My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 206

Aldric

I went to my knees in front of her.

She followed me down with her eyes. Nothing else moved — not her hands, not her chin. She just watched me go down, and then she was looking at the top of my head, and I looked up at her.

I smiled. Then I shook my head slowly, with the particular remorse of a man who means it.

I reached up and took her face in my hand. My thumb moved across her cheekbone, back and forth.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You shouldn't have had to do any of this alone. That was too much."

I started to check her over — her jaw, her neck, the line of her collar. Looking for anything the journey had left behind, any sign the attack had gotten closer than the story suggested. After a moment I looked up at her.

"Were you hurt anywhere?"

She shook her head. "I'm fine," she said. "Just exhausted from the running, and the hiding—" She stopped. Shook her head again, and then the tears came, suddenly and properly, spilling down her face and dropping onto mine where I was kneeling below her.

She started to wheeze.

"I was so scared," she said, her voice breaking up around it. "I watched those things tear into Torin. We couldn't do anything — they were so big, we couldn't have done anything even if we'd tried. All we could think about was protecting ourselves." She pulled a breath. "They tore into the carriages and there was nothing to do but run."

I kept my hand on her cheek, moving my thumb in slow circles as she spoke, nodding through it.

Then I said: "There's no way you could have outrun them."

She froze.

I smiled.

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