My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 292

Jace

I'd been standing in the cold long enough to learn the courtyard by heart, which is a thing I do when I'm nervous and won't admit to being nervous.

Forty-one paces along the front wall. A well with a frozen lip. Two of the Alpha's men at the inner door who had not stopped watching me since Mina went up, the flat unhurried watching men give a dog they haven't decided about yet. I'd given them nothing to decide. I'd stood with my hands where they could see them and my face arranged into the open, pleasant, harmless thing I'd spent five years building for rooms exactly like this one, rooms where the people in them could end me and were deciding whether to.

The gift sat in its wrappings at my feet. I'd put it together since I got north, knowing I'd be standing in a courtyard like this one sooner or later and a man doesn't come empty-handed to an Alpha's gate. I nudged it straight with my boot and made myself stop.

Mina came back through the inner door first.

She came fast, fast as she'd gone up, and the cold had put color in her face and the climb had not winded her at all, and when she saw me her whole self changed. I'd watched it happen a few times now and it still did something to me I wasn't built to handle well. The guardedness shed off her. She crossed to me and put her good hand flat on my chest, quick, a thing she did to check I was real, and I covered it with mine.

"They're coming," she said. "They're slow. I told you they'd be slow."

"You did."

"He's going to be—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "He's going to be himself. Don't take it personal. Whatever he does, it's not about you, it's just how he is with new people, he measures everyone, it doesn't mean—"

"Mina." I caught her hand against my chest. "I've met hard men before."

"Not like him."

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