My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 294

Jace

They took me inside, and the warmth hit me first, and then the fact that the warmth was the only soft thing I was going to get.

The hall they put me in was smaller than the great one I'd glimpsed off the entry, a room built for fewer people and harder conversations, with a fire going hard in a stone mouth at one end and a long table that nobody sat at. We didn't sit. A host who means you well sits you down, and the Alpha stood, so we all stood, Mina at my side with her hand finding my sleeve every minute or so to check I was still there, the Luna a little apart with her arms loosely crossed, and me in the middle of it with my coat still on and my present already handed off to a servant who'd carried it away to wherever gifts go to be examined.

"How did you meet my sister," Fenris said.

It wasn't the opening I'd have picked, but it was the one Mina and I had walked through twice on the way up, quiet, her mouth close to my ear so the wind took it. Keep how long we have known each other off the table. He doesn’t need to know you have known me since we were kids.

So I'd shortened it.

"Here. The border market, at the end of last winter." I kept it easy, no reason to dress it up. "I came north for materials, raw wool and some of the worked cloth you can't get clean in the South. She was at a stall arguing with a trader down to the bone over a bolt of dyed felt, and winning, and I made the mistake of laughing where she could hear me." I let a little warmth come, because that part needed none of the dial. "We've been talking since. A year of it, near enough."

"A year." Fenris turned the number over. "She never said your name in a year."

"No?" I feigned ignorance, held his eyes on that, because it was the soft place and I wasn't going to flinch at it. I sighed "She's careful about what's hers. I'd imagine you taught her that."

Mina's hand tightened on my sleeve, and I couldn't tell if it was the lie or the truth in it that moved her, and I didn't look down to find out.

The Alpha studied me a while. Men have been deciding things about me behind their eyes my whole adult life, in better suits and worse, and I'd long ago stopped letting it move my face, but this was a different weight than a board member running numbers. There was something in how he held still. Something that read the air around a man and not the man alone. I didn't like it, but I didn't dare show that I didn't like it.

"You've been in the human world," he said.

"Five years. More."

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