My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 279

Elara

Three Years Ago.

There was a clock in that room I never once found. You could hear it ticking somewhere behind the paneling, steady, and I spent a good part of that last night hunting it along the walls with my eyes instead of listening to the man across the table tell me how to take a stranger's life apart.

He didn't mind. Aldric never minded where your attention wandered, as long as you ended up where he'd already decided you would. He poured the wine himself, both glasses, no servant in the room to do it for him, and that's the thing about him I still haven't shaken. You brace for that kind of man to be all edges. He isn't. He's warm, and gentle with it, and the warmth is the worst part of him by a long way.

I'd like to say I sat there horrified. I didn't. I'd done my horror weeks before, in a colder room, with my family's lives laid out on a table between us, and by that last night the loud part of me had gone quiet and useful. The woman he was describing didn't have a name yet. He never gave me one. She was a chair that needed emptying, a cup that needed tending, a problem in the South with good hands and a husband, and it is a very easy thing to agree to ruin a person who is still only a shape in a sentence. I've thought about that more than I'd like. How light they keep it, at the start. Before the shape grows a face.

He'd already taken me through the rest of it, the house and the invented parents and the slow patient work of the cup, and none of that is what stayed. It was a great many careful words for something that came down to go south, take her place, give the man what she can't. Half my mind was on the clock. The wine was good. My arm still pulled where they'd set the thing into it three days before, a small hot tightness each time I reached, and I kept reaching for the glass anyway.

It was the last piece that brought me back to the table.

"And you'll give him a child," he said. The same voice he'd used for the carriage and the curtains.

I laughed. It got out before I could catch it. "With what."

He only waited.

"I'm a person, Aldric." The wine had gone tepid in my hand. "You sat me in this same chair the first week and told me so yourself. One of us and one of them don't make children. Can't. Hasn't happened since before anybody's grandmother drew breath. Your words."

"My words."

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