My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 221 - チャプター 230

LyraI had begged Sera on that call. I had begged her because Nadia had asked me to. I had begged Sera to stay away even when I knew Nadia was suffering for it. Father was ready to execute them all if they didn’t provide Sera. Knowing that, I still told Sera not to return. Not to ruin the entire thing we had worked for. And that plan had ended up with Nadia’s life on the line. Still I chose to protect my sister over the woman I loved.I had agreed because refusing would not have stopped her, and the only thing worse than letting it happen would have been refusing and watching it happen anyway with my refusal between us. I had agreed and then I had spent three months sick with it. I had eaten breakfast across from the woman who was telling me she had made her peace with dying for my sister, and I had not made my peace with anything.The night Sera escaped I went into my cupboard and cried until I could not breathe. Not because Sera was gone.My father had already arrested Nadia. Her p

IrinaI had been raised to believe a queen does not think about her mother after a certain hour.The reasoning had been domestic and circular, the way the reasoning of women raised in small pack houses tends to be. A queen has obligations in the morning. A queen who lies in the dark thinking of her mother does not sleep. A queen who does not sleep is no good to her household. I had carried the rule for forty-six years and broken it twice on harmless occasions, both of them at the bedside of a sick daughter. The third time I broke it was tonight, and it was not for any reason a woman in any pack house would have understood. I broke it for the smell.I was eight years old when they killed my mother.She had been screaming before they lit the wood. Screaming about my father, about her sister, about me. Begging, and pulling against the rope at the pole — twisting at the wrists, twisting at the ankles, twisting until the rope had taken the skin from both wrists clean enough that I could se

IrinaHe stopped touching me the night Sera was born.I had not known, at the time, that he was stopping. I had been recovering from a hard birth. He had come into the lying-in chamber twice, taken in the child, said the child is a girl, and left both times inside the half-hour. I had assumed his distance was a temporary courtesy. The weeks had become months. The months had become a year. I had been twenty years old and the wife of the King of Valdris, and my husband had stopped turning toward me, and I had spent the second year of Sera's life telling myself it was the season, the politics, the strain of his accession — anything except what it was, which was that Aldric had decided he was done.I had thought, then, that he had taken a mistress.I had spent four years searching for her. I had checked every woman who came into the keep. I had checked the kitchen girls and the maids and the daughters of the lower lords. I had read his correspondence when his clerks were lazy. I had bribe

IrinaI went to him the next evening in a dress I had not worn since the early months of our marriage. I took his hand at dinner in front of three of his guests. I laughed at one of his jokes, a thing nobody had done at one of his jokes in twenty-three years. I asked him, after the wine, if he might walk me to my chamber.He walked me.He walked me without speaking, which I took for a refusal until we reached the door and he stepped in behind me and the door closed, and he took hold of me by the upper arm in a grip that was neither rough nor kind, and he asked me in a soft voice what I was doing.I told him I had missed him.I said it in a voice I had been practicing on the inside of my cheek for a day.He held me with his eyes for what could have been a long time or no time at all.Then he took me to bed.He fucked me for the second time in our marriage, and he was thorough and unhurried and effective in exactly the way he had been the first time, and he was better at it than I had r

Irina"Luna ordered it. I did it. I'd do it again tomorrow if she said." A beat. "Doesn't mean I didn't fuck you well on that balcony. Both things are true. You're the one walking around like they cancel out."I stared at him."Sera asked you to stab me."He held the line for half a second too long."Well." He shrugged the one shoulder. "Not exactly.""What do you mean not exactly.""Yvara called me in. The order came from her.""From Yvara.""From the Alpha's beta. Yes.""And you took it.""I took it. Beta gives an order in that room, you don't ask her where she got it. She takes hers from the Alpha and his Luna. So." He tilted his head a fraction. "Yeah. Sure. Your daughter ordered it. As far as I'm concerned."I sat with that.It should not have changed anything. I had known. I had watched Sera cry in that room afterward and scold her beta in front of me, and I had known the whole performance for what it was the second she lifted her chin and started in on Yvara — a Luna does not w