My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 234

I watched Torin.

The brine had moved with the small currents in the bath when the door had opened, and the surface had settled again, and what I had in front of me was a man in pieces under a layer of yellow water. The left arm was gone at the shoulder. The right arm was whole below the elbow, but the elbow itself was a flat working joint with hide grown back over the moving parts — Madra's work, slow patient layers laid down across.

The chest was not the chest of a man who had been intact a month ago. There were sections of the ribcage that had been taken and the skin had been pulled across the gap and stitched to the meat under. The legs below the water were the things I did not let myself study for long. The legs were the part Madra had not been allowed to heal, because she needed to keep specific channels open for the brine to work, and what was under his waist did not have a name in any anatomy I had been taught.

The face above the strap was almost whole. The face had been preserved. The face still had the small mole at the temple I had used to identify him for the council the morning after Yvara had brought him in. The eyes still tracked.

He blinked.

He knew I was the reason he was looking at me out of a copper bath at the bottom of my husband's keep. He knew I was the reason he had not been allowed to sleep. He knew he had been given neither the dignity of a death nor the mercy of going under, and he knew — because Madra would have told him — that he would not be given either until the woman who had ordered him kept this way said otherwise.

He blinked again.

I held his eyes.

"Fuck,"I cursed under my breath.

I turned to go.

Madra moved.

Her hand came out of the sleeve of her robe and closed around my wrist before I had taken the second step toward the door.

The fingers were thin. The grip was stronger than the rest of her body had any right to make.

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