My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 224

Irina

My father is a spineless idiot.

He let his wife burn so his sister-in-law would stop being uncomfortable at the dinner table. He let her burn rather than stand in his own hall and say no. He let her burn so he could continue being the head of a small pack at the end of a small southern province where the food was always almost short and the children's shoes were always almost worn through. The sadness in his eyes had not been the sadness of a man being broken. It had been the sadness of a man who already knew, before the elders had spoken, that he was not going to do anything to stop them. The sadness had been the down payment on doing nothing.

He sold me to Aldric years later for a debt he should have died refusing. He sold my younger sisters in the same season for prices I do not want to think about. He sold all of us in his soft voice, without raising it once.

I was not surprised, the night he came into my chamber and put his hand on my shoulder and said the king has asked for you. I should have been. But I had known already.

Aldric had been old to me at the wedding.

Not old the way a man at the end of his life is old. Old the way a man who has been the head of a thing for a long time is old. He had been forty-two. He had the lines a man of forty-two carries. He had a small scar at the corner of his mouth from a young campaign. He had grey at his temples and a sharp tiredness around the eyes he had not bothered to hide.

He has grey at his temples now.

I have been married to him for twenty-three years. He has the same hair. He has the same scar. He has the same tiredness around the eyes and the same lines and the same hands. He has no more grey. He has no less. He does not move differently. He does not sleep more. He does not need spectacles for the small printing he reads at the long table. He turns to me sometimes across a room and his face is exactly the face he had the day he walked into my father's hall and gave me the long, slow examining gaze that meant the contract was being honored.

Wolves age. Wolves age slower than humans, but they age. I have lines around the corners of my eyes I did not have ten years ago. I have weight I did not carry at thirty. I have a tiredness in my back I am told my mother had had at the same age. The bond holds some of it back, the wolf in me holds some of it back, but only some. I have followed the rule that wolves follow. I have moved through time.

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