My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 158

158 /318

Sera

It is fairly easy to make a plan. You sit in a warm room with a map or a bottle of ale, and you move people around in your head like wooden tiles on a strategy board. You say, “If she does this, we do that,” and it sounds clean. It sounds professional. But the execution? The execution is a different ball game entirely. It’s messy. It’s loud. And more often than not, the results are covered in the kind of blood that doesn't just wash off with a bit of soap and a towel.

I was struggling, my boots scuffing against the stone floor, while Fenris held me firmly against his chest. He was like a wall of heated iron and muscle, his arms wrapped around my middle so tight I could feel the individual links of his leather bracers pressing into my ribs. I tried to pull away, my heart hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against my sternum, but he didn't budge. He just tucked my head under his chin, muffling my protests against the thick wool of his tunic.

Just beside us was the heavy oak door that led to my mother’s quarters. The wood was thick, but it wasn't thick enough to drown out the sounds.

I heard Irina's whimpers. They weren't the "distressed queen" whimpers she used to get my father’s attention; they were the sounds of a woman who had finally realized the floor had dropped out from under her. Then came a groan—deep, wet, and pained. My stomach did a violent flip. I knew that sound. It was the sound a body makes when the metal finds a home in soft tissue.

I lurched forward again, my hands clawing at Fenris’s forearms. "Fenris, let me—"

"No," he rumbled. The word vibrated through my skull, low and absolute. "Not yet."

I looked across the narrow corridor. Mina was standing right opposite us, her back pressed against the cold masonry. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated until they nearly swallowed the dark irises. She was shaking. This was the girl who had cheered when I broke Taya’s arm in the dirt, the girl who walked through this fortress like she owned the stones. But right now, the vibrancy was gone. She looked like she was realizing, for the first time, that the game we were playing had real teeth.

She was likely thinking we had gone too far. And it was even worse because the girl didn't really know what she was actually fighting for. She didn't know about Elder Kael rotting in the ravine. She didn't know about the face Bram was currently wearing. She just knew that she had been the one to set Kark up with Irina. She had facilitated the "chance" encounter, and now she was listening to the bloody results of her own handiwork.

We had to do something. The delegation from Valdris was a rot that couldn't be allowed to spread.

My mind drifted back, blurring the pained sounds from the room into the quiet, lethal planning session in the Alpha's den only a few nights ago. At the time, I wasn't even the Luna yet. I was just the "Valdris girl" who had helped hide a body.

Fenris had been sitting behind that massive desk, the one I had nearly been fucked on only hours before. Yvara was leaning against the mantle, her curved daggers resting on the stone. The air was thick with the scent of pine and the heavy, unsaid tension of the Kael murder.