My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 265

Sera

"I don't keep her on a leash, Sera."

It came out louder than the rest of it, sharp, and the sound of it hung there after his mouth had closed.

His eyes came to me. Whatever had been pushing the volume up in him pulled back down, and he dragged a hand along his jaw and moved his head once, slow, side to side. He didn't tell me he was sorry. His jaw just worked like he was keeping something that he’d rather cage in than let me see.

"I'm tired, Sera." The edge had gone out of it. What was left underneath was worn flat. "I want to sleep. That's all."

I sat with my hands folded and couldn't find anywhere to put what was happening to me. He was somewhere I couldn't reach, and I couldn't ask him why without the asking turning into a confession, because if he didn't know, if this was nothing, if I'd built a gallows out of a man's bad evening, then the wrong question would hand him the rope I'd spent the whole day being careful not to give him.

So I asked the safe one.

"What happened at the meeting?"

He paused. Half a breath, no longer.

"Nothing serious."

"So you don't want to tell me." It was supposed to come out light. It didn't. "That's what that means."

"I didn't say that."

"But that's what it looks like."

The air went out of him in a long pull. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and held them there and let them drop, and the exhaustion in him sat in the shoulders, real, the kind you can't perform. He pushed up off the bed and started for the door.

Then he stopped.

He stood there with his back to me, and after a moment he turned around and came back into the room far enough that the light off the window caught the side of his face.

"My head's a mess," he said. He moved it once, hard, and it didn't help. "I can't think straight. Every road it goes down ends somewhere violent. I don't trust myself to hold a conversation right now."

"Violent about what?"

I held myself together until the footsteps were gone.

Then I let it out.

It came out shaking. There was a pulse going hard at the base of my throat, each beat its own separate event, and I'd been holding all of it in through the length of that conversation and longer, the whole afternoon of it, and now there was nowhere for it to go but back through me. This was torture. The waiting was the torture. Why wouldn't he do it? Why would a man hold a thing like that in both hands and not bring it down?

And under that, the worse one.

Why would she do this to me?

I tried to make it sit right and it wouldn't. Mina had handed me the oil with her own fingers. She'd locked her own door and put one finger to her lips and told me exactly how to stay alive. She'd done that. And then she'd pulled a coat on and gone down the stairs and laid me out on a table for him, and what was that — what did a person have to feel, to help you breathe in the morning and put a knife in you by dark? Did she hate me that much? And if she'd wanted me finished the whole time, then what in the gods name had the helping been for?

"Fuck."

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