My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 301

Jace

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

Her wrist was thin and hard in my grip, and I'd caught it a hand's width from Mina's face, and the part of me that lunged to catch it hadn't stopped to ask the rest of me first.

That was the trouble. I'd spent my life not doing things like this. I'd built a whole man out of not doing things like this, the soft harmless southerner with his hands always open and in view, and the work of all five years had gone out the window in one breath, because I'd watched a woman wind up to drive a fist through the face of the only person on this freezing continent who'd waited for me, and my body had answered before my brain got a vote.

Now I was a stranger with his hand locked on a trueborn daughter of the North.

Behind me, the room had heard it happen.

Benches scraped. Not all of them. Three, maybe four, the sound of big men coming up off the wood fast, and I didn't turn to count because turning my back fully on the woman was its own kind of stupid, but the shape of it stood up at my spine, the temperature of a hall changing all at once.

They'd been holding off me since I walked in. A whole evening of cold looks and closed mouths, the Alpha's invisible hand keeping them in their seats. I'd handed them, free of charge, the thing that takes the hand away. An outsider, laying hold of one of their own in their own house.

They'd been looking for the reason. I'd given it to them for free.

She turned her head down to my hand on her, and she scrunched her face in disgust.

"Get your filthy hand off me." She wrenched at the held wrist, and the revulsion in it was real, the recoil of someone touched by something that came off a corpse. "Don't you put that on me. Don't you dare."

I could have answered that a dozen ways and most of them would have ruined my plans for coming here. Probably get me killed before an Alpha could react.

The math turned over behind their faces. I could see each one of them arrive at the same place, which was that whatever happened next, it could not start with them laying into the man who'd caught the hand. Not with the Alpha's name sitting in the room. Not with Fenris three days from riding out and that temper of his loose on the mountain.

It bought me a breath. It didn't buy me an exit.

The exit wasn't mine to take anyway, and I'd known that with the part of my head that still worked even while the other part had my hand on her wrist. This wasn't my fight to win. If I won it, if I stood here and out-talked one of their own into the floor, I'd have done it as the southern interloper who humbles Northern wolves in their own hall, and they would never forget that, and they would make me pay it back with interest for the rest of my time on this rock.

But there was one person in that doorway who could end this and have it be right. Who could put the woman down and have the whole hall nod along instead of reaching for a blade.

So I stepped back, all the way back, out of the middle of it, and I gave the floor to Mina.

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