My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 380

Sera

When I'd done what I could with the cloths and the basin, I went to my own wardrobe and found something that would fit close enough, a plain shift, soft wool, nothing that mattered to me if it never came back the same.

I got her into it the way you'd dress a child who couldn't manage it herself, guiding her arms, easing the fabric down over her shoulders. My hand grazed the soft weight of her breast on the way past, an accident of the motion more than anything else, and it stopped me half a second longer than it should have before I made myself keep going.

She wasn't a child. Whatever was still missing behind her eyes, the body under my hands belonged to a grown woman, full breasts, the curve of her hips under the fabric, nothing built like a child anywhere on her, and there was no taking that back once I'd felt it.

I wondered, and hated myself a little for wondering it, what it would be like once the memories came back the way Fenris said they would. When she was back, whole, a fully functioning adult with a mind of her own again. I wondered how I'd manage her then.

I didn't let myself finish the thought. I got the shift down over her hips and stepped back.

Dressed, clean, her hair drying loose down her back, she looked almost like a person. Not the person she must have been once, because I had no idea who that was, no memory of her to measure this against. All I knew was the animal. The thing that had thrashed under two grown men in the yard, the thing that had eaten from my hand every morning for a week. Whoever she'd been before any of that had turned her, I'd never met. I only knew what came after.

I sat down across from her on the low bench by the fire and just looked at her for a while.

"What am I supposed to call you," I said. Not really a question aimed at her. More the kind of thing you say into a room when you're too tired to keep it in your head. "Fenris never gave you one. I never gave you one either. Days now, and neither of us bothered."

She tilted her head at the sound of my voice, the way she always did, and said nothing, because she had nothing to say it with yet.

I thought about Yvara. About the fact that somewhere under that scarred, brutal, unbothered woman who'd broken my body into something that could survive this place, there was a story exactly like this one. A rogue. A cage. Someone who decided to keep her instead of putting her down. I wondered if Fenris had sat across from a fire once, the way I was sitting now, trying out names on a woman who couldn't answer him back.

I didn't ask her anything else. I let the fire burn and let her watch me and let myself, for the first time since he'd ridden out, stop thinking about the duel, about Taya, about the guards and the crowd and how I was going to explain any of it to anyone tomorrow.

At some point she slid off the bed and came to sit at my feet instead, the way she had in the yard, her head resting against my knee. I put my hand back in her hair without deciding to and she made that sound again, low in her throat, and I let my head fall back against the wall behind me and closed my eyes.

I don't know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that the fire burned down to coals and the room went dim and cold at the edges and neither of us moved to fix it.

Long enough that when the knock came at the door, I startled hard enough to wake her too, both of us coming up out of whatever quiet we'd fallen into at the same time, her hand closing tight around my ankle before I'd even fully opened my eyes.

"Sera." Mina's voice, muffled through the wood. "You in there?"

"I'm here." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

A pause. "You alone?"

I looked down at the woman still gripping my ankle, her eyes open now, fixed on the door the way they'd been fixed on me all night.

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