All Chapters of My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Chapter 301 - Chapter 310

486 Chapters

300 What The Fuck Do You Think You’re Doing?

Mina"And I'm going to find out what it is. Every bit of it. And when I do, there won't be a corner of this keep she can hide in, because they'll all see her for the scam she is."Inside me, something turned over.Because I knew. That was the awful part, standing there with the stew going cold in my hands. I knew more than Taya did and I'd worked hard not to. Sera had come to me once with red eyes and told me two things in the same hour. That she was carrying a child, and that Kael was dead. I hadn't asked her to explain the second one. I'd seen the shape of it sitting behind her face, the size of the thing she was holding, and I'd made a choice, the same choice I was making now with my face gone smooth and still. I didn't want it. I'd spent my whole life with other people's blood on the floor and I was done volunteering for it. Sera could carry her own. I had a man who was good to me and a kitchen full of women who'd teased me about my hair, and I wanted to keep those things, and yo

301 Giving Mina The Floor

Jace"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"Her wrist was thin and hard in my grip, and I'd caught it a hand's width from Mina's face, and the part of me that lunged to catch it hadn't stopped to ask the rest of me first.That was the trouble. I'd spent my life not doing things like this. I'd built a whole man out of not doing things like this, the soft harmless southerner with his hands always open and in view, and the work of all five years had gone out the window in one breath, because I'd watched a woman wind up to drive a fist through the face of the only person on this freezing continent who'd waited for me, and my body had answered before my brain got a vote.Now I was a stranger with his hand locked on a trueborn daughter of the North.Behind me, the room had heard it happen.Benches scraped. Not all of them. Three, maybe four, the sound of big men coming up off the wood fast, and I didn't turn to count because turning my back fully on the woman was its own kind of stupid,

302 Harmless Thing

JaceShe'd gone still. Not frightened still. The other kind. She had the bowl of stew in her two hands, absurdly, the thing she'd carried out of the kitchen to feed me, and she set it down on the nearest bench without a glance at it, and she straightened, and something came up in her that I'd been waiting our whole reunion to see arrive."He asked you a question, Taya," Mina said. "Which of them was coming for my arm. Go on. Tell the hall."Taya's mouth opened."No." Mina took a step into her. "You don't get to answer that one, because we both know the answer, and it's that you put your hand up to hit me in front of forty people who watch everything and forget nothing, and not one of them stood for me. He did." Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. The whole hall had gone to glass around us. "You want to talk about what people are. Let's. You're the daughter of an elder. I'm the daughter of a slave. You've never once let me forget it, my whole life, every room, every doorway, j

303 Inn

JaceMina dressed me for it with the care you give someone who doesn't yet understand he should be afraid.She'd come to my room before the light was full, a bundle of dark wool over her arm, her hair bound back off her face, severe, nothing like the woman who'd been teasing trader stalls a day ago. She laid the clothes on the bed, took in the southern coat I'd put on out of habit, and shook her head."Not that. Wool. You'll be standing out in the cold a long time." She worked the fastenings at my throat herself, brisk, her hands sure on them. "And listen. Whatever happens out there, you have to remain composed, don't make a sound. I know I've said it before, but I'm saying it again because you won't want to do any of it when the time comes.""You're not selling it well.""I'm not trying to sell it." She smoothed the wool flat against my chest and stepped back to take in the whole of me. "There. Now you look like you might belong here. From a distance. In a bad light."I wanted to ask

304 The Other Southerner.

Jace"Inn."He went to the waist, the chest. He didn't stop. He lowered himself until the rolling water closed over his shoulders and then his throat, and he sat down in it, submerged to the neck in a basin throwing steam off its own surface, and he held still.His skin began to change. I made myself watch it, because looking away seemed more dangerous than looking. The red came up first across his shoulders and the back of his neck, the flat angry red just like when meat is dropped in a pan, spreading down into the water and up his throat to the line of his jaw. A finer thread of steam lifted off his wet hair, separate from the steam off the water. He was being cooked. I'll tell it plain, because there's no soft way to set it down. A living man sat in water hot enough to take the skin off my arm in a second. The heat did to him what heat does to flesh. His painted eye stayed open, fixed on nothing. He never moved. He never made one sound.The shaman walked the rim of the basin around

305 The Outsider

JaceThere was nothing polite about how the hall ate.I'd been to dinners that cost more than some of the packs I'd seen, rooms where a man could starve waiting for the third fork to be cleared, and I'd learned to move through them without showing I was counting the exits. This was the opposite of all of that. Long tables down the length of a hall built for it, fires roaring in two stone mouths, whole haunches of full lambs brought out on boards and torn apart by hand. No ceremony to the eating itself. They ripped the meat off the bone and washed it down and laughed with their mouths full and reached across each other for more, hundreds of them, loud enough that I had to lean in to hear the people beside me.Mina had me near the head of it. Fenris sat at the top with Sera at his side, and Mina and I were close in, a place of honor I understood the weight of and tried not to look grateful for. Across from us sat the elders, the high houses, the ones Mina had walked me past earlier in

306 The Quiet Luna

Jace"He asked you a simple question. You didn't have to be rude about it."Fenris considered his sister's hand on his, then her face, and there was no anger anywhere in him, only a kind of delighted bafflement that she'd struck the Alpha of the North over a southerner at a feast. "What? He does smell like a human." He spread his hand, appealing to the table, to Sera, to the air. "I'm not being cruel. I'm telling the man what my nose tells me. He's got the human world all over him.""It's the years," I said, because there was no use letting it sit. I kept it easy, kept my hands open on the table. "Five of them, in their cities. You live in that long enough, it gets into everything. Their soaps, their smoke, the stuff they put in the water and the cloth and the air. I stopped being able to smell it on myself a long time ago." I lifted one shoulder. "I'd take it as a fair complaint if I knew how to wash it off. I don't, anymore."That landed better than the question had. Fenris studied

307 The Smaller Animal

JaceIt worried me more than the Alpha's nose did. I'd started telling myself the familiarity would help. Sera and I had always been easy with each other in the old days, cool and good, two clever people who recognized each other across a room full of people who weren't. I'd let myself believe that would carry. Sitting at that table with her eyes coming and going off me, I understood I'd miscounted. The woman across from me could end Blackwater's chances with a single quiet word in her husband's ear. She could refuse. She could stop the Alpha lifting a finger. She could, if she decided I was more trouble than I was worth, point a thousand Northern wolves down the mountain and there wouldn't be a Blackwater left to save, and it would cost her nothing.For one warm idiot second I thought about laying it out right there, while Fenris was full and easy and liked me. Raising Blackwater at the table, letting the Alpha's good humor do some of the work. I killed the thought before it finishe

308 Do You Think Your Brother Would Hurt Him?

SeraI watched my husband walk my friend's whole heart out of the hall with an arm around his neck, and I let none of it show. A Luna doesn't get to show things. That is the first thing this place taught me.Beside me Mina let out a breath that shook on the way out of her."To the gods," she said, low, "I hope he doesn't kill him.""You mean Fenris." I let a little amusement into it, because she needed me light, and because the alternative was letting her see I'd had the same thought for half a second before I'd put it away. "Your brother. The one you've trusted your whole life.""That's not fair.""It's a little fair." I picked at the edge of the board in front of me. "You don't trust him?""Of course I trust him." She was still watching the doorway they'd gone through, her hands flat on the table like she might push up out of the chair. "I trust him with me. I don't know what he wants with Jace. Isn't it too soon for this? They met two days ago. What's there to talk about that can't

309 What Was That?

Sera"What?""Do you think your brother would hurt you on purpose? Knowing it would get to you." I held her eyes. "Hurting Jace is hurting you. He knows that. He's not a stupid man and he loves you. So. Do you think he'd do that to you on purpose?"She was quiet for a while. Long enough that I let it sit."No," she said finally. "No. He wouldn't.""Then stop chewing your own hand off."She almost laughed. It came out broken, but it came out. Her shoulders dropped a finger's width. After a moment she reached into the bowl and took a berry, then another, and I let myself feel the small clean satisfaction of having talked one person I loved down off a ledge today. It was more than I'd managed for myself.My eyes went back to the doorway. I couldn't help it. Whatever Fenris was saying to him in there, I couldn't touch it from here, and I made myself not care. There was nothing Jace could tell my husband that would cost me anything. I'd handed Fenris the worst of it with my own mouth three

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