My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 486

Taya

The force of his punch carried me off the heavy oak chair and sent me crashing to the stone floor. My chair shattered around me. Fragments of crockery and a mug exploded in a burst of shards. The platter of food clattered and spilled. I lay there stunned, pain pulsing in my face.

When I finally tried to speak, agony lanced down my spine. Only then did I understand my jaw had been knocked from its socket. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I blinked them away. Despite the pain, I forced myself to look up at him.

He rolled his shoulders. His back straightened. He cracked his neck, the sound sharp and painful in the quiet kitchen. His hands curled and uncurled, knuckles streaked with red.

He took a deep breath, the exhale a low rumble, and looked down at me sprawled on the floor. "Fool," he muttered, shaking his head. "You really thought you were that clever." His voice was rough, contemptuous, so easy to use now. So different from the quiet way he spoke, the way he enunciated each word.

The wrongness of the sound, the harshness of his words, made my stomach turn.

He strode towards me, and I stared at his left foot. The limp was gone. He walked perfectly, with not a trace of the familiar drag that had always been a part of Father, of Kael.

I looked up at his face, and suddenly it seemed all wrong. As if a spell had been lifted and I was seeing it for the first time, really seeing it.

That was not my father's face.

That was not my father at all.

"Who... who are you?" I forced the words out, wincing at the excruciating pain radiating through my jaw.

A low, mocking chuckle escaped his lips. "Oh come on, girl. Don't play dumb with me." His voice, once warm and familiar, now dripped with venom. "You've got enough of a brain in that pretty little head of yours to figure it out."

I tried to speak again, but the words caught in my throat. Tears blurred my vision as I stared up at the stranger wearing my father's face.

"I hated you all along." His lips curled into a sneer. "Spoilt little noble brat. Always playing at being important, making decisions you had no right to make." He shook his head in disgust. "And now look at this mess you've gotten me into. What made you think you could write to your precious uncle without telling me first, hmm?"

Reality crashed down on me like a suffocating wave. I struggled to draw breath, my heart pounding in my ears.

"I thought..." The words trailed off as the truth slammed into me.

Tears streamed down my face, my voice shaking with terror and rage. Then, from the depths of my shattered soul, a scream ripped from my lungs.

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