My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 255

Jace

The water in the lodge ran hot enough to take a layer off, which was about the first generous thing anyone had done for me in five years.

I got in slow. There was a bench cut into the stone of the tub and I sat on it and let the heat climb me to the chest, and the steam went up the back wall and beaded on the underside of the wood, and I put my head back against the cold rim and shut my eyes. Through the door I could still hear her. Her heart hadn't come down off the run it had been on since the foyer.

She was standing on the rug doing whatever a woman does on a rug when a man she's been waiting ten years for is forty feet away with his clothes off. I made myself stop listening to it. There's a way to dial the ears down. I'd learned it in the human world out of necessity, because a city is a wall of sound when you can hear the way I can hear, and I'd kept it the whole five years I'd been out there alone.

Five years.

That was the part that got me, sitting in that water. Five years since the factory. Five years of cities I picked off a map for no better reason than that nobody in them knew my last name, of hotels with their own kind of cleaning soap, of women whose names I made a point of using in the room and then put down at the door.

I'd had money the whole time. That was the strange part. I'd come out of the worst day of my life with my personal savings intact and a handful of stocks that paid out quarterly into an account I almost never touched, and that had been enough to roam on for five years without working a single day. The thing that had burned was the business. The franchise. The whole apparatus my father had spent my entire boyhood building into me with both hands.

I was the heir. That was the joke of it. There was nothing left to inherit but I was, on paper and in every word my father ever said to me across a desk, the rightful heir.

He'd groomed me for it the way some men groom a horse for one race. By the time I was ten he could already recite the order of the holdings to me at dinner and have me recite them back. The day I found Mina I'd been twenty and on the road for him, sent up to that border market on the company's business, standing in the mud counting bolts of northern wool against an invoice while a ten-year-old with one slipper on got herself cornered by a dog two streets over.

I didn't go up to the North for the girl. I went up for him. He always carried me along. Every trip, every meeting, every closed door, and the whole time the same sentence in my ear like a hand on the back of the neck: all of this is yours, Jace. Every brick. You only have to be ready to take it.

I believed about half of it.

I'm going to be honest about that even now, in the water, with both of them in the ground. I loved my father and I won't take it back, but I came up in his business and you don't come up in a man's business without learning to read him, and there isn't a man alive whose own story about himself comes out clean.

Nothing is black and white. There's always the grey in the middle where the truth actually lives, and I think the grey in the middle of my father was this: he made himself the victim so I'd grow up seeing a victim, and he made himself the hero so I'd grow up seeing a hero, a man building his family's wealth back from scratch with his bare hands against a thief. And it worked on me. I did see the hero. He was a hero. He was just a hero who could not, for the rest of his life, stop competing with a king.

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