My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 392

Havard

For one bad moment, standing there, I laughed at the thought. Not because any of it was funny. Because some part of me had already done the math on how badly this could go, and laughing was the only thing keeping it from becoming a thought I'd have to sit with any longer than I could afford to.

I wheeled it back.

A man my age doesn't get to indulge despair, not with a war coming; my own grandchildren will have to finish if he doesn't live long enough to.

So. The North will come back together, whatever it costs, and I intend to be the hand that does it. Not for the North's sake alone, though I'll tell myself that version when it's convenient. For the plainer, less flattering fact that a divided North loses the war that's already started, and I have buried enough Alphas to know I'd rather be remembered as the one who forced us back into a single fist than as one more good man who watched us stay scattered until it stopped mattering who was right.

And past the North, once it's whole again, there's no reason the reach should stop at a border some dead king drew on a map he never finished walking. It's time for the North to wake up again, the way it was awake once, before any of us were old enough to remember why we needed to be.

I am old enough to know the difference between a plan and a fantasy a man tells himself in the dark to make the waiting easier. This is closer to the second thing than the first, today. But I have had smaller fantasies become plans before, given enough years and enough patience, and I intend to keep this one warm regardless of what Fenris Volkov turns out to be.

Fenris Volkov had honored that same old alliance with Valdris, the one that cost me a friend for a year and nearly cost Viktor his seat.

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