My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 273

Elara

The gold weighed three and a half pounds and it had bought me nothing, and I'd been sitting on the edge of the bed working that out for the better part of an hour.

I'd taken it out of the lining where I'd sewn it and laid the whole of it on the fur in front of me, the chains and the bracelets thick enough to chain a door and the rings with the red stones, and in the lamplight it looked like exactly what it was. A way out with no door on the far side.

Here's the part nobody who'd done this to me had bothered to think all the way through, or maybe they'd thought it through and that was the joke. The stick in my skin only ever fooled wolves. That was the entire point of it. To every wolf nose in this freezing pile of stone I was one of them, nothing worth a second sniff.

But put me on a human street. Put me in a human market with human people and their soft dull noses that couldn't smell a lie or a fear or a king all over a woman's body, and I was a woman. Young. Good skin, a heavy bag, walking through a crowd that would never once know what I was carrying or where I'd been.

I could go back.

That was the thought I kept picking up and letting myself hold for a few seconds before I put it down again. A hundred and twenty thousand in unregistered gold wasn't running money. It was starting money. Enough for me and my mother and my sister to vanish into the human world and not just crawl through it but live.

My father had worked land before the wolves came and burned all of it down to the dirt, and I knew the shape of that life, the seasons of it, the smell of turned earth in spring. The gold was enough to buy back into it somewhere far and quiet. And my mother. She'd been a nurse, but the thing she actually loved, the thing she used to talk about back when the future was still a place we thought we were going, was cloth. She had an eye for it. With money like this behind her she could have had the thing she wanted instead of the thing the fire left her.

We could have been people again. Not assets. Not a king's companion and her broken family kept in a pretty estate. People, with a business and a roof and small ordinary problems that didn't end in a processing center.

I let myself see it for exactly as long as it took to start to hurt, and then I made myself stop.

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