My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 209

Irina

I made it to the bedside chair before my legs went out.

The chair was velvet. Cold against my palms when I gripped the armrests. I sat there for a long minute with my mouth open and my throat working, breathing through my teeth, trying not to make a sound that would carry into the corridor. My chest had been holding the same shape for the last two hours and the muscles weren't sure how to do anything else. Down by the door I could still hear the senior maid's footsteps fading into the carpet, and then nothing.

For the first time since the carriage had crossed back into Valdris territory, I was not being watched.

I drew a breath in through my nose.

Lemon oil. Beeswax. The faint sweet rose of the soap the maids used in the linen press. The fire in the hearth was a clean orange, the wood already burned down to the second log, and the smoke smelled the way smoke was supposed to smell in a civilized house — like a fire, and nothing else. No iron in the air. No stone. No three-deep wolf pelts heaped on a bed because the cold up there got in through the masonry and you needed weight on you at night to stay warm. No torch pitch. No wet wool drying on a rack ten feet from where you slept. No bodies — the smell of so many bodies in one hall, men who washed when the snow melted and then again when it melted the next year.

For three weeks I had wanted exactly this. My bed. My ceiling. A room that did not smell like wolves.

I should have been able to breathe.

I wasn't.

I let my head fall back. The ceiling above the bed was painted gold leaf — clouds and small naked figures arranged in some allegory my husband had picked out a decade ago. I had never bothered to find out what it was supposed to mean.

Wash off the stench.

He had said it on my way out. Easy tone. The same one he'd used to tell me Lyra preferred women, the same one he'd used to tell me he had planned my recovery and I never had to do this again. He'd held me. He'd stroked the back of my head. His mouth had been right at my hair. His face had been in the spot where my neck meets my shoulder.

He had breathed in.

He had not had to do that.

A small noise came out of me, low and stuck in the back of the throat. I clamped my teeth down on it and put both hands over my mouth.

Three weeks of holding my own breath in their corridors. Three weeks of pinching at my food to make sure I wasn't tasting fur in it, of scrubbing my hands twice between courses, of wrinkling my nose every time one of the warriors came too close to a doorway. And the first thing my husband had told me, on the very first hour of being back inside a house I'd built my entire personality around being clean enough for, was that I smelled.

He could have meant the road. The horse. The leather of the carriage. Two days of dust and northern air in my hair. He could have meant any of that. The mountains up there had a particular cold that got into the wool and didn't leave it. Anyone who'd ridden out of Ironmaw in the last week was going to come into a southern keep carrying that scent. It would be true of the captain too. Tomorrow, when the funeral rites for Torin were called, every wolf who had been in the delegation was going to walk into the chapel smelling exactly the same.

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