My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 397

Taya

I turned the page over. There was nothing on the back of it.

I picked up the next one.

Kael.

I'm waiting.

And the next.

Brother,

It's been six weeks. I've sent three men and none of them come back with anything but the word that you're well and busy.

If I've offended you, say so and I'll take it as it comes. If something's wrong, say that instead and I'll come. But don't leave me sitting up here reading trader gossip about my own blood.

They went on like that, shorter each time. My uncle's hand stayed neat all the way through, but the letters got thinner, four lines and then three, and I could feel the man on the other end of them getting quieter and less certain, and then finally not asking anymore at all.

I sat with the last few of them in my hands and something turned over in my chest.

He hadn't answered.

My father, who had spent three months riding out to the outer camps in the snow telling anyone who would stand still that the treaty was a knife in the North's back, who had told me to my face in the armory that he would rather see Fenris bleed out than watch a southern woman sit in the Luna chair. My father had signed that thing. And when his own brother wrote to demand what he thought he was doing, he said nothing at all, not one word, for months.

I had thought it was shame. All this time I had watched him go grey and quiet and I had thought, there it is, he's finished, they broke him and he doesn't have the spine to admit it.

But a broken man explains himself. A broken man writes back and says she has me, she has something on me, help me. That's what breaking sounds like.

Silence is not what breaking sounds like.

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