My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 231

Sera

I had told Fenris on the walk down that I wanted to end it.

He had not answered. He had walked beside me with a hand at the small of my back and the torch in the other, and he had said nothing until we reached the iron door at the end of the corridor, where he stopped and looked at me and asked, "End what."

"You know what."

"Say it, Sera."

"Torin."

He did not answer that either. He reached past me and opened the door.

The room was small enough that the three of us crowded it. Two grease lamps in old iron sconces. A drain in the centre of the stone floor that emptied into the keep's old kitchen channel. The copper bath against the far wall, deep enough for a man, shallow enough to keep his head out, set at an angle on a wooden rest so the water would not slosh when she lifted him. The smell was the smell I had been carrying out of this room on my skin for two weeks and could not wash off no matter how long I sat under the bathhouse waterfall after.

Madra was at the bath. She turned when we came in. She had a curve in the spine that came from a hundred years of leaning over copper bowls, and she straightened as much as that allowed when she heard the door.

"Alpha. Luna."

"How is he," Fenris said.

"Awake."

That was the entire report. Awake. It was the only report Madra ever gave, because awake was the whole of what she had been told to keep him.

Torin's head was where it was supposed to be — out of the brine, propped on a small wooden cradle that ran across the lip of the bath, leather straps holding the jaw closed so he could not bite his own tongue while being lifted in or out. The rest of him was in the water. The brine had gone the colour brine went when it had been working — a soft yellow-green that did not exist anywhere outside this room. His eyes were open. They had been open the last three times I had come down. They tracked me from the door.

"Same as last week," Madra said. "Heart steady. Wound at the shoulder has stopped weeping. He has not slept."

"He has not slept in three weeks."

"He has not."

"That isn't possible."

"It is unkind, my Luna. It is not impossible." She inclined her head. "He sleeps in the small way an animal sleeps when it is being watched. A second at a time. He has not lost consciousness for longer than a breath since I closed the door on the first morning."

I watched Torin.

He watched back.

That was the thing I had not been able to put down between visits. He watched back. The face above the leather strap was not a face anymore in the way the rest of him was not a body anymore. Half the muscle of his neck was gone. The shoulder I could see above the brine was a flat raw plate of healing meat. The jaw under the strap had been moved by Yvara's wolves into a shape my brain refused to file as Torin's. But the eyes were Torin's. The eyes were the eyes of a man who knew what was being done to him, and knew who was doing it, and was not — as far as I could see — allowed to look away.

His voice did not come up. That was the thing about Fenris. The volume did not change when the temperature did. The same flat voice that had said come here to me on a balcony said stop to me now, and the stop landed harder than any shout would have.

I stopped.

He took a step away from me. He stood in the centre of the room with the lamp on his left and the bath on his right and Madra at the bath with her hands folded in her sleeves, and his face was not the face of the man I shared a chamber with.

"Look at him."

"I am looking at him."

"Look at him properly."

I made myself look at Torin properly.

"That is not your problem to fix."

"Fenris —"

"He is not your problem. He has not been your problem from the day he opened his mouth in your mother's company. He thought with his cock. He fucked the wrong woman. Your mother used him because that is what your mother does with men who think with their cocks, and now he is in a bath in my keep because he could not keep himself out of a bed he had no business being in. That is not on you. That is on him. And on her."

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