My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 276

Elara

He kept his hand clamped over my eyes the whole way down the corridor, and I let him, which tells you exactly how deep into this I'd gotten. Letting a wolf walk me blind through a house full of his own kind.

His other hand sat at the small of my back, steering. He smelled of cedar soap and under it the thing I never get used to, the wet animal warmth of him that closes my throat if I think about it, so I didn't think about it.

I counted steps instead. Twelve. A turn. The give of a different rug under my slippers, thicker than the hall runners. Somewhere off to the left two of the house wolves went quiet as we passed, the way they all go quiet now, watching the floor and waiting for the storm to move on.

"Stop here," Kane said. He turned me by the shoulders, squared me up to something. I could feel space open in front of me, a room with air in it. "Don't open them yet."

"They're closed. Your hand's still on my face."

"I know. I'm enjoying it." There was something in his voice I hadn't heard from him in all the time I'd been in this house. Lightness. A man holding a thing he can't hold any longer. "Okay. Okay, ready."

He took his hand away.

"Open them."

I opened them, and for a second I had nothing.

The room had been finished. Not finished the way I'd left it, half-painted, the crib still in its crate against the wall, a bolt of cloth I hadn't bothered to hang folded on the floor. Finished.

The crib stood assembled in the center, dark wood carved along the rails with running shapes I'd never asked for, the kind of work that takes a man with good tools a long time. The walls had gone a deep soft blue.

There were shelves, low ones, lined with carved animals and stacked with cloth-bound books no infant would read for years. A wide chair with a footstool by the window. Fur on the floor, white and thick. A chest at the foot of the crib with the lid up and folded things inside, small things, impossibly small.

The truth was I couldn't stomach being shut in a small room with a crowd of wolves and the reek coming off all of them at once. The stick in my skin keeps me hidden among them, makes me read as one of theirs to every nose in this house, but it does nothing for my own. To me they still stink. A whole pack of them packed into a nursery was more than I could carry.

So I'd done it alone. And somewhere along the way the nursery had become the one place in this entire beautiful tomb of a house where I could shut a door and be by myself. The bedroom was the only other, and Kane was in the bedroom.

Then I'd stopped coming.

Not all at once. A day skipped, then two, then most of a week. I told myself I'd get back to it and I didn't, because Aldric had gone silent and the silence had hollowed me out, and there's only so long a person can hammer little carved rabbits onto a shelf for a child that doesn't exist while the man who put her here won't answer a single word she sends. I'd run out of the will to play. I wanted out of this house. So I'd let the work sit, and Kane had watched me let it sit, and the great fool had read exhaustion into it. The poor tired Luna, heavy with his heir.

I almost laughed standing there. If he knew there was nothing in me. If he understood that the work had stopped because the actress had simply gotten bored of her own play. That would be the thing that finished him. The last nail to his coffin.

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