My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 275

Elara

There's one rule that keeps a human alive in a house full of wolves, and it's that you are never alone. I'd held to it for months. Tonight I'd broken it.

I stood in the middle of the room with my face still wet and kept my eyes on Kane instead of on the duffel by the bed, and the same thing went around and around in me. How much had carried. I'd emptied myself into that box out loud, the contract and Marcas and Aldric's name and please help me, in a voice I hadn't bothered to keep down, because I'd stopped believing anyone was on the other end of anything I said.

Someone had been on the other end of the wall.

"Elara." He took another step, and his hand came up like he wanted to put it on me and didn't know if he was allowed. "There's no one here. Who were you talking to?"

I read his face before I could name it as reading. It's the thing I do the way other people breathe. And what sat in his face wasn't suspicion. Suspicion has a hardness to it, a narrowing, and there was none of that. There was confusion, and under the confusion the plain stupid hurt of a man who'd walked in on his wife crying alone and couldn't work out why she hadn't come to him with it. He hadn't caught words. A man who'd caught the words would be a different man standing in that doorway. He'd caught a sound through the door and come in to an empty room and it had frightened him.

I let the crying come. I didn't have to reach for it. It was already sitting at the top of me from the box, held in a shape that looked like control, and I stopped holding. My face came apart. The breath scraped out of me and I pressed both hands over my mouth and let my shoulders go, and through it, broken, two words.

"My mom."

He went still.

"She's dead."

"What—" He crossed the floor and his hands closed on my arms, big and warm and clumsy. "When? When did this happen?"

"A week." I let it come out wrecked, muffled into my own hands. "About a week ago."

"A week." Something left his face and something worse moved in to take its place. "You've been—" He pulled me in against his chest, one hand spreading at the back of my head, and I let myself be pulled, and I put my face into him and breathed the wolf reek of him that I have never once gotten used to, that closes my throat every single time, and I went soft against it and let him believe he was giving me something.

"I'm sorry," he said into my hair. "Fuck... A whole week, and you've been carrying that in here alone. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you've got enough." Broken up, into his shirt. "You've got the whole pack on you, the borders, all of it. I wasn't going to put my crying on top of all that. It isn't fair to you."

"I did something stupid, too." I drew back far enough to look up at him, and I wiped under my eyes with the edge of one finger, careful, the small composed gesture of a woman trying to pull herself together for somebody else's sake. "While I've been like this. I haven't been thinking straight, Kane, and I—the contract. That Mistwood man."

I shook my head. "I keep turning it over and I can't make it sit right. I was so frightened. About the beasts, about the children on the school paths, about—" my hand went to my stomach, flat, and I left it there, and his eyes dropped to it the way his eyes always drop to it "—and he made it sound like the only thing that would keep everyone safe, and I signed it without you."

"I sold your pack out from under you because I got scared and I wasn't in my right mind, and you should be furious with me, and you're not, and somehow that's worse."

"Elara. Look at me." He took my face in both hands and ran his thumbs under my eyes, and there was so much earnestness in him it was almost hard to hold the look. "The beasts are gone. You hear me? Whatever that contract cost, the border's been quiet for the first time in months. No more children coming off those paths in pieces. You did that. You were out of your mind with grief and frightened for this pack, and you did the thing that stopped it, while I was too busy mourning to protect anyone. I'm not going to punish you for that."

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