My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 298

Mina

It was evening, and I took him the long way around the pack house, because I wanted him to see it, and because I wanted a few more minutes of him to myself before the whole keep got its hands on him.

It was the same walk I'd given Sera her first week. Down the gallery where the old shields hung, past the long windows that showed the yard going blue with evening, and I named things as we went, the naming you do for someone you want to belong somewhere. That's the armory. That's where the council sits. That door you don't open. He took it all in with that quiet attention he had, the one that left you feeling like the only lit thing in the room, and every few steps his hand found the small of my back, light, only to say he was there.

"There's a feast coming," I said. "Day after tomorrow, the big one. You'll want to be ready for that. Northern feasts aren't like anything you've sat at down south, I promise you."

"What's the occasion?"

"My brother's riding out soon. He’s taking a war party with him." I said it easy, no more weight on it than it requires, because to me it was a normal thing, my brother left and my brother came back, he'd done it my whole life. "We always feast before the butcher goes out. It's tradition. You send him off full and loud so the cold doesn't get in him on the road."

Something moved in Jace when I said it. If I hadn't been watching his face I'd have missed it, a little still place opening behind his eyes, there and gone. He didn't say anything. He filed it, whatever it was, and walked on, and I thought nothing of it then.

"And tomorrow," I went on, "there's the ceremony. Before any of the feasting." I stopped and turned to him, because this part mattered. "I need you to brace for it, Jace. The butcher ceremony. It's not gentle. It's old, it's the oldest thing we have, and the first time you see it your body's going to want to do something stupid. Don't. Just stand still and let it happen and don't look away, whatever you do. They notice who looks away."

He frowned.

"What happens at the feast?"

"You'll see tomorrow." I started walking again. "I'm not going to spoil it. Just trust me and hold your nerve."

We went a few more steps before he asked the one question I knew was coming.

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