Page 3 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo

Once they released him from this place, the boy decided he’d find Cutter. He’d take his oldest friend on this adventure with him. For, as Dougan had become his brother in Newgate, Cutter had always been his brother on the streets.

It was Cutter’s crime for which the boy paid, and he did it gladly. He owed him after what happened to Cutter’s twin sister.

Caroline… sweet Caroline. Gone forever…

He couldn’t say why the scuffle of the boot broke his drowsy ruminations. The night guards made rounds every hour. Maybe he heard a few boots too many. Or the twinge of violent anticipation raced like a specter through the still, humid night.

One developed a sense for danger in this place. Especially one so young as he. Unlike in the wild, predators outnumbered the prey in here, and would tear each other apart to make a meal of him.

In the early days… they had.

In the days before Dougan and Argent. Before the Blackheart Brothers.

The ominous creak of the cell door brought him to his feet, the knife he’d fashioned from obsidian he’d found in the tunnels at the ready.

Lanterns blinded him in the windowless room. He slashed out at the men spilling into his cell, his power andspeed wrought by days of backbreaking work digging railways beneath the city. He cut something. Someone. The warm rush of blood slicked over his hand.

Fuck. Now his knife would be difficult to wield.

His vision cleared in time to see the back of Walters’s head connect with the stones, leaving so much blood and some of his skull behind when he fell.

Five guards cornered the boy in a room hardly big enough for two grown men to stretch across.

“Dougan Mackenzie?” The sergeant sneered, close enough that the boy could count the flecks of tobacco in his teeth.

“No! I’m not Dougan Mackenzie. I’m Dor—”

“Your father sends his regards.”

The boy blocked the first blow with his fresh tattoo, the pain turning him feral. He didn’t see the cudgel arcing toward his temple until it was too late. Nor the boot that snapped his ankle, dropping him to the ground.

Now he counted time with impacts. With the snaps of bones and spurts of blood.

The boy’s last thought was that Walters had been right to doubt him.

He’d never hunt for his treasure. He’d never return for his friends.

For no one could come back from the dead.

CHAPTERONE

If Lorelai Weatherstoke hadn’t been appreciating the storm out the carriage window, she’d have missed the naked corpse beneath the ancient ash tree.

“Father,look!” She seized Lord Southbourne’s thin wrist, but a barrage of visual stimuli overwhelmed her, paralyzing her tongue.

In all her fourteen years, she’d never seen a naked man, let alone a deceased one.

He lay facedown, strong arms reached over his head as though he’d been trying to swim through the shallow grass lining the road. Ghastly dark bruises covered what little flesh was visible beneath the blood. He was all mounds and cords, his long body different from hers in every way a person could be.

Her heart squeezed, and she fought to find her voice as the carriage trundled past. The poor man must be cold, she worried, then castigated herself for such an absurd thought.

The dead became one with the cold. She’d learned that by kissing her mother’s forehead before they closed her casket forever.

“What is it, duck?” Her father may have been an earl, but the Weatherstokes were gentry of reduced circumstances, and didn’t spend enough time in London to escape the Essex accent.

Lorelai had not missed the dialect while at school in Mayfair, and it had been the first thing she’d rid herself of in favor of a more proper London inflection. In this case, however, it was Lord Southbourne’s words, more than his accent, that caused her to flinch.

As cruel as the girls could be at Braithwaite’s Boarding School, none of their taunts had made her feel quite so hollow as the one her own family bestowed upon her.