My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 293

Jace

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

"Forgive me." I put both hands up, open, rueful, and pushed every ounce of the harmless thing into my face. "Forgive me, that was—" I let myself laugh again, smaller, shaking my head, a man embarrassed at his own nerves. "I've been standing out here an hour working myself up to meet the Alpha of the North, telling myself all the ways it could go wrong, and then you both walk out and you're just—" I gestured helplessly at the two of them, at the snow, at the whole grand frozen picture of it. "You look like something off the front of a saga. And I'm a southern textile man with cold feet and a present I'm suddenly sure is too small. It broke something in me. I'm sorry. It was nerves. Bad ones."

A beat. The courtyard held.

Then Mina laughed, because she believed me and because she was strung tight herself, and her laugh gave the men permission to ease off their hands, and the thing passed over like weather.

The Alpha didn't laugh. But the question went out of his eyes by a degree, filed rather than answered, and he came down the last steps with his hand out.

"Fenris," he said.

"Jace." His grip was a test and I let it be one and gave back just enough. "Thank you for having me up. I know what it costs to let a stranger past your gate."

"I know what it costs too." Flat. Not unfriendly. A man telling you the price is real. "Mina speaks well of you. Mina doesn't speak well of anyone."

"Then I'll try to deserve the lapse."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite anything, and he stepped aside, and there she was.

"My mate," Fenris said. "Seraphina Volkov."

"You brought us something," she said.

"I did." I crouched and lifted it and the wrappings caught the light. "For the house. From the South. I hoped—" and here, at least, I didn't have to act, because the hope was real even if everything around it was a lie "—I hoped to start on the right foot. With all of you."

Mina was at my shoulder, bright, oblivious, her hand finding my arm, and the surprise I'd been carrying up the mountain for Kane folded itself down small and quiet inside me, where I could keep it, where it would wait.

He had no idea. None of them did but her.

I handed the Luna of the North her gift, open-faced, empty-handed, a man with nothing to hide.

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