My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 326

Sera

"You're taking Jace?"

"I am."

"Into a fight. Against the thing that killed your brother." I pulled my hands back out from under his, slow, so it wouldn't read as anything. "Fenris. That's Mina's mate.”

“They’re not official yet.”

“Do you want to argue that now?”

He exhaled and went quiet.

“She fucking dragged him up North to see you, and she's not been this close to happy since I’ve known her. And now you just want to take him away from her to war?”

“I have my reason—”

“No.” I said. “If he dies out there, she will never forgive you. She'll never forgive me for standing here and letting you."

That landed. I saw the moment it clicked behind his eyes.

Whatever else he was, he was Mina's brother first

"She'll be angry," he said.

"Angry is an understatement. It would ruin her."

"She's tougher than you're giving her."

He didn't say it unkindly. He rubbed the back of his neck, the leather at his shoulder creaking with it, and for a second he weighed it, instead of standing there already decided.

"I'm not taking him to die, Seraphina. I'm taking him because he's worth more out there than anyone else I could put on a horse. Let me show you. Then you can decide whether I'm throwing Mina's man away or not."

He moved back to the chest, and this time he came back with something in his hands I hadn't seen before, a thing bound in dark hide, thick, the corners of the pages inside gone soft and brown with handling. He held it a moment before he gave it to me.

This wasn't that. A wolf is an animal and knows it. This thing in the drawing had been made to know things, and the man who drew it had wanted you to understand that at a glance.

I turned one page. There was a second drawing, the same creature but opened up, a healer's teaching diagram of a body, lines pulling out to the side with a careful cramped writing beside each one that I couldn't read. In the corner, newer, in ink that hadn't browned yet, someone had drawn a small clean diagram of a jaw and a row of numbers, and under it three words in a hand I didn't know.

"That's his," Fenris said. He'd been watching my face, not the book. "The southerner's. He did that last night, in my chamber. He looked at these for an hour and then he asked me for a pen."

"What is it."

"The teeth. And the count of them, and the wear on them in the drawing." Fenris crouched, finally, the leather creaking, bringing his eyes level with mine over the top of the book. "He said a mouth like that, worn like that, belongs to something that lives a long time. Longer than us. Much longer. He looked at a picture and told me the thing we're riding out to kill is old. Older than anything the elders remember, and the elders remember a lot."

I closed the book. Something in me felt off. Which was weird. I was scared, yes. But it was different because something about the diagram felt too familiar. Like I knew it personally.

"So he's clever," I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "That doesn't mean he can fight. Clever men die first in the dark."

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