My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 296

Taya

Rurik 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 it in small coin. "I only hear things. I don't get told the war plans. You'd have to ask someone important."

I turned from the basin and gave him the look.

He lasted about a breath.

"Fine. East. Something's wrong out east, nobody's saying what, and nobody who'd actually know is talking, which means it's bad." He waved it off, already bored with the part that wasn't the good part. "But that's not the thing. The thing is, with him gone and the warriors gone with him, this keep's going to be wide open for days. So." He tipped his head at me, a glint coming up. "If you were ever of a mind to do something about our beloved southern Luna, you'd have the run of the place to do it in."

I went still over the basin.

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