My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 300

Mina

"And I'm going to find out what it is. Every bit of it. And when I do, there won't be a corner of this keep she can hide in, because they'll all see her for the scam she is."

Inside me, something turned over.

Because I knew. That was the awful part, standing there with the stew going cold in my hands. I knew more than Taya did and I'd worked hard not to.

Sera had come to me once with red eyes and told me two things in the same hour. That she was carrying a child, and that Kael was dead. I hadn't asked her to explain the second one. I'd seen the shape of it sitting behind her face, the size of the thing she was holding, and I'd made a choice, the same choice I was making now with my face gone smooth and still. I didn't want it.

I'd spent my whole life with other people's blood on the floor and I was done volunteering for it. Sera could carry her own. I had a man who was good to me and a kitchen full of women who'd teased me about my hair, and I wanted to keep those things, and you don't keep soft things by picking up every knife that gets offered to you.

So I didn't flinch at dead. I didn't flinch at flinch. I stood in that doorway and let Taya think she was the one holding the dangerous thing.

"If you've got a problem with the Luna," I said, and my voice came out level, which surprised even me, "take it to the Luna. Stand in her doorway and say all that to her face. I'd love to watch." I shifted the bowl. "It's got nothing to do with me, and you've got no reason to be standing in my way saying it. Move."

Taya didn't move an inch. But something went across her face, a small crack, because the words had landed somewhere she hadn't expected to be hit. Her eyes went around the corridor, quick, a bully checking who was near when the ground shifts. Then she came back to me, and her voice went low and vicious.

"You fucking bitch. You think you can talk to me however you like now? Have you forgotten who I am?"

I don't know where it came from, except that it had been coming for years.

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