My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 335

Jace

"Hey." I made myself lighter. "You remember when I asked if you'd come back with me to the city?"

She held her eyes on me. Then the tears came harder, running over my thumb, but she didn't answer, because of course she remembered. She probably thought about it everyday, because I did.

"I'm still here," I said. "Look. Right here. And I'm coming back. This is one more thing, that's all it is, one last thing I have to do. I go, I ride around in the cold, I let your brother watch me not die, and I come home, and I've proved whatever needs proving, and then we go. With his blessing. No hiding, no sneaking you off the mountain in the dark like I stole you. You want that. Don't tell me you don't want that." I ran my thumb across her cheekbone again.

"You want to spend the rest of it hating your brother on my account? That's no way to have a family. Let me fix it the only way it can be fixed."

She shook her head the tears coming faster.

"So let's do this." I got my forehead down against hers. "And listen. If it makes you feel any better. I'm cursed to outlive everyone I know. So there's no chance that I’m dying out there."

I laughed. She didn't. She didn't get the joke, and I wasn't going to explain it, because the explaining kills it.

My mother told me that once. Cursed to outlive them all. She didn't mean it real, she meant it the same as any mother saying a thing to a boy who won't sit still, “you'll bury us all, you little terror.”

I never thought there was anything in it. Then she and my father went into that factory and came out as two things the coroner needed a chart to tell apart, and I didn't, because I wasn't there, because I was three cities over losing money on a game I didn’t even like.

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