My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 225

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Irina

He 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 bribed three different chamber boys to tell me which rooms he went to at night, and they had all told me, with confusion in their voices, that he went to his own room every night and did not leave it.

I had thought he had a clever way of masking the mate bond. I had been certain I could not feel another woman through him because he was actively blocking the signal. I had spent four years going slowly mad trying to find a woman who, as I came to understand, had never existed.

There was no mistress.

Aldric simply did not want me. He had needed a queen and he had needed an heir, and he had received both inside three years, and once those had been delivered he had set me down. He has gone to his own bed every night for twenty-two years.

I had been twenty-three when I understood that in clean sentences.

I had been twenty-three and the queen of a southern kingdom with a child on my hip, and my body had not been touched by another body for two years, and I had been tired of being a woman whose only function had been completed.