My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 307

Jace

It worried me more than the Alpha's nose did. I'd started telling myself the familiarity would help. Sera and I had always been easy with each other in the old days, cool and good, two clever people who recognized each other across a room full of people who weren't.

I'd let myself believe that would carry. Sitting at that table with her eyes coming and going off me, I understood I'd miscounted. The woman across from me could end Blackwater's chances with a single quiet word in her husband's ear.

She could refuse. She could stop the Alpha lifting a finger. She could, if she decided I was more trouble than I was worth, point a thousand Northern wolves down the mountain and there wouldn't be a Blackwater left to save, and it would cost her nothing.

For one warm idiot second I thought about laying it out right there, while Fenris was full and easy and liked me. Raising Blackwater at the table, letting the Alpha's good humor do some of the work. I killed the thought before it finished.

Not with him. Not in front of her. She'd see the whole plan the second I opened it and she'd close it in the cradle, smiling, and I'd never get another swing. Whatever I do, I had to do it with Sera first, alone, on ground I'd chosen. The rest of the mountain came after her.

I'd settled that with myself when Fenris pushed back from the table and stood.

The hall didn't go quiet for it. He wasn't making a speech. He came around behind Mina's chair and put a hand on it, and he leaned down toward his sister, easy.

"I'm going to borrow your man for a few minutes."

Mina's head came up. "Why? Did he—" She stopped, recalibrated, and I watched her decide to be light about it and not quite manage it. "Did he say something wrong?"

I was already rising as I said it, already turning toward Fenris, giving him the motion before he had to ask for it twice, because a man who has to be led looks like a man with something to hide and a man who walks himself toward the knife looks like a man with nothing to fear.

Then, because I'd decided in that half-second that the only way through this was to refuse to be the smaller animal in the room, I put my arm up across the Alpha's shoulders, light, the easy steer you'd give an old friend toward a bar, and walked him toward the door.

A few heads turned. Their attention landed on me and stayed. An outsider's arm laid across the Alpha of the North, in his own hall, in front of his own elders. I didn't take it off. I kept it there, easy, kept walking, talking low about nothing, and Fenris stopped and brought his eyes down to the arm across his shoulders for one long beat.

Then he laughed again, quieter this time, only for me, and we went.

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