Page 106 of A Knight’s Vengeance

He had no choice.

“Grant me Wode,” he said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “and I will spare you.”

Brackendale choked for breath.

“You will also give me Elizabeth, as my betrothed.”

Shocked murmurs rippled through the throng around them. The older lord’s eyes flared. “Never!”

With deliberate slowness, Geoffrey pressed the blade forward, drawing a streak of blood. A final warning. “I do not want to kill you, but I will. Do you agree?”

Brackendale hesitated, his gaze hard and bitter.

His head jerked in a nod.

“I want your word of honor, as a knight,” Geoffrey demanded.

“You have it,” Brackendale muttered. He tried to move his bleeding leg and winced.

“I will withdraw my sword, and you will stand and confirm our agreement to all who have witnessed,” Geoffrey ground out. “If you betray me, I will kill you. Understand?”

“Aye,” the older lord spat.

Geoffrey lifted his blade to return it to its scabbard.

A snap broke the bailey’s near silence. In the space of an indrawn breath, he recognized the sound—a crossbow bowstring as the weapon’s trigger released.

The bolt whistled like a demon unleashed.

His mind yelled for him to move. It was too late.

The steel-tipped bolt pierced his left shoulder. Mail, flesh, and sinew splintered.

A scream tore from the depths of his soul and shattered his world into a crimson haze.

The bolt’s impact sent him reeling back against the stone wall in a spray of blood. The jolt jarred the bolt deeper into his chest.

He screamed again.

Gasping, he stared down at his ruined shoulder. He clutched at the ugly, gaping wound. His numb fingers tried to hold together the broken links of mail and mangled flesh, to staunch the flow of his life’s blood.

He sank to his knees.

A figure emerged from the darkness smothering him. A woman with bewitching blue eyes and hair that shimmered like black silk. The woman he loved.

“Elizabeth,” he moaned.

Pain flared.

Darkness claimed him.

“Naaaaayyyyyyyy!”

Elizabeth heard a woman’s shrill scream. She did not recognize her own cry until it trailed off and died on her lips.

Wrenching free of the guards detaining her, she ran to Geoffrey’s side. He lay crumpled in a heap against the blood-smeared wall, the wooden end of the bolt protruding from his mail. His face was as pale as death. Blood ran down his hauberk and pooled around him on the ground.

She knelt in the dirt and smoothed hair from his brow. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she wiped the wetness away with her sleeve. Her belly clenched into a sickening knot. How could this have happened?