My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 256

Jace

Nothing is black and white. There's always the grey in the middle where the truth actually lives, and I think the grey in the middle of my father was this: he made himself the victim so I'd grow up seeing a victim, and he made himself the hero so I'd grow up seeing a hero, a man building his family's wealth back from scratch with his bare hands against a thief. And it worked on me. I did see the hero. He was a hero. He was just a hero who could not, for the rest of his life, stop competing with a king.

Because that's what Aldric did with the company my father left behind. He made it great. He took the half my father walked away from and he expanded it past anything the two of them had built together, and every year the thing got bigger and shinier and further out of reach, and every year my father got smaller next to it, and the smaller he got the worse his decisions ran.

He started making moves out of spite instead of sense. He pulled money off his own books to stand up some firm that had no reason to exist except that Aldric didn't have one like it. He chased. A man can spend his whole life chasing another man and call it business right up until the end.

Then the threats started.

He hired an inspector. A private one, a quiet human professional whose whole job was to follow Aldric and learn his comings and goings, and that was the point where I stopped being able to read my own father, because the chasing had been pitiful but the threats were something else, and underneath the threats was the thing that scared me, which was that my father had stopped being afraid.

He found something. I never learned what. But he found a thing on Aldric and it made him bold, bold in a way I'd never seen in him, and the proof of how bold came on a morning I'll have until I die, the morning Aldric drove out to our house on the island for the first time.

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