My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 262

Sera

"My Luna. Should I send for the healer?"

I got a hand up off the rim of the basin before she could come around to my side. "No."

"You've been at it a while—"

"I heard you the first time."

The rest of it came up before I could finish the sentence, thin and sour, and I gripped the cold iron edge and let it. The girl stayed where she was by the door with a folded stack of linens against her chest, not moving, not leaving, doing the worst thing a servant can do, which is hover.

I spat into the basin and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist.

"It was the cellar," I said. "Madra had the brine vats open. Half of it went down the wrong way and I've been tasting salt since."

"The brine doesn't usually—"

"Do you make a habit of arguing with me?"

That moved her. She came forward and set the linens on the chair and bobbed her head down low, the way they all did now, eyes on my boots instead of my face. "No, my Luna. I'm sorry."

"Leave the water. Take the basin out and have it rinsed. And shut the door behind you."

She took the basin in both hands and went, and the latch dropped, and the room was mine again.

I stood there a moment with my palm flat against my own stomach, over the wool, where there was nothing yet to feel and everything to be afraid of. That was the part I kept catching on. For weeks I'd apparently carried this thing and my body had said not one word about it. No sickness, no ache, nothing. I'd walked through the keep certain right up until Madra's nose found me out. And now, the very hour I knew for a fact what was in me, my body had decided to start announcing it from the inside. Like it had been waiting for my permission to betray me.

I crossed to the table by the window and picked up the bottle.

But she was gone. Back down the mountain with the Valdris carriage, back to my father, back to whatever the two of them did to each other in the dark. She'd taken the craft south with her, and even if she hadn't, even if she were two doors down this minute, I wasn't sure I'd hand her something this soft to hold.

Which left one person.

I stood in the middle of my own room and went through the whole of the keep in my head, every face I could put a name to, and they came up the same way they always did. Yvara was a blade and the blade belonged to Fenris; she'd open my throat the moment the arithmetic stopped favoring the crown, and she'd do it without hating me, which was worse. The healers reported to the council. The dressers gossiped. There was nobody. The whole frozen fortress of them, and there was nobody.

Except the one who already had the secret.

Mina had handed me the oil. Mina had a drawer full of Southern things that weren't supposed to exist this far north, and a stick that read two lines, and a flat way of saying if it's an Ashford heir you're finished that meant she'd already done my thinking for me and arrived at the same door. She was angry with me. She'd called me a butcher and she hadn't been wrong. But anger wasn't the same as betrayal, and I had no one else, and I'd run out of the luxury of giving her space.

I pulled a shawl off the bedpost and went to find her.

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