My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 321

Irina

"Lyra…Your father's talking to you.”

She came back slow, the way a person comes up out of deep, cold water, blinking before any of it makes sense. Her eyes found Aldric, lost for a half second before they placed him.

He tilted his head, a small curious angle he used on things he hadn't decided about yet. "Are you all right? You haven't been eating."

She shook her head, and before she could find any words to put behind it, I was already talking, because I'd learned a long time ago that the space after a question like that was the most dangerous part of any meal.

"Is the food not to your taste? I could have something else sent up. There's no shame in it, if your stomach's not settled."

"The food's fine," Lyra said. Flat and final, in the small way she still had left to her.

We let it sit there, all three of us pretending the matter had been settled, because none of us wanted to be the one who pushed it further than that.

Aldric went back to his eggs. The room went quiet in the particular way it did when everyone at a table has agreed, without discussing it, not to say the next obvious thing.

It didn't last.

"I've loved you a long time, you know," he said, not looking up from his plate, the words landing as ordinary as anything else he'd said that morning.

"It would make me very sad, watching you lose weight because you wouldn't eat." He looked at her properly then, his eyes moving down and up once, an assessment dressed as concern. "You're already underweight for your age. You need to eat more, Lyra."

She let a breath out through her teeth, sharp enough that I heard the frustration riding underneath it. "I'm fine."

He let the matter close itself, content with it. Then he spoke again, the air of a man who'd nearly forgotten to mention something:

"Oh and I've been reading a great deal, lately. About people who love a little differently than what you and I were raised to believe was the only shape of it."

The corners of his mouth lifted, easy, reaching all the way up into his eyes, which was somehow the worst part of it. "I'm glad of it, Lyra. Truly. That you get to live a life outside whatever this family might have expected of you."

Something almost fond moved through his face.

"I always knew you'd be the independent one. You've got something in you that isn't from me." His eyes moved to mine, brief, unhurried, then away again, back down to his plate, as if he'd simply misplaced something and found it exactly where he'd expected it to be.

My heart did something ugly and fast behind my ribs. I reached for the teapot instead of my own throat.

"I want you to be comfortable," Aldric went on. "Whoever you choose to be. Whoever you choose to be with."

Lyra carefully set her knife and fork down.

She held her eyes on him, steady, her face gone still in a way I hadn't seen on her in months.

"How come Sera never got that," she said. "Hmm? To be who she wanted. To be with whoever she chose?"

I swallowed. I wanted, more than I'd wanted anything in a long while, for my daughter to let it go.

"Lyra!" It came out of me before I'd decided to say it.

She turned sharply on me instead. "What?!"

"You cannot speak to your father that way."

She held there a long moment, and whatever had been burning in her face a second ago went somewhere colder, somewhere with my name on it.

"You don't even have a life of your own," she said, quiet now, almost gentle with how much it cost me. Then she shook her head, slow, like she'd decided I wasn't worth the rest of the sentence, and turned for the door.

I didn't know I was going to snap until I heard myself doing it.

"Get out!"

She left without looking back, her footsteps fast and uneven down the corridor until the sound of them gave out entirely.

The room held the quiet for a long time after that, the kind that doesn't move, a third plate nobody was going to eat from sitting on the table between us. My daughter had taken my whole life and folded it into one sentence, and she hadn't even needed to raise her voice to do it.

Aldric sucked his tongue once against his teeth, a small wet click, and shook his head slowly.

"She holds so much anger," he said. "It's sad."

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