My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 233

Sera

Madra cleared her throat.

"Luna," she said, soft. "The man will be kept."

I did not answer her.

"He will be fed. I will make sure he is moved every two hours. I will talk to him to keep him company. Even while he’s awake, I’ll make sure he doesn’t suffer. But the work will go on the way it has been going."

I sighed. Didn’t know how to react to that.

"Thank you, Madra."

She inclined her head and went back to her sleeves.

Yvara had not moved during any of it.

She had come in behind Fenris and me, and had taken the position she always took in any room with the three of us — against the wall closest to the door, arms folded, watching me the whole way through the Fenris speech.

She came off the wall now.

She did not come to me directly. She went around the foot of the bath and stopped a step to my right, and considered Torin with the flat, careful attention she gave most things.

"He's right."

"I know."

"He didn't have to be loud about it."

"He wasn't loud."

"He was loud for him." A glance at me, then back at Torin. "He doesn't speak that way to most people."

I did not answer.

She let a moment pass. Then she sighed. The small dry sigh I had come to recognize as Yvara letting something through her face on purpose.

"Luna."

"What."

"When the contract first came up, I told the Alpha he was making a mistake."

"You did."

"I said a southern princess did not have what it took to survive the North. I said the politics up here would eat her in a season. I said she would cry the first time she watched something be killed."

I sighed. She wasn’t exactly wrong. But I wasn’t crying. Yet.

She took the step before she had decided to take it. I watched her think about it the half-second after.

"That would be the first time—"

"Sera."

"That would be the first and last time, Yvara. When I give you an order, the order is the order. You don't improvise. You don't put your judgment over mine. You don't call a man in to use a knife because you think the queen deserves it. If you do — if you do it again, even once — I will make you understand in front of my husband and your men and a hall of our council exactly why I am the Luna of this pack and you are my second. Are we clear."

She did not answer.

"Are we clear, Yvara."

She held me with her eyes for a count.

"Yes, Luna."

"Good."

I let her have the second she needed to put her face back on. Then I turned away from her toward the bath, so she could walk past me without my watching her do it. Her boots crossed the stone. The door opened. The door closed. The latch clicked.

I was left with Madra and the bath.

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