Chapter 16: For the House

I did not sleep that night, and at seven in the morning I made them bring my father down to the great hall.

The Keep ate breakfast there, a long room of pine tables and a fire you could stand a horse in.

Two hundred Strathmore wolves sat with their plates.

Nobody ate when Alden Corvane came in between two guards.

He had put on a clean shirt. He had shaved around the bruise on his chest.

He looked painfully respectable.

"Thea," he said. "Honey. They said you wanted to see me."

"Stand there."

I pointed at the bare floor in front of the fire.

He stood.

Ewan sat at the head table with his arm in a sling and his face blank.

He had said he would not speak unless I asked him to.

Brigid sat beside him with her stick across her knees.

Daphne stood in the doorway to the east wing in her borrowed coat.

She had come in so quietly that my father had not seen her.

I held up the paper.

It had come out of the hunter's coat, folded in four, on good cream stock, with the corner stained by sleet.

"The man in the cell says you wrote this in January," I said. "I'd like you to read it to me."

"I don't know what that is."

"It's got a ring seal."

I turned it over.

The seal was a pinecone in a circle, pressed in red wax.

It matched the signet ring he had worn every day of my life.

He looked at it for a long time.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Severed Ties: Rise of the Silver Wolf from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.