Pirated (Classic Fairytales with a Taste of Darkness #3)

Chapter One

ANATOLE

The Barbe-Bleue cut through the morning fog, her black sails swallowing what little light the dawn offered.

Anatole stood at the bow, one hand resting on the rail, watching the coastline of Roquemort emerge from the mist. Vineyards crawled up the hillsides in neat, dying rows.

It was a town that had seen better centuries huddled against the shore.

Somewhere in that town, his seventh bride was waking up.

His wolf stirred beneath his skin, restless in a way it hadn't been for years.

Hungry, it whispered. Starving. We need.

We need. Twelve years without a true mate bond, twelve years of fighting through ruts alone, chained in the hold while his crew kept their distance.

An unbonded apex alpha couldn't survive forever.

The instability was already showing in the gray threading through his temples, the way his control slipped more easily with each passing month.

He needed an omega. He needed the curse broken. They were tangled together—mistaken for the same need—and that mistake had already cost six women their lives.

"Captain." Luc's boots were soft on the deck as he approached. His first mate's scarred face was unreadable, but Anatole could smell the hesitation on him. Worry, layered over years of loyalty. "The debt collectors sent word. They have her ready."

"A human omega." Anatole kept his voice flat. "Confirmed?"

"Confirmed. The father hid her for years, but he couldn't hide her from the men he owed money to." A pause. "She's young. Twenty-two."

Young. Marguerite had been young too. Twenty when she died in his arms, the curse eating through their bond like acid through silk.

"The curse was designed for wolf omegas," Anatole said. "Morvenna never accounted for a human. The magic might not take the same way."

"Or it might kill her faster."

Anatole finally turned from the rail. The silver-blue streak in his beard caught the weak light, the curse's mark.

"Every omega I've taken has died. Bought, bartered, given willingly.

It doesn't matter. They find the room. They open the door.

They look in the mirror." His hands flexed at his sides.

"This one is different. She has to be different. "

His wolf pushed against his ribs, urgent and angry. This one. Yes. This one will live. This one is ours.

Anatole told his wolf to shut up. It had been wrong before.

JEANNE

THE VINES WERE DYING.

Jeanne knelt in the dirt between rows of grapes that would never ripen, her fingers working at weeds that hardly mattered anymore.

The vineyard had been failing for five years, ever since her mother's death.

Her father had stopped caring about the land around the same time he'd started caring about cards and dice and the sweet promises of wolves who lent money at ruinous rates.

She could smell the sea on the wind. The salt and brine made her skin prickle with unease. Her omega senses were sharper this close to her heat, and she'd learned to trust them.

"Jeanne?"

Her brother Marc picked his way between the rows, his face pale beneath his farmer's tan.

He was thirty-three, ten years her elder, and he'd been the one to help her hide what she was after she'd presented at sixteen.

Six years of suppressants bought on the black market, of masking her scent with bitter herbs, of never letting any wolf get close enough to smell the truth on her.

"They're coming," Marc said. "Father's creditors. They'll be here within the hour."

Jeanne stood, brushing dirt from her worn skirts. "How much does he owe them now?"

Marc's throat worked. He wouldn't meet her eyes. "It doesn't matter. They're not here for money."

The air left her lungs. She understood then, in the way that omegas always understood danger before it arrived. Her father's debts. Her hidden designation. The wolves who collected for the sea captains.

"He sold me."

It wasn't a question. Marc's silence was answer enough.

"To whom?" Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. Inside, the careful architecture of her hidden life was collapsing into rubble. "Which captain?"

"Jeanne..."

"Which captain?"

He looked at her then, and the grief in his eyes was answer enough.

Bluebeard. The Cursed Captain. The monster who had taken six omega brides.

All of them died.

THEY CAME FOR HER WITH chains.

Four wolves in human form, all betas from the look of them, with the hard eyes of men who collected debts for a living.

They found her in the farmhouse, sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded in her lap.

She hadn't run. There was nowhere to run to, and she'd seen what happened to people who fled from wolves.

Better to meet this with her spine straight and her chin raised.

Her father stood in the corner, not looking at her. Henri Lavigne, fifty-two years old, smelling of cheap wine and cheaper excuses.

"The captain will be pleased," the debt collector said, eyeing her with professional assessment. "Human omega. That's rare these days. Rarer still to find one unclaimed at twenty-two."

"She's worth more than the debt," her father said. The words scraped out of him like he was the one being wronged. "I should receive the difference."

Jeanne's nails bit into her palms. She didn't look at him. She couldn't look at him or she would start screaming.

"You'll receive nothing except the pleasure of keeping your hands," the debt collector said. "Be grateful we don’t demand those as interest."

They put the chains on her. Iron, cold against her wrists. The omega in her recoiled, instinct screaming wrong wrong wrong, but she forced herself to stay still as they led her out of the only home she'd ever known.

Marc was waiting on the path to the village.

He had a knife, the one their mother had used to gut fish, but he held it like he meant to use it.

"Let her go." His voice shook. His hand didn't. "We’ll find another way to pay the debt.”

"Marc, don't." Jeanne pulled against the chains.

"I won't let them take you. I promised mother I'd protect you."

The debt collector sighed. "Humans," he said, almost fondly. Then he moved.

He didn't even shift. He didn't need to. One moment Marc was standing with his knife raised. The next, he was on the ground with his throat torn open, blood pumping into the dirt in rhythmic gushes. His eyes were still open. He was still looking at her.

Jeanne's scream tore out of her, raw and animal. She lunged toward her brother's body, chains rattling, but the wolves held her back. Marc's mouth was moving. Trying to say something. Trying to say her name.

Then he stopped trying to say anything at all.

"Fool," the debt collector said, wiping his hand on Marc's shirt.

They dragged her away while her brother's blood seeped into the vineyard soil. She stopped screaming after a while. She saved it. Tucked it down deep where she could feed on it later, let it burn like coals in her chest.

Her father had sold her. Her brother had died for her. And somewhere in the harbor, the most feared ship on the Crimson Sea was waiting to swallow her whole.

THE BARBE-BLEUE WAS a nightmare carved from wood and tar.

Black sails hung limp in the windless harbor, a dark blot against the morning sky.

The hull was painted the blue of deep bruises, and the figurehead was a snarling wolf with bared teeth and empty eyes.

Werewolves moved across the deck, calling to each other in voices that carried over the water.

Their scents hit Jeanne in a wave as she was led up the gangplank, the overwhelming presence of predators.

Her omega instincts were screaming at her to run, to hide, to submit, to bare her throat and hope for mercy. She told her instincts to shut up. She wouldn't give these monsters the satisfaction.

"Wait here." The debt collector pushed her to her knees on the deck. "The captain will inspect his purchase."

The crew gathered to watch. Twenty werewolves in human form, maybe more, all of them staring at her with varying degrees of curiosity, wariness, and pity. She lifted her chin and stared back. Her brother's blood was still drying on her skirts.

Then the crowd parted, and he walked through.

Captain Anatole Barbe-Bleue was nothing like the monster of the stories.

He was worse.

Tall and broad, built like violence given form, he moved across the deck with the lazy confidence of a predator who had never met anything worth fearing.

His black hair was pulled back with a leather cord, revealing a face that might have been handsome if it hadn't been so brutally cold.

Ice-blue eyes swept over her, assessing, calculating.

His beard was close-cropped and dark, except for a single streak of silver-blue that ran from the corner of his mouth to his jaw.

The curse mark. She'd heard the stories. A witch had branded him, and every omega he'd taken since had died screaming.

He stopped three feet from where she knelt. His scent rolled over her.

Salt wind, black pine and gunpowder, layered over something that made her thighs clench.

Her breath caught and slickness flooded between her legs without her being able to stop it.

Alpha. Not just any alpha. Apex. The most dominant designation a wolf could carry, and her traitorous omega body was responding to it like a flower turning toward the sun.

She hated it. She hated him. She hated the wetness soaking through her underwear and the way her nipples had tightened. The sudden, desperate ache between her thighs had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with biology.

His nostrils flared. His pupils dilated, black swallowing blue, and a muscle in his throat jumped as he swallowed hard.

"Leave us," he said. His voice was low, commanding, the kind of voice that expected obedience and received it. The crew scattered without a word. Even the debt collectors retreated to the gangplank. In moments, they were alone on the deck, predator and prey.