My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 263

Sera

"Mina."

I put my ear near the wood. There was no fire-sound, no shift of weight on floorboards, no breathing. I worked the latch and pushed the door in.

The room had gone cold. That was the first thing. The hearth held a bed of grey ash with no orange in it at all, dead long enough that the chill had crept all the way back into the stone, and a room where a wolf had been an hour ago did not get that cold.

The bed was made. The vanity I'd seen her at last, with its little metal mirror and the jar of charcoal she'd been smudging onto her eyes, sat clean and squared away, the brush set down parallel to the comb, everything in its place in a way that made my skin crawl without my being able to say why.

I went to the wardrobe and opened it. I don't know what I was looking for. Clothes hung there, plenty of them, but a gap in the middle where things had been pulled, and on the floor of it the shape pressed into the dust where something heavy had sat a long time and been lifted away.

"Mina," I said again, to the empty room, like saying it would put her back in it.

I shut the wardrobe. I stood there with my hand on the cold door of it and let the dread settle into its proper shape, which was not where is she? Did she—

A sound came from the corridor. I went out fast.

A laundry maid was coming up the passage with a basket against her hip, and she startled when she saw me and dropped into the little bow. "My Luna."

"The Alpha's sister. Mina. Have you seen her?"

"Not — no, my Luna. Not just now."

"When."

The girl's mouth worked. She was young, freckled across the nose, and she didn't want to be the one standing in front of me with no answer. "This morning, maybe. Early. She was on the lower stair when I came up with the first wash."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify