The Last crimes of Peregrine Hind

A sizzling novella from the Rake I’d Like to F… Anthology, coming everywhere November 30!

Sneak peek!

by Sierra Simone

With a soft cluck, he turned his horse back east to where the road from Exeter dipped into a steep, wooded valley. His friends were waiting at the bottom, their mounts already hidden deep in the trees.

“Well?” Lyd asked as Peregrine came to a stop. She was pacing while the others sat checking their pistols. Her jaw was tight, her normally pale cheeks flushed. “Anything yet?”

“No.” Peregrine looked up at the moon through the trees. “The innkeeper did say it would be late.”

Peregrine paid innkeepers all around Devonshire to give him information when he needed it. Even the keepers of the finer establishments were susceptible to bribery, so long as they were never connected to any crimes that came of the information given—and Peregrine was careful never to let those connections be known. It served his purposes to be thought unnervingly omniscient, his movements and motives shrouded in mystery.

It had given him the reputation of the most infamous highwayman in England, but after four years of terrorizing the roads, Peregrine could conclusively say that the recipe of infamy was much simpler than people seemed to think:

Half preparation.

Half indifference to death.

Peregrine no longer cared very much if he lived or died—and really, when stealing a mere twelve pence could get a thief taken to Tyburn, a highwayman was already a dead man walking. At thirty-four, Peregrine was already older than most in his profession ever lived to be, but the thought rarely bothered him. He’d come from the war, after all, from the bloody, desperate fighting in the Low Countries, where death stalked every man regardless of age or station. He never thought he’d live this long, had assumed from the moment he signed his name to the rolls of the Queen’s army that he wouldn’t make it to twenty-five, much less the age he was now. He’d joined the army anyway in order to send his much-needed wages to his mother and siblings, but when he’d returned, he’d found his family and their farm in ruins. Anyone he’d ever loved—any purpose he’d ever had after his career as a soldier—was gone. Dead and cold in the ground.

Now he only drew breath to destroy the Dartham family, and tonight, at long last, that destruction would begin.

“I hope she’s with him,” Lyd said, her voice shaking a little. “I want to see her face.”  Lyd had her own reasons for hating the Darthams—and the duchess in particular.

“The innkeeper said she would be with him,” Peregrine replied, staring at where the road broke through the trees at the top of the hill. They would wait for the coach to work its halting way to the bottom and then begin its ascent up the other side. That way, they could free the horses without worrying about a rolling coach injuring them. Peregrine didn’t hurt horses—or people—if he could help it, and he usually could. While he paid his army of innkeepers to spread stories of his bloody cruelty, he had no interest in dealing pain or death these days. 

He couldn’t even shake the nightmares from the war he’d left four years ago.

And what did I get for those nightmares? Peregrine asked himself as he watched a cloud drift over the moon. What did I get for killing all those strangers for some other stranger’s crown?  A dead family and a farm that had been enclosed for the Duke of Jarrell’s sheep.

Which was why tonight, he’d make an exception to his usual rule about hurting or killing; why tonight, he’d embrace whatever nightmares may come. Because tonight, he was going to kill the Duke of Jarrell. Peregrine was going to kill him in the chilly, lonesome dark, the same dark in which Peregrine’s pregnant sister had died as she’d waited outside of Far Hope’s doors for help.  Help that never came.

A distant creak and clack announced an approaching coach. The rest of the band—three thieves plus Lyd—got to their feet.

“Last chance to leave,” Peregrine told them. They were brave, but the murder of a duke and the robbery of a duchess was a Rubicon. They’d be wanted criminals forever; they would be given a more vicious death than the usual Tyburn jig if they were caught. And while Peregrine and Lyd had revenge on their minds, the other thieves were here for money, plain and simple, and there was no telling how much the duke would have with him. It could be enough to set them up for life, or it might only be enough to buy them a pair of secondhand boots.

But even knowing that, none of them left. With nods at Peregrine, they melted into the trees near the spot where he’d confront the coach, ready to swarm the conveyance and disarm any guards or passengers. Peregrine urged his own horse up and into the trees too, deep enough that he was hidden from moonlight, but only a few seconds away from the road itself.

Then they waited.

As he’d known it would, the coach made its way slowly down the hill, using blocks under the wheels to temper its descent. As it came closer, the moonlight gleamed along its ornate trim and illuminated an image painted on the outside of its door: two stags framing a shield, which was adorned with a sun and moon and topped with a single golden key.

The Dartham family crest.

The coach made it safely to the bottom of the hill, and then the two footmen stowed the blocks and walked alongside the coach as the horses began to pull it up the hill. Peregrine’s friends would take care of the footmen; his role would be to stop the coach’s progress and prevent the driver from arming himself.

Flooded with a grim sort of excitement, he pressed in with his calves and surged forward on his mount, breaking through the trees and charging in front of the coach.

“Stand and deliver!” Peregrine cried.

All hell broke loose.

Then he saw the duke, and all other observations left his mind. He seized the murderer of his family by his coat and hauled him bodily out of the coach, sending him sprawling onto the damp dirt of the road.

Peregrine hopped easily to the ground and took two long strides over to the duke. “He was alone,” he told Lyd, and she swore in response.

Lyd had wanted the duchess. Badly.

The duke was just pushing himself to his hands and knees when Peregrine pressed a boot to his shoulder and shoved the duke back onto his rump. Peregrine then raised his pistol, already loaded and primed.

He was grateful for the bright moon tonight. He hoped the duke would see enough of Peregrine’s sister in Peregrine’s features to feel thoroughly haunted by his sins as he died. But then the man on the road lifted his terrified face, and Peregrine froze.

Yes, those were the extravagant clothes a Dartham would wear; yes, there was the skin that seemed to shimmer the palest gold. Yes, there were those dark eyes, which Peregrine knew would be a deep sapphire if he peered closely enough. But this was not the duke.

This was not the duke.

Peregrine swore to himself as he studied the man’s face, but there could be no doubt. Reginald Dartham had narrow eyes set closely together, a thin mouth, and a scattering of pockmarks across his jaw. But this man had an entirely different look to him: wide eyes fringed with long lashes, a full mouth, and a jaw carved in a fine, unblemished line. And while Reginald was well known for his elaborate periwigs, even while traveling, it was this man’s real hair which tumbled darkly around his shoulders as he scrambled to his knees.

It gleamed like silk in the moonlight.

“Stop,” Peregrine ordered coldly, his pistol still raised.

The man stopped, his face tilted toward Peregrine. There was no doubt now that Peregrine had gotten a better look. While the duke was in his forties, this man couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

“Please,” the man breathed. “Please. I have money—there’s money in there—”

“We’ll be taking that as it is,” Peregrine interrupted. “Who are you, and why are you in the Dartham’s coach?”

“I’m S-Sandy—Alexander. Alexander Dartham.” The young man swallowed, and then breathed again, “Please. Please.”

An unpleasant stab of empathy followed the man’s pleas. How often had Peregrine heard those words on a battlefield? Or after the smoke had settled, when all they could do for the wounded was hold them down and hope the surgeon could amputate quickly?

But then Peregrine remembered his sister and the little niece or nephew he never got to meet. He remembered the cold graves of his mother and brother.

Likely they had pleaded too.

Heart once again hardened, he stared down at Alexander Dartham. He’d heard of the duke’s younger brother—a notorious rakehell who gambled and swived his way through London. They said no man or woman was safe from his charms, and Peregrine reluctantly admitted to himself that he could see why. Alexander was very beautiful, and on his knees like this . . . also dangerously stirring.

“Where is the duke?” Peregrine demanded, tamping down the flare of heat he felt looking at the brother of his enemy. “He’s supposed to be passing through here.”

“He took a horse and rode to Far Hope,” Alexander said. “This morning. He was worried about being any later than he already was to receive his guests. Please. Don’t. I can give you anything you want. Anything.”

“No, you cannot,” Peregrine informed him.

No one could bring back the dead.

One of the thieves relieved Lyd on coachman duty. She climbed down and came to stand next to Peregrine. “You should kill him,” she said bluntly. “Hasn’t it been your design to destroy them all anyway?”

It had been—although he hadn’t intended to kill anyone aside from Reginald. After the duke’s death, the plan went, he would rob the duke’s widow and the new duke of everything that could be carried off, and then he would burn Far Hope to the ground.

And then what, he didn’t know. All his careful preparations ended with Far Hope in embers. Maybe he’d retire.

Maybe he’d keep roaming the roads until he was inevitably caught and even more inevitably hanged.

But this was an unexpected difficulty. If he let this younger Dartham live, then Alexander would tell Reginald that he was being sought by a highwayman, not for money, but for murder. Peregrine’s opportunities for revenge would shrink further—not to mention that Reginald would no doubt make sure Peregrine was hunted by the law more than he already was. 

Which would be…inconvenient. 

Peregrine looked back at the young lord, his pistol steady in front of the man’s face. He hadn’t killed anyone since the war, and even then, the battles had been volleys of smoke and mud and screams, utter chaos, impossible to tell who he’d killed or if his musket had struck anything at all.

Never had he killed someone like this—in stillness and in quiet, with them unarmed and helpless in front of him.

But his sister had died in stillness and in quiet too, she and her unborn child, and Peregrine didn’t know what else to live for if it wasn’t avenging her death, along with the deaths of his mother and brother. Why not start here?

Why not make Reginald Dartham feel part of what Peregrine had felt when he’d lost his entire family?

He curled his finger around the trigger.

Find out what happens to Peregrine and his pretty captive in The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind, coming November 30th in the Rake I’d Like to F… Anthology!

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