My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 323

Sera

The door opened without a knock, which in this whole keep only one person dared, and I caught her in the mirror before she'd cleared the frame.

Mina. Cheeks high with color, hair a wreck she hadn't bothered to fix, walking with the loose roll of a woman who'd been somewhere worth the walk back.

Our eyes met in the glass and we were both smiling before either of us said a word.

"You're glowing," I said.

"I wonder why." She dropped onto the end of my bed without being asked, which was the other thing only she did.

"You've been minding your skin. Good oils."

"Nooo..." She sighed with a smile that was widening from ear to ear. "I just came off his cock." She said it to the ceiling, perfectly content.

I put both hands over my ears. "Fuck, Mina. I don't need to hear that!"

She laughed, that full unbothered laugh she'd had when she first arrived and lost for a long while after, and hearing it now put something right in my chest that had been crooked for weeks.

There'd been weeks where she couldn't look at me, after she learned what I'd done, what these hands had done.

The whirlwind girl had gone somewhere small and quiet and I'd thought I might have cost myself her for good. The laugh meant the door was open again. I'd take the laugh. I'd take it gladly.

The only trouble with the glow was knowing exactly whose hands had put it back on her, and that I had not yet decided what I thought of the man wearing those hands.

She caught it out of the air, delighted with herself, and fell back laughing into my blankets.

"I can already taste the blood," she said, when she'd settled, and there was nothing soft in it. She was looking at the ceiling, but she'd stopped seeing it. "When he comes back. However it goes out there. I'll know it the second he's through the gate."

That was the Mina under the wickedness, the one the South made and the North sharpened, the omega blood and the slave blood and the wolf in her that wanted to bite. I didn't laugh at it. You didn't laugh at that part of her. It was the truest part she had.

"He'll come back," I said.

"I know." She didn't look at me. "I just want to taste it when he does."

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