WolfeStrike (De Wolfe Pack Generations #2) - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,92
and shutting the door softly. Only when their footsteps faded did the man on the bed open one eye to make sure that he was alone.
Joah de Brayton was quite alone.
And he’d gotten an earful.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
God’s Bones, he thought. Did I truly just hear all of that?
He was still in shock.
It had taken Joah a few days of hard riding to arrive at Blackpool Castle, and given the fact that neither he nor his horse had barely rested, it gave the perfect illusion of a man who was desperately ill. He was exhausted and sweaty, and warm beneath all of that armor, so he was the very picture of a man who needed help.
Already, he had received a good deal of it.
Pretending to be unconscious had its advantages. People would speak of things in front of him that they wouldn’t have had he been awake, so all he had to do was lay there and pretend to be oblivious. He’d begun that particular performance about the time he reached the first of two gatehouses of Blackpool Castle.
At the first gatehouse, all he had to do was faint and the rest was easy. Men came out of the gatehouse to see what the trouble was and after he pretended to be incoherent, he further pretended to pass out completely. Given that it was an expected hospitality practice to tend to the health and well-being of an ill traveler, he was picked up and carried into the gatehouse and set gently on the floor inside of the guard shack.
That was where he learned quite a bit.
Although Joah had known the Blackpool Castle was a de Wolfe property, he hadn’t known who was in command. He was not surprised to discover that the son of the Earl of Warenton was the commander, the man called Tor. One of the same men who had been in the Hunting Party that had murdered Steffan, according to Powell.
Joah could not have planned this better.
Already, he was where he needed to be, in the fortress of a murderer. It was a perfect place to start, but what made it more perfect – and also a little puzzling – was the fact that Isalyn de Featherstone and her father were evidently here as well and, according to the two women, Isalyn was betrothed to Tor, or sweet on him, or something that those two women disapproved of.
But there was some connection there.
Pretending to be unconscious had given him more information than he could have hoped for, but he was particularly interested in the fact that the two women had also mentioned Isabella, none other than the woman Steffan had been betrothed to.
She was here, too.
That told Joah that almost everyone with a connection to Steffan and the man’s death was here at Blackpool for one reason or another. He was in a nest of them. A son of the Earl of Warenton, Gilbert de Featherstone and his daughter, and Steffan’s betrothed, Isabella. So many pieces to a greater puzzle that he planned to fit together for his own particular needs. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it yet, but something those two women said stuck in his mind, even now.
We will pay someone to remove her.
They had been referring to Steffan’s sister, Isalyn. Their entire conversation revolved around their evident dislike of her, which made more sense when they spoke of the woman in relation to Tor de Wolfe. Tor had an eye for her, or she had an eye for him, and the two women were incensed about it. They had spoken of removing her, of even paying someone to abduct her. Fairly strong words coming from two well-bred women, but it gave Joah an idea.
Militarily, he could not hope to hurt the House of the Wolf. He couldn’t even take on one of them in a personal challenge because everybody knew de Wolfe knights for the most elite knights in England. Not that he was any slouch, but challenging a de Wolfe knight would be suicide.
Nay, he had to be far more clever than that.
He had come here to seek revenge for something they took from him. They took Steffan from him, the only man he had ever loved. Given that they had taken something from him, it would stand to reason that the best way to seek vengeance against them would be to take something from them.
The dynamic between Tor de Wolfe and Isalyn de Featherstone had his focus.