My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 379

379 /526

Sera

The keep had gone quiet by the time I reached my chambers, the corridors empty in that particular way they went empty when word of something strange had already run ahead of me. I could feel it in the way the few servants I passed kept their eyes down. Nobody stopped me. Nobody asked.

I got the door shut with my shoulder, the rogue still bundled against my chest, and stood there a second in the dark before I remembered to light anything. She hadn't made a sound the whole walk back. Just her face pressed into me, breathing slow, the furs tucked tight around her, and that same doubled pulse ticking under my hands, hers and mine running close enough together that I couldn't always tell which was which.

I laid her down on the bed. Not the floor. Not a chair by the fire. The bed, because some part of me had already decided that before I'd thought it through, and by the time I noticed I was doing it, it was done.

She curled into the furs and watched me with that same open, hungry look, tracking me across the room the way she'd tracked me across the yard. I lit the lamp on the dresser and the light caught the state of her properly for the first time since I'd had her free of the guards, and it wasn't good. Dirt ground into every crease of her. Her hair a solid mat past saving with fingers alone. Bruises coming up along one hip where the men had pinned her.

"Fuck," I muttered, more to myself than to her. "They really did a number on you."

This was my fault. I had left her down there so long that when she finally broke loose, the only shape she had left to be was an animal fighting for its life.

"Gods," I said, mostly to myself, and went for the washroom.

There was a basin, a jug, a stack of cloths Mina kept folded on the shelf out of habit more than use these days. I filled the basin, brought it back, set it on the floor beside the bed, and knelt down in front of her the way I'd been kneeling in front of her every morning for a week, except this time there was no cage between us.