A Hatred Most Pure novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Bar

Dietrich's face did something I had waited eighteen years to see.

It slipped.

"Speaker, my wife is not well," he said. "She has been confused for months. Guards, take her back to the tent."

Nobody moved.

Pia kept walking.

She came up between the standing stones with the whole Moot watching, and stopped three paces from her husband.

"I climbed out of the window of a locked room," she said, to the Speaker.

"My husband locked me in last night, when I came back from Dunmarrow."

The Speaker's eyes narrowed.

"Say what you came to say."

"I was fourteen, on the harbor wall. I watched Dietrich drop the bar across the ice house door, because his father told him to.

"Cora Tarrant was not there. She came later, when it was done."

She turned and pointed at him.

"He's lied about it for eighteen years, and I've kept quiet. I am so sorry, Ansel Rooke."

Ansel closed his eyes.

"She's mad," Dietrich said. "Look at her."

"Look at her eye," the Speaker said.

It was very quiet.

"Who put it there?"

Pia didn't answer.

She looked past her husband to the Saltmarsh benches, at the broad man in the gray coat.

Dietrich's Beta had been standing with his arms folded.

He unfolded them slowly.

"Speaker," he said. His voice was thick.

"I brought her back from Dunmarrow last night on my Alpha's order. I didn't know he'd lock her in.

"This morning I found the window open and a rope of bedsheets down the wall."

"That's not the whole of it, is it?" the Speaker said.

"No." He wiped his mouth. "He paid those three. I carried the silver.

"And the granary at Dunmarrow, Speaker. He called them renegades. They were my men, on his order.

"He told me to hang whichever one talked."

"You will regret that," Dietrich said, very softly.

Keep reading free with an account. Start A Hatred Most Pure from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.