My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 247

Mina

I took the back stairs. The stone was damp, the air smelling of old earth and the wet moss that grew in the crevices where the sunlight never reached. I moved fast, my boots making a dull clack-clack-clack against the masonry. I bypassed the main courtyards, weaving through the narrow servant tunnels that ran like veins through the keep's lower levels.

I reached the small iron door near the laundry chutes and slipped outside.

The air was sharp. It bit at my face, the freezing mountain wind cutting through my tunic. I stayed in the shadows of the outer wall, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I pulled the phone from my pocket. My thumb hovered over the glass.

I hit the contact.

It rang once. Twice.

"Hey," he said.

The sound of his voice hit me like a physical blow to the stomach. It wasn't the boy from the border market. It was a man. The rasp was heavier now, a slow, textured rumble that I felt in the soles of my feet.

"Jace," I whispered. My throat felt like it was full of dry sand. "I'm outside. I’m coming down the mountain pass toward the lower market."

"I see you," he said.

I stopped walking. I looked around the empty, snow-dusted trail. There was nobody there. Just the jagged black rocks and the stunted pines.

"Where? I don't see you."

"Keep walking, Mina. Don't stop. The guards on the north tower are watching the path."

I started moving again, my legs shaking. I kept the phone pressed tight to my ear, the heat from the device warming my cold palm.

"It's been so long," I said. A sob caught in my chest, a hot, heavy thing I couldn't swallow. "Jace, I... I miss you so much. I thought you forgot. I thought you found someone else in those human cities."

"Hey, hey," Jace said. His voice softened, turning into a low, grounding murmur. "You can't cry yet, little bird. We aren't even in the same room. You're going to waste all that emotion over a piece of plastic."

I sniffled, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. "Okay. Okay, I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he said.

A silence stretched between us, filled only by the sound of our breathing and the distant, muffled thumping of the drums from the keep.

I stopped. The phone was still pressed to my ear. I could hear the rustle of fabric on his end. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would escape my chest.

I turned slowly.

He was standing ten feet away, leaning against a wooden pillar under a tattered canvas awning. He didn't look like the boy in the picture from Paris. He was taller. Wider. His red hair was shorter now, messy and windblown. He was wearing oversized rags—a thick, scratchy wool tunic that made his shoulders look even broader.

He didn't move. He just looked at me. His eyes were the same—that bright, sharp amber—but the weight behind them was different.

He raised his hand, the phone still gripped in his palm.

"Hey," he said.

The word came from the phone against my ear and from the man standing right in front of me at the exact same time.

He was here. He was really here.

* * *