My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 257

Jace

And the god was kind.

I'll give him that, because it's true, and because it's part of the thing I can't get out from under. He came into my mother's house and he spoke to my mother with a sweetness and a respect you would not expect out of any man, let alone that one, and I stood there and watched my mother go soft and bright in a way I hadn't seen in years, and somewhere in the middle of it I'd have sworn on anything I watched her quietly reconsider every choice that had carried her into a marriage with my father.

I don't think she knew her own face was doing it. I knew. I could read her the way I could read him. The Aldric effect, I called it later, when I was alone and trying to make a small dry joke out of a thing that wasn't one.

He spoke to me, too. The way a man at the top speaks to a younger man he's decided has something in him. Easy. Direct. A few questions that weren't small talk, that went straight to whether I understood the holdings, whether I understood money, and a look at the end that said he'd gotten his answer. He was good to me. That's the plain word. He was good to me, in my mother's front room, with the sun coming through.

Then he and my father went out by the pool to talk.

I sat inside with my mother. I could see them through the long glass, the two of them down past the tiled edge of the water, standing close, and for the first few minutes it had the shape of a calm thing, two old men finishing an old argument. I didn't try to listen. I want that on the record. I had the ears and I didn't use them, and to this day I don't know if that was respect or cowardice.

Then my father started shouting.

I saw it before I'd have heard it anyway. The whole frame of him went up, the arms came up, the hands cut the air the way his hands cut the air when he'd stopped caring who saw, and his mouth was moving fast and ugly and his neck had gone dark with it. I couldn't make out a word through the glass.

I didn't need the words. I've never in my life seen that much hate come out of one body. It came out of him in waves and it didn't stop, and the venom of it pressed against the window from forty feet away, and the whole time, the entire time, Aldric stood there and took it.

He didn't move. He didn't raise a hand or a voice. He stood with his back straight and his face arranged into nothing at all and he let my father empty the worst of thirty years onto him without a flicker, and that stillness was worse than anything my father was doing, because a man only stands that still when he has already decided how the conversation ends.

And here is the part I keep. Here is the part I sat in that water trying to set down somewhere it would stop cutting me.

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