Page 105 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo

He wanted vengeance. Blood for blood.

He’d dragged the disconsolate Cutter around the city, asking the right questions, sussing out the exact customer who’d enticed her home that night.

They’d found him at the docks not two days later.

And Ash had held the fucker down while Cutter… well, he did the cutting.

It had been a first kill. For both of them. And the screams had drawn the constable from his watch. To protect Cutter, Ash had broken a window and nabbed something valuable in plain view of the police. He’d taken off, leading the patrolman away from the site of their revenge.

He’d even allowed himself to be caught.

For Cutter.

For Caroline.

They’d thrown him in Newgate for a handful of years. He hadn’t cared. Justice had been served with a blade in the dark. As it would ever be for the subsequent two decades.

“Caroline,” he groaned, wiping at his face, startled that his hand came away wet, though whether from sweat or tears he couldn’t tell.

His first love. His first blood.

The memories began to flood him like a dam breaking. The cold overwhelming his veins as year after year returned in fragmented images and broken emotions. Faces. Names. Scents. Sounds.

With a raw breath, he reached out for his anchor. For the one soul he needed to ground him back to this time. To this place.

Lorelai.

He reached, almost to the point of flailing, and it was Cutter… Carlton? Who took his hand and hauled him to his feet before he and Blackwell settled him into a chair.

Because Lorelai had disappeared.

***

Lorelai blindly stumbled out to the back garden, gulping in breaths of sea air that were exhaled as broken sobs.

She’d never forget the way Ash had said another woman’s name. His eyes had been glossy, his voice reverent. His ever-placid, forbidding features had crumpled with a sentimentality she’d never before witnessed. She’d thought, until now, Ash was incapable of experiencing the depths of such emotion. It was all right, she’d reasoned. She could love enough for the two of them.

What a fool she’d been. Because it wasn’t that hecouldn’tfeel. It was that he didn’t feel those things forher.

He felt them for Caroline.

If the girl had been half as handsome a woman as Inspector Morley was a man, Lorelai could certainly understand Ash’s love for her.

Catching her reflection in a window renewed the torrent of Lorelai’s tears. What had she to offer a man like him now that her youth had faded, and her hope had waned? Was she only the stonewashed specter of his first love? Had his eyes caught the sight of a familiar girl some twenty years ago, and evoked the forgotten passions he’d cultivated for another?

Did he seek to return for her, to claim her, so intensely because he thought he’d regained some semblance of a love long dead?

The tragedy of it was a thousandfold, for them both.

“Do not weep, lovely,” a deep voice soothed from the shadows. “It will all be over soon.”

She was drawn against a hard, muscled body from behind. A sweet scent cloyed through her senses, and then the earth became sand beneath her feet as she gratefully sank into the beckoning darkness.

CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO

Two brothers. Ash stared at the men who’d once been the boys upon whom he relied. Two brothers not of his lineage. What a tangled connection they all made.

He’d remembered nearly everything, and what little he could not, Morley and Blackwell had spent the better part of a morning piecing together for him.