My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 280

Sera

I'd been standing outside Mina's door long enough that my feet had gone cold through the slippers, and the room behind it was as dead and dark as it had been the night before.

I'd knocked. Twice, soft, then once with the side of my fist, and nothing came back. The hearth-light didn't move under the door the way it would if a fire were lit. I'd put my palm flat to the wood and listened the way I'd taught myself to listen in this place, for a heartbeat, for breath, for the shift of a body on a mattress, and there was none of it. She wasn't in there. She hadn't been in there all night. I'd lain awake in my own bed turning it over until the turning wore a groove, and the groove only ever ran to one place, which was that Mina had gone down those stairs in a coat and taken my secret to my husband, and that was why Fenris had looked at me the way he'd looked at me and then walked out and not come back.

I put my forehead against her door for a second. Then I pushed off it. There was no point standing here freezing for a woman who'd already done the thing.

I'd half turned for the corridor when I heard her.

Soft. Careful. The particular sound of someone trying not to make a sound, which carries further in an empty hall than ordinary walking ever would. I went still against the doorframe where the bracket-light didn't reach, and she came up the passage from the lower stair without seeing me, hood up, shoulders drawn in, moving with her weight on the balls of her feet. She had one hand holding the front of a dark coat closed at her throat. She kept glancing back over her shoulder at the stairs behind her. She moved like a woman who'd lifted something off a table and was getting it out of the house before anyone counted the silver.

She got within a few feet of her own door before she looked forward.

She saw me standing in the dark and the whole of her jumped. A short, swallowed yelp got out of her before she clamped it down, one hand flying flat to her chest.

"Oh fuck—" She caught the rest of it behind her teeth. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, then over my shoulder down the empty hall and back to my face. "What are you doing."

"Waiting for you. Where've you been?"

She didn't answer that. She got her key into the lock and got the door open and got a hand on my arm and steered me through it ahead of her, fast, like the corridor itself might be listening, and she shut the door behind us and turned the latch and stood with her back against it.

She let her breath out. A long one, all the way down, the breath of somebody who'd been holding it for the length of a hallway.

The room was cold. Her hearth was grey ash, gone out hours ago, and there was a thin grey light coming in at the window edges that meant the morning hadn't properly started yet. She pushed the hood back. Her hair was down and there was color high in her face from the cold, or from the stairs, or from whatever she'd been doing wherever she'd been doing it, and her mouth had a softness around it I hadn't seen on her in weeks. Not the hard set she wore at me lately. Something looser. Something that had been somewhere good.

She looked at me, finally, the way you look at a thing you've found in your room that has no business there.

"What are you doing creeping around outside my door at this hour?"

"I should be asking you that."

I let my eyes go down her and back up. The coat. The boots, real ones, laced to the shin and dirtied at the toe. The hood she'd just dropped.

"Why are you dressed like a ranger?"

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