of her beaming cheeks, dimpled with a delighted smile. The fullness of her expressive lips. The riot of untamed curls spilling like dark honey down her plain peach gown.

  He was no poet, this he knew, because every word that came to mind was both crass and insufficient.

  He had no frame of reference with which to compare her. No metaphors to pronounce. But he remembered that in the graveyard, he’d dragged himself beneath the statue of an angel. Soft-cheeked and solemn, with the striations of gray stone curls tumbling down to her hands pressed in prayer. Her head tilted to the side, as she gazed in grace, guarding the dearly departed.

  The thought of that angel—of someone like her—missing him, loving him, assuming he was gone, fueled his ability to crawl, broken and burning, through the storm to the roadside.

  But during these weeks in the dark, when he could think through the pain, he’d realized a few things. No one had come for him, though the old earl had sent word far and wide.