Chapter Five
JEANNE
It started with the blanket.
She hadn't meant to take it. She'd been walking past the crew's quarters on her way back from the galley, where Gris had pressed another cup of bitter tea into her hands, and the folded wool had been sitting on a barrel outside the door.
A spare, maybe, or something left out to air.
It was soft, dark blue, and it smelled like tar and old wood.
She picked it up and kept walking.
By the time she'd climbed the stairs back to the captain's quarters, she had already tucked it under her arm like it belonged there.
She didn't question it. Her skin was buzzing too much for questions, her thoughts slippery and strange, and the blanket was the first thing all day that had made the buzzing quiet down, even a little.
She spread it across the foot of the bed and stood back to look at it. Something about the placement bothered her, though she couldn't have said what. She moved it to the left side, then the right. Folded it lengthwise. Unfolded it. Laid it at an angle across the pillows.
No. None of that was right either.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples.
What was she doing? She had bigger problems than bedding arrangement.
Her heat was close enough now that her clothes chafed no matter what she wore, and the pull toward the forbidden door had become a constant low hum in her ribcage, like a second heartbeat keeping its own time.
She should be planning, thinking, anything other than fussing over the placement of a stolen blanket.
But when she stepped away from the bed, her hands itched to go back to it.
She found the second blanket in the trunk at the foot of the bed. A heavy thing, quilted, with a his scent. She buried her face in it. Pine, salt, and gunpowder. Her whole body loosened, tension draining out of her shoulders and spine like water through a cracked hull.
His. This was his. And her omega instincts were rolling in it like a cat in sunlight.
"Stop," she told herself, the word clipped and sharp in the empty cabin. She meant to put it back in the trunk. Close the lid. Walk away.
Instead, she carried it to the bed and began layering it over the first blanket, tucking the edges in to form a wall along one side.
The sane part of her mind watched this with a kind of horrified fascination.
She knew what this was. She had read about it in the books about omega biology that Marc had smuggled to her after she'd presented.
Nesting, the books called it. The instinct to build a safe, scent-saturated space before heat, somewhere soft and enclosed that the omega's body could interpret as shelter.
She had never nested before. Six years on suppressants had kept her heats shallow enough to avoid it, and she'd always had the herbs to dull whatever instincts pushed through.
Now, with no suppressants, no herbs, and an apex alpha's scent saturating every plank of the ship, her body was making up for lost time.
She understood all of this. She could observe herself doing it with clear, rational awareness. And it made not one bit of difference, because her hands were already moving again, pulling the sheets free and rewrapping them so the folds created a raised border on the other side of the bed.
She needed more.
The thought arrived fully formed and non-negotiable, the way hunger or thirst arrived. Not a preference. A requirement. She needed more soft things, more layers, more of the architecture her instincts demanded before they would let her rest.
She searched the cabin. Navigation charts were useless. The weapons on the wall made her skin crawl when she got too close to them. But she found a shirt in the wardrobe, linen worn thin from washing, and when she held it to her nose, his scent rolled through her like a tide.
This was the shirt she had woken up clutching that morning. Or one like it. She should have been mortified. She had thrown it across the room hours ago, disgusted with her own weakness.
Now she folded it and tucked it into the center of the nest, arranging it so it would be near her face when she lay down.
She pulled two more shirts from the wardrobe.
A vest. Something heavy and dark that might have been a coat.
Each item she held up and smelled, and her body gave a verdict: yes or not this one.
The ones that carried his scent most strongly went into the nest. The rest she discarded on the floor without a second glance.
The pile was growing. Blankets, his clothes, the sheets rearranged into ridges that formed walls on three sides. She'd pushed the pillows against the headboard to create a fourth wall, and the center of the bed was now a shallow bowl of layered fabric, enclosed and protected.
She climbed in to test it.
She relaxed the moment she lay down. The buzzing under her skin didn't stop, but it shifted, became something she could live with instead of something she wanted to claw out of herself.
His scent surrounded her on all sides, layered and complex, and her omega instincts stopped clawing at the inside of her skull and settled into a low, steady purr.
She closed her eyes. For the first time in days, the pull toward the forbidden door faded to background noise.
Safe, something in her whispered. Not her mind. Something older, something that lived in the base of her spine and the marrow of her bones. Safe here. His scent. His den. Ours.
She opened her eyes and stared at the canopy above the bed.
Not ours. Not his den. She was a captive in a dead woman's place, building a nest out of a monster's wardrobe, and tomorrow her heat would hit and she would burn alive while he chained himself in the hold and pretended that distance could save either of them.
She should tear the whole thing apart. Throw his clothes back in the wardrobe. Strip the bed down to bare mattress and lie on it like a person with some dignity left intact.
She didn't move.
The nest was too right. Too necessary. Her body had made a decision that her mind had no authority to overrule, and fighting it would cost her energy she couldn't afford to waste. Not with the heat this close. Not with the door still whispering in the back of her skull.
So she lay in the nest she'd made from a cursed pirate's belongings, and she let herself breathe.
A knock at the door. "Little one?" Gris's voice, careful. "I brought supper."
"Come in."
The old cook entered with a tray, and she watched his gaze travel over the bed. Over the ransacked wardrobe, the clothes on the floor, the elaborate construction of blankets and shirts and folded sheets that she'd built without fully deciding to.
Recognition and an old sadness flickered across his face.
"The others did this too?" she asked.
Gris set the tray on the desk. "Every one of them. Some sooner than others." He paused, choosing his words. "Marguerite used to steal Anatole's coat right off his back. He'd be standing at the helm and she'd walk up behind him and just take it. He never stopped her."
Jeanne pulled one of the shirts closer to her chest. She told herself it was involuntary. "I can't help it."
"I know." Gris didn't say it with pity, which she was grateful for. He said it the way he might say the tide's coming in or the wind's shifted. A fact. No judgment attached. "It means your heat's close. By morning, I'd wager."
She knew. She could feel it building in her like a storm gathering behind the horizon, the pressure mounting in her belly and her breasts and the aching space between her thighs that no amount of shifting position could ease.
"Does he know?" She gestured at the nest, the evidence of her body's betrayal.
"He can smell it. All of it." Gris's expression was unreadable. "The nesting, the slick, the way your scent's been changing all day. He's been on the opposite end of the ship since noon trying to stay upwind of you, and it's not working."
Of course it wasn't working. She could smell him from here, through the walls, through the deck, through whatever distance he tried to put between them. The bond his wolf had declared was pulling at both of them like a rope with no slack left.
"Eat something," Gris said. "Whatever you can manage. You'll need the strength."
He left, closing the door behind him, and she was alone again in her nest. She ate a few bites of bread and some dried fish, though her appetite was nearly gone. Then she curled back into the hollow she'd made, pulled his shirt to her face, and breathed.
She should hate herself for this. For the way her body was preparing itself for a man she hadn't chosen, building a nest out of his scent like an offering, like a welcome. Marc would look at her and see surrender.
But Marc was dead. And the nest wasn't surrender. It was survival.
Her body knew something her mind was still fighting, and if she was going to make it through what came next, she needed every advantage her instincts could give her. Even the ones that came wrapped in a cursed alpha's shirt.
She buried her face in the linen and let his scent carry her toward the first real sleep she'd had since coming aboard.
The dead brides were quiet tonight. Maybe even they understood that an omega in a nest was not to be disturbed.
ANATOLE
HE COULDN'T SLEEP.
Anatole paced the deck in the darkness, the night wind cold against his skin. Above him, the stars wheeled slowly, indifferent to his suffering. Below him, in his cabin, Jeanne's scent seeped through the wood, sweet and ripe and maddening.
His wolf was pacing too, restless behind his ribs, snarling at the distance he'd put between them. It didn't understand. It couldn't understand. It only knew that their mate was close, and they weren't with her, and that felt wrong on a level deeper than thought.
Gris found him an hour before dawn, still pacing.
"You look like death," the old cook said, handing him a cup of something that smelled like herbs and bitterness.
"I feel like death." Anatole took the cup but didn't drink. "Her heat?"
"Tomorrow. Possibly tonight." Gris settled against the rail, his weathered face tired in the pre-dawn gray. "It'll be bad, Captain. Human omegas don't handle heat well without an alpha to ground them. Especially not a heat triggered by a compatible apex."
"I know."
"Do you?" Gris's voice was gentle. "Because I've seen omegas die from heat fever. It's not a kind way to go. Their bodies burn themselves out, desperate for something they can't have."
Anatole's hands tightened on the cup. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that chaining yourself in the hold might kill her just as surely as the curse would." Gris met his eyes. "I'm saying you might have to make a choice, Captain. Between the certain danger of the curse and the certain danger of leaving her to burn alone."
"There is no choice." But even as he said it, Anatole knew he was lying. "If I bond with her..."
"Who said anything about bonding?" Gris shrugged. "A heat can be eased without a bond. You know that as well as I do. The question is whether you can control yourself enough to ease her without claiming her completely."
Anatole stared at the old cook. "You're suggesting I..."
"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm telling you what I've seen, and I'm trusting you to make the right call." Gris pushed off the rail. "She's a good omega, Captain." He paused at the stairs. "I'd hate to see her die because you were too stubborn to save her."
He disappeared below, leaving Anatole alone with the stars and the impossible choice in front of him.
Ease her heat without bonding her. Touch her, fill her, give her body what it needed to survive, but never bite her mating gland. Never form the bond that would seal her fate.
Could he do that? In the grip of rut, with his wolf screaming for her, could he hold back the one instinct that mattered most?
He didn't know.
But as the sun began to rise over the Crimson Sea, painting the sky in shades of blood and gold, he realized he might not have a choice.
Because Gris was right. Leaving her to burn alone might kill her.