My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 313

313 /328

Jace

I still couldn't work out why Mina kept going down to the kitchens.

She was gone before I woke, second morning in a row, off to work with the cooks and the pot-scrubbers. She didn't have to be. She was the Alpha's sister, half his blood anyway. One word from her and she'd never lift a finger in this place again. But down she went, every morning, and came back smelling of smoke and bread with flour up her sleeves, happy in a way I didn't poke at.

The omega thing was the half that wasn't Fenris's. Her mother was a slave brought up out of the south, and in the North that travels straight down the blood. Nothing washes it out, not even an Alpha for a brother. So she got both at once. The protection and the stain. I'd watched it follow her around the keep, the small ways people stood a half-step off her, careful, the respect that stopped a hair short of real. None of them did it to her face. Nobody up here was dumb enough to slight the Alpha's blood where the Alpha might hear about it. But they did it.

So the morning was mine, and I went looking for something to fill it, which has never once led me anywhere good.

Around the side of the keep there was an open yard with the snow stamped flat, and two women in the middle of it beating the hell out of each other.

This wasn't sport. They were working, and working hard. A loose ring of soldiers stood around them, twenty or so, the big kind the North grows, the kind I'd been calling mastiffs in my own head since the day I rode in because there's no other word for a person built that size. They watched in dead earnest. Nobody cheered. A few of them had coin out. In the middle the two women went at it, both bleeding already, neither of them showing any sign of stopping.

I should have kept walking. I knew what I was the second I slowed down, because I have known it a long time.

I am a gambler. Not the kind who does it for fun on a holiday. The kind it's wrong with. I had it before my father died, before the business went bad, before any of the things people like to blame. I couldn't watch two of anything go up against each other without needing money on it. Cards, horses, which raindrop beats the other one down a window. Didn't matter. The need was the same every time and it never once asked whether I could afford it.

It started clean enough, with golf. God, I loved golf. The patience of it, the long slow con of a course, a man alone working out the wind. I tried for two years to get Kane to take it up so we could build something around it, a club, a circuit, real money. He had the hands for it. He could've been good. He never wanted it to be more than a game, though, and you can't make a man hungry who isn't, so I let it go. After golf it was fighters. Boxing first, then the cage, because the money ran deeper there and the reading was cleaner. A horse can't tell you much. A man in a ring tells you everything, if you've watched enough of them.