Chapter Sixteen
ANATOLE
He went to the forbidden corridor alone.
The upper decks carried the accumulated warmth of bodies and cooking fires and the friction of living.
Down here, the air thinned. The smell changed.
Pine tar and bilge water and something underneath that had no natural origin, something sweet and decaying that made his wolf flatten its ears and press itself against the back of his mind.
The guards Luc had posted stood at the corridor's entrance, two betas from the night watch. They straightened when they saw him. Good men. Loyal wolves. They would stand here until their relief came, and the next pair would stand here after them, and none of it would matter.
"Captain." The taller one, a wolf named Corentin, kept his voice low. "No activity tonight."
"Good. Stay sharp."
He looked past them, down the corridor to the door at the far end.
It looked ordinary from this distance. Old wood, warped iron hinges, the kind of door you'd find in any ship's hold.
From here, he couldn't see the golden light that leaked from beneath it, couldn't feel the hum that Jeanne described in her bones.
The curse had never spoken to him the way it spoke to omegas.
He turned and climbed back up, past the lower decks, past the crew quarters where wolves slept in hammocks that swayed with the ship's movement, past the galley where Gris's banked cooking fire glowed like a low orange eye.
He climbed until he reached the main deck, where the night air hit him clean and salt-edged, and the stars burned overhead in their ancient configurations.
His wolf was restless. Not the desperate, clawing restlessness of the early days, when it had screamed MATE MATE MATE and he'd had to chain every instinct to keep from claiming Jeanne on the spot.
This was different. His wolf was pacing the borders of his mind the way it paced when it sensed a storm that hadn't yet broken the horizon.
Something was coming, and the wolf knew it, and the man knew it, and neither of them knew how to stop it.
He leaned against the mainmast and closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the dead brides waited.
Marguerite first, always first. Dark hair and dark eyes and a laugh that had made his wolf go still with wonder.
He'd loved her the way young men love, with the whole of himself and no reservation and absolutely no understanding of what love cost. He'd taken her secretly, bonded her in the shadow of her mother's island, and when Morvenna found out, the curse had eaten through their bond like fire through dry rope.
He'd held Marguerite while she died. Twenty years old, clutching his hands, her scent curdling from wildflowers to ash. Three days from the seeing to the end, and he'd spent every minute of those three days trying to will her alive with nothing but the force of his love.
Love hadn't been enough.
After Marguerite, he'd tried control. He bought Celeste because she was strong, a fighter, a wolf omega whose own nature gave her resistance the curse might not overcome. He'd kept his distance. Set rules.
Four months. Then the door took her too.
After Celeste, he'd tried kindness. Tried cruelty. Tried every configuration of emotion and distance he could devise. Six brides. Six different approaches. Six identical outcomes.
And now Jeanne. Who was none of those things and all of them.
What if it's you?
The thought arrived like a blade between the ribs, quiet and devastating. He'd been asking himself what Jeanne needed to survive the mirror.
But what if it wasn't all about Jeanne?
Six women had loved him. Six women had died. The common element wasn't the women. It was him.
The thought hollowed him out. He stood at the mainmast with the wind in his hair and the stars overhead and the sea whispering against the hull, and he looked at the shape of his own love and saw what Morvenna must have seen all those years ago when she designed the curse.
He loved like a cage. The way his wolf loved, all territory and possession and the snarling refusal to let anything in or out.
He'd told himself it was protection. He'd told himself the walls he built around each bride were shields.
But shields and cages were made of the same material, and the women trapped inside couldn't tell the difference.
You have stolen my daughter's heart.
Stolen. Not won. Not earned. Not received. Stolen. Morvenna's curse was built on the premise that Anatole's love was a form of theft, and every bride since Marguerite had been stolen too, bought or bartered or taken from lives they hadn't chosen to leave.
Including Jeanne.
He'd bought her. Paid her father's debts, put a price on her body and her scent and her potential to break his curse. She'd come aboard in chains. Whatever she'd built since then, however fiercely she'd chosen him, the foundation was theft. His theft.
What if the curse couldn't be broken because the curse was right about him?
His wolf howled, a low, anguished sound that vibrated through his bones. No. She chose us. She chose us freely. She said so.
But she'd chosen him inside the cage. Inside the ship that was his territory, surrounded by his pack, bound by his claim. She'd chosen him the way a prisoner chose to befriend the warden, because what else was there? What else could she do?
He'd told himself her love was different. But what if he was wrong? What if the curse was simply taking longer with a human host?
Then she would die. And it would be his fault. Again.
The thought was a canyon opening beneath his feet, and he stood at the edge and looked down into all the years of accumulated guilt and grief, and the shape at the bottom looked exactly like himself.
If he kept his distance. If he pulled back.
If he rebuilt the walls he'd spent weeks dismantling and became the captain instead of the man, the cold strategic mind that treated omegas as tools instead of mates.
If he gave her reason to stop loving him.
If her love faded, the pull would fade with it, because the curse fed on love the way a fire fed on air.
If she stopped loving him, the door would stop calling.
She'd survive.
She'd hate him. But she'd be alive.
Alive and hating him was better than dead and loving him. He had six graves to prove it.
JEANNE
THE HAMMOCK WAS USELESS. The open deck was worse.
Three nights of sleeping under that poisoned green sky with Anatole's arm locked across her waist, and every morning she woke a little further from where she'd started, her body inching toward the stairs in her sleep like a compass needle that only knew one direction.
She went back to the cabin. The nest she'd built weeks ago was still there, but three days of sleeping on the open deck had left the cabin cold and stale, the scent fading from the sheets, the air tasting of nothing but wood and bilge.
Marc's candle still sat beside the compass on the desk. The curtain she'd tied back hung limp.
The hum was louder down here. Two decks closer to the door, and she registered the difference in her teeth, in the thin bones behind her ears, in the spaces between her ribs where the pull lived.
Standing in the cabin doorway, she had to grip the frame with both hands and hold herself still for a count of ten before the urge to keep walking, to keep descending, to follow the hum down to its source, released enough for her to think.
She wasn't here to give in. She was here to build.
The old nest was dead. Not dismantled, but drained. The scent had thinned to nothing and the borders had gone flat, and the cabin smelled like absence. Absence was exactly the kind of gap the curse slipped through.
She started with his coat.
It hung on the hook by the door where he'd left it that morning, heavy canvas lined with wool, salt-stiffened and carrying his scent so strongly that when she pressed her face into the collar, the hum in her ribs dropped by half.
Not gone. Nowhere close. But quieter, the way a storm sounded from inside a house instead of out in the wind.
She spread the coat across the center of the bed, open, sleeves wide like arms waiting to close. Then she went to the trunk.
She was not gentle about it. She had no time and no peace of mind, and the pull was a constant pressure behind her sternum, a hand pushing her toward the stairs, and every second she spent in this cabin was a second she had to actively choose not to walk out the door and down.
She hauled blankets out by the armful, stripped the cold sheets and replaced them with ones from the bottom of the chest that still held a ghost of his scent trapped in the weave.
His watch shirt, the one he wore on late nights at the helm. She knew it by the salt stains on the cuffs, had learned to track his moods by which shirt he chose each morning, and this one meant long hours and hard thinking. She pressed it against the headboard like a compress against a wound.
His vest went on the left wall. The linen undershirt from the hook behind the door on the right.
A wool blanket she'd never seen before from the very bottom of the trunk, so old and worn it was more texture than fabric, and it smelled like years.
Like the ship itself had seeped into the threads.
That one she wrapped around the pillows until the headboard became a barricade.
The bed was becoming a rampart.
Higher than the ceremony nest, denser, the walls thick with layered fabric, his scent concentrated in every fold.
She built it up on all four sides until the center was a deep hollow, a pit lined with everything that smelled like him, and when she crawled into the middle and pulled the coat over herself like a second skin, the hum in her ribs dropped again.