The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  “Don’t leave me alone.” Tears streamed down Veronica’s cheeks and she backed away to the railing, her wild eyes finding the hulking forms of surrounding pirates in the swiftly dissipating mists. “I’ll jump into that ocean before allowing you to leverage yourself for me.” She scooted onto the railing, readying to hurl herself backward into the sea.

  “No!” Lorelai stumbled forward, but was caught around the waist and hauled back against the Rook’s unyielding body.

  Moncrieff surged out of the fog, and scooped Veronica off the rail at the exact, breathless moment she’d released herself to the whims of gravity. Once again, he ignored her screams and struggles as he carried her back toward the blue room with long, furious strides.

  Lorelai panted with equal parts horror and relief. She’d almost lost her dearest friend in the terrible blink of an eye. Thank God for Moncrieff’s reflexes. She’d not have made it in time.

  The Rook breathed a faint sound in her ear. “How noble you both are. It’s almost inspiring.”

  “Someone has to be,” she spat.

  “On the contrary. The sea demands no such nobility, and neither do I. One of the many appealing aspects of being a pirate.” Stooping down, he scooped her up with an arm behind her knees, and the other supporting her shoulder blades.

  Pirates, apparently, were predisposed to carry their female captives.

  It occurred to Lorelai to protest, but she immediately thought better of it.

  “See that we’re ready to disembark for Ben More at dusk,” he ordered the faceless crew in the mists.

  “Aye, Captain,” came several calls.

  “When the fog clears, you’ll find we are near Tobermory on the Isle of Mull,” he continued without looking back. “You’ll all be happy to note a bevy of eager young ladies from the Siren’s Song brothel preparing to board.”

  It astounded Lorelai that the crew saved their roars of delight until she and the Rook had taken their leave, still unwilling to disobey their captain’s order for silence.

  It seemed she was not the only woman who would be ravaged aboard the Devil’s Dirge today.

  They passed Moncrieff in the hall as he threw the bolt home on the blue room before pressing his back against the door. Veronica’s fists knocked against her prison, her cries barely audible from within the sealed room.

  “You think it’s a good idea, Captain, to bring these ladies aboard this ship, with these men? If anyone but Barnaby had happened upon them trying to escape—”

  “Why else do you assume I provided the whores?” The whisper of a smirk tugged at the Rook’s lips. “The crew will be appeased.”

  Moncrieff considered this, then shrugged. “That’s why you’re the captain.” He gave the Rook a two-fingered mock-salute, and sauntered off. “I suppose I’d better inspect our new cargo when they arrive … sample the goods.”

  Lorelai hung passively in the Rook’s arms until they reached his lush quarters and he kicked the door closed. Delectable smells cloyed around her and she blinked over at a sumptuous repast laid out on the table she’d tripped on the night prior.

  Another throne had been added to his, this one upholstered in green velvet.

  How had he managed such a feast so quickly? She’d only just left this room not a quarter hour ago or so …

  Of course. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling foolish and small. He’d known the moment she’d left his quarters. He’d allowed her to get as far as she did in the mist, because he’d known someone would stop her.

  Or that he would.

  So, what now? Did he mean for them to dine together before or after he took her virginity?

  Despite the tension she sensed in her captor’s arms, the grim displeasure visible at the corner of his mouth, he set her down with care. He stabilized her with strong hands and didn’t release her until she’d gained her balance.

  The imprint of his fingers lingered on her arms long after he’d moved to a secretary desk and lifted the lid to riffle through a few papers contained inside.

  “What makes you assume I’m going to break you?” He asked the question casually, not looking up from the document he’d lifted from the desk.

  “What?” Had she misheard?

  “You told Veronica, every time you’re broken, you get back up and limp along.”

  She had said that, hadn’t she? They’d said that to each other on multiple occasions.

  “You truly believe that becoming my lover would break you?” He was looking at her now, expectant curiosity hanging quizzically on his formidable brow.

  Lorelai couldn’t form an answer. She felt very brittle. It wouldn’t take much. And Veronica wasn’t wrong about one thing, the Rook was enormous.

  He could very, very easily crush a strong and sturdy man.

  And she … she had proven herself to be someone easily broken.

  He didn’t have much patience for her silence, and slammed the lid of the secretary closed. “No matter.” His voice sounded darker as he approached her, and Lorelai was only slightly aware that she instinctively moved to place a lounge chair and end table between them.

  “You said you’d do anything to save your sister-in-law.” His lids lowered to half-mast, wicked suggestion gleaming from their dark depths. “Are you a woman of your word? Will you truly do … anything?”

  Lorelai gulped, and thought of Veronica. “I am.” She’d meant to sound more certain. “I will.”

  Suddenly terrified, she squeezed her eyes shut and balled her fists at her sides, waiting for him to strike. Willing the instinct to fight or flee to abate. She’d just lie still. She’d close her eyes, and pretend her lover was Ash.

  Just as she’d imagined more times than she cared to admit.

  The Rook possessed Ash’s demeanor, just not his soul.

  “Here.” His voice didn’t sound much closer.

  Lorelai peeked out of one eye, and then stared down in abject astonishment at the paper and quill he’d set before her on the side table.

  The marriage certificate from last night. Somehow this frightened her more than the prospect of his ravishment had. “I—I thought you said you didn’t need my signature.”

  “I don’t need it. But I want it. And you said anything.”

  Her brows pinched together against a distinct feeling that she was Alice fallen down the rabbit hole. “I thought I was negotiating for … for sex.”

  “Oh well. Have it your way.” He stepped around the chair and reached for her.

  “No!” She snatched up the pen and held it out as though it would ward him off. “No, I’ll sign.” Bending over the table, she carefully scrawled her name with slow, methodical flourishes.

  Thankfully, this seemed to appease him, and he sauntered to a screen beneath the far right window and folded it aside.

  “What are you doing?” She instantly realized the question had been needless, as the screen revealed a deep copper washtub.

  “I’m drawing a bath.” He turned two curious knobs and steaming water flowed out of a curved copper faucet like magic.

  “How?” she marveled. It was a silly question under the circumstances, but Lorelai had wondered several times at the unfamiliar technology he’d amassed for the Devil’s Dirge.

  The Rook understood her question immediately. “Prodigy inventors and enterprising engineers always need financial backing, and what better way to spend my ill-gotten gains than a few creature comforts?” He tested the water flowing from the spigot with a few clever fingers. “A Mr. Juengling in Germany installed water-heating barrels in my engine room. The same heat which produces steam can, at smaller, further intervals, also be used to boil for the kitchen and the bath. I understand none of the particulars but then I pay others for that.”

  Had Lorelai not been terrified for her virginity, she’d have marveled at the mechanism and asked a million questions. As it stood, she could only focus on the fact that he meant to get her naked and into that contraption. “A bath—it’s really not necessary. It
hasn’t even been a day since last I bathed. And I washed hours ago in the basin.”

  “I’m not drawing it for you.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder, and Lorelai caught her breath. Partly at the thought of being forced to watch this lean, masculine predator bathe. And partly because she glimpsed a part of the impish boy she’d once known in his wicked look.

  “Ash?” she breathed.

  The familiarity disappeared as he straightened to his full and terrible height, glowering onyx shards at her. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “Then who are you?” She gestured at him in frustration.

  “I am none other than the Rook,” he insisted.

  “That is your title,” she argued, holding up the paper she’d just signed with his part left curiously blank. “What is your name?”

  “I still have no idea.” He shrugged as though this had little consequence.

  “Then how do people address you? What do they call you when they speak to you?”

  “They call me the Rook, obviously. Lorelai, this is getting tedious.”

  Stymied, she made a sound of frustration in her throat. “But one can’t address another with a the before their name.” She mimicked a benign conversation. “What do you think of these hors d’oeuvres, the Rook? When should we set sail, the Rook? Aren’t you being ridiculous, the Rook? It’s not only impractical, it’s impossible.”

  It occurred to Lorelai that she was being rather insolent for a pirate captive, but her nerves stretched beyond the capacity for restraint.

  Astonishingly, her captor didn’t at all seem to mind. He touched his chin pensively. “You could shorten it to Rook, I suppose,” he ceded. “There’s no great need for a the.”

  “Is that what your friends do?”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “Your crew then?” she pressed.

  “They call me Captain.”

  “That certainly won’t work for me.”

  “Address me as husband, then, and I will always answer.” After a look that threatened to scorch the fine hairs from her body, he perched on the bed to rid himself of his boots.

  “But … in the eyes of most countries, we are not truly married,” she argued.

  “You only just signed documents to the contrary,” he reminded her without looking up from his buckles.

  “They don’t have your name on them!” She brandished the marriage contract in her hand as if they proved her point. “Why do you insist on being intolerable?”

  “I’ve given you options,” the Rook said reasonably. “You’re just being stubborn. You weren’t stubborn as a child. I remember you being quite agreeable.”

  “Well, we’ve both changed in twenty years, haven’t we?”

  He looked up at her then, conducting a thorough examination as though to test her theory. From her unruly hair, to her pilfered shirt, and down to the soles of her wedding slippers. The silence became thick, heavy, charged with whatever emotions didn’t reach his dead, black eyes.

  She knew what he saw. An old maid. A crippled spinster in her thirties who’d let loss paint her pale and gaunt, and allowed bitterness to etch wrinkles into her forehead.

  Why, then, didn’t he look away? Why did he not allow his disappointment to show? If he were not Ash, and she was no longer agreeable, why did he want her, still? What would their life together look like? Would he take her to sail the world with him, forever locked in his cabin for his own personal use? Would he install her somewhere like a kept woman, to visit when he felt the need?

  And if he claimed not to be Ash, why carry out a promise a supposedly dead man made?

  She could no longer stand the silence of torturous unanswered questions and opened her mouth to inform him thusly.

  “You need a name,” she blurted. Well … that wasn’t what she’d expected to say, but it was true, nonetheless.

  “Why?” He stood and approached her in his bare feet, his gait as quiet as a hunter stalking his prey.

  “I need you to—I mean—you need to be a person. Not a title.” When he drew close, she put her hand out, and it landed over his chest, over the shirt still rumpled because he’d slept in it.

  Unless he’d not slept at all.

  Though her strength was feeble next to his, he halted his advance as though her hand were a wall. He stood abnormally still but for the muscle twitching and tensing beneath her palm. The warmth of his body radiated through the fabric, heating her chilly fingers.

  Lorelai stared at her white hand against his black shirt. She remembered touching him like this before. Over his clothing, enjoying the little intimacies of their budding young romance. The brush of his hand against hers. The way he’d tuck her hair behind her ear. The strength of his shoulders and arms as he provided her stability whilst crossing the treacherous estuary.

  That kiss.

  The long-ago kiss that launched their love from an innocent infatuation into another territory altogether. That kiss had promised this very thing. He’d sworn with his lips that he’d claim her one day.

  That Ash would.

  “Why can you not be my Ash?” she pleaded. “You said you liked the name. That you liked being him for me.”

  He stared at her a long time, retaining that unnatural stillness that unnerved her to no end. “The boy you—knew is dead,” he informed her gravely.

  But that made no sense. He stood right here. “Why?” she demanded. “Who killed him?”

  His eyes burned with an onyx fire. “Mortimer Weatherstoke. Though Ash has died many times since the first.”

  “Mortimer?” Lorelai snatched her hand back as though she’d been burned. “What did he do to you?”

  He said nothing, but his knuckles whitened as fingers curled into fists. It was the first sign of emotion Lorelai had observed since he’d taken her.

  “What happened to you? To Ash?” she whispered. “Tell me.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he rumbled. “The past has already been written. The blood is already dry. The only part left of Ash is the part who—”

  “The part who what?”

  “The part who … owns you.” Had she imagined it, or had it seemed as though he’d been about to say something else?

  “You don’t own me.” How cruel time could be, to turn the boy she’d loved into a man she loathed.

  “Of course I do.” He smothered his sentiment with a leer. “Haven’t you ever heard it stated that possession is nine-tenths of the law?” Without the barricade of her hand, he crept forward, crowding her. “What if I were Ash? What would you say to me?”

  Heart stalling and then sputtering back to life, Lorelai took a limping retreat backward. “Y-you only just said that you wouldn’t answer to Ash. That he was dead.”

  He reached for the ever-present curls at her temple, and she flinched as he caressed them, and twirled them about his finger. “Indulge me,” he purred in that voice as thick and sonorous as torn velvet. “Pretend we are not on a pirate ship. That I am not the Rook. Imagine I walked into your little estuary yesterday and called your name. And we now stand in the same place, in the same mist surrounding us the day we were parted. What would you say to Ash?” He leaned closer, his warm breath smelling of whisky and desire as his head dipped low. His mouth a threat hovering over hers. “What would you do to him, after all this time?”

  Without forethought, her hand whipped up and slapped his cheek with such force, her palm stung with it. “You promised to come for me!” she cried. “I prayed for your return, and then I begged. I pleaded with God to protect you, to send you back to me. When he didn’t, I mourned you. For years I mourned you like a beloved who’d died tragically. Mortimer told me you remembered who you were. I thought you’d gone back to your life. And as much as it pained me, I could have forgiven you for that. But you left me alone for twenty sodding years to become this?” She gestured at him in all his dark glory. “This heartless, violent, deviant man? If you are not Ash, then you are not he who promised to come
for me! You are not who I wanted.”

  “Yet I am what you get.” His eyes glittered dangerously as he straightened. “My condolences. But it doesn’t change anything. You still belong to me, and you will from this day on. It’ll be better if you just resign yourself to the inevitability of it.”

  “Just how do you expect me to do that?” she demanded. “You would have me simply roll over for you? Swoon and submit gratefully to you? A stranger? To the most violent and deadly criminal the world has lately known?”

  After a protracted moment, he said, “Well. Yes.” He turned his back to her then, and walked to the sideboard, pouring himself a drink. “You would have done so for that fat slab of rotten blubber. Don’t tell me you’d have rather been Mrs. Sylvester Gooch. That you’d prefer to spread your legs for that gibface mutton wank over me.”

  She flinched. “I was trying to save my family from ruin. Without my marrying Mr. Gooch, we’d have been homeless.”

  “I know.” He knocked back his whisky.

  It occurred to Lorelai that he might have been angry with her. That most men would have slapped her back, or worse. He might have attacked her with the sexual frenzy of the prior night, full of masculine indignation over her physical challenge.

  But the Rook treated her outburst as though it were nothing. In fact, he didn’t even flinch as her slap had collided with his face. Hard. He’d reacted to it like it had no more consequence than a fly landing on his cheek.

  And yet, for a man who claimed to be so emotionless, Lorelai swore she glimpsed moments of the maelstrom churning beneath the smooth surface.

  He went to the bath and adjusted the knobs so the water flow ceased before turning to regard her. “Why are you so thin?”

  The question couldn’t have surprised her more. “I have been too distraught of late to eat much,” she answered honestly. Might she have seen a flicker of regret in his dark eyes before he hid them from her?

  He motioned to the breakfast, cooling on the table. “Eat now.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach made a rude noise, which she stubbornly refused to acknowledge.

  He took a threatening step toward her. “I will feed you from my hand, if I must.”