My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 336

Jace

I know what I saw across that fire. She was watching a thing happen that she could have easily stopped, and she was choosing to let it happen anyway , and she was making sure her hands stayed clean while she did it.

That's her. If it is her, that's exactly her. She wouldn't push me onto the horse. She'd only decline to take me off it. She'd let her husband's war do the thing she wanted done and she'd stand there in the cold with nothing on her face and let me ride off toward the worst thing on the continent, and if I never came back she'd be able to say, truthfully, that she never touched me.

The beauty of it, the part that would make me tip my hat if it were anybody but me on the horse, is I can't accuse her of anything. Accuse her of what? Standing quietly? Letting her husband run his own expedition? There's no crime in the room. There's only a man who talked his way onto a ride he'd have been smarter to talk his way out of, and a woman who watched him do it and kept her mouth shut.

If that's the game, it's a good one. It's better than mine.

Because here's where I actually am, standing in the snow with the horses stamping and the men mounting up around me, and I might as well be honest about it since there's nobody in my head but me.

I'm out of position.

The whole thing only works if I'm here. On the mountain. In front of Sera, in the hall, close enough to keep pushing, keep talking, keep wearing the idea down until it stops being my idea and starts being one she thinks she came to herself.

That's the play. That's the only play.

A man leaves the table, he stops being dealt cards. They're about to walk me off the table into a frozen dark for however long it takes to hunt a thing so ancient, and by the time I get back, if I get back at all, whatever I'd built up here will have gone cold, or worse.

I can't even manage it from the road. I can't send word. There's no runner going back and forth between a war party and a keep with little updates on how the courtship's going.

Then there's Kane.

I had made him belive I was coming to get help, and all he had to do was sit tight and not do anything stupid, which for Kane is a tall order but a survivable one. I did not tell him about the metal. Of course I didn't tell him about the metal.

Sera. At the edge of the torchlight, near the door, not close to any of it. Her husband was up on the biggest horse in the line saying a last thing to one of his men. She wasn't watching him. She was watching me. Across the whole yard, in the dark, she had her eyes on me, and she didn't look away when I caught her at it, which is the thing that told me everything, because a person who's innocent looks away.

She held it. Held my eye across the cold with nothing on her face at all.

That was when the thought came to my mind: she's going to Blackwater.

She's got weeks now with the Alpha gone and the hall hers and an army sitting idle and every reason in the world to look south while nobody's watching her do it. She could go. She could go this week. She could ride down to the pack that threw her out and walk into that hall and do whatever it is she's actually planning, the thing under the thing, the plan I still can't see the shape of, and I would not be there for any of it.

She could go to Blackwater without me. If she wanted to, would she?

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