Chapter 19: The Highwayman: Chapter 20

He was gone.

Farah leaned her weight on shaking, outstretched arms and tried to absorb the paralyzing shock. The brittle sound of breaking glass and splintering wood echoed down the hallway and carried for some distance. Then all was silent.

This couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be happening. Had she really heard that name whispered against her neck? Felt the truth of it shudder through her in that unmistakable voice?

Against the soft window cushion, she struggled to catch her breath. Aftershocks of the mind-shattering climax still caused her inner muscles to clench and pulse. The slick leavings of their sex quickly became cold, exposed to the empty solarium with its marble floors and many windows.

That name. She’d never forget how he said that name. Farah realized that Dorian Blackwell had been very careful never to utter that name to her before.

And now she knew why.

She had to get to him. Now.

Shimmying her back and legs so that her skirts slid back into place, she began to tug at her bindings. She could say one thing about her husband, he certainly knew about restraints.

Shouldn’t this window latch give? In her stupefied desperation, she simply struggled fruitlessly for a moment. Grunting and straining, she pulled this way and that. She needed just a few inches and she could probably shimmy off the point at the top. Damn her short legs. Maybe if she could somehow lift her skirts over her knees so she could climb over the window seat and stand on it …

She froze as heavy footsteps shuffled down the hall.

“My lady!” Murdoch’s horrified exclamation echoed in the solarium.

“Please release me.” She pulled against the cords biting into her wrists as she struggled to look back at him. Remembering her discarded drawers, Farah grimaced with mortification. However, if anyone was to find her in such a state, she could only ask it be Murdoch. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before.

“There are limits to my loyalty,” the Scotsman growled as he climbed onto the ledge and began to work at her husband’s masterful knots. “I’ll kill him for this.”

“No, Murdoch,” Farah admonished as her hands finally slid free and she pressed them against a protesting back as she stood. “You must forgive him for this.”

“Never!”

Farah searched the floor around her until she snatched up her ripped eggshell-blue drawers. “You must,” she insisted. “Just as I must forgive you for not telling me who he was all this time.”

He turned the color of a jaundiced turnip. “I—I doona know what ye mean, lass.”

“Oh, do give it up, Murdoch!” she huffed. “Now tell me which way he went.”

“Christ, Jaysus,” the old man moaned, looking quite unwell.

“Which way?” She brandished her unmentionables at him in a threatening manner.

Murdoch pointed out the west doors. “Follow the devastation,” he said rather dazedly. “Though when he’s in such a state, I wouldna advise being in his path.”

Despite everything, Farah was unable to suppress a grin and planted a kiss on Murdoch’s balding pate. “Don’t follow me,” she ordered before dashing out.

The devastation did, indeed, mark a path toward her husband. Antiques were pushed over. Pictures pulled off walls. Priceless glass vases and stone statues lay smashed in the middle of the hallways.

Ducking into an unused guest room, she used her ruined undergarments to clean herself and discarded them in the rubbish basket before resuming her search.

The path ended at the back stairs, and Farah followed them down to where the garden door flapped against the storm.

Of course, Farah knew exactly where she’d find him.

*   *   *

The stone walls of the terrace gardens stood higher and in better repair than those ancient mossy rocks at Applecross. It made sense to Farah, in a way, as she approached the man slumped against one. He stood higher, too, these days, impossibly so. But this sable-haired man was once a sable-haired boy she’d known better than any other, and he still retreated to cold stone walls in times of crisis.

His white linen shirt and dark vest were plastered to his torso and outlined powerful shoulders along with the dips and swells of thick arms. His limp hands dangled over splayed knees. Locks of hair dripped rainwater onto the grass beneath him, hiding his downturned face. The posture of defeat didn’t diminish the potency of his masculinity.

An acute ache opened a pit in her chest and spread until she had to swallow to keep it down.

Here they were again. A cold storm. A stone wall. A wounded boy. A lonely girl.

“Tell me why you’re crying?” She whispered the first words she’d ever spoken to him.

And he gave her the same reply, without looking up. “Go. Away.”

A ragged gasp escaped her and she rushed to him, sinking to her knees next to him in a cloud of expensive midnight skirts.

He snatched his hands back and fisted them at his sides. “I mean it.” The dangerous growl rumbled from deep in his chest. “Get out of here.”

She swallowed a lump of tender, painful joy. “Let me see your hands.”

He lifted his head like a man with the weight of a mountain on his shoulders and turned it on his straining neck to spear her with those unsettling mismatched eyes. He wasn’t crying. Not yet. But muscles twitched in his face and his lips pulled into a hard white line as he visibly fought the pool of bright moisture gathering against his lids. “I’m warning you, Farah.”

“You should know me better than that,” she murmured, slowly moving her fingers across the grass toward where his fist clenched at his side.

Neither of them felt the rain or the biting cold as she picked up his big, white-knuckled fist. Her hands looked so small in comparison. Both of them clutching his one fist and still not engulfing it. Farah’s heart didn’t pound so much as it quivered inside her rib cage, struggling to move her blood through veins tight with hope and awe and terror.

Her long, slim fingers covered his thick, scarred ones and one by one, coaxed them to uncover his secret.

A breath as jagged as the long seam across his palm broke from her throat, then another. She could feel her face crumbling as hot tears mingled with the cold rain on her cheeks. The wounds Dougan had suffered the day they’d met. The scars she’d traced as a girl more times than she could count.

“Oh, my God,” she sobbed, pressing her lips to his scarred palm. “My God, my God.” The exclamation became a chant. A question. A prayer. Punctuated with kisses and strokes of her fingers as though his hand were a holy relic and she a pious disciple at the end of a long pilgrimage.

Finally she held it to her cheek as she sat back on her knees and stared into the face of the boy she’d given her heart to, and the man who’d begun to steal it.

His entire body shook, though his features were still as granite, but for a twitch in his strong chin he couldn’t seem to control. He regarded her as one might a strange dog, unsure of whether its next move was to nuzzle or attack.

“Is it truly you, Dougan?” she pleaded. “Tell me this isn’t some kind of dream.”

He turned his face from her, a drop of moisture leaving the corner of his eye and slowly following the blade of his cheek to join the rivulets of rainwater running down his jaw and neck.

“I am Dorian Blackwell.” His voice matched the stone, gray, flat, and cold.

Farah shook her head against his palm. “I knew and married you as Dougan Mackenzie, all those years ago,” she insisted.

His throat worked over a difficult swallow and he pulled his hand out of her grasp. “The boy you knew as Dougan Mackenzie is deceased. He died in Newgate Prison.” His gaze swung back to hers. “Too many times.”

Farah felt her heart become a fragile thing. More fragile even than the vases and sculptures that lay in shards along the expensive flooring of his home. “Is there nothing left of him?” she whispered.

He stared at a point over her shoulder for a moment, before reaching out.

Farah didn’t dare move as he pulled a wet ringlet over her shoulder and wound it around his finger. “Only the way he—remembers you.”

Hope swelled and tears overflowed her lashes again, blurring her vision until she blinked them away. She felt like a woman ripped in two by opposing forces. Exquisite pain and agonizing elation. Dougan Mackenzie had been returned to her arms. Alive. Broken. Powerful. Unable to bear her touch. Unwilling to give his heart.

Were the heavens truly so cruel?

She reached up, smoothing the wet streams of his hair off his wide brow. “You don’t look a thing like him,” she murmured with awe. “He was so small, his face rounder. Softer. And yet, I see him in your dark eye, that dear, mischievous, intelligent boy. So, you see, he cannot be dead. I must have known that somehow, all this time. It’s why I never let you go.”

“That’s impossible,” he said.

Farah lifted the hem of her blue skirt and found a white petticoat beneath that was not yet drenched. Gently, she covered a finger with the hem, much as she had when they were children, and knelt up to wipe the rainwater from his face.

After a cautious wince, he remained unmoving. Unblinking. Unbreathing as she parodied her prior ministrations to him from all those years ago.

“Of course it’s possible,” she said. “It was your Gaelic spell that you said to me in the vestry at Applecross. Those last words.”

“I remember, Dougan. And I know you never forget.” She let the petticoat fall away and traced the lines of his brutal face with fingers soft as feathers, learning and memorizing this new incarnation of him. “My soul recognized your soul—and was reborn. I knew there was something behind those eyes, beneath those gloves, that would give back to me what I’ve been missing all these years.” Farah launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and clinging like a burr. Their first kiss tasted of salt and desperation. Tears mingled, his or hers, she couldn’t tell. Lips fused. Bodies melded. And finally, a miracle.

His thick arms encircled her, pulled her to him, then his hands plunged into her hair as he claimed her mouth with his tongue. He was as big and hard as the stone wall behind him, a mountain of ice melting beneath her warmth. But his mouth neither punished nor demanded. This time, his kiss was full of darkness and hesitancy. It was as if all the emotions he couldn’t understand or allow poured from his mouth into hers in a tumble of chaos.

Farah accepted them all. Savored them. Would hold them and help him identify and sort through them later, when they’d finished discovering just who they’d become.

She felt safe here in the arms of this dangerous man. It was like returning to a home that had been destroyed and rebuilt. The same bones, same structure, but a new core that felt more foreign than if you hadn’t ever known it from before. Walls and obstacles constructed by hands that were not her own.

But it didn’t matter to her. She’d learn this man he’d become, renovate with her love what could be improved upon, and accept and adapt to what she could not repair.

“I love you, Dougan,” she murmured against his stroking mouth. “I’ve loved you for so long.”

He released her hair and shackled her shoulders with his strong hands, thrusting her away from him so abruptly she felt it in her bones. The scar interrupted by his eye was deep enough to catch the rain, and the expression on his face finally forced the storm’s chill beneath her skin. His breath came in ragged pants, and his lips were colored with the heat of a kiss. But any other effect had disappeared, and that fact struck Farah’s heart with dread.

“I am Dorian Blackwell.” He shook her shoulders a bit, as though that would give his words more weight. “I have been for the entirety of my adulthood and will be until this wretched life is over.”

“How is that possible?” she asked gently, setting her hands on his chest to stabilize herself. Curious ridges in the hard planes of muscle called her fingers to investigate. Seams? Scars? She found herself firmly planted away from him as he prepared to stand.

“That’s just another story full of blood and death,” he warned.

“Tell me,” she insisted, fisting her hands in her skirts, promising herself that no matter how badly she ached for it, she would not reach out until he finished.

The rain beat them with a steady staccato, dripping down the stones of the wall in dark streaks that evoked images of bloodstains. The grass beneath them cushioned the hard ground and fragrant hedges hid what walls could not. It was a lovely garden, just awakened to the first nudges of spring with blooms not yet blossomed. But as Dorian spoke, a grim pall covered the whole world, one that not even this lovely corner could brighten.

“I wrote to my father, the Marquess of Ravencroft, Laird Hamish Mackenzie, before they sentenced me. I begged him not only for help on my behalf, but also for his help in locating you. In keeping you safe.” His eyes touched her for a moment, but then swung to fix on a weathered hedge, stubbornly holding on to the barren kiss of winter.

“I never heard a word from my father, though as my situation became more desperate, I wrote to him more often. Turns out, instead of the paltry sum it would have taken to hire a lawyer for me, he paid exponentially more to his friend and associate Justice Roland Cranmer the Third to be rid of me. Cranmer, in turn, paid the three most corrupt and vicious guards in Newgate to beat me to death.”

Farah gasped, holding a horrified hand to her heart to keep it from bleeding out of her chest. “They—killed Dorian instead?”

“He happened to be working on a cipher for outside communication with my cell mate, Walters, and so we switched for the night, knowing the lazy guards had a hard time telling the difference between us.”

“Walters, you mean—Frank?”

His lids shuttered for only a moment. “Walters used to be brilliant and brutal and prone to manic episodes of extreme artistic genius. One of the best forgers ever captured. They tried to kill him that night, as well, but he survived to become the gentle simpleton you met. I suppose they left him alive because he can’t remember what happened, and therefore couldn’t speak against them.”

Farah couldn’t tell which was more responsible for the moisture on her cheeks, the relentless rain, or her tears. “Dear God.” She sniffed. “Your own father caused all this?”

A frightening satisfaction lifted her husband’s satyric features. “He paid his price, and was the first to experience my wrath. He funded my rise and, needless to say, there is a new Marquess of Ravencroft. His legitimate heir, Laird Liam Mackenzie.”

Farah didn’t even want to know what happened to the old one, and couldn’t exactly summon pity for the man who’d paid for the violent death of his own son.

“Liam Mackenzie is … your brother?” she breathed.

“Half brother,” he answered tightly. “I am only one of countless Mackenzie bastards out there. We tend to stay out of Laird Mackenzie’s way.”

“Why?” Farah asked.

He looked away, signaling that the matter was closed.

She wisely moved on. “Now Cranmer’s gone missing?”

“Dead. And they’ll never find the body.”

Farah wasn’t surprised. “How were you able to take on Blackwell’s identity?”

His lip curled into a snarl of disgust. “There are no words to describe the filth of the railway mixed with that of the prison. Infection killed more men than violence.” He swallowed obvious revulsion. “We truly could have been brothers. The Blackheart Brothers. And we smeared our faces and skin with soot and mud to protect it from the sun and cold when we worked. The added benefit was often men didn’t realize to whom they spoke if we weren’t standing next to each other. I lost all traces of my Highland brogue and learned his mannerisms and accent very early on. Once I grew to roughly his size, there was no telling us apart.”

“Who knows who you really are?” she asked.

“Murdoch, Argent, Tallow, and—well—Walters is confused most of the time. We were the five who ruled Newgate. The fingers that made a fist.” He curled his fingers over his scar, squeezing until the creases whitened. “We all knew it was supposed to be me who died in that cell. And we all wanted revenge, so we took it. And we’ve never stopped taking since.”

Farah found it difficult to digest his story, her mind threatening to regurgitate its ugliness onto the ground like so much rancid meat. “You won’t say his name,” she murmured. “Dorian Blackwell, the boy who died.”

“You don’t seem to understand. Whoever was left of the boy I was is buried in that mass grave along with his body. You did not marry Dougan Mackenzie.”

“Yes I did,” Farah insisted in a gentle whisper.

He pushed to his feet, standing over her like a reluctant executioner, about to carry out the sentence of a dark soul. “I am Dorian Blackwell. I will always be Dorian Blackwell. He lives on in me.”

Farah lifted to her knees, meaning to stand, but froze when he took a retreating step. “Then—I’ll love you as Dorian Blackwell,” she offered. “For I married him, as well.”

A quiet and painful desperation speared through her as his face hardened. “Do not speak of love, Farah. For it is something I cannot give.”

Stunned, she fell back on her haunches as though his words had physically pushed her down. “What?” Of course, Dorian had told her that before. But—things were different now.

“I can offer you protection. I can offer you revenge. I’ve given you your legacy. But I cannot offer you my heart, because I am not capable of giving something I don’t possess.”

Bleeding for him, Farah forgot to be proud, forgot to be strong, and prostrated herself on her knees in front of him, clasping her hands in supplication. Ready to give him anything. Her heart. Her soul. Her life. He was her soul mate, back from the dead. It would kill her to lose him again. She didn’t care what he’d done, what life had driven him to do. She’d take those sins upon her own head; carry the burdens of his memories on her slim shoulders. “You can have my heart,” she offered.

“You’d be a fool to give it to me,” he mocked, twisting his features into something foreign and frightening.

“Then I am a fool,” she insisted. “For I already have.”

“I do not suffer fools!” he hissed. “You gave your heart to Dougan, before you even knew what it meant. It is not meant for me.”

She seized his fist, pressing a kiss to the scarred knuckle. “But Dorian has begun to steal it, thieving highwayman that he is.”

“Then take it back!” He wrenched his fist from her grasp, pulling her off balance and forcing her to catch herself on the grass with her outstretched hands, soiling them with the mud beneath. “In my hands it will become corrupted. Poisoned. I’ll blacken it until you hate me almost as much as you hate yourself for giving it to me.” He thrust a finger at her to silence her reply. “Every part of my life has been bleak, brutal, and bloody—except you. I’ll not add your ruin to my many sins.”

“We can change that,” she cried. “Together.”

He bent and thrust his strong, cruel face into hers, water falling from his hair onto her skin. “That’s what you’re too blind to see. I don’t want to change. I like being the Blackheart of Ben More. I relish making the imbeciles that run this empire into my puppets. I feed on the fear of others. I love to crush my enemies and outwit the police. I am not the redeemable hero, Farah. I am not the boy who loved you. I am the villain—”

“Fine!” Farah held her soiled hands up. “All right. I’ll take it, all of it. I’ll take you just as you are. Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More. I’ve seen the kind of man you are, how you take care of those whom you pretend not to care about. I’m your wife. I’ve been your wife for seventeen years. I love you.”

His next words made her doubt the twitching flicker of agonized emotion that struggled to peel itself from his bones before he crushed it behind his mask of ice and stone. “I know what you’re thinking, Farah. Don’t you think it has been offered to me before? Maybe if you love me enough. Accept me enough. Set a good example of compassion and kindness that you’ll make me a better man.”

He was so astute, so brutally correct, that Farah had to force herself not to cringe from him.

“There is no better man under this.” He gestured to his scarred eye. “In fact, with you here, I’m much worse. I lose control around you, Farah. You make me blind. The thought of touching you dissolves me into madness. The thought of another man touching you…” He grabbed her wrists and held the raw skin in front of her eyes. “Look what I’ve done. What I—forced you to do upstairs.”

“You didn’t force me,” Farah breathed. “I—wanted you.”

“I would have.”

“You can’t have done,” she argued. “Dorian, I’ll never deny you. I’m yours. Only yours. Just like you’ve always said.”

Before her eyes he became a stranger. The vestiges of the angry, possessive Dougan Mackenzie disappeared. And even the cold, aloof, and dominant Dorian Blackwell gave way to someone new. It wasn’t just the light and life that disappeared from his eyes, but the shadows and mystery, too. It was almost like watching him jump off the edge of a cliff. She’d never in her life felt so utterly helpless. Not with her hands bound to the bed. Not when they’d taken the boy she’d loved away from her. Not ever.

“What about your promise?” she reminded him desperately. “You promised me a child.”

“Consider this the first time of many that I’ll disappoint you.”

“But you said that you always keep your promises.”

“I was wrong to say that.”

Farah panicked. He wasn’t just retreating. It was like watching him die. Right there, in front of her. Severing the ties with the last of his humanity. With the part of himself that still searched for her after all these years.

“Why?” She hated the pleading note in her voice.

“As I said before.” He straightened, his hair hanging down into his eyes. “I do not suffer fools.”

He stepped over her like one would a sopping puddle and strode toward the house. Farah watched his drenched clothing molding to the wide back he held as straight as an arrow.

She fought her heavy, sodden skirts to stand. The ache in her heart echoed in the falls of his feet on the wet flagstone walk to the house. It was like she’d thrown her heart beneath his boots and each beat was the stomp of his heel.

Well, she wasn’t a flame to be stomped out so easily. “Then why marry me?” she called after him, pushing her wet ringlets out of her eyes. “Why capture me and bind my life to yours if you planned to cast me away? What’s the bloody point?”

“The point is, I’m a bastard,” he replied over his shoulder. “In every sense of the word.”