My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 317

Jace

Sera went still.

She stared at me like I had said something so ridiculous that it was taking a while for it to make sense.

I watched it land on her.

Then she started to laugh.

Not a small one. She threw her head back, both hands dropped to her knees, and she laughed at me, loud, out in the open yard, bent over with it, her shoulders shaking violently.

Around us the warriors turned to look. Their Luna, folded in half and howling at the southerner in the snow. A couple of them came half off the fence, unsure whether something had gone wrong with her. Nothing had gone wrong with her. She was the only one in that yard having a good morning.

I stood there and let her have it. Then I pushed a slightly frustrated breath out through my nose and waited.

Let me stop it there a second because I want to be fair to her, and fair means admitting she had a point.

What I'd asked for was insane. I know it. A man with no blood, no claim, no pack, no name anybody up here had heard a week ago, standing in the snow asking the Luna of the North to hand him an Alpha's chair. If a stranger walked up and said it to me I'd have laughed too. Not in his face. I've got better manners than she does. But I'd have laughed.

So I won't pretend she was wrong to think I'd lost my mind.

But I'm not a desperate man.

I know what that word means up close. I watched it for years, on a man I loved, and whatever it is, it isn't me. It was him. It was my father.

You already know most of it. I won't drag you back through the worst of it again. The short version is that my father spent my whole boyhood building a thing with both hands and pouring it into me a spoonful at a time, every holding, every name, recite it back, Jace, all of this is yours. Then it was gone, and I was the heir to nothing but a number with my name at the bottom of it. The company's mine now. The company is a full debt. That's the whole inheritance.

But there is one thing on this earth that turns that number back into something. A metal in cold ground a long way south of here, the kind the humans build half their new world on and can't get enough of. My father knew about it for twenty years and never once got his hands on it. Now it's the only road I've got back to even. So yes. I came to finish the thing he started. I'll own that all day.

But I want to be clear about the part that matters, because this is where people get it wrong.

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