My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 254

Fenris

Vane cleared his throat. A small dry sound. The kind of sound an old man makes before a thing he has been doing every morning of his adult life.

"You have to remain calm, Alpha."

"Calm."

"Yes."

I stared at him.

He stared back. He kept staring back. He was the only chief in the chamber whose eyes were on mine and not on the dust, the table, or the floor between his boots, and his eyes had the quality of a man who had decided thirty years ago what his last day was going to look like and had stopped fearing it sometime in the middle of his life.

I leaned forward over the table. I set both fists on the wood.

"You are sitting in this chamber, Vane, asking me to be calm, while the men who took my brother apart are out there at this minute having a fine time of it. Going from one pack to the next. Tearing children open and walking away. You are asking me to be calm."

Vane scanned the room once, fast. I knew the scan. He was checking who in the chamber needed to live through the next minute. Then he came back to me.

He let his breath go on purpose, the way a man breathes out to slow a horse he is not sure of.

"I am not asking you to ignore them, Alpha. I am not asking you not to avenge the Alpha Dimitri. I am asking you to come at this thing with your head still on your shoulders."

Don't listen to this old man, the wolf said in my ear. Egh egh egh. Look at him sitting there. Look at the soft old throat of him. We can be on the road inside the hour. Egh egh egh. Two years, Fenris. Two years we have waited. The old man wants us to wait one more day. Egh.

I shut my eyes for a beat. I let the wolf finish what he was finishing. He had to finish or he was going to keep at me, and I needed him low for what came next.

When I opened my eyes Vane was where I'd left him. Hands on the parchment. White hair grey with mortar dust. The fire at the back wall had come most of the way back upright.

Vane had served my father.

He had served Dimitri for the year and a half my brother had held this seat, and in that year and a half he had been the only chief at this table who would say no to my brother to my brother's face.

He'd said no the morning Dimitri rode out to the eastern provinces, and my brother had laughed at him, and four days after the laugh my brother had come back down the mountain in a cloak that did not have his name stitched into the collar. Vane had been the one to bring the cloak across the courtyard with both arms because he would not let a servant do it.

He'd put the cloak in my hands. He hadn't said anything for a long minute. Then he had said I am sorry, Alpha, and that was when I became the Alpha — in the courtyard, with my brother's empty cloak in my hands, and dust on Vane's coat.

He was the oldest chief in the chamber.

He was the only man at this table I would not be able to break across my knee.

He was also the only thing standing in front of the door tonight. He was a thin line, and on the other side of him was a war I was going to start before midnight, and the one reason I had not already shoved past him and walked out into the courtyard was because he had not stepped aside. Vane did not stand in front of any man unless he had a thing worth standing for.

I had known that about him since I was nine.

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