My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 310

Sera

I held her eyes, level. "What do you want, Taya. You've paid your respects. You can go enjoy the rest of your night."

The sympathy slid off her like it had never been fixed on. She held my eyes a moment, then she dipped her head, the picture of courtesy again. "Enjoy the feast, my Luna." She turned to go.

She got one step and stopped.

When she came back around the courtesy was gone off her face. What was under it was quieter than I expected, and worse for being quiet. Her eyes went to me, then to Mina, then back.

"My father hates you," she said plainly, like she was setting down a fact we both already owned. "He'd have fought you to his last breath. He told me so."

I watched her and said nothing.

"And then." She stopped. Something worked at the corner of her mouth, and for a moment the hate in her had confusion tangled all through it, a daughter who couldn't make the pieces fit.

"Then he turns overnight. Now he's your dog. Moving through the keep making sure no one so much as looks at the Luna wrong. Telling me to behave myself."

Her voice dropped, and the venom in it went cold with years behind it. "The same man who swore he'd put me in that chair. Who'd have torn the pack apart to do it. Now he tells me to behave."

I held still under it. It was the hardest work I'd done in days, that stillness, because I knew exactly what had happened to her father and she was standing there grieving a man she didn't know was dead.

She leaned down. Close, so it was only for me, her voice gone to almost nothing.

"I don't know what you did to him. But I'm going to find out. And the day I do, there won't be a corner of this keep that doesn't know how much of a scam you are." She straightened. "Enjoy it while you have it."

She held me in her eyes with all of it open, the whole of the hate, undisguised, and it went through me cold, because I had seen that exact look before. I had put a man on the ground with his own broken bone through his throat. His eyes wide and wet, the air whistling where it shouldn't, drowning in his own blood, not dying fast enough, and I had stood over him and watched. Kael. Her father. The set of her jaw, the shape of her eyes, the resemblance close enough that for one bad second I was back on that floor, the dead man staring up at me out of his daughter's face.

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