My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 277

Elara

This room, all of it, the carved crib and the blue walls and the tiny folded clothes, was the price of Sera. He'd thrown her out for a child. That was the whole of it, stripped down. He didn't love me. I'm not a stupid woman and I never told myself otherwise. He loved her, the omega, the one who'd waited six years, and he'd given her chair away and marked the wound with a baby that was supposed to fix everything.

An heir first. Everything a man feels comes after. Those are the rules wolves break themselves on, and back home I used to think people were the foolish ones. Then I met wolves. They'll tear out their own hearts for a custom and call it strength.

He'd been suffering since she left. I'd watched it. The shadows that don't leave his eyes, the way his hand drifts to the old scar on his collarbone when he thinks no one's watching, pressing it like it aches. He chose duty over the only thing he loved, and the thing he chose instead of her was me. A human. A lie in a borrowed body.

"Why did you do all this?" I turned, taking the whole room in with a slow look. The crib alone must have cost a season's trade. "It's a nursery, Kane. A crib and a blanket would have done it." I shook my head at the whole of it. "This is too much."

"Nonsense." He said it fast, almost offended. "Nothing is too much. Not for him."

He caught both my hands in his, and he was laughing now, low and pleased with himself, and he pulled me off the spot I'd rooted to and drew me toward the middle of the floor.

I didn't understand the happiness coming off him. I've made a study of reading people, it's the thing that's kept me breathing, and I couldn't place what he was running on. I let him pull me and I watched his face and I gave him a small careful smile with a question folded into it.

"What's gotten into you?"

"Dance with me," he said.

"What?"

He had me by the hand already, drawing me in, his weight shifting like the music was a thing the room already held.

"There's no music."

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