lunged past his friend and slammed his door closed, whirling on the unfashionably tanned and brawny man who wore a smart suit as loosely as his devil-may-care smirk.
“I told you never to call me that,” he snarled.
The smile widened to that of a shark’s. “It’s your name, isn’t it?” He held up his hands against the onslaught of irritation burning from Morley’s glare. “I’m sorry, I’ve tried, but I can’t call you Carlton with a straight face.” These last words were strained through a chuckle as if to elucidate his point.
“Call me Morley, then, everyone else does.” He returned to his desk to straighten the papers he’d upset in his haste, arranging them into tidy piles. One in need of signatures. One in need of written correspondence. One in need of dissemination to his clerk as signatures and replies had already been made.
Amidst all the chaos, he needed order. He needed it to think. To decide what to do next.
He needed to control the outcome.
What he didn’t need was interruptions, even in the form of just-discovered long-lost best mates with murderous reputations of their own.
“Debacle,” he muttered. “Doesn’t even begin to describe what happened this morning.” Looking up, he leaned on his desk with both fists, too agitated to sit down. What word could he possibly use? Catastrophe? Disaster? Nothing seemed quite strong enough.
Three stories below where they stood, a lone woman was locked in a secret cell.
A murderer? A mother?
His lover.
What to do with her was his only pressing concern.
“Is there a reason for your visit, Dorian?” he asked shortly.
“I told you never to call me that,” the pirate sent him a black look that might have had a lesser man begging his pardon. Or his mercy.
Both of which he famously lacked.
“It’s your name, isn’t it?” Morley shot back the man’s own words.
“Touché.” Hard, obsidian eyes softened by scant degrees as Ash wandered about his spacious office. He read the commendations on the walls, looked at his certificate of knighthood, his army medals, a broken bayonet, a bullet that had been dug out of his thigh in Afghanistan displayed in a shadow box made by his regiment.
Catalogues of a life they were supposed to have lived together. A life that was stolen from them by the vagaries of fate.
The black eyes softened to something more filial and familiar. “Speaking of the man who took my name when I was presumed dead, Dorian is about to join us for a chat.”
“Come the fuck again?” Morley straightened. “The Blackheart of Ben More, King of the London Underworld is coming here? To my office in the middle of the day?” His jaw locked against the rest of the sentence, hissing the last of these through clenched teeth.
“Former King of the so on and so forth. He’s reformed, remember?”
“Allegedly,” Morley muttered.
Ash waved him off. “It’s a central location for us to meet, and we’ve information for you and Detective Inspector Argent to investigate in both your vocational capacities.” He bucked his brows rather meaningfully.
Morley rubbed at the tension tightening at the base of his neck. “The last time the Blackheart of Ben More was in these walls, I tied him to a chair and beat him within an inch of his life.”
“That isn’t exactly how I remember it.” As if summoned by his title, the subject of their conversation let himself into Morley’s office with nary a knock and left the door wide open behind him as he stopped abreast of Ash, his very own doppelganger.
Morley’s fingers still itched to throttle the man often. Or, like now, punch the vaguely superior expression from his features and blacken the obsidian eye that wasn’t covered by the eyepatch.
But alas, he could not. Morley and the so-called Blackheart of Ben More had established a truce recently—well, a ceasefire—for the sake of the man they both called brother.
The real Dorian Blackwell—now Ash—and an orphan named Dougan Mackenzie had been locked in Newgate Prison together as boys. Because of their similar looks, black hair, and dark-as-the-devil eyes, they’d been christened the Blackheart Brothers in Newgate, and the infamous moniker had followed them through a menagerie of miseries and misdeeds.
Upon Dorian’s supposed death in prison, Dougan Mackenzie, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a pedophile, assumed Dorian Blackwell’s identity and release date.
He lived as Dorian Blackwell for two decades, as the reigning King of the London Underworld, whilst the real Dorian, having crawled out of a mass grave with no memory, lived as the Rook,