My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 322

Sera

Three weeks I'd been in the North, and three weeks the South had stayed quiet, and the last thing I'd do was to call it winning.

I sat at the vanity with my hair wet down my back as I watched my own face in the glass and turned the silence over, the same as I'd been turning it since I crossed into this country. No rider had come up the mountain with my father's seal since Irina left.

No letter. Irina had gone home carrying the worst news a returning Queen could carry, how the rogues taken Torin and the men with him on the eastern road, and my father has been silent since then.

Not a question, or even a summon to understand why one of his deligates was mutilated by Norther wolves.

Three weeks of nothing. By every measure I had, Aldric was too quiet, and it was uncomfortable.

I didn't trust the quiet. Not from him. A quiet board only ever meant I couldn't see the hand that was moving.

The comb caught a knot and I worked it loose without looking down. I'd learned the ways of the North fast because I'd had to, and one of the first things I'd learned was that this was the only ground in the world my father held in any kind of regard.

He respected almost nothing, but he respected this. The strongest wolves alive, kept to their own cold country, owing him not one thing and afraid of him even less.

Everywhere south of the water belonged to him in one fashion or another, the packs that knelt and the packs that thought they hadn't, and the difference between those two had never once mattered to the outcome. He held them all.

All but one.

I'd run to Blackwater because Blackwater was the single pack in the South my father's hand had never closed around, and I'd told myself that meant it sat too far out, too far down, past the edge of where his reach could follow. I had been a girl, a naive, stupid girl who knew nothing.

I understood that now, here, with my hair dripping and the truth finally holding still long enough to look at.

It wasn't that Blackwater was beyond him. It was that Blackwater wasn't worth the closing.

A small pack on poor ground, a clash with an old Alpha who'd died stubborn rather than kneel, and my father had weighed the whole of it and decided it cost more than it returned and let it lie.

Not mercy. It was just pure arithmetic.

He'd known what I'd be the day I walked out of his house. He'd told me to my face that an Omega wouldn't last long, and he'd let me go anyway, because a piece that removes itself from the board saves you the trouble of removing it. He hadn't needed to chase me to Blackwater. He'd needed only to wait for me to be disgraced, and sent back.

Which was exactly what happened.

I would have been useless. My father would have wasted me away if a mountain of a man hadn't found a use for me first.

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