My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 210

Irina

I stood up. I did not mean to. My legs went out from under the chair before I knew why, and the cramp under my ribs went sharp and I bent forward over the bedpost, fingers wrapped around the cold wood, and I tried to figure out where my body wanted to go.

Out. Out was where my body wanted to go.

Where, though.

I pressed my forehead to the bedpost.

Not back to Holt. The thought came up and I shut it down. Not my father.

Beren of Holt was the alpha of a small pack at the end of the southern provinces, and his alliance with Valdris was older than my marriage to Aldric. The marriage was the alliance. The marriage had paid for the alliance. The original loan from Valdris had covered eighteen years of failed harvests and missed payments and one bad winter where half my father's pack had starved, and by the time I was sixteen, the interest on the principal was higher than anything my father's lands could ever produce. I was the interest. I had known what I was on the night my father came into my chamber and put a hand on my shoulder and said the king has asked for you. He had not been able to meet my eyes. He had walked out within the minute.

My father had not betrayed me by sending me to Aldric. I understood that. He hadn't had a choice. But because he had not had a choice then, he would not have one now either. If I rode south to Holt and asked to be hidden, my father would feed me, he would put me up in my old bedchamber, he would take my hand at dinner. And he would have a courier on the road north to Valdris before the second night was over.

He wouldn't even cry about it. He wasn't that kind of man. He'd tell himself it was for the pack.

He'd be right.

The eastern courts hated me. The western houses had stopped speaking to me when I'd married south. The North was where I had just come from, and the North was the reason I was in this room with my hands shaking on the bedpost.

I had no allies.

I sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed because my legs weren't going to keep holding me. The rug was deep wool, heavy enough that my dress hem disappeared into it. I crossed my arms over my knees and put my forehead down.

Now think.

The road.

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