My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 306

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 me over the cup, and something in him turned from the closed thing back toward the open one.

"Five years," he said. "Doing what."

So I gave it to him, the safe version, the one I've told in better rooms and worse. My father's business, the cloth trade, the holdings that had carried our name before I was born. The cities I'd worked out of, the way the human markets move, money chasing money across a map. I left the parts that bleed on the floor. I didn't tell him the company was ash. I told him the shape of the thing without the hole in the middle of it, and he listened, genuinely, the cup forgotten in his hand, because for all the old stone around him the man had never seen the world I'd come up in and he wanted to know how it worked.

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