My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 219

Lyra

Nadia's room was three corridors over and a half-stair down from my mother's wing, and I walked it in the same bare feet I had walked the other way in an hour earlier. The stone had been cold the first time. It was colder now. Or I was. I could not tell.

The lower wing was where the scribes and the household clerks slept. Smaller rooms. Plainer carpets. No silver on the door frames. The corridor was lit with the cheaper oil lamps, not the soft ones from my mother's wing, and the shadows fell harder. I knew this hall by heart. I had been walking it for years.

I stopped outside her door.

I did not knock at first.

I stood there listening for whether she was sleeping. I would not wake her if she was sleeping. That had always been the rule, since before any of this had become what it was. Nadia worked her hours. Nadia kept her schedule. I did not arrive at her door demanding she stop being a person on her own time.

I heard a page turning.

She was awake.

I knocked. Three soft. Two pause. One.

The door opened a hand's width.

"Lyra."

She had been crying earlier. I could see it in the soft swelling under her eyes that she would have hidden from anyone else. There had been a time when she hid her face from me too. We had moved past that.

"Can I come in."

She stepped back and opened the door enough for me to slip through, then closed it behind me without a sound.

The room was lamplight. A single low light at her desk. A book she had been reading face-down on the wood. The bed was made because she made it every morning in the order she had always done everything, and the room smelled of her: the soap she used, the ink on her fingers, the candle she had burned at her vanity earlier in the evening.

I had been waiting for this room for an hour, and now I was in it, and the thing in me did not know what to do with itself.

"She is back," Nadia said. Soft.

"She is back."

"How is she."

I did not answer. I crossed to her bed and sat on the edge. I did not look at her. I stared at the wall above her desk, at the small framed sketch she had done years ago of the eastern gardens, hung in the same spot in every room she had ever lived in.

"Lyra."

"In a minute."

"All right."

She did not push. She closed the book on her desk, slowly, so the page would not lose its place. She did not come to me. She stayed at the door. She had learned over the years when to come and when to wait.

I should have been grateful for the patience. Tonight I was not grateful.

"You don't have to stand over there," I said. It came out wrong. Too short, too clipped. My father said things to people in that exact register when he was not pleased with them. "I'm not going to bite."

She did not move toward me.

"Are you not."

"What is that supposed to mean."

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