My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 305

Jace

There was nothing polite about how the hall ate.

I'd been to dinners that cost more than some of the packs I'd seen, rooms where a man could starve waiting for the third fork to be cleared, and I'd learned to move through them without showing I was counting the exits.

This was the opposite of all of that. Long tables down the length of a hall built for it, fires roaring in two stone mouths, whole haunches of full lambs brought out on boards and torn apart by hand. No ceremony to the eating itself. They ripped the meat off the bone and washed it down and laughed with their mouths full and reached across each other for more, hundreds of them, loud enough that I had to lean in to hear the people beside me.

Mina had me near the head of it. Fenris sat at the top with Sera at his side, and Mina and I were close in, a place of honor I understood the weight of and tried not to look grateful for.

Across from us sat the elders, the high houses, the ones Mina had walked me past earlier in the day with their names and their holdings murmured into my ear.

That one's Vane, oldest blood in the room. That one lost two sons at the southern ridge. That one you don't turn your back on. I'd kept the list. It's the only kind of memory that's ever kept me alive.

Fenris turned to his mate with a bone still in his hand.

"Well," he said. "What did you make of it. The preparation."

Sera set down whatever she'd been not-quite-eating. "You succeeded," she said. "In traumatizing me. Thoroughly. I'll be seeing it behind my eyes for a year."

Fenris threw his head back and barked a laugh, loud enough to turn heads down the table, and Mina laughed with him, and even the elders' end of the table eased at the sound of the Alpha amused. I let myself smile because the moment asked for it.

"It looked like it hurt," Sera said, when he'd come down off the laugh. "The water. It should have killed you. It would have boiled the skin off anyone else in this hall."

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