My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 207

Aldric

"Apparently, our daughter prefers women."

I watched it land. I watched her face — the way her brows came down into the small, immediate frown of someone receiving information that doesn't fit what they know. I nodded, letting it settle in. I held my cup out slightly, and chuckled.

"I was very surprised too," I said.

Irina shook her head. "That can't be true," she said.

I shrugged. My lips pressed together, even, noncommittal. "I’m just as surprised as you are."

She stared. The information was still sitting in the air between us, unprocessed, too new to know what to do with it.

Almost immediately, a knock, and the door came open. The senior maid — twelve years in this house, absolute discretion, knows exactly when to appear and when to become invisible. She greeted me with her customary composure, and then turned to Irina with a genuine smile, warm and unperformative.

"Welcome home, my Queen. We're so glad you're back."

"Irina." I set down my glass. "I know this is a lot to sit with. We'll talk about Lyra properly when you've had some rest." I gave her a mild look. "But for now, you need to sleep. And you need to—" I paused, and breathed in through my nose, quite casually.

I looked at her.

"—wash up all that stench on you."

The air between us changed.

I held her eyes. I held them for exactly the right amount of time — long enough that she understood what I'd done, not long enough to force her to respond to it. Then I nodded, once, with the patient understanding.

Irina was absolutely still.

She swallowed.

Then she nodded, and followed the maid out of the room without looking back. The door closed behind them.

I stood where I was and didn't move.

It was sitting exactly where I'd set it down for him. Full. He hadn't touched it. I looked at it, and then I looked at him.

"Why aren't you drinking?"

He looked at the glass. He had forgotten he had it. From here, I could see his right hand. The faintest tremor to it, the kind a disciplined man does his best to suppress and still can't fully manage.

Trauma. That was what that was.

Irina hadn't reacted that way. She wouldn't. She has the kind of psychology that can go through genuinely terrible things and come out the other side still functional, still presenting. It's why I'd sent her in the first place — with Torin there to do the political work and Irina there to hold it together. Torin was an idiot, honestly. He was useful in specific circumstances, useful the way a reliable instrument is useful, but he had no resilience. If he'd been the one to survive instead of her, he'd have arrived here in pieces, and the debrief would have been useless. He would have been useless.

Even the captain was shaken — and he was made of better material than Torin. But Northern wolves are another order of thing. They're not just bigger. They're more primal, beastly in a way that registers on something older than training, older than instinct. More like something that came before wolves, something the first stories called devil hounds. They shake something loose in a person that doesn't shake back into place easily.

There was a rumor, actually — an old one, going back to the border wars — that the devil found it particularly easy to take hold in a Northern rogue. That something about how they were made left a door open. Well. All a rumor.

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