My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 283

Mina

"What's her name?"

There it was. The first place the lie could break open. He wanted a name. Men want a name once they've decided to do something about a person. But the name was the one thing I couldn't give him. Say Sera and he'd have all of it: that the jealous scullery maid I'd built was the Luna of this pack, the Alpha's mate, my brother's wife. I'd spent every day since he got here keeping him away from those people. I wasn't taking the wall down over a sore shoulder.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"Jace." I turned my head. He was right there, closer than I'd thought, his jaw a few inches off mine, and his eyes weren't soft, they had that flat thing in them again, the take-a-look-at-you thing. "Leave it. I mean it. You go making noise about some kitchen woman and it gets back around and it's me who has to live in that keep with all of them, not you. You don't have to wake up in there. I do."

He held my eyes for a second. The fingers kept moving the whole time, gentle, like the hands belonged to a different man than the one doing the looking.

"All right," he said.

He said it too easily. I caught that, and let it go. Him dropping the name was what I'd wanted.

"Roll it forward for me," he said. "Slow."

I rolled the shoulder forward. A third of the way it caught, grinding, the catch shooting up the side of my throat.

"Okay. Back."

"It doesn't go back either."

"I know. I want to feel where."

His hand pressed in along the top of the joint, finding the place, and when he hit it I jerked and grabbed his wrist on reflex, my nails going into him.

"There," he said, like I'd done him a favor.

"That's not helping."

"It's not supposed to feel good. It tells me it's the joint and not the bone." He eased off, smoothed his thumb over the spot he'd dug into, an apology without words. "It's not broken. You'd be a different color and you'd be sick from it. It's wrenched. The socket's angry. Few days."

"I don't have a few days. I have a keep full of people who notice when I move wrong."

His hand slowed on my shoulder.

It hit me the second it was out. Her. Too big a word for a kitchen woman on a stair, a whole life's worth of it left hanging in the air over a turnip-and-potato grudge.

He caught the size of it. Not the lie. The size.

"For her," he said.

"For—" I caught it, hauled it back down to fit the story, made it smaller. "For any of them. That's what I mean. You give and you give in that place and you stand in front of people and you take things for them and it's never enough, you're never anything but the girl who doesn't belong, the one they tolerate, and then somebody puts your shoulder in a wall on the stairs like you're nothing, like all of it counted for nothing." My voice cracked in the middle of it and I let it, because a cracked voice fit grief and grief was the one true thing in the whole speech and I could afford to spend it. "And you go home and there's no one to even—"

I stopped.

There was someone to. He was right here. His arms were around me. I'd come home to him.

"There's no one in the keep," I said, fixing it. "To tell."

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