All Chapters of My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Chapter 381 - Chapter 388

SeraThe keep had gone quiet by the time I reached my chambers, the corridors empty in that particular way they went empty when word of something strange had already run ahead of me. I could feel it in the way the few servants I passed kept their eyes down. Nobody stopped me. Nobody asked.I got the door shut with my shoulder, the rogue still bundled against my chest, and stood there a second in the dark before I remembered to light anything. She hadn't made a sound the whole walk back. Just her face pressed into me, breathing slow, the furs tucked tight around her, and that same doubled pulse ticking under my hands, hers and mine running close enough together that I couldn't always tell which was which.I laid her down on the bed. Not the floor. Not a chair by the fire. The bed, because some part of me had already decided that before I'd thought it through, and by the time I noticed I was doing it, it was done.She curled into the furs and watched me with that same open, hungry look,

SeraThe knock came before any of us had touched the bread.Not the servants' knock, quick and apologetic. This one was heavier, more certain of itself, and Mina's head came up at the same second mine did."Enter," I said.It was one of the guards from the corridor, not one I recognised, young enough that he kept his eyes down out of habit rather than fear. "Luna. It's Kael, he says he needs to see you now, that he already tried yesterday and you weren't able to."I felt Mina go still beside me. The rogue, curled against my side with her face still half in the furs, didn't stir, but I noticed the guard's eyes catch on her for half a second before he remembered himself and looked away."Send him in," I said.Mina didn't move to leave. I watched her, wondering how she'd hold up. She'd known for weeks it wasn't really Kael. But she hadn't stood this close to him since I told her, and I didn't know what that would do to her.Bram came in alone, and shut the door himself behind him without

Sera"I'm calling her Wren.""Wren," Mina said, slow, like she was trying to feel the weight of it in her mouth. She looked down at the rogue, then back at me, and shook her head. "I'd have picked something better."I scoffed. "What?"She went quiet a moment, thinking. "Amara," she said finally.I laughed before I could stop myself. "That's too Southern."Mina's eyebrows went up. "What? Did you just decide you hate the south now?""No." I looked down at the rogue, still curled into my side. "It's not that. She's Northern. Not from anywhere south of here. It has to be a name from around here, not one of ours."Mina sighed, long and put-upon. "Definitely not Wren, then." She said it again, testing it, and made a face like it had gone sour in her mouth. "Pick something else."Bram had gone quiet through the whole exchange, standing near the door like he wasn't sure he was still welcome in the conversation. When the two of us finally ran out of words, he asked, careful, "Is that the mad w

YvaraThere's a particular way Fenris goes quiet that I never had to learn from anyone. I've had it in me since before I understood what it meant, the same way you know the weight of your own hand. Ten feet behind him or ten paces, I always know the second it starts. He'd gone that way an hour out from camp and hadn't come back from it, and I didn't ask where we were walking, because I already knew.I led anyway. Off the main trail, up through frost-stiff grass and trees gone bare enough that the cold came straight through them, no windbreak left in any of it. My feet found the ground before my head caught up to why. The way they know the floor of my own room in the dark. Neither of us had come this way in two years, and somehow neither of us had lost it.We came up through the last of the trees into a clearing gone to seed since anyone last stood in it, and there in the middle, the cairn we raised for Dimitri two years ago.Two years does to stacked stone what neglect does to a wound