The two men stared at each other, panting, their steel frozen on the other’s neck.

“Wolfbridge?” Des choked out the word.

“Troubant?” Wolfbridge seethed out the word.

Des hadn’t heard the voice in eighteen years.

The voice speaking his name.

His title.

{ Chapter 22 }

“You’re still as feeble as you were at Eton.” Shirtless, Wolfbridge dunked a cloth into the basin of water in the captain’s quarters of theFirehawkand dragged it across the deep slice along his upper arm.

“Aye—that I always will be with the blood.” Sitting at the small table, Des blanched, looking away from Wolfbridge’s arm. He’d made sure all of his men were taken care of—broken limbs and cuts and bullet wounds—and with all the blood sending his head light, he’d barely made it into the captain’s quarters.

His quarters, now.

Without looking directly at the wound, Des flicked his thumb toward Wolfbridge’s arm. “Does it need stitches? I can’t do it, but I can round up Wes or Vally. They’ll be crooked, but it’ll be closed. Our best stitcher has a broken arm.”

“It’s fine.” Wolfbridge tossed the bloody rag into the basin of water and set the knuckles of his fists onto the table between them, leaning towards Des. “What the hell are you doing here, Troubant? What the hell are you doing alive? We gave you up for dead years and years and too many blasted years ago. What the hell happened to you?”

Des sighed. He’d been waiting for this question since they’d left the Port of Bilbao—bloody and bruised, but victorious. That the duke had held his tongue this long was monument. Wolfbridge was not a patient one. But maybe now he was. Eighteen years should change a man.

Des’s look met Wolfbridge’s livid stare. His brother-in-law was decidedly furious with him. “I was pressed onto an American warship just before I was due to set sail on the ship to follow Corentine home.”

Wolfbridge’s light brown eyes pierced him. “And then what, you loved the sea so much you decided to become a privateer?”

“No. I sat for seven years on that blasted warship and then when I finally was freed and on a ship back to England, it was set upon by pirates.”

“So what?” Wolfbridge’s right fist lifted and slammed back down onto the table. “You never bothered to come back? You’ve been alive—did you never get my letters? Any of them? I sent them to every governor across the whole bloody world, looking for you.”

Des’s look narrowed at his brother-in-law. Wolfbridge’s ire was beginning to vex him. Why should he care if Des never wanted to step foot in England again?

Des’s mouth pulled to a thin line. “Yes, I got your letter. I saw it and then there was nothing for me to come back for. Corentine was gone. So I disappeared. Got on theFirehawkand tried to forget everything.”

Wolfbridge jerked back, pulling to his full height for one full breath before he leaned forward, slamming both of his fists onto the table. “Nothing to come back for? Are you mad?”

“No.” Des’s head shook, his lip curling. “The title means nothing to me.”

“Nothing to come back for?” Wolfbridge’s voice sank low into a deadly growl.

Des met his glare. “No.”

Wolfbridge leaned further forward, his mouth snarling. “You have a bloody child, Desmond. A girl. She wasn’t important enough to come back for?”

“I—what?” His head snapped back.

“Your child. Your child that is now eighteen years old and has never seen her father.”

Des’s heart stilled in his chest. “I—what—you never—the letter…”

His eyes closed as his mind flashed back to that abhorrent moment on thePrimrosewhen he’d read the letter—read that his wife had died. The crew of theRed Dragonhad attacked, and Redthorn had grabbed the letter from his hand. Laughed at it. Laughed at him. Des had never got to read the full of it.

Never thought he needed to read the full of it.

Des’s eyelids crept open and his look centered on Wolfbridge. “Tell me again what that letter said, Reiner. I—I read that Corentine had died—and then…” His eyes closed, his head shaking. “And then it was taken from me. I never read the whole of it.”