My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 325

Sera

The women came for him a little after moonrise, and I stayed where I was, propped against the headboard with the blanket pulled up to my ribs, and watched them turn my husband into something built for killing.

There were four of them. I knew two by name now, Bekka and the older one, Hesse, who never spoke to me directly and never quite failed to be polite either.

They worked around him without waiting for instruction, all of it worn smooth by long repetition, the motion doing itself. One at his back with the leather. One at his feet. Hesse handling the straps across his chest, pulling each one tighter than seemed comfortable and then tighter again, and Fenris standing through all of it with his arms held a little out from his sides, patient, letting himself be handled.

I'd never seen him like that. Still. Given over to other people's hands.

The armor wasn't armor of the kind the South made. No plate, nothing that shone. It was layered hide and boiled leather and something dark worked into the seams that I didn't ask about, and it made him bigger, which I wouldn't have thought was a thing he needed help with.

The straps bit lines into the muscle of his arms. Hesse smoothed a palm down his back when she finished, one flat pass, checking the whole rig held, and stepped away.

He caught me watching.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm just learning the process." I kept my voice level. "Nobody teaches the Luna this part."

"There's nothing to teach. They dress me. I go." He rolled one shoulder, testing the give of the leather. "It isn't complicated really."

"It looks complicated from here."

Bekka glanced at me when I said it, quick, then back to her work. I could tell they didn't like me talking during this. I couldn't have told you how I knew that, but I knew it, the same way I knew half of what I knew in this place now, by the small stillnesses that opened up around the wrong word.

I let them finish. It took a while. When the last strap was set Fenris flexed both arms, dropped into a half-crouch and came back up, the whole weight of the rig moving with him, settled and natural on him, and he made a low sound that meant he was satisfied.

"Why now," I said.

"What?"

"It's the middle of the night. You could sleep. Ride at first light, see the ground you're crossing." I shifted the blanket. "You're taking men into a fight none of you can see coming in the dark. I don't understand the sense in it."

He held my eyes a moment. Not annoyed. Weighing whether the question deserved the long answer or the short one.

"Wolves hunt under moonlight," he said.

"Still doesn’t make sense."

"It does actually." He crossed to the chest by the window and grabbed his gauntlets off the top of it. "The moon's up. That's the whole point of it. We've always gone at night. My father did, his father did, back further than anyone bothered writing down. Dawn's for farmers."

"That's still not an answer."

He scoffed.

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