My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 311

Jace

The corridor he took me down got narrower and colder the further we went. I have learned over a long, careful life to pay attention when a powerful man walks you somewhere quiet.

He didn't talk on the way. The arm I'd laid across his shoulders had come off somewhere around the second turn, naturally, the moment its work was done. Now he was a step ahead of me, a wall of a man moving through his own house, and I followed, because the only thing worse than following him would have been making him ask twice.

The torches got fewer. The noise of the hall fell off behind us until it was a rumor of itself. I counted the doors we passed, the turns we took, the same as I count everything, because a man who knows the way out is never quite as trapped as he looks.

We stopped at a door at the end of it. He opened it himself and stood aside and waited for me to go in first, which is not a courtesy. You put a man in a room ahead of you when you want to be the one between him and the door.

I went in.

It was a plain room for the most powerful man on the continent. A bed I doubt he used much, a cold hearth, a table, a chair. Skins on the floor. A window cut narrow into the stone with the black night sitting in it.

There was a weight to the room I couldn't account for at first, the kind of close still air a space gets when it's used to holding one person and his quiet. Then I saw the second chair, pulled up by the cold hearth, angled toward the first, nobody in it. I let that go. It was none of my business who Fenris Volkov kept an empty chair for.

He shut the door behind us. I heard it close. I kept my hands loose, my back not quite to him, and waited to find out what kind of night this was going to be.

"Sit," he said.

I sat. He didn't. He went to a chest against the wall and stood over it a moment with his back to me, and I had time to think about how far the hall was and how thick the door. Then he lifted the lid, took something out, turned around. It wasn't a blade.

It was a book.

He came and dropped it on the table in front of me, heavy, the sound of it landing telling me it was old before I'd touched it. Then he pulled the second chair around and sat across from me, the table between us.

"You talked at my table like a man who reads," he said.

"I read."

It was something else, dense and small, made by a patient hand, line after line of it. I turned three pages and got no purchase anywhere. The first cold finger of the thing this book was going to do to me touched the back of my neck, which was to make me feel stupid in a language I didn't have.

Then I reached the drawings.

Someone had sat with a living thing and drawn it the way the old human anatomists drew, every line put down to be true rather than pretty. A figure, standing, filling the page. Not a man. It stood on two legs and had two arms, but the arms hung to the knees, longer than any arm I'd ever shaken. The jaw ran out too far and hung too heavy, built to hold more teeth than a face has room for. In its own panel beside it, the hands: longer in the palm than mine, the bone at the last joint of each finger hooked, a claw drawn back into the shape of a nail and not quite hidden there.

I wasn’t a wolf. I would have known a wolf. I carry one myself, under my own skin. There is a particular shape to the thing we become, and this was not it. This was a third thing. Not a man, not one of us, something with its own line that ran alongside both and belonged to neither.

"Well," Fenris said. He hadn't moved.

"Give me a moment."

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