My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 398

Sera

I'd lost count of the separate ways Mina had made her point tonight, because I'd stopped listening to the words hours ago. What I heard now was the raw edge in her voice, worn hoarse from talking over my silence.

Underneath the counting was the thing I couldn't get away from. Taya was still going to be standing in that ring in the morning, no matter what Mina said, or how she argued it.

Amara sat on the floor by the hearth where I'd left her, knees drawn up, watching the pair of us. Her eyes went to whichever of us was speaking and stayed there until the other one started. Neither of us had said a word to her in hours.

"Are you clear on how that oil actually works, Sera? It's not a spell. It's a seal, and it only holds while you're still. It thins when you sweat. It breaks outright when you bleed." Mina's hands went out at her sides. "Do you want to be standing in a dirt ring with your own blood on you and every wolf in Ironmaw close enough to smell what's in your belly?"

I said nothing.

"I don't understand why you're not taking this seriously." Her voice cracked on the last of it. "I genuinely don't."

My jaw tightened. That was all she got.

"Listen to me." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, then dropped them. "You know the law. The council handles infidelity. The penalty is death, and it's worse for a Luna, because a Luna is supposed to be what every woman in this pack measures herself against. Not a cheat." She let out a long breath, tired of making the same case in a new shape. "They already want you out of that chair. They've wanted it since the day you sat down in it. You'd be handing them the one thing they'll never have to argue about. And Fenris is six days east and we cannot send for him. You have to call it off. You cannot be in that ring tomorrow."

Still I said nothing.

The honest answer was that I could kill her tomorrow.

A duel is the one place where I could put Taya in the ground in front of the whole pack and walk out of the ring with no man alive who had the standing to call it murder. I had worked that out the night she challenged me, and it had made me sick to have worked it out, and I hadn't stopped wanting it since.

And I had reasons. Taya was not going to stop looking. She had already told Mina to her face that she knew something had been done to her father, that she didn't have all of it yet, and that she was going to find every bit of it. She wasn't wrong and she wasn't going to give up. She would keep pulling at it, and there was too much of it to hide forever, and one day she would be standing in front of the truth. Her father was dead. And I had a hand in it.

There was no corner of this keep I could hide in after that.

Taya wasn't a threat to me now, but she wasn't going to stay that way forever. She was already starting to push. Today it was a duel. Tomorrow it would be something worse.

I wasn't going to say any of that to Mina either.

So I let the silence run. I knew what it looked like. It looked like I held her in contempt, and I let it look that way, because the truth was worse and a lie to her was worse than that.

Mina stopped arguing. She went quiet, and something in me braced before she'd opened her mouth again.

"If you're actually considering killing her," she said, "you need to kill that idea instead. Tonight. Before you walk out there."

My heart leapt. I looked at the door, then back at Mina.

"Keep your voice down."

The colour came up in Mina's face all at once.

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