My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 211

Irina

He had to drag me three steps before my body remembered how.

We ran for an hour. The two that had not gotten Torin came after us into the trees. They were behind us and they were closing and we were down to maybe twenty yards of running room before a rock face when they stopped.

They turned around. They walked back to the road.

We had thought, at the time, that the smell of the kill had pulled them off us. I had needed to think that, because anything else would have stopped me from running.

I let myself think the other thing now.

Wolves of conquest, Aldric had said an hour ago in the study. With the right person in charge, you could direct an entire Northern army of rogues. Point them wherever you needed them to go.

He had said it because he was telling me he knew. He was using the captain's debrief as cover to tell me exactly what he thought had happened on that road. He was watching my face for the answer.

And what he had got was yes.

I pressed both hands flat against my mouth.

Sera.

Sera had done this.

When my daughter had told me to ride home and tell my husband we had been attacked by rogues on the road, I had assumed she meant lie. Stitch a story. Use the soft voice. I had not assumed she meant put real wolves on a real road and have them tear my friend apart in front of me and call them off when they were finished.

She had used the wolves of the North against the southern delegation. She had directed them. She had pointed them.

She had become an army general while I was still treating her as an embarrassed girl.

A short, ugly noise came up out of me. It was not a laugh. It came close. I put my forehead down on the rug.

I had carried that girl in my body. I had picked her tutors. I had picked the ribbons in her hair. The girl who used to crawl into my dressing room and sit on the floor and dab my perfume on her wrists from a bottle she could barely lift — that girl had stood in front of me three days ago and played a recording of me begging a barbarian to fuck me harder, and her face had not moved.

She was becoming her father.

The thought arrived. It was cold. It went down through the bone of my chest and stopped at my stomach. I had been fighting Aldric for twenty-two years. I had built whatever was left of me around fighting him. And while I had been busy fighting him, I had been raising the version of him that was going to outlive him.

The cramp under my ribs let go.

The one piece that did not fit was Torin.

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