All Chapters of My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Chapter 281 - Chapter 290

SeraI'd been standing outside Mina's door long enough that my feet had gone cold through the slippers, and the room behind it was as dead and dark as it had been the night before.I'd knocked. Twice, soft, then once with the side of my fist, and nothing came back. The hearth-light didn't move under the door the way it would if a fire were lit. I'd put my palm flat to the wood and listened the way I'd taught myself to listen in this place, for a heartbeat, for breath, for the shift of a body on a mattress, and there was none of it. She wasn't in there. She hadn't been in there all night. I'd lain awake in my own bed turning it over until the turning wore a groove, and the groove only ever ran to one place, which was that Mina had gone down those stairs in a coat and taken my secret to my husband, and that was why Fenris had looked at me the way he'd looked at me and then walked out and not come back.I put my forehead against her door for a second. Then I pushed off it. There was no po

MinaI came back with the door shut behind me before I'd worked out what my face was doing.The sack of foodstuff hit the floor by the entry harder than I meant. A turnip rolled out of the top of it and went under the bench and I let it go. My other hand had the bundle of clean clothes pressed up against my chest, against the side that didn't hurt, because the side that did hurt had been screaming at me the whole walk back and I'd been holding the bundle on the good side without deciding to.Jace was at the low table with a cup in front of him and a flat wooden box open beside it, some human thing he tinkered with when he was bored, small metal pieces laid out in a row. He raised his eyes when the door went. Then he held them on me a second longer than a man holds them on someone who's only been gone two hours."That was quick.""They didn't have the salted kind. I got the other." I kept my eyes off him while I said it.He didn't say anything to that. He set the cup down. He had a way

MinaHe was quiet. His chin came down to rest on the top of my head, careful of the shoulder, his breath going slow in my hair. I let myself sink into it. The comfort was real even if the cause was made of nothing."They don't see you," he said. "That's their failure. Not yours.""I know.""You've spent your whole life in rooms where you do the most and you're counted the least." His hand moved on the shoulder, slow circles now, past the working part into something that was only tenderness. "You are young, and already carrying people who'd never once carried you.""You don't know that.""I knew it by your face." A small sound, almost a laugh, cut short before it got going, the same clip he always put on it. "Took me about a minute. A child shouldn't have a face that tired."My mouth tugged toward the wall, where he couldn't see it. My face had been clenched for hours and it hurt to let it go."She's not worth your shoulder," he said. Bringing it back around. "Whoever she is. A woman wh

SeraI'd been standing outside her door long enough that a girl carrying linens had passed me twice, and both times I'd pretended to be looking at something on the wall.There was nothing on the wall. Grey stone, a torch bracket, the same as every other length of this keep. I'd ordered a man's death with less hesitation than it was taking me to lift my hand and knock on a door I'd walked through a hundred times. I knew the room on the other side. The narrow bed, the vanity with its polished iron mirror, the smell of lavender soap and whatever she burned to keep the damp out. It was a room I'd been safe in, and that was the problem. The last time I'd been in it we'd torn something open and never closed it, and I'd let the weeks since do the closing for me, which meant it had never closed at all.My hand wouldn't go. I stood there and watched it not go. There were things I could make myself do, and this was not one of them, and that frightened me more than the door did.I knocked. Twice,

SeraI grabbed onto her. Both hands on her arm across my chest, gripping hard, and I couldn't make myself let go."I'm sorry." I was crying. "I'm so fucking sorry, Mina. I'm sorry. I keep... I keep hurting you and you keep being here and I don't deserve it. I don't deserve you being here.""Shut up," she said into my back, soft. "Shut up. It's fine.""It's not fine.""It is. Shut up. Stop talking."I couldn't stop. "I used you. I kept you in the dark and I used you and then when I was scared I turned against you and I thought you'd sold me. You. The only person who—""Sera." Firm. "I said shut up."So I shut up. I stood there and held her arm across my chest and cried with my face wrecked and my nose running and absolutely nothing composed about any of it. She held on. We stayed that way until the breathing evened out and the fire had burned down to a lower sound and the guard's shadow had passed the window twice more.She let go first. Came around to face me. She had been crying too,