My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 389

Halvard

I watched him walk away toward the stables, and I let myself feel, for exactly as long as it took him to cross the yard, something close to liking him.

It didn't last longer than that. It never does, with me. Sixty years of watching young Alphas ride in convinced of their own weight has taught me not to trust the feeling while it's still warm.

He hadn't touched my daughter. He'd taken the account of Redhand and Thornwood like a man already braced for the wound, no theater in it, no false grief either, just a jaw that tightened and stayed tightened.

He'd asked the right questions in the right order. He hadn't once tried to convince me of anything, which in my experience is the surest sign of a man who isn't lying.

All of that was true. None of it changed the other thing that was also true. Every pack from here to the coast knows the name Butcher, knows the shape of what Fenris Volkov can do with his hands when he's asked to.

I had known his father as a friend for longer than I can easily count. I had watched his brother become the kind of Alpha this North doesn't produce twice in a lifetime.

What I did not know, standing at that wall, was what the man underneath the reputation actually was, once you stripped away his father's shadow and his brother's memory and the fear his own name puts into a room before he's said a word in it.

I have buried three Alphas of Ironmaw with my own hands at their funeral fires. Viktor's brother first, more years back than I like counting, before the seat should ever have come to Viktor at all. Viktor himself after that, an old friend by the time frost had gotten into both our knees.

Then Dimitri, too young, the kind of death that makes an old man angry at the world for getting the order wrong. And now this one standing, breathing, walking toward my stables like the seat under him was simply his by the accident of being the last man left in the room.

That is the part that sits wrong with me, and has sat wrong with me since word first reached us that Ironmaw's Butcher had taken the Alpha's chair as well as his own.

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