My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 281

Sera

"You've got enough of your own to be going on with."

Her eyes dropped. To my middle, to the flat of my stomach under the wool, and held there a beat, and came back up to my face.

"You've got a bigger problem than me."

And there it was. The reason I'd come. It came up the back of my throat all at once, and the look on her face, that flat, knowing drop of her eyes to my belly and back, landed on me as something close to a smirk, like she was enjoying the size of the hole I was standing in.

I crossed the floor and grabbed her by the sleeve before I'd decided to move.

"Why would you do it?" Both hands fisted in her sleeve, and I don't fully remember taking hold of her. "I told you. I came in here and I told you. I put it in your hands, and you went straight to him with it. Why."

She leaned back from me, frowning, off-balance with my grip pulling her.

"I don't understand. Sera, I don't know what you're talking about."

"The girls saw you." My voice was climbing and I couldn't get under it. "On the lower stair, going down toward the chamber. Right after providing me with a solution, why would you still expose me right after?"

"Sera..."

"Do you hate me that much?" It cracked in the middle and I hated that it cracked. "To sit there and listen and then walk straight downstairs and take it to Fenris? Why would you give me that and then turn around and... why, Mina. Why."

She wasn't saying anything. She was staring at my face and her mouth was shut and her eyes moved over me and she said nothing at all, and the nothing was the worst thing she could have done.

"Say something." I shook her sleeve. "Say something to me. Tell me. Do you hate me that much? I know I've... I've done things you can't stand. I know that. But I have never once sold you. Not ever. I've had your back since I first walked into this miserable place, I've stood in front of you, I..."

The thing broke loose and came out before I could stop it. "I love you. I love you, Mina, you stupid thing, and this is what you do with it? Because I came to you with a mess? You decided the easiest thing was to hand me over so you'd never have to deal with me and my problems again?"

I swallowed. There was wet at the bottom of my eyes and I would not let it up.

"I hope you're happy," I said. "He's not speaking to me. He came back from that meeting and he wouldn't even look at me. He's somewhere right now deciding what to do with me. So. I hope it was worth the walk downstairs."

And the whole time, the entire time I was bleeding out in front of her for the second time in two days, all Mina did was stand there and look at me.

"Unhand me," she said flat out.

The grief in me turned over and came up the other side as something hot.

"You." She pointed at me, and her hand was shaking, and I couldn't tell anymore if it was the shoulder or the fury. "You have spent every day I've known you building yourself a box. Hiding your head. Jumping at doors. Waiting for the thing that's coming for you, and there's always a thing coming for you, because you keep making the things. You did this. All of it. You."

Her voice cracked up to the top of itself.

"Just live!" She screamed it. The word bounced off the cold stone. "For once. Just. Fucking. Live."

She wasn't done. She got her breath and went on, lower, and somehow the lower was worse.

"This place was fine before you got here. Ironmaw stood for a hundred years before you walked through the gate and it'll stand a hundred more after, with or without you in it. You think you're holding it all together. You're not. You're the one cracking it."

"You didn't have to do any of it," she said. "Not one piece. You could have just kept your head down and worn the title and been the Luna and let the rest of it alone. That was all anyone needed from you. That was all."

I stood there with my eyes open and my mouth open and nothing in it. Not a word. For the first time since I'd come north there wasn't a single thing I could put in the air to make my side of it stand up.

She turned away from me. She was holding her shoulder still, and her back was to me, and her voice came out worn all the way down.

"Please just leave my room."

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