My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 328

Sera

"Why?" He asked.

I didn't answer. I'd had the whole evening to build a reason and I'd built three, and standing there with my hands on his chest my reasons were starting to feel scrambled.

He watched me as I saw the gears move behind his eyes.

"The child," he said. "You want the man to know about the child."

That genuinely surprised me.

“What? No."

It came out fast and flat and truer than I meant it to.

It wasn't about Kane knowing. Kane could go his whole life not knowing and I'd lose no sleep. The thing sitting low in me, the thing I hadn't let myself hold in daylight, had nothing to do with wanting Kane to have any part of it.

If anything it was the opposite, and I wasn't ready to look at that in front of anyone, least of all a man in war leather with twenty riders waiting on him.

He took it in. He didn't push. That was the thing about him that still undid me when I let it. He heard the no and set the question down, no second try at it from another angle, no watching to see if the no held.

"All right," he said.

"Listen. I've got nothing against a child. Understand that first." He said it plain, no softness laid over it, which was how I knew it was true.

"But I've never in my life respected a man who threw his wife out to freeze, and I'm not going to start because there's a baby in it. So if you're riding down there to make him pay for it—"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't say anything. That's how I know to bring it up." He put one hand over both of mine, that grip that swallowed them. "If this ride has revenge on it, Seraphina, you go with the whole North at your back. You don't need it hidden. You don't need my leave, but you've got it. Whatever you decide to do to him, do it."

"He's not worth the trouble it would take."

"Then he isn't. That's yours to weigh, not mine." His thumb moved once over my knuckles. "And Blackwater's already past your father's line. Nothing you do down there touches anything up here. If that's what's had you quiet about it, let it go. There's no reach that far south. Not even his."

I turned that over and it kept getting bigger. He'd said it plain, no more weight on it than telling someone to help themselves to bread, and he meant all of it, the full size of the thing, an army sitting at my word while its master rode the other direction.

I don't know if he understood what he was putting in my hand.

"You trust me too much," I said. It came out before I'd weighed whether to say it, which almost never happens with me.

"Probably." That almost-smile again. "Haven't been wrong yet."

He pulled his gauntlet straight, wrapping up the moment. Then he stopped, a thing coming back to him, and something changed in his face that I didn't have a read for.

"There's one more thing before I go." He was watching me now, close, that steady hold he got when he'd decided to give me something and wanted to catch the moment it landed. "A gift. I've been holding it for tonight."

"Fenris. You're dressed for a war."

"It can wait. Come down with me." He held his hand out, and there was something under his quiet that I couldn't name, something that had been sitting behind his eyes the whole time the women were strapping him in. "I want you to see it before I ride."

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