My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 390

390 /526

Halvard

So. No leverage there. I will need another door, or I will need to accept there isn't one, and simply watch, and wait, the way I have watched and waited through two Alphas already and outlived them both.

I have watched and waited longer than that, if I am honest with myself standing here alone. I watched and waited through Viktor too, though not the way I watch now.

Viktor and I had been close once, closer than an old man likes to admit to missing. That ended the year he signed an alliance with Valdris without so much as a rider sent north to warn the rest of us it was coming.

I heard of it from a trader before I heard of it from him, and I rode to Ironmaw myself to ask him what in the North's long memory he thought he was doing, tying our strongest pack to a Southern king none of us had ever had reason to trust.

He didn't explain himself. He shunned me at his own table, in front of his own men, and sent me home like a boy who'd overstepped. We didn't speak again, not properly, for the better part of a year.

Almost a year later, word came that Dimitri was to marry one of King Aldric's daughters. No Alpha in the North heard that and slept easy that night.

A meeting was held, quiet, without Viktor's knowledge, because by then most of us had come to the same conclusion on our own: that a man making decisions like that, decisions no one else in the North had been asked about, was no longer fit to hold the seat he held.

I will not pretend the reasoning in that room was as clean as it sounded out loud. Every Alpha in the North envied Ironmaw for what it had, and I include myself in that without much shame at this age.