《My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian 》全部章節：第 261 章 - 第 270 章

Sera"My Luna. Should I send for the healer?"I got a hand up off the rim of the basin before she could come around to my side. "No.""You've been at it a while—""I heard you the first time."The rest of it came up before I could finish the sentence, thin and sour, and I gripped the cold iron edge and let it. The girl stayed where she was by the door with a folded stack of linens against her chest, not moving, not leaving, doing the worst thing a servant can do, which is hover.I spat into the basin and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist."It was the cellar," I said. "Madra had the brine vats open. Half of it went down the wrong way and I've been tasting salt since.""The brine doesn't usually—""Do you make a habit of arguing with me?"That moved her. She came forward and set the linens on the chair and bobbed her head down low, the way they all did now, eyes on my boots instead of my face. "No, my Luna. I'm sorry.""Leave the water. Take the basin out and have it rinsed. And

SeraHe came in without knocking, which meant nothing, because it was his room too, and I knew that, and I put it on the list anyway.That was the state I'd worked myself into. An hour on the edge of the bed with my hands folded and my back straight, and in that hour I'd taken every small ordinary thing and turned it over to read the underside, and there is always something written on the underside if you've decided beforehand that there will be. Mina gone since first light. A coat. A cold hearth. A gap pulled out of the middle of her wardrobe. I'd set them in a row and the row had teeth, and the bad thing about building something like that with your own two hands is that you can't afford yourself the relief of not believing it.So when the door swung in and he came three steps into the room before he registered I was sitting on the bed at all, the voice in me said he can't even look at me, and I knew it for what it was and I let it talk."You're back," I said.He didn't answer right

FenrisThe blue had spread since I was last down here. Dimitri would have had a name for it. He had a name for everything that grew in this place, the long ones and the low creeping ones and the pale things that only opened after dark, and he would say the names to me while he had his hands in the dirt, and I would forget them before I reached the gorge. I never learned a single one. He was the one who learned the names. I learned where to put a blade.The caldera held its heat the way it always had, the deep springs breathing warm wet air up through the grass while the snow piled against the black walls and never crossed them. It was the one warm place in a country built out of ice, and he had made it that. He had found the steam and the dirt and coaxed a garden out of the belly of a mountain, and now he was under the white stone in the middle of it with the flowers growing up over the edge, and I stood at the foot of it the way I had stood at the foot of it more nights than I would

Fenris"That was my thought."We stood with it between us, the springs breathing their warm air up through the grass, the blue flowers holding still on their stems where there was no wind to move them."So," she said at last. "Does this mean we're going back to the field?"I looked at the stone. At the flowers he'd planted growing up over the place where the rest of him lay. He had been a clean thing. He had no taste for blood, and he had a life down here in the dirt, things he loved and tended and gave his hours to, and that was the difference between us that had always been there and always would be. I had never tended anything. I was made for one purpose and pointed at it from the time I could lift a sword, and the purpose was this pack and the man my father had been, and I had hated every hour I spent in that chamber listening to the chiefs run their mouths. I am not an Alpha the way my brother was an Alpha. He was the seat. I was the thing the seat kept behind it for when the ta

Mina"I heard that."I spun around, one hand still on the handle, and my heart was in the back of my throat, I could feel the blood in my face going from zero to everything in about a second. He was standing in the arch of the kitchen doorway with his shoulder on the frame and no shirt on, and his arms were crossed at his chest, he was looking at me with the small expression on his face that I had been on the wrong end of since yesterday — that slight angle of his mouth, the unhurried patience of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing."You were not meant to hear that.""And yet.""I was talking to myself.""In my direction.""The kitchen is small." My voice came out steadier than I had any right to. "There was nowhere else to be facing."He pushed off the doorframe and came in, and I held my ground by the coals because the alternative was giving him the satisfaction of watching me back up. He had the kind of body that you couldn't be casual about up close, and I'd been up close al