Laurent and the Beast (Kings of Hell MC 1)

With the walk from Brecon to Mr. Fane’s property taking such a long time, Mr. Barnave agreed for Laurent to stay the night and return to town in the morning. Of course, Laurent’s employer assumed he would sleep with the horses or house servants, but if anything were to happen between him and Mr. Fane, it would happen tonight.

Laurent spared no effort in dressing and grooming himself, and despite the long trip through the woods, he chose his best clothes. A pair of light brown breeches, knee-high leather boots, the slightly old fashioned waistcoat with yellow stripes, and Laurent’s pride and joy—a stunning, brilliantly blue tailcoat that widened his shoulders and nipped in at the waist. He’d purchased it from a used clothing seller with money he’d collected in tips and then drained his pockets to have it fitted to his size.

It was worth every dime.

A double set of porcelain buttons ran along the front of the coat, and the wide lapels left enough room to fit Laurent’s most prized possession—a brooch his mother had given him upon their parting seven years ago. It was a composition of a Cupid’s bow with arrows, two hearts with two doves, and a burning torch depicted in silver and colored with red enamel to symbolize both romantic love and blood spilled during the revolution in France, which had been still causing chaos and sudden arrests when Laurent left for the Americas.

He’d considered pinning it into the knot of his neckcloth, but he worried the muslin would flop over the pin, making it go unnoticed. And it mattered, because if it became a talking point, he could tell Mr. Fane the whole story of the family feud between his mother who favored the revolution, and his grandmother who believed the King was appointed by God and should not be judged like ordinary men. That in turn could lead to a conversation about what they both valued most in life, and Laurent could say he considered freedom a cause worth dying for.

Laurent’s great grandfather used to work in the gardens of Versailles and passed many stories of Louis XIV to his daughter and Laurent’s grandmother. In his words, the king had been godlike himself, and Grandmother even owned a small print that depicted the king, which he kept in a frame above her bed. In honor of a man so breathtaking and so beloved by his grandmother, despite the fashions of the day, Laurent wore his dark brown hair in long waves that reached all the way down to his shoulder blades. It was his one eccentricity.

He didn’t own much, but he was lucky to be graced with a handsome face and lustrous, healthy hair. Secretly he wondered if the long locks communicated that in the arms of the right man he would be as pliant as a woman, but that hope was only based on his own interpretation of things he barely understood.

The shadows cast by the trees in the weak illumination of the lantern, transformed the forest into a place where werewolves lurked in the gloom and ancient spirits waited for a lone traveler to make a false move. He knew such things were only fairytales, of course, but a handful of men have perished in the woods around Brecon in the past few years, and whatever had taken them might as well come for Laurent himself.

He almost wished he wouldn’t have to use the lantern, because the contrast of light and dark made everything beyond the trunks closest to the road sink into the shadows, making everything even more ominous.

But he couldn’t risk falling down and ruining not only his Sunday clothes but also the items Mr. Fane asked him to deliver. So he persevered, telling himself there was nothing to fear. Wolves were rare in the area, and the light in Laurent’s hand would surely scare off any predators. The lost men had surely owned no such commodity.

No matter how carefully he worked on distracting his mind, after an hour of marching along the hardened road between Brecon and Mr. Fane’s residence, he still sensed an itch of fear whenever shadows shifted, and some small animal made a sound in the darkness where the lantern’s light couldn’t reach.

Everything was blurrier in the dark, and for some time now Laurent’s eyes had been becoming terrifyingly fallible in the best of conditions. He felt secure enough in the shop and around Mr. Barnave’s house, which he knew by heart, but stepping his foot outside, even to do deliveries, was becoming more difficult every day.

He didn’t dare tell anyone that with each passing week, letters turned blurrier, and objects in his close proximity seemed so unclear that sometimes he had a hard time recognizing people he did not know very well. With the seven years of his indenture about to come to an end, his whole family left behind in France and barely ever writing him letters, his situation was beyond dire. Having worked as a clerk for most of his life, he had no other skill. And what good was a clerk who could neither write, nor read, or worse yet—one that would ultimately lose his eyesight entirely?