My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 285

Mina

"It's complicated."

"It's not, though." He said it gently. He always said the pushing things gently. "It's the simplest thing in the world. I'm not a man who hides. I don't like the hiding. You're not a thing I'm ashamed of, Mina, you're the opposite of that, and I'm tired of the only place I get to have you being a cold lodge two hours' walk from the people who matter to you."

The people who matter to you. He'd put it right next to the thing I'd been bleeding about all night, the people who don't see me, the people who count me least, and now here he was, the one who saw me, the one who counted me, and he wanted to stand in the same room as the people who didn't, and let them see that someone did.

When he said it like that I couldn't find the edge of the no. The no had been so clear an hour ago and now it was somewhere under all the warmth and I couldn't put my hand on it.

"You want to meet Fenris," I said.

"I want to meet your brother." A correction so soft it didn't feel like one. "There's a difference. Fenris is the Alpha. Your brother is the man who tied you to a bed so you wouldn't break your own arm thrashing, and bathed you for a week, and said sorry every night until you could hear it. You told me that." His arm tightened around the front of me, slow. "I don't want to meet the Alpha of Ironmaw. I couldn't care less about the Alpha of Ironmaw. I want to shake the hand of the man who did that for a little girl, and I want him to know who I am, because I'm not going anywhere, and a man like that should know the name of whoever's been keeping his sister warm."

My eyes were hot again. For a different reason now. He'd taken the truest, softest thing I had about Fenris and laid it down between us so gently, and the wanting-him-to-meet-them had stopped being a want and turned into something with more weight in it, respect and seriousness and the shape of a man who meant to stay.

"It's not the right time," I said, and even I could hear it wasn't a no. It was a later. He'd moved me from no to later and the ground had changed under my feet before I'd caught it, so I was already standing on the new part of it.

"I'm not asking for today." His mouth was near my ear now, his voice down low and warm and certain. "I'm asking you to stop walking out of here with a hood pulled down to your nose like you're ashamed of where you slept. I'm asking that when you're ready, you take me up the mountain and let me stand in front of your family like a man who has nothing to hide. Because I don't. Do you?"

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