My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 286

Sera

I'd been standing outside her door long enough that a girl carrying linens had passed me twice, and both times I'd pretended to be looking at something on the wall.

There was nothing on the wall. Grey stone, a torch bracket, the same as every other length of this keep. I'd ordered a man's death with less hesitation than it was taking me to lift my hand and knock on a door I'd walked through a hundred times. I knew the room on the other side. The narrow bed, the vanity with its polished iron mirror, the smell of lavender soap and whatever she burned to keep the damp out. It was a room I'd been safe in, and that was the problem. The last time I'd been in it we'd torn something open and never closed it, and I'd let the weeks since do the closing for me, which meant it had never closed at all.

My hand wouldn't go. I stood there and watched it not go. There were things I could make myself do, and this was not one of them, and that frightened me more than the door did.

I knocked. Twice, soft, half of me praying no one would answer.

"It's open."

Her voice came flat through the wood. No question in it. She knew the weight of a step in that corridor, knew mine from the girls', and she'd said it's open in the tone of someone who'd already decided not to make it easy.

I went in.

Mina was at the vanity, side-on to me, working a comb through the underside of her hair with her left hand. Her right arm she kept low, close to her body, the elbow tucked, and when she reached up to free a snag she did it with the left and brought the right along stiff, the shoulder moving as one piece with her spine instead of on its own. She'd built a whole way of sitting around not using it. Every adjustment of it landed in my own chest, because I knew the exact shape of the wardrobe corner that had put it there. I'd heard the sound it made.

"You're up early," I said.

"Always am." She didn't turn. "You're the one with the strange hours."

I shut the door. The latch dropped louder than I meant.

For a moment neither of us said anything. The fire ticked in the grate. She kept combing. I stood three feet inside the room with my hands not knowing where to be, and I had the sick, familiar sense of having stood exactly here before, in this room, with something broken open on the floor between us that we'd stepped over instead of cleaning up. We were good at that. We'd had the practice.

"How is it," I said. I didn't say the shoulder. I didn't have to.

"It's a shoulder." She set the comb down. "It hurts. It'll stop."

"Good. That's... good."

She turned on the stool and gave me a look that wasn't angry, which was almost worse. It was tired. The kind of tired that comes from deciding whether to give you the time.

"Is that why you came."

"No."

"Then why."

I opened my mouth and nothing came. The speech I'd built on the walk here, the careful thing I'd rehearsed, the words in the right order, it all sat in my throat and wouldn't move. What came instead was stupid, and small.

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