My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 274

(Author's Note: The last chapter was changed. Sorry to those that read it. But the new chapter is here. Happy Reading!)

Elara

The gold weighed three and a half pounds and it had bought me nothing, and I'd been sitting on the edge of the bed working that out for the better part of an hour.

I'd taken it out of the lining where I'd sewn it and laid the whole of it on the fur in front of me, the chains and the bracelets thick enough to chain a door and the rings with the red stones, and in the lamplight it looked like exactly what it was. A way out with no door on the far side.

Here's the part nobody who'd done this to me had bothered to think all the way through, or maybe they'd thought it through and that was the joke. The stick in my skin only ever fooled wolves. That was the entire point of it. To every wolf nose in this freezing pile of stone I was one of them, nothing worth a second sniff.

But put me on a human street. Put me in a human market with human people and their soft dull noses that couldn't smell a lie or a fear or a king all over a woman's body, and I was a woman. Young. Good skin, a heavy bag, walking through a crowd that would never once know what I was carrying or where I'd been.

I could go back.

That was the thought I kept picking up and letting myself hold for a few seconds before I put it down again. A hundred and twenty thousand in unregistered gold wasn't running money. It was starting money. Enough for me and my mother and my sister to vanish into the human world and not just crawl through it but live.

My father had worked land before the wolves came and burned all of it down to the dirt, and I knew the shape of that life, the seasons of it, the smell of turned earth in spring. The gold was enough to buy back into it somewhere far and quiet. And my mother. She'd been a nurse, but the thing she actually loved, the thing she used to talk about back when the future was still a place we thought we were going, was cloth. She had an eye for it. With money like this behind her she could have had the thing she wanted instead of the thing the fire left her.

We could have been people again. Not assets. Not a king's companion and her broken family kept in a pretty estate. People, with a business and a roof and small ordinary problems that didn't end in a processing center.

I let myself see it for exactly as long as it took to start to hurt, and then I made myself stop.

Because every part of it, the land and the cloth and the quiet, only worked in a world that didn't have Aldric in it. And the world had Aldric in it.

Your scent remains exactly the same to me. I will always know where you are.

He'd said it with his hand cupping my face the night they cut the stick into me, and I'd been young and stupid enough, and trying hard enough to find the soft place in him, that I'd heard it as a romantic thing. It wasn't romantic. It was a leash. He'd told me to my face it was a leash and I'd heard a love song.

There was no city far enough. There was no weight of gold that bought back the one thing he'd taken out of me, which was the simple animal right to be somewhere a man couldn't find me.

I could run to the bottom of the human world and build the whole life, the land and the cloth and the roof, and one ordinary afternoon there'd be a long clean car idling in the lane and a man with a little white in his hair stepping out of it, unhurried, and that would be the end of the story.

And I wasn't even sure I'd make the lane.

Lately I had the feeling of being watched, and I'd learned a while ago not to argue with that feeling. Not Kane's people, who watched me the way the help watches weather they're hoping moves on.

Something steadier. Someone of his, somewhere in the keep, keeping a quiet count of me. I couldn't have pointed at a face. I knew the weight of a held look when it sat on the back of my neck, and it had been sitting there for days.

The worst of it was the silence.

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Chapter 288 - Who Were You Talking To?

Elara

Four recordings into the brass box, and nothing back. Four. The box sat on the table by the window under a folded shawl, and four times I'd spoken into it the way I'd been shown, careful and useful and full of the things he'd want, and four times I'd waited for the click and the low hum that meant something was coming back down the line to me, and four times it sat there dead as a stone.

I didn't know what I'd done.

That was the thing chewing me from the inside, worse than Marcas, worse than gold that didn't spend. I didn't know what I'd done wrong and I didn't know how to take back a thing I couldn't even name, and there wasn't one soul on this earth I could ask. So I did the only thing left, which was the stupid thing. The thing a smarter woman wouldn't have touched.

I got up and got the box.

I had to stop and press my lips together.

"Please," I said. Quiet. The whole hard thing gone out of me at once, and what was left underneath was the girl from the warehouse. "Please. Help me. Help me, I beg you."

I heard footsteps in the corridor.

I had the catch shut and the box off my knees before I'd finished hearing them, both hands moving on their own, the box and the shawl and the spare reel sweeping off the table and into the open duffel at the foot of the bed in one motion, and I dragged the flap of it over and shoved it back with my heel and was up and turned toward the door with my hand smearing the wet off my cheeks, hard, twice, fixing my face into the thing I keep it in.

The latch lifted.

The door came open and Kane stood in it.

He didn't come in right away. He stood in the frame with one hand still on the iron and he looked at me, and then his eyes went around the room, the table, the bed, the corners, slow, and came back to me, and his brow pulled down.

He took a step in. Then another, faster, crossing the floor toward me before I'd got the last of it off my face.

"Are you crying?"

Fuck.

I didn't answer. He stopped a few feet from me and his eyes went around the room one more time, the empty room, and the confusion in him got worse, and when he looked back at me his face had changed.

"What — " He glanced at the door behind him, at the corners again, at me. "Who were you talking to?"

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