Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Kabanata 291 - Kabanata 300

Sera“Why would anyone do that.""Because I wanted you." He said it plainly, a fact too simple to need defending, and he couldn't seem to understand why I was making it complicated. "The child was already there. It didn't change what I wanted. So I took the vow."Something in me pulled tight and went looking for the soft place to put a knife."And you said nothing." Low. "For all of it. You knew, and you watched me carry it. You watched me go grey, you watched me flinch every time you came near with that nose of yours, and you said nothing. You let me come to you. Tonight, on the worst night of my life, you made me be the one to drag it into the light, when you could have ended it any time you wanted.""Sera.""That's what you do, isn't it." I couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop. "You decide what people get to carry. You sit on the hard things and call it protecting them. You'd rather hold a thing alone until it rots you out than say it to someone's face, because saying it means someb

JaceI'd been standing in the cold long enough to learn the courtyard by heart, which is a thing I do when I'm nervous and won't admit to being nervous.Forty-one paces along the front wall. A well with a frozen lip. Two of the Alpha's men at the inner door who had not stopped watching me since Mina went up, the flat unhurried watching men give a dog they haven't decided about yet. I'd given them nothing to decide. I'd stood with my hands where they could see them and my face arranged into the open, pleasant, harmless thing I'd spent five years building for rooms exactly like this one, rooms where the people in them could end me and were deciding whether to.The gift sat in its wrappings at my feet. I'd put it together since I got north, knowing I'd be standing in a courtyard like this one sooner or later and a man doesn't come empty-handed to an Alpha's gate. I nudged it straight with my boot and made myself stop.Mina came back through the inner door first.She came fast, fast as she

JaceThey took me inside, and the warmth hit me first, and then the fact that the warmth was the only soft thing I was going to get.The hall they put me in was smaller than the great one I'd glimpsed off the entry, a room built for fewer people and harder conversations, with a fire going hard in a stone mouth at one end and a long table that nobody sat at. We didn't sit. A host who means you well sits you down, and the Alpha stood, so we all stood, Mina at my side with her hand finding my sleeve every minute or so to check I was still there, the Luna a little apart with her arms loosely crossed, and me in the middle of it with my coat still on and my present already handed off to a servant who'd carried it away to wherever gifts go to be examined."How did you meet my sister," Fenris said.It wasn't the opening I'd have picked, but it was the one Mina and I had walked through twice on the way up, quiet, her mouth close to my ear so the wind took it. Keep how long we have known each ot

TayaRurik came in without knocking, the same as always, already talking before the door had shut behind him."So the Alpha's leaving." He dropped onto the bench by my window and put his boots up on the sill like the room was his. "Riding out. Soon, is the word. And it's not a few men, it's a proper war party, half the good warriors going with him."I was at the basin and I didn't turn around. "How do you know that.""A friend told me.""What friend.""A friend." He grinned at the back of my head in the polished iron. "I have those. People tell me things. It's a gift."It wasn't a gift, it was that Rurik couldn't walk past two people murmuring without folding himself into it, and everyone knew it, and somehow they told him things anyway. I'd stopped asking who his friends were years ago. It was never anyone. It was always everyone."Riding out where," I said."How would I know that." He said it to the ceiling, wounded, a man whose gift had been insulted and was going to make me pay for

MinaIt was evening, and I took him the long way around the pack house, because I wanted him to see it, and because I wanted a few more minutes of him to myself before the whole keep got its hands on him.It was the same walk I'd given Sera her first week. Down the gallery where the old shields hung, past the long windows that showed the yard going blue with evening, and I named things as we went, the naming you do for someone you want to belong somewhere. That's the armory. That's where the council sits. That door you don't open. He took it all in with that quiet attention he had, the one that left you feeling like the only lit thing in the room, and every few steps his hand found the small of my back, light, only to say he was there."There's a feast coming," I said. "Day after tomorrow, the big one. You'll want to be ready for that. Northern feasts aren't like anything you've sat at down south, I promise you.""What's the occasion?""My brother's riding out soon. He’s taking a war p