The Highlander (Victorian Rebels Book 3)

“Would you like some scotch?” Dorian asked, moving to a table topped with a tray of crystal decanters and glasses situated between the two high-backed leather chairs.

Grateful for the space between them, Farah’s first inclination was to decline, but upon second thought she said, “Yes, thank you.”

“It is compliments of your relation, the Marquess of Ravencroft.”

Farah blinked. “Relation?”

Watching her carefully, he retrieved two identical glasses, splashing them liberally with thick, caramel liquid. “Liam Mackenzie, the current laird of the Mackenzie clan. A kinsman of your late husband, I’m certain.”

Searching her memory, Farah struggled to quell her racing heart. “I—never had the chance to meet him,” she said. Which was the truth.

Blackwell gave her an enigmatic look. “Please, sit.” He motioned to the chair closest to the fire.

Cautiously, Farah sat, unable to take her eyes off him for a moment, just in case. In case he—what? Flew into a murderous frenzy? Lured her into a false sense of security and then—

“You mustn’t attempt escape again,” he said conversationally. Instead of handing her the drink, he set it on the small table at her elbow before lowering his tall frame into the chair across from her. It was a little like sitting across from the devil, preparing to make an arrangement and trying not to consider the eternal cost of such a bargain. Your heart. Your life.

Your soul.

“I told you,” Farah began. “I was hungry.”

Blackwell leveled her a droll look. “Let’s not insult either of our intelligences by lying to each other.”

To cover her guilt, Farah reached for the scotch and took a larger gulp than she should have. Gasping, she held her hand over her mouth as the liquid burned into her chest and brought tears to her rapidly blinking eyes. So much for keeping her composure.

Amusement toyed with the corner of his lips, but a smile never claimed them. “You nearly frightened poor Murdoch to tears.”

Farah opened her mouth to retort, but only a hiccup emerged. Clamping her lips shut, she cleared her throat, and tried again. “In circumstances other than these, I would be sorry to hear my actions caused another any distress, but to kidnap a lady in the middle of the night and not expect her to attempt escape already calls your intelligence into question.” She took another sip of the strong liquor, a much smaller one this time, having learned her lesson.

Blackwell had yet to drink, he only swirled the liquid about in his glass, never once taking his eye from her. “I thoroughly anticipated your flight, and had one of my men watching each possible exit to the castle,” he informed her. “I only warn you against further attempts for your own safety. If you happen to slip past one of my guards, I shall very much dislike to send the hounds after you. It would make all of this much more unpleasant for both of us.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t I?”

Farah gaped, unable to fathom his brutality. She shouldn’t be shocked, she’d been around the worst sort of criminals for more years than she’d care to admit. But, somehow, it astounded her that one so cultured, so relaxed and wealthy and tailored, could issue such a threat with a civil tongue. The criminals of her acquaintance were dirty and foul with explosive tempers and crude language. Blackwell threatened violence as though discussing the price of Irish potatoes.

“I’m beginning to understand, Mr. Blackwell, that there are no depths to which you wouldn’t sink to get whatever it is you want.”

At last, Blackwell lifted his glass, to his lips and drank, effectively hiding his expression. When he lowered it, he regarded her with an unapologetic smirk. “Then you are finally beginning to know me, Mrs. Mackenzie.”

“I shouldn’t like to,” she said stiffly.

“You don’t have a choice.”

Farah finished her drink in one reckless swallow, this time braced for the burn. “Go on, then,” she challenged, the scotch adding smoke to her voice. “Let’s have it.”

Resting his drink on his knee with one hand, he leaned forward, watching her features intently. “Do you know the one thing a man must do to achieve all that I have in such a short time?”

“I’m sure I don’t.”

He ignored the note of sarcasm in her voice. “He must always repay his debts, and he must always fulfill his promises.”

“That’s two things,” Farah challenged.

“Not necessarily.”

Biting her thumbnail, she puzzled over his words. “But you don’t owe me anything, nor I you. We’ve never made promises to each other.”

At that, he was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Farah squirmed in the large, overstuffed chair, feeling like a child whose feet barely touched the ground.

“Do you remember what Morley said in the strong room those few days ago?” he asked.

“Should I?” Of course, she remembered every word.

He made that sound again, one that could have been amusement or annoyance. “Seventeen years ago, I was sentenced to Newgate Prison as a lad for theft. Because of some prior indiscretions, I was given a hefty term of seven years’ hard labor.”

His build began to make more sense. If he’d spent a great deal of his youth digging tunnels, breaking rocks, and hauling ties for the new London underground railway, as many English prisoners did, such work would form his wide shoulders and heavy bones.

“Among my new fellow prisoners was a transferred orphan boy from the Scottish Highlands. A murderer too young for the gallows, as he was all of thirteen, and the public revolted to see anyone younger than sixteen with his neck snapped by a noose.”

Farah flinched, then stared. “Dougan,” she whispered.

“Precisely.” He finished his drink in one swallow, but made no move to pour another. “How we hated each other, at first. I thought he was a sniveling weakling ripe to be picked upon, and he thought I was a witless bully.”

“Were you?”

That provoked the whisper of a nostalgic smile. “Of course I was. I used to throw rocks at his hands while he carried buckets of dirt. Tried to make him drop things and cause his knuckles to bleed.”

Farah could feel her face hardening and a very foreign, frightening sort of anger bubbling through her blood. If Blackwell noticed, he ignored it and continued.

“One day, my rock missed his hands and caught Dougan between the legs. He fell to the ground, vomited, trembled for at least five long minutes while we all stood and laughed at him, even the guards. And then he did something quite extraordinary. He reached for the rock, stood up, and hurled it so hard at my head that it felled me. Then he leaped on me and beat my face so bloody, my own mother wouldn’t have recognized me.”

Farah set her glass back on the table as the trembling in her own hand become violent. “Good,” she forced through lips stiff with outrage. She began to detest the sight of him. What was once intriguing and dangerous was now not just her enemy, but Dougan’s as well, and that she could not abide.

Instead of taking offense at her anger, a barely perceptible softening of his features relaxed the hard line of his mouth. “I respected him after that, enough to leave him alone. Not just me, but all of us boys. He was one of the youngest among us, but the hate and violence he harbored burned the brightest. We all saw it that day, and we all feared it.”

Farah’s throat tightened. She didn’t want to hear any more of this, didn’t want their beautiful memories tainted with a confirmation of the details of his suffering. Yet, this was her penance, wasn’t it? To be faced with the consequences of the reckless actions of her youth. If Dougan’s memory deserved anything, it was to have his story told, and she would force herself to sit and listen. She still owed him that much.

Owed him everything.

“The day came when we were to be assigned to the labor lines. Initially, most of us younger lads were put in the lines to be sent to the prison ships stationed off the coast. Hellish, rotting hulks that neither the navy nor shipping companies could use anymore, with a prisoner mortality rate of more than seventy percent. We were separated into four lines, ours bound for the ships.” Here, Dorian paused and considered her intently. “None of us knew it at the time, but Dougan Mackenzie was the only one among us who knew how to read the signs or the guards’ registers. We all would have marched to our deaths had he not plucked my two best mates, Argent and Tallow, into the railway worker line. To this day, I don’t know what made him do it, but at the last moment he grabbed me, too, without a guard noticing, and very likely saved my life.”

Farah couldn’t fathom it, either, but still hadn’t recovered her voice well enough to say so.

“We were inseparable after that, Dougan and I. We formed a band of boys who worked the railways, just the four of us at first, protecting each other when we could from the older men and sometimes the guards. Teaching each other how to survive in such a place. For seven years, we gathered favors, debts, allies, and a few enemies among the boys and men who came and left Newgate Prison. We were leaders among them, young and strong, feared and respected. They came to know Dougan and me as ‘the Blackheart Brothers,’ as we both had black hair, dark eyes, and sharp fists.”

Now that Farah looked at him, really looked at him, she attempted to superimpose her memory of Dougan’s boyish features on the sculpted, cruel face of the man in front of her. Couldn’t be done. Though the hair was black, and the one eye was dark, the resemblance ended there. Swallowing, she forced her frozen tongue to form words. “How do I know you’re not deceiving me?”

“You don’t,” he answered simply. “Nor does it matter, because here’s where all this information becomes relevant to you.”

“I fail to see how.”

“Let me ask you something,” Blackwell said intently. “How do you believe Dougan Mackenzie died?”

A knot of dread formed in her stomach. “I was told it was consumption that took him, that he fell ill and never recovered.”

“And who told you that?”

“The reception guard at Newgate,” she answered honestly. “The day it happened.”

Blackwell became very still, the hand on his glass turning white. “What were you doing at Newgate Prison ten years ago on the day Dougan Mackenzie died?” he demanded, emotion coloring his voice for the first time since they’d met.

“That’s none of your business.”

“You will tell me, Farah, if I have to force it out of you,” he said through clenched teeth.

She blanched at his forceful use of her first name, but stubbornly pressed her lips together.

“Damn it, why would you go there?” he roared, surging to his feet and hurling his crystal glass into the fireplace. Farah flinched as it exploded against the stones.

He stalked to her chair, and to her everlasting shame, Farah cringed away from him in fear. He didn’t touch her, though, just towered over her, panting and raging. “Why would you set foot in that wretched place on that day of all days?”

“I—I…” She could barely form a thought, let alone words.

“Answer me!” he bellowed in a voice that she swore rattled the windows.

Farah couldn’t look at him anymore. Couldn’t see the wrath piercing at her with an archer’s precision. Couldn’t face his lies, or more petrifying, his truths. “It wasn’t just that day. I went to Newgate every night for seven years and left Dougan cheese and bread.”

“No.” He retreated a step, staggered was more like it, giving her the moment she needed to gather her courage.

Farah stood, her head barely reaching his cravat so she had to crane her neck to look up at him. “You see, Mr. Blackwell, your kind are not the only ones who keep their promises. I, too, made a promise years ago, that I’d never let Dougan Mackenzie go hungry, and I kept that promise up until the day he … the day … he…” Her composure finally broke and she retreated to stand in front of the desk, swallowing frantic gulps of emotion.

He allowed it, gathering his own armor to him in front of her eyes in the form of cavalier tranquility. “He never knew that extra food was from you. We thought the other prisoners’ families left it as offerings, or some kind of payment for our continued favors or good graces.”

“But I wrote him letters every week and delivered them with the food,” she protested.

“He never received them.”

That, alone, was enough to break her heart. Farah’s shoulders lost all their ability to keep her head up, and she slumped over. “I thought I’d at least give him a little bit of hope. That he would know that, even locked away, he wasn’t alone in the world.” She didn’t look at him but for a glance from beneath her lashes. He still stood where he had before, with more information she didn’t want, but had to discover, locked behind his cruel lips.

“Tell me how he died,” she ordered softly. “If not by illness, then by what means?”

“He was murdered.” With those three cold words, Blackwell pierced her heart.

“How?” she whispered.

“Beaten to death in the middle of the night by three prison guards.”

Farah clamped a hand over her mouth as the tartlets churned in her stomach and crawled up her throat with an acid burn. She swallowed, then again, grateful the food couldn’t pass the lump of tears in her throat to end up retched all over the study’s expensive carpets.

“Why?” she gasped.

“That is the eternal question, isn’t it?”

Farah was too shocked, too disconsolate to be angry at the lack of emotion in his voice. She couldn’t be sure how long she stood staring at the hem of her lovely dress, one she’d had on for much too long that now felt tight and confining and bit into her skin. She wanted to be rid of it. To be rid of this room, of the past, of everything. She wanted to be back in her office, where she ought to be, shuffling paperwork and making ordered sense out of chaos. Pretending that she had no time for emotion, for grief, for guilt, only responsibility and an endless list of things to do to keep the dissonance of her thoughts occupied.

She didn’t hear Blackwell approach until he was standing beside her.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Her question came out more of an accusation.

He submitted her to another one of his protracted silences before finally answering. “Because I’ve owed Dougan Mackenzie a debt, one it has taken me ten years of careful execution to repay. When I saw you in the strong room, when I realized who you were, I thought, who better to share his revenge with than you? You can help me wreak vengeance on everyone who tore your lives apart all those years ago.”

Farah stared at him, searching for a lie on his pitiless face. Finding none, and still doubting her instincts. Dorian Blackwell was a thief, a liar, and a criminal. Could she believe him? Was he, even now, playing some kind of terrible, merciless game?

“Take my hand, look me in the eye, and promise me you’re not lying to me.” It came out more of a plea than a command. Morley had told her once that one could detect a lie by the tension in a man’s hand, the dilation of his pupils, and the direction of his gaze. Farah was not skilled in the practice, but she wanted to try.

Blackwell regarded her offered hand as though she presented him a slug or a spider. “No,” he said shortly.

“Then you are lying,” she insisted.

“No.”

“Prove it,” Farah challenged. “Why would you deny this innocuous request if you have nothing to hide?” She thrust her hand farther toward him, and he barely concealed a flinch.

“I have plenty to hide, but in this, you can be assured I am in earnest.”

“I could never trust someone who couldn’t even offer a handshake upon his honor.”

Blackwell considered her outstretched hand for a disturbingly long time. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to oblige you.”

She let her hand drop. “I can’t say I’m surprised.” So had he been lying about Dougan’s death? About all of it? What should she believe?

After a time, he seemed to come to a decision. “I will, however, give you a gesture of good faith. I will give you information about myself that few beyond the two of us have ever or will ever know.”

Farah found the gesture odd, but she stood silently, waiting for him to continue.

“The years I spent in prison, shall we say … disinclined me toward any contact with human flesh. That is why I do not shake your hand.” He presented this information as though informing her of the weather but, for the first time, his eye did not meet hers. “I also admit that I’m not above lying to you to get what I want; however, in this I’m certain our purposes are aligned, and therefore I have no need to manipulate you. I think you want those who have harmed Dougan, and you, to pay for their crimes.”

“Revenge.” She tested the word, an ideal she’d always abhorred and yearned for at the same time. “And you consider yourself as what, some sort of Count of Monte Cristo?”

He gave a nonchalant shrug. “Not particularly, though the book is a favorite of mine.”

Farah frowned. “I thought you said you couldn’t read.”

That Dorian Blackwell could laugh at a time like this astounded her. But he did. The sound so devoid of true mirth, it caused goose pimples to rise on her skin and her nipples to tighten painfully. It was a dark sound, like the rest of him, and it washed over her with chilling totality. “I don’t see what’s so funny, it was only a question.”

“You must think me a fool,” he said.

“I think you’re a lot of things.”

He stepped closer. A moth’s wing wouldn’t have survived in the space between them, and still he never touched her, though she could feel the sensation of him on every inch of her skin.

“I’ll tell you this,” he began darkly, his eye swirling with all the intensity of last night’s storm. “There are immense differences between the Count of Monte Cristo and the Blackheart of Ben More. Edmond Dantes was given his treasure. He never had to stoop to the things I did in order to take it. In prison, he was only whipped on his anniversary. He was isolated in his own cell, which Alexandre Dumas never imagined would be preferable to what we had to endure. He was never stabbed, raped, publicly flogged, humiliated, beaten within an inch of his life, or taken ill and left for dead.”

With every word, Farah’s eyes widened and she again found herself cringing back, but he didn’t allow her to retreat, bending until his compelling face was mere inches from hers. “And that is just what the gaolers did to me.”

She’d been able to control her tears until that moment, but no longer. They spilled over her lashes and washed down her cheeks, causing her breath to tremble in her chest and rattle through her lips. To no longer be able to abide the comfort of human contact. How did he stand it? No wonder he was so very remote. How could warmth touch your heart when it wasn’t even allowed near your skin?

It could have been regret that softened his features, but it was still impossible for her to tell. “You’re thinking of Mackenzie,” he murmured.

Ashamed that she’d been thinking of Blackwell and not her Dougan, Farah nodded, not trusting herself to make a sound.

For the second time since they’d met, he raised his hand to her face, only to pull it back again. “Is there no pity in your heart for me?”

Farah turned from him then, dashing madly at her cheeks. There was, of course, but she didn’t dare show it to him. “Do you deserve my pity?” she asked, her voice thick with her tears.

“Probably not,” he answered honestly. “But the boy I once was might have.”

The next tear that fell was for him, though she’d die before letting him know it. “Dougan. He was—he was small for his age. So skinny and starving. It would have been easy for anyone to … to prey upon him.”

“It was,” Dorian confirmed. “But he learned quickly.”

The sobs she’d been fighting so valiantly began to burst into tiny explosions in her chest. They cut off her breath unless she let them free in a flood of hot tears and desperate gasps.

“His death was years ago.” Dorian’s voice softened, and she dare not turn to him. “A decade at least. The pain cannot be so fresh as all that.”

She agreed. She’d thought that with time, the stinging grief and the crushing guilt would fade, but it didn’t. It was as though Dougan Mackenzie refused to die, and because of it, she was doomed to relive the blessings and horrors of their time together again and again. “You don’t understand,” she wailed. “It was my fault. My fault all of this befell him. Didn’t he tell you why he was incarcerated in the first place?”

“He killed a priest.”

“For me!” She whirled around, shocked at how close he still stood. “He killed that priest for me. He was subjected to all the suffering and indignities you just described and more because he was only trying to protect me. You don’t understand how much I regret that every day of my life! I think about it all the time. I hate myself for it!”

“He never blamed you.” For the first time since she’d met him, Dorian seemed to be at a loss. Unsure, maybe, of how to handle a distraught woman. But Farah didn’t care, she was purging something so terrible in front of someone who may be an enemy, or might prove an ally.

“You can’t know that!” she insisted. “It was just a few kisses from the priest, a horrid touch or two. If I’d never gone to Dougan that night. If I’d only submitted to a small ignominy … perhaps it would have saved his life. Perhaps we’d still be … together.”

“Never.” Blackwell’s features hardened again, and he looked as though he wanted to shake her. “Dougan would rather have submitted to his thousand tortures than to have you submit to one. He wouldn’t have survived your suffering. He loves you that much.”

“Loved,” she sobbed. “Loved me, and because of it, he didn’t survive! His love for me got him killed.” A smothering nausea overtook her, images of the boy she loved suffering in the graphic ways Blackwell described assaulted her imagination until she wanted to crawl out of her own skin to escape them. She needed to escape this room, to flee the darkness and the man who was shrouded by it. “Forgive me,” she gasped. “I—I must … go.” Her vision blurred by tears, she lurched in the direction of the doors, relieved that he made no move to stop her. Light flared through the windows of the grand entry and blinded her as she was so accustomed to the shadows. She caught the scent of muffins or toast wafting from the hulking figure silently shocked by the sudden opening of the study door.

Farah seized upon the sunlight with a mad desperation, and pulled the heavy doors of the keep open. The two footmen stood as sentries on either side, and they moved to stop her, but paused as though someone had given them a staying command.

Farah launched herself past them, running blindly for a gazebo perched on the edge of the tallest rocks, and shaded by a copse of trees. From the vista, she could stare across the channel and see the black rock and green mosses of Scotland’s Highland shores. She watched the churning waves break upon the cliffs with power enough to crush the mightiest of ships. The shards of her churning emotions were tossed about thusly inside of her. And, for the first time since those months after Dougan Mackenzie had died, she cried with all the strength her broken heart could muster.

*   *   *

Dorian stood in the archway of his castle and watched the woman flee as if for her life. “Let her go, Walters,” he ordered, stopping his cook from going after her and hauling her back.

“Name’s Frank,” Walters insisted, though he obediently returned to Dorian’s side.

It took a moment for the words to penetrate Dorian’s concentration, so focused as it was on the retreating form running with desperate abandon toward the pavilion, her skirts the color of sea foam billowing out behind her.

Finally, he glanced over at his biggest and most pliable employee. “Frank?”

Walters inclined his head toward the pavilion. “She named me this morning.”

“Of course she did,” Dorian muttered.

Walters looked after her, as well, his doe-brown eyes becoming very troubled. “What’s wrong with your Fairy, Dougan?”

Dorian sighed, running into this problem more often than he cared to. “It’s me, Walters. It’s Dorian. Dougan is dead, remember?”

“Oh.” Confused, the giant man took a long moment to study his features, his brows drawn together. “I forgot. I’m no good at remembering things.”

“It’s all right,” Dorian soothed.

“She misses Dougan,” the big man said, sniffing down at his muffins.

“Yes. Yes, she does.”

“I do, too, Dorian.”

Dorian could feel a familiar darkness surge in his veins. These days, it was tinged red, for blood, with a greater frequency. It no longer disturbed him, he told himself as he retreated to his study. “We all do, Frank,” he said before he closed himself in. “We all do.”