My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 436

Fenris

The insult hit me in the gut. I felt it in my bones. I held still.

"Sera," I said.

She tilted her head, not following. "What?"

"Her name. It's Sera."

Something came into her face then, and I watched it arrive. She had been swinging in the dark all night and I had just put a lamp in her hand.

"Sera." She turned it over like she was tasting it. "She is a novelty to you now, Butcher. She will not last a winter up here."

I said nothing.

"The women already laugh at her. Behind her hand, over the wash, every one of them." She came a step nearer. "She does not understand our ways and she never will. What will you do when she cannot hold that seat? You will tire of her. They always tire of the pretty foreign thing."

I watched her and did not answer.

"Sera." She said it again, savouring it now that she had it. "Sera the soft. Sera the Southerner. Do you know what they will call her when she is not in the room? Because they already do."

Her chin came up.

"She is weak and she is soft and she will break, the way all her people break. And when she does, you will remember there was a woman here who could have stood in that seat."

She was mid-sentence, her slender finger jabbing at the air, her face flushed and animated with righteous indignation, when I moved. My left arm shot out, impossibly fast, and wrapped into a vise around her neck.

Her words cut off. Her eyes went wide, bulging, her mouth opening in a soundless O. Both slender hands flew to my wrist, scrabbling at it, trying futilely to pry my grip off her delicate throat. I could feel her pulse pounding beneath the pad of my thumb, her breath rattling into her lungs through the narrow gap left between my fingers.

She was so tiny, so fragile in my grasp. My hand easily circled her throat, more than enough room left over to slip my fingers in the gap. I tightened it just enough to show her my intent was real, my message clear. I did not shout or yell or rage. I was utterly silent, the only sound in that narrow way the wet strangled squeak of her breath.

I drove her backward with the one arm, her heels skidding on the wet stone, until her back met the longhouse wall with a flat hard smack that went up through my forearm. Then I lifted her clean off the ground. Her weight meant nothing. She might have been a coat hanging off my hand.

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