Chapter Thirteen
JEANNE
The rum had made her bold.
Or maybe the evening had done that. She'd spent her whole life being hidden, invisible, the omega tucked away so the wolves wouldn't find her. Tonight she'd stood in the center of a wolf pack and been seen.
Marc would have been proud. The thought came without the knife-edge of guilt she'd been carrying since his death. Just a quiet warmth, like sun on skin. He would have been proud of her for finding a place in the world, even one as strange and dangerous as this.
She found Anatole at the rail, away from the gathering, watching the crew.
"You're lurking," she said, leaning against the rail beside him.
"I'm supervising."
"You're lurking at your own mate's celebration. That's pathetic, Captain."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "You've been drinking with my crew."
"Your crew cheats at cards. I still won." She bumped her shoulder against his arm, the easy contact that had become habit between them. "Thank you. For tonight. For all of it."
"Don't thank me. You earned your place here. I just made it official."
She studied his face in the lantern light. "I'm going to beat it," she said. "The curse. The door. The mirror. Whatever Morvenna built, I am going to outlast it."
"Jeanne..."
The rum was making her reckless, but the conviction underneath the recklessness was real.
Bone-deep and steady. "I love you, Anatole.
Not because my biology compels it. Not because I have no choice.
Because I've seen the worst of what you are and the best of what you are, and I am not afraid of what I’ll see in the mirror. "
"The curse hears you," he said. "It knows when an omega declares herself. The pull will get worse after tonight."
"Let it."
"It may come for you sooner than we're ready for."
"Then we'd better be ready." She took his hand and placed it over her heart. "I am telling you, here, in front of your pack and your stars and your cursed, beautiful ship, that I am going to survive this."
He pulled her in. Wrapped his arms around her and held her against his chest, his chin resting on top of her head.
Behind them, the crew sang. Old sailor songs, rough and out of tune, the sound of a pack that had been living under a shadow and was remembering what light looked like.
The lanterns swayed in the rigging. The stars turned overhead.
The Crimson Sea held them in its dark palm and, for once, seemed gentle.
For one night, the forbidden door was silent.
And Jeanne decided she wasn't done being bold.
She took his hand and pulled. Not toward the rail, not toward the crew, but toward the stairs that led below. Toward the cabin.
He let her lead. The great apex alpha, the most feared captain on the Crimson Sea, followed a human omega through the corridors of his own ship without a word of protest. She could hear the crew still singing behind them, voices fading as they descended, and by the time she pushed open the cabin door, there was only the creak of the hull and the rush of blood in her ears.
She turned to face him. He filled the doorway, lantern light from the corridor catching the planes of his face, and his scent rolled over her, pine and salt layered with something deeper tonight, something that smelled like the smoke from the lanterns and the rum on his breath and the warmth of a man who'd let himself hope.
"Jeanne." His voice was low. Careful. "You've been drinking."
"Not that much. The crew cheats at drinking games too, so I learned to fake most of it." She stepped backward into the cabin, pulling him with her by the front of his shirt. "I know what I'm doing."
"And what are you doing?"
"Claiming my mate."
She watched the words land. Watched his pupils blow wide, watched his nostrils flare as her scent shifted, honeysuckle thickening to something richer as her arousal built. She wasn't in heat. This wasn't biology dictating terms.
"Sit down," she said.
His eyebrows rose. "Are you giving me an order, omega?"
"I'm giving you an order, Captain." She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed.
Not hard. She couldn't have moved him if he hadn't chosen to go.
But he went, backing up until the edge of the bed caught his knees and he sat, looking up at her with an expression she'd never seen on him before.
Not hunger, though that was there. Not amusement, though the corner of his mouth was doing that almost-smile thing she loved. Something closer to awe.
She pulled her dress over her head in one motion and dropped it on the floor.
His breath changed. She could hear it catch, and she could smell the answering shift in his scent. The pine deepened, took on the smoked-oak undertone that meant his body was responding. His hands came up to reach for her, and she caught his wrists.
"Not yet." She guided his hands to the bed at his sides. "You've been in control every time. During the heat, after the heat, every time we've been together, you've been the one setting the pace. Tonight it's my turn."
"Jeanne." Her name came out strained. She could see the tension in his forearms, the effort it was costing him to keep his hands where she'd put them. His wolf would be snarling behind his ribs. An apex alpha didn't yield control. It went against every instinct in his body.
Good. She wanted him fighting his instincts. She wanted him to know what it was like to surrender because the person asking was worth surrendering for.
She stepped out of her underclothes. Stood before him in nothing but the moonlight coming through the cabin windows, and let him look.
Not the way he'd looked at her during the heat, when need had blurred everything.
She let him see her as she was. Small. Human.
Scarred on the collarbone and freckled on the shoulders and wet between her thighs because she wanted him, because her body had learned the shape of his and craved it even without biology's whip at her back.
"You're so damn beautiful." The words tore out of him. His hands fisted in the sheets. "Let me touch you. Please."
The most feared alpha on the Crimson Sea, saying please to a vineyard girl from Roquemort. She filed that away in the growing collection of moments that proved he was more than the monster the stories described.
"Soon." She reached for his shirt, unlacing it slowly, pulling it over his head.
His chest was broad, scarred, the dark hair rough against her palms as she ran her hands down his torso.
His stomach contracted under her fingers.
His scent was thickening, pine and smoke and the dark musk that meant he was getting hard, and she could see the evidence of it straining against his breeches.
She undid the laces of his breeches and freed him.
He was already thick and flushed, the head slick, the knot at the base beginning to swell even though they'd barely started.
His cock jumped against her palm when she wrapped her hand around him, and the sound he made was nothing like the composed, commanding captain. It was raw. Needy.
"You can touch me now," she said.
His hands were on her before she finished the sentence.
Gripping her hips, pulling her forward, his mouth finding her breast. She gasped as his tongue circled her nipple, as his teeth grazed the sensitive peak, and she braced her hands on his shoulders while he sucked and licked and made her legs tremble.
"I need to taste you," he groaned against her skin. "Let me put my mouth on you."
She shook her head. "Next time. Right now I need you inside me."
She climbed onto the bed, onto him, pushing him back against the headboard.
He went without resistance, his hands still on her hips, his gold-flickering eyes tracking her every movement as she straddled his lap.
She could feel his cock pressing against her inner thigh, hot and insistent, and when she shifted her hips to align them, slick from her body coated him.
The scent of it filled the cabin, honeysuckle and vanilla gone dark with want, twining with his pine-smoke until the air was thick with the smell of them together.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked.
She sank down onto him.
The angle was different from above. Deeper in some ways, the stretch of him more pronounced as gravity pulled her down, and she had to go slowly, taking him inch by inch, her thighs shaking with the effort of controlling her own descent.
He filled her until she thought she couldn't take any more, and then she took the rest, settling into his lap with his cock buried to the root.
"God." His head fell back against the headboard. His fingers dug into her hips hard enough to bruise, and she liked it. Liked the evidence that his control was fraying. "You feel incredible. So tight around me."
She rolled her hips. Experimentally at first, testing the angle, learning how this position changed the sensation. When she found the motion that dragged him against the spot inside her that made sparks fire behind her eyes, she did it again. And again.
"That's it." His voice was wrecked. "Ride me, omega. Take what you need."
So she did.
She set the pace. Slow at first, rising and falling on his cock, each downstroke sending pleasure radiating through her core. His hands gripped her hips but didn't guide, didn't push, didn't try to speed her up. He let her use him, and the power of it was intoxicating in a way the rum hadn't been.
This was what it meant to choose. Not to be taken, not to surrender to biology, but to climb on top of the alpha who'd bought her and ride him until they both broke apart.
"Faster," she breathed, more to herself than to him, and she increased the pace.
The wet sounds of their joining filled the cabin.
His cock was so deep at this angle, it stretched her with every drop of her hips.
She braced her hands on his chest, fingers splayed over the scar Morvenna's magic had carved into him, and she rode him hard.
"You're going to make me come." His voice had gone guttural, his eyes full gold now, his wolf surging close to the surface. "The way you're moving, the way you're squeezing me, I can't hold back much longer."
"Then don't." She leaned down and kissed him, her tongue sweeping into his mouth the way his had swept into hers so many times before. She tasted rum and the wildness that lived under his skin. "I want to feel your knot. I want you locked inside me."
His hips snapped up. Involuntary, his body overriding the discipline he'd been maintaining, and the force of the thrust made her cry out against his mouth. The impact hit something so deep inside her that her vision blurred.
"Again," she gasped. "Do that again."
He obeyed. The apex alpha, the captain who'd commanded wolves for twenty years, obeyed.
His hips drove up to meet her on every downstroke, the slap of skin against skin punctuating the rhythm she'd set, and the combination of her pace and his power built something molten in her belly that was climbing fast.
"I'm close," she panted. "Touch me. Now you can touch me everywhere."
One hand left her hip and slid between their bodies. His thumb found her clit, slick and swollen, and he circled it with devastating focus. She keened, her rhythm stuttering, and he took over the pace from below, thrusting up into her while his thumb worked her toward the edge.
"Come for me." It wasn't a command. It was a plea. "Let me feel you, Jeanne. Please."
She shattered. The orgasm tore through her from the inside out, her walls clenching around his cock in waves, her body locking down on him so hard that his knot caught on the next thrust and swelled to full size, sealing them together.
She screamed his name, back arching, nails raking down his chest, and he followed her over with a roar that vibrated through her bones.
His seed flooded her in hot pulses, filling her until she could feel the pressure of it, and she ground down on his knot, chasing the aftershocks, clenching around the thick swell of him until every last ripple of pleasure had been wrung from both their bodies.
When the world stopped spinning, she was draped over his chest, his arms locked around her back, both of them breathing like they'd sprinted the length of the ship. His knot throbbed inside her, and each pulse sent a smaller wave of pleasure rolling through her oversensitive body.
She propped herself up on his chest to look at him. His eyes were fading back to blue, lazy and sated, the lines of tension gone from his face for the first time she could remember. "Next time, I'm going to taste you first. That's not a request."
His cock twitched inside her, knot and all, and she grinned at the way his breath hitched.
They stayed tangled together while his knot softened, talking the way they always did.
But the conversation was lighter tonight.
No dead brides, no curse mechanics, no countdown.
She told him about the drinking game the crew had tried to cheat her at, and how she'd figured out their system within three hands and turned it against them.
He told her about the time Luc had gotten drunk enough to challenge a harbor post to a fight and lost. She laughed until her stomach hurt.
When his knot released and he slipped free, she cleaned them both with a cloth from the washbasin, and they curled together under the blankets, her back to his chest, his arm across her waist. His scent was tangled with hers now, pine and honeysuckle so intertwined that she couldn't tell where he ended and she began.
She fell asleep to the sound of his breathing.
THE SHIP WAS STILL. The lanterns in the rigging had burned to nothing. Anatole was asleep behind her, one arm heavy across her waist, his breath deep and even against the back of her neck.
Something had woken her.
Not the door. The door was still quiet, its hum absent from the background frequency of the ship. That should have been a comfort. Instead, the silence rang louder than the pull ever had.
She lay still, listening. The creak of the hull. The whisper of water against wood. Anatole's breathing.
And then, so faint she might have imagined it, a voice.
Not the dead brides. Not the chorus of six women that had haunted her dreams since she came aboard. A single voice, older, colder, carried on a frequency that vibrated in the wood of the ship itself.
You think you can beat me?
Jeanne's blood went still in her veins. That wasn't the curse. That wasn't the door or the mirror or the dead brides speaking through the magic that preserved them. She somehow knew whose voice that was.
That was Morvenna, the sea witch.