My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 253

Fenris

"Yes, my Alpha."

A sound came up out of my chest. It wasn't a word. It dropped onto the table in front of me, and the chief next to Bram twitched away from it.

"Then we leave." I was already moving. My chair came back from the table with the long stone-on-stone scrape of a chair nobody was going to bother to soften. "We ride before dark. I want six of the eastern outriders prepped. Kael, you're with me. I want the riders from Brightwater and Grey Reach brought back to this chamber before sundown so I can hear what their men saw out of their own mouths —"

"Alpha."

"— get the horses out of the long stable, water them before the saddles go on, somebody find Yvara, I want her on the road with me —"

"Alpha."

"— Sera doesn't need to know the route. Put her in the south wing tonight and keep her there until —"

"Alpha."

I'd been on my feet for a while by then.

The wolf was up. He was all the way up. He had his teeth in the back of my throat and he was working them, and the muscles down the sides of my jaw were moving without me telling them to, and the heat had come up off the back of my neck and gone down through both arms.

The air in the chamber had taken on the close pressed quality it gets when the aura starts pushing past the body of the man it lives in. I knew the pressure from the inside. From the outside I knew what it did to a room. The fire at the back wall had bent. The chiefs were holding their positions and they were sweating, the acrid wet of men whose bodies had decided without their permission to be afraid.

Vane had not moved. He'd put both hands flat on the parchment to keep it from blowing in the pressure, and the dust had settled on the backs of his hands and through his white hair and on the collar of his coat. His face had the same expression it had carried since I was eleven years old and I'd cut my hand open trying to hold a blade by the wrong end. He had not blinked once.

I dragged my eyes around the room.

The chiefs were holding their seats the way men hold themselves to a chair they've been ordered to sit in. The fire at the wall was still bent. The dust was still falling, slower now. Toren had dust in his oiled beard. Bram was watching me with both hands flat on the wood and his shoulders low, the way you watch a thing you have known a long time and have not yet stopped being able to read.

I brought my eyes back to Vane.

"What." A quieter version of the word. Almost a question.

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