My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 302

Jace

She'd gone still. Not frightened still. The other kind. She had the bowl of stew in her two hands, absurdly, the thing she'd carried out of the kitchen to feed me, and she set it down on the nearest bench without a glance at it, and she straightened, and something came up in her that I'd been waiting our whole reunion to see arrive.

"He asked you a question, Taya," Mina said. "Which of them was coming for my arm. Go on. Tell the hall."

Taya's mouth opened.

"No." Mina took a step into her. "You don't get to answer that one, because we both know the answer, and it's that you put your hand up to hit me in front of forty people who watch everything and forget nothing, and not one of them stood for me. He did."

Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. The whole hall had gone to glass around us. "You want to talk about what people are. Let's. You're the daughter of an elder. I'm the daughter of a slave. You've never once let me forget it, my whole life, every room, every doorway, just like this one. And here's the part you got wrong all those years, the part you're going to stand there and finally hear."

She closed the last of the space.

"I'm also the sister of the Alpha. And he has skinned men for less than the wind you just took toward my face."

I have made my living reading the moment a thing turns, and that was the moment. It wasn't in this woman. Taya. It was in the room. Behind me the four of them settled back down toward their benches, the worst of it draining out of the air, because every wolf in that hall had run the same sum Mina laid in front of them and come out the same place. The slave's daughter was the Alpha's blood, and the Alpha was Fenris.

Taya stood in it for one more second, and I will give her this, she didn't crumble. She gathered herself up out of it with the kind of pride that's mostly spite, and she pulled her wrist in against her body where I'd held it, nursing the place my hand had been, and she put her eyes on Mina with a hate that had years of root under it.

"Enjoy your man," she said. "Enjoy all of it. While it lasts."

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