My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 391

Halvard

Viktor had been a good Alpha in the end, whatever his last mistakes. He'd made every pack in the North stronger by being in it. It took losing him to understand that, and by the time we understood it, Vidar had gone quiet, and the whole thing was over.

Everything held, more or less, until word came that Dimitri had died too, killed on the ridge south of here. The men who rode with him came back too broken to say much of anything about what they'd seen. And with no one else standing in line for it, the Butcher became Alpha because there was no one else.

I do not blame the boy for any of that. He lost a father and a brother inside two years with nothing in between to prepare him for either. But losing my sympathy for his circumstance was never the same as losing my worry about what an unhandled Butcher means for the rest of us, and I had already decided, before he ever rode through my gate, that I was going to find some way to put a hand back on that weapon whether he liked it or not.

Here is the thing I have not said to him, and will not say to him, not tomorrow, not for a long while yet if ever.

If the weapon were mine to hold instead of his to be, I could do more with it than he seems inclined to imagine for himself.

Ironmaw first, since it already answers to that name whether it likes the reasoning or not. Then the rest of the North, pack by pack, through conquest.

I have watched enough young Alphas mistake patience for a plan, and Viktor was not the last good man I've seen ruin something trying to hold it together on nothing but good intentions and no real hand on the reins.

I am old enough to remember what the North was before it scattered itself into a dozen packs, each one guarding its own small piece of ground like the ground itself was the thing worth guarding.

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