My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 299

Mina

The kitchen has its own atmosphere, steam and the bang of pots and the heat coming off the ovens in a wall, and Marta was at the long table working a joint of meat with a cleaver, and when she saw me her face did a thing I wasn't ready for.

Her whole face opened up.

"Well," she said, setting the cleaver down. "Look who's glowing."

I'd come in braced. The last time I'd stood in this kitchen I'd snapped at her, used the word help as a weapon, thrown my brother's name down between us to put her in her place, and she'd gone flat and sterile and called me the Alpha's blood and never once met my eyes. I'd carried that out of here. I'd meant to make it right and hadn't known how.

"Marta," I started. "About the last time. The way I talked to you. I was—"

"You were a cow," she said pleasantly, already reaching for a bowl. "Don't fuss it. We've all had days we'd take back." She started spooning stew, thick, the good cut, more than I'd asked for. "I hear there's a reason you've been wearing your hair nice."

The other girls at the ovens were grinning now, openly, and one of them made a small sound and Marta swatted at her without looking.

"There's a man," I admitted, and the heat climbed my own face, and I hated it, actually didn't quite hate it.

"There's a man," Marta agreed, like it was the best news she'd had all week. "Good. About time someone made you put a comb through it."

That was the thing that got me, standing in the steam with a bowl warming my hands. Not one of them said it. Not one of them leaned in with the question I'd been braced for in every other corner of this keep tonight, the one sitting under all those turning heads in the hall.

They didn't ask why he was the way he was. They didn't say a word about him not smelling right, not seeming wolf, not being one of ours. They teased me about a man, the oldest teasing there is, women in a kitchen needling one of their own, and they let him be only that. A man. Mine.

I could have kissed her.

"Thank you," I said, and I meant it about more than the stew, and Marta heard the more and waved it off with the back of her hand.

"Go on. Feed him before he wastes away. Southerners are thin."

* * *

"I see you've grown some spine," Taya said softly closer to my face. "That’s new. Must be the man. Or…maybe it's the company you keep up in the Alpha's rooms these days, you and the southern princess, thick as thieves." Her eyes were bright and ugly. "Speaking of. You can carry her a message for me, since you're up there licking her boots anyway."

"I'm not carrying you anything."

"Tell your Luna," Taya went on, like I hadn't spoken, "that I know. Not all of it. Not yet. But I know she's done something to my father. I know she's got her claws in him somehow, something she's holding over his head, because that man raised me to be Luna of this pack and now he won't say her name without flinching."

Her voice dropped further, and the hate in it was a real thing, so fucking old and patient.

"And I'm going to find out what it is. Every bit of it. And when I do, there won't be a corner of this keep she can hide in, because they'll all see her for the scam she is."

She laughed, low pleased with herself.

* * *