All Chapters of My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Chapter 251 - Chapter 260

FenrisVane had been talking for a quarter of an hour and hadn't told us anything yet.I knew his rhythm. I'd known it since I was a boy. He laid the ground out slow — the names of the packs, the names of the men who'd sent the riders, the dates the riders had come in, the conditions of the horses when they got to our gate. He read the names off the parchment without lifting his eyes off the parchment. He did that when the news at the bottom of the page was bad. He'd done it the night my father died and he'd done it the night my brother died, and now he was doing it again, and his shoulders had the same set in them they'd had both other times, and his free hand was flat on the table with the thumb tucked in. I'd been watching the thumb for ten minutes. The thumb was the thing that told you.The chamber was old. The fire at the back wall was honest enough but the room was twice as big as any fire was going to win against, and the chill went up through the soles of the boots into the lo

FenrisVane cleared his throat. A small dry sound. The kind of sound an old man makes before a thing he has been doing every morning of his adult life."You have to remain calm, Alpha.""Calm.""Yes."I stared at him.He stared back. He kept staring back. He was the only chief in the chamber whose eyes were on mine and not on the dust, the table, or the floor between his boots, and his eyes had the quality of a man who had decided thirty years ago what his last day was going to look like and had stopped fearing it sometime in the middle of his life.I leaned forward over the table. I set both fists on the wood."You are sitting in this chamber, Vane, asking me to be calm, while the men who took my brother apart are out there at this minute having a fine time of it. Going from one pack to the next. Tearing children open and walking away. You are asking me to be calm."Vane scanned the room once, fast. I knew the scan. He was checking who in the chamber needed to live through the next mi

JaceNothing is black and white. There's always the grey in the middle where the truth actually lives, and I think the grey in the middle of my father was this: he made himself the victim so I'd grow up seeing a victim, and he made himself the hero so I'd grow up seeing a hero, a man building his family's wealth back from scratch with his bare hands against a thief. And it worked on me. I did see the hero. He was a hero. He was just a hero who could not, for the rest of his life, stop competing with a king.Because that's what Aldric did with the company my father left behind. He made it great. He took the half my father walked away from and he expanded it past anything the two of them had built together, and every year the thing got bigger and shinier and further out of reach, and every year my father got smaller next to it, and the smaller he got the worse his decisions ran. He started making moves out of spite instead of sense. He pulled money off his own books to stand up some fir

JaceThe smell hit me before I'd cleared the doorway, and my stomach turned over and answered it before I had any vote in the matter.I came out of the bath with the towel knotted at my hip and my hair dripping down the back of my neck, and the whole front room had changed while I'd been in there. There was a small table set in front of the couch. Low, square, the right height for a man to eat off without getting up, and it was loaded. Steam still coming off most of it. The smell had layers to it, the brown deep bottom note of something seared hard in fat and over that the sharper green thing of an herb I couldn't name, and the worms in my stomach woke all the way up and started in on me.Mina was bent over the table, still setting it. She had her back to me. She'd changed at some point into a short skirt, and somewhere in the bending the hem of it had ridden up the backs of her thighs, all the way up, to the soft underside of her where the curve of her ass started, and for about a se

Jace"Why would I ever lie about loving you?"She kept staring at me like I'd told her the moon had come up green and she was waiting on me to admit I was joking, and I let her stare, because the silence was doing my work for me and I'd long since stopped being uncomfortable inside a silence.I dragged the last of the food off the plate."Ahh. Fuck. This is good." It came out of me low, around the bite. I worked the rest of it down and set the fork against the empty plate with a small clink. "Thank you, Mina. I mean that one too."That broke her. She let her eyes go off me and the corner of her mouth came up."I'm happy you enjoyed it."She got up and started clearing. She reached across me for the plate and stacked it on the others, and halfway through she stopped cold and said a word under her breath I won't repeat, something about forgetting the water like a fool, and then she had the whole stack balanced against her hip and she was gone, off across the long room with quick short st