My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 81

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Sera

I stood there in the center of the room. A full minute passed in complete silence. My mother slowly pulled herself up from the floor. She sat on the very edge of the bed. She looked exhausted, pathetic, and deeply ashamed.

"Sera," Irina started. Her voice was weak. "I am sorry. I didn't know what I was doing. The fear in this fortress... the way that savage looks at you... Torin was just..."

I waved my hand sharply, cutting her off mid-sentence.

"Save your pity story for someone else," I said bluntly. "I don't care who you fuck. I don't care about your excuses. I am not here to judge your morals."

Irina stopped talking. She blinked, clearly caught off guard by my complete lack of emotional reaction. She wiped a streak of sweat from her forehead.

She frowned, looking closely at my face. She saw the dark, calculating intensity in my eyes. She saw the dried blood on the edge of my sleeve that belonged to Kael.

"Then why are you here?" Irina asked.

"I need something from you," I said.

Irina stared at me. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to regain a fraction of her maternal authority. "What could you possibly need from me right now?"

I stepped closer to the bed. I looked directly into her eyes.

"I need you to recreate a face for me," I said.

Irina stopped breathing. The color completely drained from her cheeks, leaving her skin stark white. She stared at me in absolute, horrifying silence.

She thought I didn't know.

She thought her secret was buried safely in the past, hidden behind the high walls of the palace. But I knew exactly what she was.

My mother was a witch.

I didn't learn it from a book, and she never sat me down to confess it. I learned it when I was ten years old.

My father had been away on a long diplomatic mission to the western borders. Lyra was still a very young toddler, sleeping in the nursery. It was the middle of the night. A frantic Valdris noble had arrived at the palace gates on a foaming horse, carrying a small, wrapped bundle in his arms.

It was his daughter. She was roughly my age. Her family’s carriage had been attacked by a splinter group of rogues on the road. The rogues hadn't just clawed her; they had injected her with refined wolfsbane.

I had snuck out of my bedroom to see the commotion. I hid behind a heavy velvet curtain in the lower hall and watched the noble carry the screaming girl into my mother’s private study.

I saw the girl's face before my mother closed the door. It was a ruined, horrific mess. The wolfsbane was causing rapid necrosis. The skin on the right side of her face was turning black and actively melting off the bone. The muscle underneath was exposed and rotting. The healers had said there was absolutely nothing they could do. The girl was going to die from the poison, or survive as a disfigured monster.

My mother didn't call for more healers. She locked the heavy wooden doors to the study.

But I knew the servant's passageway that ran behind the walls. I crawled through the dusty, narrow tunnel and looked through the small iron grate that ventilated the study.

I watched my mother work.

She had brought out a heavy stone bowl filled with a thick, grey substance. It looked like clay, but it wasn't normal river mud. It had a dark, greasy sheen, like crushed charcoal mixed with rendered fat. It smelled sharp, like burning ozone and deep earth. The scent drifted right through the iron grate into my hiding spot.