My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 292

Jace

I'd been standing in the cold long enough to learn the courtyard by heart, which is a thing I do when I'm nervous and won't admit to being nervous.

Forty-one paces along the front wall. A well with a frozen lip. Two of the Alpha's men at the inner door who had not stopped watching me since Mina went up, the flat unhurried watching men give a dog they haven't decided about yet. I'd given them nothing to decide. I'd stood with my hands where they could see them and my face arranged into the open, pleasant, harmless thing I'd spent five years building for rooms exactly like this one, rooms where the people in them could end me and were deciding whether to.

The gift sat in its wrappings at my feet. I'd put it together since I got north, knowing I'd be standing in a courtyard like this one sooner or later and a man doesn't come empty-handed to an Alpha's gate. I nudged it straight with my boot and made myself stop.

Mina came back through the inner door first.

She came fast, fast as she'd gone up, and the cold had put color in her face and the climb had not winded her at all, and when she saw me her whole self changed. I'd watched it happen a few times now and it still did something to me I wasn't built to handle well. The guardedness shed off her. She crossed to me and put her good hand flat on my chest, quick, a thing she did to check I was real, and I covered it with mine.

"They're coming," she said. "They're slow. I told you they'd be slow."

"You did."

"He's going to be—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "He's going to be himself. Don't take it personal. Whatever he does, it's not about you, it's just how he is with new people, he measures everyone, it doesn't mean—"

"Mina." I caught her hand against my chest. "I've met hard men before."

"Not like him."

Because here is what I was looking at.

I was looking at Sera. Seraphina. The omega. Kane's barren wife, the one he'd wrung his hands over and then snuffed out because she couldn't give him a pup, the woman I'd watched run a border pack's whole ledger from a back room while her husband took the credit at the front. I'd liked her. I'd thought Kane was the dumbest man in three territories the day he signed her away. I had spent the entire ride up this mountain bracing to meet the Luna of Ironmaw, a title that travels ahead of whoever wears it, mate to the butcher, mistress of the most feared pack on the continent, and the woman wearing it was the kitchen-ledger omega from Blackwater, standing on the Alpha's arm in furs that cost more than the whole pack I'd come from, watching me with a face that had already, in the time it took me to laugh, gone smooth and unreadable and shut.

The whole of it landed at once and there was nowhere to put it but out, and out it had come, and now I had a courtyard of armed wolves staring at a stranger who'd laughed in their Alpha's face.

I did the only thing there was to do. I leaned into it.

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