Chapter Fifteen #3
He sank his teeth into the curve of her shoulder as his knot locked them together, and the dual sensation of her body clamping around his knot and his teeth in her flesh pushed him over the edge.
He came with a sound that was more wolf than man, his hips jerking, seed flooding her in thick, hot pulses while her orgasm milked every drop from him.
For a long time, neither of them moved. His teeth were still in her shoulder, his knot still locked inside her, their bodies shaking with the aftermath.
When he finally unclenched his jaw and pulled back, there was a perfect imprint of his bite in her skin.
Not the mating gland. But a claim nonetheless.
"Did it work?" she asked, her voice barely above a breath.
He listened. The hum was still there, vibrating through the floorboards. But Jeanne's eyes were clear, fixed on his face, and her scent had steadied, the guttering-candle thinness replaced by something stronger. His scent was all over her, sunk into her pores, marking every inch of her skin.
"For now," he said. "It worked for now."
They both knew for now wasn't the same as enough. But it was what they had.
Knotted and tangled and sweat-damp, he held her and she held him and they pretended the hum vibrating through the floor beneath them didn't exist.
"Tell me something," she said. The way she always did, when they were tied. "Something true. Something the curse can't touch."
He thought about it. The list of things the curse couldn't touch was getting shorter by the day.
"My brother Niles," he said. He hadn't spoken about his family in years. "He’s two years older than me. He inherited the pack when our father died, so I took to the sea because there was nothing for a second son on land."
"Is he still alive?"
"Last I heard. We haven't spoken since the curse.
He tried to help, in the beginning. Sent wolves, sent gold, sent a healer from the eastern packs.
None of it worked, and after Isabeau died, he stopped trying.
" Anatole paused. "I think he decided it was easier to have a dead brother than a cursed one. "
"That’s awful."
"Family is a weakness. People who love you either sacrifice for you or sacrifice you. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground."
"Marc sacrificed for me." He could feel the echo of old pain through the closeness of their bodies. "My father sacrificed me. Both of them loved me, in their way. The difference was what they were willing to lose."
He held her tighter.
"What are you willing to lose?" she asked.
"Anything. Everything. Whatever it takes to keep you alive."
"That's not what I asked. I asked what you're willing to lose. Not what you're willing to give up for me."
The question sat between them. His knot pulsed, and she gasped, and for a moment neither of them could think about anything except the place where their bodies were joined. When the spike of pleasure faded, the question was still there, patient and unanswered.
He didn't know. That was the honest answer, and it was the one that scared him most, because he suspected the thing he needed to let go of was the very thing he'd been clinging to hardest.
Control.
JEANNE
ON THE FOURTH MORNING, the greenish sky broke into rain that smelled like copper and tasted like grief.
Jeanne stood on the main deck, face turned up to the strange rain, and let it soak through her clothes.
The crew avoided it, ducking under awnings and below hatches, their wolves whining at the wrongness of water that fell from a sky that was the wrong color.
But Jeanne stood in it because the rain was cold and real and it gave her something to feel besides the pull.
It was no longer a tug or an ache or even a chain.
It was a tide, rising inside her, filling spaces she hadn't known existed.
Every thought bent toward it the way iron filings went toward a magnet.
She'd be in the middle of a conversation with Gris and realize she'd lost five minutes, her mind gone blank while the door called to her.
"Little one." Gris appeared beside her with a coat. "You'll catch your death in this rain."
"I'm fine." But she took the coat and pulled it around her shoulders. "How long can the witch hold us?"
"I don't know. We’ve all been trying to break free of the current for three days. The captain’s barely sleeping."
She knew. She could see it in the hollows forming beneath his eyes, and in the tension that never left his shoulders. He was trying to control the situation with the sheer force of an alpha's will, and all of it was sand against a tide.
"You've been on this ship for twenty years. You've seen six brides come and go. Tell me the truth, not the version you think will keep me calm. Am I going to open that door?"
Gris was quiet for a long time. The copper rain ran down his weathered face, collecting in the lines of decades at sea.
"Every omega who has come aboard this ship has opened that door," he said.
"Fighters, scholars, gentle souls, brave women.
Six different kinds of strength, and none of it was enough.
The door doesn't overpower you with force.
It wears you down. It finds the gap between your resistance and your need, and it slips through. "
"What gap?"
"Different for each of them. For Celeste, it was the need to conquer.
She couldn't stand being told there was something she couldn't defeat.
For Isabeau, curiosity. For Adele..." His voice roughened.
"For Adele, it was hope. She thought the room held answers.
Thought if she understood the curse, she could break it for the captain. For the baby."
Open the door and save him. The answer is inside. All you have to do is look.
"You think my gap is the same as Adele's," she said.
"I think you love the captain and are willing to sacrifice your own safety for his sake." Gris gripped her shoulder. "And I think the curse knows that's your weakness. That you'd walk into that room and face the mirror if you believed it would save him."
"Then what do I do? How do I fight a temptation that's built from my own love?"
"I don't know, little one. I've watched six women fail and I don't know."
The rain kept falling, wrong and copper-tasting, and the ship drifted in its unnatural circle, and the door hummed its ceaseless song from the deck below. But Gris's words settled into a place beneath the pull, beneath the hum, beneath the constant erosion of her will.
Could she face the mirror and break the curse?
She held onto that thought the way she'd held onto Anatole's shirt during her heat, pressing it close, breathing it in, letting it become the thing she reached for when the door called loudest.
THAT NIGHT, THE SHIP broke free.
Jeanne was on deck when it happened, sitting beside Anatole at the helm, her head on his shoulder while he steered by starlight. The green had finally left the sky around sunset, and the stars had come back, and the Wolf's Eye was burning in its accustomed place above the northern horizon.
One moment the Barbe-Bleue was caught in the slow, sick circle that had held her for four days.
The next, the current released, like a fist opening, and the ship surged forward on a clean south wind.
The sails filled with a crack that echoed across the water, and the rigging sang, and the crew let out a collective breath that was half-howl.
Anatole's hands tightened on the wheel. "She couldn’t hold us any longer. It’s a small victory, but a good one nonetheless."
But the pull was still there. Stronger than ever.
She knew now it wasn’t if she went to the door, but when.
There had to be a way to beat the witch’s curse.
As the south wind carried them away from the Scattered Isles, she thought long and hard about what to do.
The air cleared up with every league of open water between them and Morvenna's islands.
“Maybe the answer isn't keeping me from the room. Maybe the answer is making sure what we have is strong enough to endure what I find there," she said, out of any other options.
His hands went white on the wheel. "You're talking about walking into a room that has killed every omega who's entered it."
"I'm talking about the possibility that the door is inevitable, and we need to stop fighting the inevitable and start preparing for it."
"No. I will not accept that the door wins." He was shaking. She could see it in his arms, the tremor running through muscle and bone. "I have buried six women. I have put six rings in that chest. I will not put a seventh. I will not."
She didn't push. Not tonight. He wasn't ready to hear what she was beginning to understand, the thing Gris's words had planted and Morvenna's waters had nourished.
She would open the door. She leaned against his shoulder and watched the Scattered Isles disappear behind them, dark shapes against a dark sky, and said nothing more.
But in the silence, she began to plan.