My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 449

Sera

Vane's eyes met mine, calm and level. "If it had been anyone else she was asking, Luna, you would have been handed exactly what you were after."

I did not flinch. Not a flicker of an eyelid or a twitch of a lip. I gave him nothing at all.

He went on, his tone measured, a little dry. "You could have come to me yourself and asked. If you wanted to know so badly, I would have told you what you needed."

I nodded. "Right."

But that had never been the problem.

The problem was that I might have been asking a man who stood in league with the very thing I was digging at. A man who might be part of a plot to bring down my own mate. If I had walked up to him and asked, I would have handed him the fact that I knew, and there is no undoing that once it is done. The risk had been too high.

He knew anyway now. And I still could not tell him a single thing.

So I said the only words that cost me nothing. "I'm sorry. I was only curious."

Vane inclined his head and accepted it. He gave me a small wry smile, as though he knew the truth of it perfectly well and had decided to let me keep it.

Then he told me anyway.

"Vidar Sarn is Kael's brother. His elder brother." He said it the way a man reads out a line from a ledger. "He holds his own ground and he answers to nobody for it."

I kept my hands folded and said nothing.

"Your mate will not know him," Vane went on. "Vidar is of an older generation. Fenris would have been a boy."

"But someone knew him."

"His father did." Vane's eyes came up to mine at that. "Viktor knew him well enough."

He let a moment go by.

"They were never friends."

The words hung in the air between us. I felt a chill run down my spine. I had known that Vidar was Kael's brother, from the letters I had read. But to hear it stated so plainly, as fact, by this careful, measured man, it made it so much more real, somehow.

I straightened slowly, smoothing my shaking hands over my skirts. Vane was watching me, his eyes narrowed slightly, as though trying to gauge my reaction. I schooled my features into careful neutrality and met his gaze steadily.

"If Vidar means to come here," Vane said, "and especially with the Alpha away, you must be very careful, Luna."

"Careful of what?"

"There is one thing Vidar Sarn has always wanted." His eyes did not leave mine. "That is to take Ironmaw."

I had read that in the man's own hand. I had sat with it for days. But it had been ink on a dead man's paper, mine alone, something I had worked out and could not prove to anyone.

Hearing it out of the mouth of the oldest chief on this council made it a thing the North already knew.

"Do not let him set foot in this pack," Vane went on. "Not once. Not for an hour."

"And why has he not set foot in it before now?"

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