Jocelynn looked up and instantly wished she hadn't.
For a moment, her mind refused to understand what her eyes were showing her.
Adala hung from the rafters. Very still. The silver threads in her dark hair caught the light and glimmered faintly. They were the only thing in the room that seemed to move.
The cord from the bed curtains had been knotted around the beam above her. Thick, braided silk in Lothian blue, the same cord Jocelynn had seen tying back curtains in a hundred rooms of this manor, and it had bitten so deep into Adala's throat that the skin bulged around it.
Her head hung at an angle no living neck could hold. Her face, already battered, had swollen further and darkened to a dusky purple beneath Owain's bruises, and her split lips had gone the color of a plum. Her left eye was still swollen shut. The right was open. Bloodshot and bulging, the white shot through with red, it stared down at the overturned stool as though she were still searching for it.
