My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 320

320 /328

Irina

The soap was gray and threw off no smell of its own, which was the entire point of buying it. I'd ordered it up from the laundress's stores under the excuse of a skin complaint, and I kept the bar wrapped in plain cloth at the back of the cabinet where no maid would think to ask why the Queen needed something so ugly.

I worked it into my throat first, where his hand had been, then down to my collarbone, then my chest. My nails were short and I scrubbed with them anyway, hard enough to leave thin pink trails. Between my thighs I used my fingers and the cold water both. Twice. Once was never enough, and twice was barely enough either. A man's nose forgets. A wolf's doesn't. It didn't matter that the man himself was already three turns gone over the wall and halfway back to whatever hole he slept in. What he left behind stayed exactly where he'd put it until something stronger scrubbed it out, and the only thing in this palace stronger than Kark was the husband I was about to sit across from.

I dunked my head and worked the soap through my hair too. It stung my eyes and left me smelling faintly of nothing, which was worse than smelling of anything at all, because nothing was its own kind of strange on a woman who usually wore rosewater. I'd have to put the rosewater back on after. Layer the ordinary back over the scrubbed-raw underneath. I'd been doing it in one form or another for twenty years now.

The bell rang twice from the breakfast hall. I had perhaps ten minutes.

The green dress lay where he'd left it, in two pieces on the floor by the bed, the bodice torn clean from the skirt. Aldric's favorite, the one he always found some reason to mention when I wore it, the one I'd been planning to wear today specifically because a woman doesn't go looking different the morning after she's done something different. I picked it up anyway, turned it over once, and understood there was no mending that would hold past a glance.

I went through the wardrobe fast. Not the blue, he'd ask why I'd switched colors entirely. Not the gold, too much like trying. I settled on a gray so close to the green in cut that it might pass as the same dress to anyone who didn't look hard, and prayed that this morning, of all mornings, nobody would.

Aldric was already at his eggs when I came in, in the kind of good humor that meant the morning would run long. He set his fork down when he saw me, a small private courtesy he'd kept for twenty years, never once needing to be asked for it.

"There's a pack three valleys west," he said, before I'd even reached my chair. "Lost a great many of their people this winter. A fever. Took their Alpha too, in the end, which is the real shame of it. I want to send relief. Grain, blankets, a healer or two. Whatever will help them stand back up."

"That's generous of you." I let a careful line settle into my voice, the shape of concern rather than the thing itself. "Are we certain it's safe to send anyone in? I'd have thought caution mattered more than a visit, until it's run its course."