My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 291

Sera

Mina had been in our room for the better part of an hour and she had touched everything in it twice.

She was at the window now, then she wasn't, she was at the foot of the bed picking up the comb I'd set down and turning it over and putting it back not quite where it had been. She couldn't hold still. She'd come in dressed already, the good wool, her hair done in a way I hadn't seen her bother with, and she'd been ready since before she got here and the readiness had nowhere to go, so it came out of her as motion, around the room, around us, while Fenris and I were still half into the day's clothes and moving at the speed of two people who had buried something heavy the night before and not slept much after.

"You're not even close," she said.

"We're close."

"You're not. He's been down there since the sun was over the gate. He's going to think no one's coming."

"He's not going to think that."

"You don't know him." She caught herself, a grin slipping out at the floor. "You'll see. Hurry up."

I had never seen her like this. That was the thing I kept turning over while I worked the ties at my collar. In all the time I'd known Mina, through every hard turn of it, I had seen her sharp and I had seen her guarded and I had seen her gone cold and flat with hurt. I had not seen this.

She could be happy, yes. But not this. She was lit from somewhere I didn't have a name for, and she kept moving because the light wouldn't let her sit, and watching it do that to her put a thickness in my throat I had to work around.

"Mina." Fenris hadn't raised his eyes from his boot. "Please sit. You're wearing a track in my floor."

"Your floor is stone."

"You'll manage it."

She made a face at the back of his head and he didn't see it and I did, and for a second the two of them were ten years younger and I was a stranger in a doorway watching a brother and a sister who had grown up in this keep with no one but each other.

"Out," I said.

She turned. "What?"

"Out, Mina. We can't dress with you circling the room. Go down. Tell him we're coming. We'll be ten minutes behind you."

"That's exactly why I shouldn't go down." She planted herself. "If I go down then it's just me and him and your chamber men staring at him like he's a goat at market, and ten minutes turns into thirty because you two will start a conversation, I know you will, you'll get to the door and Fenris will remember one more thing he has to say and we'll all die of old age. I'll wait. I'll wait right here and make sure you actually move."

"Mina."

"I'm helping."

"Mina." It was Fenris this time, and he put a little of the floor into it, the register that ends things, and even he had to use her name twice on her these days.

She held for one more breath. Then her shoulders came down.

"Fine." She went to the door. "Fine, I'll leave, I'll go stand in the cold with a man I love and wait for the two of you to remember how doors work."

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