My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 451

Lyra

We stumbled along the edge of the palace grounds as dusk fell, the sky gone pink and orange over the rooftops. Odile had her arms spread wide to take in the breeze.

"I can't believe I've never seen the sun go down before," she breathed. "It's like the whole sky is on fire."

"Welcome to the great outdoors." I swayed and caught myself. "Just be glad it isn't raining."

Nadia was clinging to my arm for support, her hair wild and tangled. She smiled vaguely at me but said nothing. She had been quiet all evening, which was not like her at all. I patted her hand and kept us both moving.

Odile skipped ahead on the gravel, her thin dress fluttering around her legs, then whirled back to face us with an enormous grin.

"I'm drunk," she confessed. "Is that what the fresh air does?"

"No, that's the brandy."

She laughed and came back and slipped her arm through Nadia's other one. "Tell me stories about when you were small. I want to hear about you and your sister."

I opened my mouth to say something clever and instead the words just came out on their own.

"Oh, you want the embarrassing ones, do you? Sera locked me in the pantry when I was six and left me in there for hours until one of the staff found me. Or when we were twelve she convinced me to run naked across the courtyard and then watched out the window while the stablehands chased me down."

Odile clapped her hands. "Yes. Those ones. More."

"We were always at each other's throats." The gravel crunched under us and I was warm all the way through. "She was so proper and I was a little terror. But she looked out for me in her own way. Like when I tried to marry the goat in the gardens and she turned up and stopped me."

Odile stopped walking. "You tried to marry a goat."

"I was ten and he was wearing a very handsome bow tie." I grinned at her. "Sera arrived just as we were getting to the vows. She hauled me off and dunked me in the fountain to wash away my sins."

Odile was laughing so hard she had to hold onto Nadia to stay upright.

"Sera kept you in line, then."

"Sera? Please. Sera talked me into half of it." I snorted. "She climbed down the trellis on her sixteenth birthday to get out of the castle. Made it halfway and dropped straight into the fountain in all her good clothes. Soaked through. She had to come back up the stairs past every guard in the west wing looking like a drowned cat."

Odile shrieked.

Nadia made a small noise beside me that might have been a laugh. I squeezed her hand.

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