My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 351

Sera

"That's us both."

It went in under the ribs, into the same place the other cruel things had been, and I swallowed it clean because there was work to do and I could not afford to be selfish and because I have never in my life known what to do with truth said kindly.

I stood off the bed.

Get up. You need a proper bath."

"No."

"Mina."

"No." She drew her knees up. "Go away, Sera."

"Not happening."

"I'm not doing this." Her voice went thin and she flattened it back out. "I'm not getting up, I'm not eating, I'm not going down to the kitchens. Just go away please."

"You're getting in the water, and I'm bathing you, Mina!" My voice shook slightly it surprised me.

She went quiet, staring at me. I swallowed. I was holding on to something I keep lying to myself about, and now it was affecting me.

"Why do you care?"

'I don't know.'

I didn't say that; instead, I got both hands under her arms and hauled. Surprisingly, she didn't protest, or try to stop me, but she didn't help me either.

She just stayed still, as I pulled her up, then supported her standing. I started to walk her with a fur round her shoulders and her feet bare on the stone, and when I put her in the water she sat exactly where I put her, knees up, arms round them, eyes staring blankly.

The pool ran hot out of the rock down there and the steam came off it in sheets and hung. I got in behind her with the soap.

Her hair had matted at the back into a thing I had to work through with my fingers before the comb could go anywhere near it, and I did it slowly, section by section, didn't try to pull so I don't hurt her.

She had done this for me once. In the copper tub in the room above, with my face split open and my hands shaking too badly to hold anything, she had washed Taya's blood out of my hair and had not once told me to be brave.

I did not say that either.

The water moved, and the steam went up and neither of us said anything for a long while.

I got her out and dry and sat her on the bench and started oil into her shoulders, and when my hands were busy enough that neither of us had to look at anything, I asked her.

"How well do you know Yvara?"

She had to decide whether the question was worth answering. I watched it go across her back.

"Since I was small." Her voice came out of her thick. "She was always there. She's just always been there."

Which was no good to me at all. Mina had come into the world long after whatever it was I was asking about.

"Do you know about the—" I stopped with my mouth open.

I did not know if she was supposed to know. Fenris had never once behaved as though it were a secret. Neither had Yvara, standing in that stable with a torch in her hand, telling me what I now owned.

ut Yvara had also put two men on that woman and had her carried out of the yard before the pack could see her, and men do not carry things out of yards in the dark for nothing.

I could not hold it by myself another day, and the only man who could have told me what to do with it was somewhere east of here on a horse.

"About what?" Mina asked.

I sat there with the oil going cold on my fingers.

"About what, Sera."

Fuck it.

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