My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 333

Jace

The horse they gave me didn't like me and I didn't blame it. I'd been standing at its shoulder for ten minutes holding the bridle where the woman showed me, up near the cheek, not down by the bit, and every so often it swung its head around and fixed me with one big wet eye and blew air out its nose, and I understood the look.

Neither of us had asked for this. Neither of us had been consulted. We were both here now, breathing out clouds into the dark, waiting on men who'd already decided how the rest of our night was going to go.

An hour ago I'd been asleep.

It was a good sleep. I was warm, with Mina's leg thrown over both of mine, and suddenly the door had opened without a knock and the tall woman was standing over the bed saying my name, not waking a person so much as confirming a fact.

All she said was:

“Get up, you’re riding with us tonight.”

For a full minute, I was confused.

But I got myself out of bed anyway.

By the time my feet were on the cold floor she'd already dropped a pile of leather at the end of the bed and told me it was mine now and left, and Mina was awake now, she was sitting up with the blanket clutched to her breasts going: “what is it, what's happening,” in a voice climbing toward something I didn't have time to talk her down from because I was busy trying to work out how to put on a dead man's armor in the dark.

It didn’t fit.

Whoever it was built for was wider than me through the chest and longer in the arm, so the whole rig sits on me completely wrong, the shoulders too far out, the straps cinched to their last hole and still loose.

A boy playing dress-up in his father's things. I know how it reads. I caught one of the real warriors giving me a once-over by the torches and then deciding I wasn't worth the second look, which he was right not to spend it.

Here's what I've put together, standing here, because nobody's told me anything straight.

They're going after the thing. The one from the drawings. The one that killed the brother nobody says the name of above a certain volume. I'm going with them.

I don't know why I'm going with them. I have a guess, and the guess is the book, the hour I spent in the big man's chamber turning pages and telling him what I thought I was seeing, I think that hour bought me a seat on this ride.

I think my stupid mouth had talked me onto a horse.

The tall woman won't tell me. I tried. When she was cinching the last strap she wouldn't meet my eye about it, and I asked her straight, why me. Here's what she gave me back.

"Take it off. Take the damn thing off right now and come back inside. You don't have to do this, you didn't agree to this, nobody can make you get on a horse. I don't care what my brother says. He's not your Alpha. He's not anything to you."

"Mina."

"You owe him nothing, you owe none of them anything, you came here for me, you came up this whole mountain for me and now they're going to make you go out to…" She stopped. Her jaw worked. She wouldn't say it. Nobody would say it. "I already lost somebody out there. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I have already done this once."

There it is. That's the part I didn't have a plan for.

Because I can talk. That's the one thing I've always been able to do, talk a man out of a debt or into a deal, talk myself out of a beating twice that I can think of, talk a woman who's decided she's leaving into staying one more week.

I've got a mouth that works when the rest of me doesn't. But there's no version of the true thing I can say to her right now, and the false things all taste like what they are.

I can't tell her I'll be fine because I don't know that.

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