My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 264

Sera

He came in without knocking, which meant nothing, because it was his room too, and I knew that, and I put it on the list anyway.

That was the state I'd worked myself into. An hour on the edge of the bed with my hands folded and my back straight, and in that hour I'd taken every small ordinary thing and turned it over to read the underside, and there is always something written on the underside if you've decided beforehand that there will be. Mina gone since first light. A coat. A cold hearth. A gap pulled out of the middle of her wardrobe. I'd set them in a row and the row had teeth, and the bad thing about building something like that with your own two hands is that you can't afford yourself the relief of not believing it.

So when the door swung in and he came three steps into the room before he registered I was sitting on the bed at all, the voice in me said he can't even look at me, and I knew it for what it was and I let it talk.

"You're back," I said.

He didn't answer right away. He dragged the heavy outer coat off his shoulders and dropped it over the back of the chair instead of hanging it, and stood there a moment with one hand braced on the chair, his head down, like the chair was doing him a favor. There was a fine grey film across the shoulders of his shirt, and the same dust dulled his hair, and I had no idea what it was from. He didn't tell me. He pulled a hand through his hair and a thin cloud of it came loose and turned in the light from the window, and he watched it fall as if it were the most interesting thing that had happened to him all day.

"Bad meeting," I said.

"They're all bad."

He came over and sat on the edge of the bed beside me, close, the mattress tipping us toward each other, and that should have been the moment. He had a way of arriving back to me at the end of a thing — hands on my shoulders, his nose somewhere along my jaw, the whole rough inventory he never skipped, they're mine, right, the possessive checking-over I'd started to need without admitting it. He didn't do any of it. He sat with his forearms on his thighs and his hands loose between his knees and looked at the dead fire across the room, and whatever was behind his eyes was nowhere near me.

He's gone quiet because of what she told him, the voice said. He's deciding what to do with you. This is what a man looks like the hour before.

I had no evidence for it. I had a coat and a cold fire and a husband who hadn't slept, and I knew that, and I sat there building the rest of it anyway.

"You've got dust in your hair," I said.

"I know."

"From what?"

He didn't take it. He turned his head and finally put his eyes on me properly, and there was a held tension running under him, a coiled thing I'd only ever felt off him before a kill, and I couldn't read where it pointed. Then his nostrils moved.

I'd been waiting for it from the moment the door opened. This morning in the corridor he'd put his nose to my neck and refused to let the wrongness go, had it half-named, almost had me. I braced for the same. I sat very still and let the oil do its quiet work at my throat and my wrists and low across my belly, and I waited for him to take my arm and worry the truth out of the muted edge of it.

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