My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 446

Mina

I looked back up at him and made myself smile. Made myself be normal. The girl who does not care that her mother is dead.

"This is good, at least." I lifted my cup, and then, mostly to myself, "Wonder if she's doing the sweetbread tonight."

"You sound like your mother."

I flinched. He did not seem to notice.

"The kitchens kept a pot of it in the stores, year in and year out," he said. "At your mother's insistence. She said it turned bitter if it didn't sit at least a season between harvest and oven."

I stared at him. How in hells did the old wolf know that.

"How d'you know something like that?"

He shrugged and took another long drink of his ale.

"She said it was bitter anyway."

"That she did." Vane was smiling into his mug. "She said you could not get a decent sweetbread this far north to save your life."

"Bitter as a witch's tit," I said, and stopped with a start. That had been Mother's line. I sat there with my mouth still open around it.

How strange, to hear her voice come out of mine.

Still I did not stop.

I kept talking. About the cook, about the kitchens, about the state of the rushes and whose idea it had been to lay green ones down in a room this hot. He answered all of it. He had an opinion about the rushes. Of course he did.

Somewhere in it I stopped keeping count of what I was saying.

"Do you remember your brother standing up for you when you were small?" Vane said. "He had a hell of a right hook for a boy of ten."

I blinked. I had not been thinking about Dimitri. I had not been thinking about anything.

"Of course I remember." I laughed. "He fought six of them. And then he made me go back and face them after. Made them say my name."

"He was a good boy." Vane turned his cup on the table. "He was the best of us."

Something went sharp in my chest and I breathed around it and kept my face where it was.

"He was," I said.

I reached for my cup and found it empty. I set it down and looked into the fire a while.

"Sorry," I said. "I've been talking your ear off."

"You have not."

I turned back to him. He was watching me with a faint smile, one arm along the table, entirely at his ease.

"You've been nursing that same cup all night." I gestured at it. He had not called for a refill once. Not once, and I had lost count of mine.

"I have been trying to keep up," he said.

"No you haven't."

He did not argue with that. He did not say anything at all.

The quiet went on. I opened my mouth to put something into it and nothing came, and he did not help me, and he did not seem to mind the quiet in the least.

I sat there in it. My cup was empty. I could not remember finishing it.

The drop came at last, cold and shameful, into my stomach.

I had been talking forever. Endlessly. Pouring it all out. And he'd barely said a word. And he'd stayed sober through every bit of it.

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