My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 173

Kane

The grass was still slick with the kind of heavy, grey dew that soaked straight through your socks if you weren't wearing the right boots. I wasn't. I was wearing a pair of old sneakers that had seen better days and jeans that had a permanent grease stain on the left knee from fixing the tractor last Tuesday. I didn't care. Being the Alpha of Blackwater meant I could technically walk around in a burlap sack and people would call it a fashion statement, but mostly, I just didn't have the energy to give a damn about the optics.

I stood at the edge of the long field, the heavy iron-headed club weighted perfectly in my right hand. It was an old game, something my grandfather used to play when the pack was still fighting for every inch of the valley. It looked like golf if golf was played by people who expected to be attacked by a mountain lion at any moment.

I stared at the red flag fluttering three hundred yards away. The wind was coming in from the east, a sharp, biting breeze that smelled like wet earth and the copper tang of the nearby river. I did the math in my head. The trajectory. The force needed. If I hit the ball at a forty-five-degree angle with enough snap in my wrists, it would clear the rise and drop right on the mark.

My father used to tell me that my brain was my biggest handicap. "Stop thinking, Kane," he’d say, usually while cuffing me over the back of the head. "The ball doesn't want to be calculated. It wants to be hit."

I let out a slow, jagged breath. I adjusted my grip, feeling the rough leather of the handle bite into my palms. I swung.

The crack of the iron hitting the ball echoed across the empty field, sharp as a gunshot. I shaded my eyes against the morning glare, watching the white speck arc against the bruised-looking sky. It was high. It was straight. It looked perfect.

Then the wind shifted. Just a tiny, invisible shove from the east. The ball caught the draft, wobbled, and dropped twenty yards short of the red flag, disappearing into the tall, un-mowed weeds.

"Close," I muttered to the empty air. "Tsk. It would have been really good if it actually hit."

I stayed there for a second, my arms still following the arc of the swing. I didn't move. I just stood there, staring at the spot where I’d failed. It had become a ritual lately—this standing still. It was the only time the silence in my head didn't feel like a physical weight. Ever since that night in the office, when the silver light had burned my eyes and the bond had snapped like a dry bone, the silence had been deafening. There was a hole in my chest that felt like a drafty room in an old house. I’d filled it with pack business, with Elara’s pregnancy, with the endless yapping of the chiefs. But out here? Out here it was just the wind and the failure of a white ball.

"You're leaning too far into your left hip, you know."

I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. The scent reached me first—expensive human cologne, something that smelled like artificial citrus and laundry starch, mixed with the faint, metallic smell of a brand-new car.

Jace.

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