My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 350

Sera

The rugs in the upper corridor had been beaten before light. I could smell the cold still in them, that mineral smell snow leaves in wool, and I walked the whole length of the level without meeting anyone, which told me something I did not want to know about how the keep was holding. Three days, and it had gone quiet.

He was alive. I checked him a hundred times a day now, and what came back was low and steady and somewhere east, unhurt, riding. That was all it ever gave me. It was not comfort. It was the absence of the other thing, and I had learned to take that and call it enough.

Then the second one.

She sat under this keep like a stone in a shoe. Close and low.

I had felt her every hour for three days, and what came off her now was hunger. I could feel her hunger because I had no idea if she had been fed, and I didn't have the mind to go looking for her. She was a rogue.

I turned at the landing and went the other way.

Mina's door stood open. The room behind it was black, curtains drawn and pinned.

I stopped in the doorway.

Her heat reached me before my eyes came round. Then the shape of her, curled on the bed with the furs kicked down to the foot of it. She was breathing steadily; I could tell she was not asleep.

Three days she had been down in that dark. She had gone into it on purpose and pulled the door after her. I had let her. For the sake of courtesy I had let her have her moment.

I knew she was mad at me for not helping her stop Fenris from taking Jace.

Jace was ambitious in the manner of men who have already lost everything once, and he had shown me the whole of his hand inside an hour of Blackwater coming out of his mouth, and a man like that uses what is nearest to him because nearest is cheapest. He had used Mina to gain access.

So I had taken him off this mountain. I did that protecting my sister.

That was it.

At the window edge the light had gone hard and white. She should have been in the kitchens four hours ago.

I crossed the room, got a fist in the curtain, and pulled.

Morning came in off the snow all at once, flat and absolute. Mina groaned into the mattress.

She was in nothing but her underwear. Her body was bare as she curled up on herself. I could see the outline of her ribs. She had gotten so thin.

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