My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 81

Sera

I stood there in the center of the room. A full minute passed in complete silence. My mother slowly pulled herself up from the floor. She sat on the very edge of the bed. She looked exhausted, pathetic, and deeply ashamed.

"Sera," Irina started. Her voice was weak. "I am sorry. I didn't know what I was doing. The fear in this fortress... the way that savage looks at you... Torin was just..."

I waved my hand sharply, cutting her off mid-sentence.

"Save your pity story for someone else," I said bluntly. "I don't care who you fuck. I don't care about your excuses. I am not here to judge your morals."

Irina stopped talking. She blinked, clearly caught off guard by my complete lack of emotional reaction. She wiped a streak of sweat from her forehead.

She frowned, looking closely at my face. She saw the dark, calculating intensity in my eyes. She saw the dried blood on the edge of my sleeve that belonged to Kael.

"Then why are you here?" Irina asked.

"I need something from you," I said.

Irina stared at me. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to regain a fraction of her maternal authority. "What could you possibly need from me right now?"

I stepped closer to the bed. I looked directly into her eyes.

"I need you to recreate a face for me," I said.

Irina stopped breathing. The color completely drained from her cheeks, leaving her skin stark white. She stared at me in absolute, horrifying silence.

She thought I didn't know.

She thought her secret was buried safely in the past, hidden behind the high walls of the palace. But I knew exactly what she was.

My mother was a witch.

I didn't learn it from a book, and she never sat me down to confess it. I learned it when I was ten years old.

My father had been away on a long diplomatic mission to the western borders. Lyra was still a very young toddler, sleeping in the nursery. It was the middle of the night. A frantic Valdris noble had arrived at the palace gates on a foaming horse, carrying a small, wrapped bundle in his arms.

It was his daughter. She was roughly my age. Her family’s carriage had been attacked by a splinter group of rogues on the road. The rogues hadn't just clawed her; they had injected her with refined wolfsbane.

I had snuck out of my bedroom to see the commotion. I hid behind a heavy velvet curtain in the lower hall and watched the noble carry the screaming girl into my mother’s private study.

I saw the girl's face before my mother closed the door. It was a ruined, horrific mess. The wolfsbane was causing rapid necrosis. The skin on the right side of her face was turning black and actively melting off the bone. The muscle underneath was exposed and rotting. The healers had said there was absolutely nothing they could do. The girl was going to die from the poison, or survive as a disfigured monster.

My mother didn't call for more healers. She locked the heavy wooden doors to the study.

But I knew the servant's passageway that ran behind the walls. I crawled through the dusty, narrow tunnel and looked through the small iron grate that ventilated the study.

I watched my mother work.

She had brought out a heavy stone bowl filled with a thick, grey substance. It looked like clay, but it wasn't normal river mud. It had a dark, greasy sheen, like crushed charcoal mixed with rendered fat. It smelled sharp, like burning ozone and deep earth. The scent drifted right through the iron grate into my hiding spot.

My mother had stood there, cold and completely unbothered by their tears. She calmly explained that she didn't know what the child looked like before the wolfsbane melted her features. She had no visual reference. She couldn't fix the clay to match the original, so she simply built a new face.

My father returned a week later. The issue was quietly settled with a massive sum of gold and a strict demand for silence. The noble family moved away to the far borders.

But it left me with the information. My mother could change faces. She could mold flesh and bone with her strange clay and her dried leaves. She never knew I watched her that night. She never knew I kept her secret for nearly a decade.

Until right now.

I watched the realization hit her. I watched the panic flood into her eyes as she sat on the edge of the bed in the freezing Ironmaw guest room.

"You..." Irina whispered. Her voice trembled. "How do you know that?"

"It doesn't matter how I know," I said. I crossed my arms over my chest. "What matters is that I need you to do it again. Tonight."

Irina stared at me. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. The shock slowly started to wear off, replaced by a defensive, stubborn wall. She pulled her shoulders back again, her jaw setting into a hard line.

She looked at my dark Ironmaw clothes. She looked at the blood on my sleeve. She realized I was asking her to use her witchcraft to help the northern savages she despised so deeply.

Irina shook her head. She looked me right in the eye.

"I am not doing that for you," she said.

* * *