My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 400

Bram

The letter lay open on my desk, its contents already seared into my mind before I'd finished reading it twice.

Elder Kael, Greyhollow Estate.

I am pleased to report the successful completion of the latest ore batch. Our yield is a record, twelve and a half percent silver content. The market has continued to climb, prices now at a shilling and two pence the ounce. The batch runs to fifteen thousand ounces of pure silver. Total value, eighteen thousand silver. I await your further instructions on the claim.

Yours, Osric.

I laid it aside and reached for the ledger.

Numbers, leverage, exits. Those were my gods now. The only ones who cared whether I lived or died. I flipped through the neat, cramped pages until I found the entry for Greyhollow, and my jaw tightened before I'd even finished reading it. Forty percent of the claim had been sold off to some buyer I'd never heard of, before I ever took Kael's face. Sixty percent remained.

There was no name against the sale, only a mark I didn't recognize. Whoever held that forty percent knew this claim as well as I was about to. That was worth remembering, filed away with everything else I was learning to carry and say nothing about.

I did the math. Sixty percent of eighteen thousand silver, a season's yield, was near enough eleven thousand. I sat with that number a while, turning it over. Eleven thousand silver was more than Kael's entire staff earned in a year, all of them together, cook and groom and steward and the rest. Eleven thousand silver, every season, for as long as the vein held.

Enough to disappear into a life nobody would think to go looking for.

I thought about what that would actually mean, not as a number on a page but as a fact of my body somewhere else. A house with my own name on the deed, whatever name I chose for it. A bed I didn't have to lie awake in listening for footsteps. Nobody bowing to a face that wasn't mine.

The servants here would do anything for me. Dress me, feed me, carry my letters before I'd finished writing them. When I first came into this life, one of the girls had gone to wash me the way she'd have washed Kael, without a flicker of hesitation, hands already moving before I'd said a word. I stopped her. That was the one line I drew, out of everything I'd let myself become. It still turns my stomach to think about it, not the act itself, but the ease of it. What a man has to have demanded of people, for years, for a girl to reach for a stranger's ass and not think twice.

I was wearing his face and I still hadn't worked out where he ended and I began.

The self-preservation of it was the only part I let myself think about clearly. I wear a dead man's face through another woman's magic. If that's ever found out, by his brother riding in from the east, by some sharp-eyed chief, by anyone at all, I'm the one standing in the room when it happens. Not Sera. Not Fenris. They have power between them, and distance, and a hundred ways to survive being wrong. I have none of that. Discovery doesn't mean trouble for me. It means my own death, mine specifically, and nobody else's.

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