My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 284

Mina

He was quiet. His chin came down to rest on the top of my head, careful of the shoulder, his breath going slow in my hair. I let myself sink into it. The comfort was real even if the cause was made of nothing.

"They don't see you," he said. "That's their failure. Not yours."

"I know."

"You've spent your whole life in rooms where you do the most and you're counted the least." His hand moved on the shoulder, slow circles now, past the working part into something that was only tenderness. "You are young, and already carrying people who'd never once carried you."

"You don't know that."

"I knew it by your face." A small sound, almost a laugh, cut short before it got going, the same clip he always put on it. "Took me about a minute. A child shouldn't have a face that tired."

My mouth tugged toward the wall, where he couldn't see it. My face had been clenched for hours and it hurt to let it go.

"She's not worth your shoulder," he said. Bringing it back around. "Whoever she is. A woman who'd do that to you over stores and standing isn't a woman who has anything. People who have something don't reach for a person on a staircase."

The irony of it sat in my chest, a swallowed stone. He was talking about Sera. His hands were on the hurt she'd put in me, and he was telling me she was small, that she had nothing, that people with something don't reach for a person on a staircase. He had it backwards. She was the most powerful she-wolf on the continent. She was carrying a secret that could burn three lives down. She was my sister. I let him call her nothing, because the only other choice was the truth, and the truth had teeth.

"You're being nice to me," I said. "I don't trust you when you're nice to me."

"I'm always nice to you."

"You're nice to me when you want something."

I'd meant it as nothing. A thing you say. The kind of small jab you throw at a person you're comfortable enough with to jab. But a change went through him where my back met his chest, a half-second hitch in the slow of his breathing, there and gone, the kind of thing I'd have missed if I weren't pressed up against his whole front catching every part of him.

"What does that mean."

"It means I've been thinking." His thumb kept moving on my neck, light, and the touch and the words came at me from two different places, the hand soothing and the words doing something else I couldn't yet get the shape of. "We've been doing this in the dark for a while now. You coming out here under a hood so nobody clocks your face. Me staying out of the keep so nobody clocks mine. Sneaking around like we've done something wrong, when we haven't done a single thing wrong."

"It's not about wrong. It's about—" I stopped. I couldn't tell him the truth. That the moment the keep learned I had a man, they'd want to know which man, and a wolf from the human world with money and no pack would pull exactly the attention I'd spent months keeping off us. That I didn't want him near Fenris. Near any of them. I couldn't say it without saying why, and I didn't have a why I could name. Only the cold feeling that I should keep him away.

"It's about what," he said.

"It's complicated."

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