My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 388

Fenris

Halvard found me before I found him.

I hadn't left the wall since walking out of the feast. The dark had thinned to grey while I stood there, and I heard him on the stairs before I saw him, a heavier tread than mine, unhurried.

He didn't speak for a long while. Just stood there next to me with his forearms on the stone, looking at the same nothing I was looking at, and I'd had enough of Northern Alphas and their silences to last me the winter.

"Say what you came to say."

"My daughter is a beautiful woman." Halvard said it plainly, no preamble. A fact everyone already knew, stated flat. "Has her mother's face, near enough. Any man in that hall would have given an arm for half of what she offered you earlier, and my own men would have taken it without thinking twice. Yet somehow you didn't."

I said nothing. There wasn't a question in it yet, and I'd learned enough of this man in two days to know not to fill his silences for him.

"So I find myself wondering," he said, "whether that was truly your mate holding you back, or whether you meant it as an insult to my house. A message that my daughter wasn't worth the trouble." His eyes cut to me, sharp now, all the fatherly warmth gone out of his voice. "I'd hate to think a guest under my roof spent his evening insulting me and calling it loyalty."

"It was neither," I said. "I have a mate. That's the whole of it. Nothing about your daughter entered it, not as an insult and not as anything else. If you're looking for a slight against your house, you won't find one in a man simply keeping what's his."

He held my eyes a long moment, and the tightness went out of his jaw, though not all the way. "Mm."

"And if it was a test after all," I said, "you could have just asked me plainly what kind of man I am. Would have saved us both the evening."

"Would it." He didn't confirm it. Didn't deny it. His face gave up nothing, exactly as unreadable as it had been the whole visit. "Ask a man what kind of man he is, and he'll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear. Watch him when he doesn't think anyone's judging him for it, and you get something closer to true."

I didn't have anything to put against that. I was too tired to want to try.

"I'm going to tell you something now," he said. "Not because you passed anything. Because I'm done deciding whether you're worth the risk of telling you, and I've decided."

I turned my head then. His voice had gone flat, the kind of flat that comes right before someone finally says the thing they've been carrying alone too long.

He was quiet a long moment, watching the trees, before he spoke. "Redhand and Thornwood didn't fall to raiders."

My hands had gone tight on the stone without my telling them to. Not surprise. Confirmation of something I'd been carrying since before we ever rode out.

"Okay?"

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