My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 290

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Sera

“Why would anyone do that."

"Because I wanted you." He said it plainly, a fact too simple to need defending, and he couldn't seem to understand why I was making it complicated. "The child was already there. It didn't change what I wanted. So I took the vow."

Something in me pulled tight and went looking for the soft place to put a knife.

"And you said nothing." Low. "For all of it. You knew, and you watched me carry it. You watched me go grey, you watched me flinch every time you came near with that nose of yours, and you said nothing. You let me come to you. Tonight, on the worst night of my life, you made me be the one to drag it into the light, when you could have ended it any time you wanted."

"Sera."

"That's what you do, isn't it." I couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop. "You decide what people get to carry. You sit on the hard things and call it protecting them. You'd rather hold a thing alone until it rots you out than say it to someone's face, because saying it means somebody gets to see inside you, and you'd sooner die than let that happen." His face took it and I kept going. "You're not protecting anyone, Fenris. You just can't stand to be known."

It was an ugly thing to say. I said it anyway.

He didn't roar. I'd seen Fenris angry and I knew the shape of it, the heat coming off him, the wolf rising up behind his eyes, and I braced for it again.

It didn't come. He went still instead. Still in a way that was worse than the heat, a stillness that went all the way down, and when he spoke his voice had dropped to something I'd never heard out of him.

"You're right."

I hadn't expected that. My own footing went out from under me.

"I don't say things." He'd turned his face from me, toward the dark in the window, toward whatever he kept out there. "There are things I've carried so long I wouldn't know how to set them down if I tried. I tell myself I hold them to keep them off other people. That's a lie I've believed for a long time. The truth is that when I say a thing out loud it becomes real, and there are things I'd rather carry to my grave than make real by saying them." His jaw worked. "The child was one of them. As long as I didn't say it, it was just a thing I knew. The moment I said it, I'd have to feel it. So I didn't say it. You're right about all of it."

The anger went out of me all at once. I'd swung to make him bleed, and instead of bleeding he'd opened a door, onto something so much bigger than what I'd been hitting that I couldn't find the edges of it.