Chapter Sixteen #3
"You," she said. "During the heat, you held yourself at the doorway and told me to send you away.
You gave me a choice when every instinct in your body was screaming to take.
After the heat, you taught me knots and star charts and let me tend to your crew, and when I kissed you, you sat with your hands on the chair and let me set the pace. "
"That doesn’t erase the fact that you're here because I bought you."
"No. Nothing can erase that. The transaction happened, and it will always be part of our story, the same way Marc's death will always be part of our story and my father's betrayal and Morvenna's curse and every ugly, brutal thing that put us in this cabin on this ship in the middle of this godforsaken sea.
" She was breathing hard. The pull pulsed with every heartbeat, and she used it, let it fuel her instead of drag her, because the love that fed the pull was the same love that was keeping her standing in front of this man while he tried to convince her she was a prisoner.
"But that’s not the whole story. The fact that I'm standing here arguing with you instead of packing a bag for Port Sang, that's the story.
My story. And you don't get to decide it's not real because it scares you. "
"That doesn't scare me. The curse does."
"It won’t kill me."
The words landed between them with the force of an anchor dropping.
"I would rather love you and face the mirror than stop loving you and survive.
That's my choice. Mine. Not yours, not the curse's, not biology's.
I am choosing this with everything I have, and if you send me to Port Sang, I will find a way back to this ship, and if you lock me in the hold, I will love you from behind iron bars, and if you sail to the end of the world, I will follow, because that is what freely given means.
It means no one can take it from me. Not even you. "
He made a sound. Low, broken, pulled from the same place where his wolf lived.
His hands were shaking at his sides, and she could see the gold bleeding into his eyes, the wolf responding to her voice and her scent and the force of what she was giving him, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
"You should hate me," he said. "I bought you. I kept you. I got your brother killed."
"The debt collectors killed Marc. My father's choices killed Marc. You weren't even there."
"I paid the debt that put the collectors there."
"Do you blame me for being the thing my father had to sell to pay off his debts?" She took the last step between them and put her hand on his chest, over the scar, over the place where Morvenna's magic had cut him open on the night everything went wrong. " Do you blame me for being born an omega?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then stop blaming yourself for the curse. Start helping me break it."
His hand came up and covered hers. His palm was rough with calluses, his fingers long enough to wrap around her hand entirely, and the heat of his skin through the linen of his shirt was the temperature of a man running a war inside himself.
"Jeanne." Her name in his mouth sounded like surrender and refusal at the same time. "If you die, it will end me. There will be nothing left. Not the captain, not the wolf, not the man. Just the thing Morvenna made me."
"Then we'd better make sure I don't die."
"And how do we do that?"
“Come into the room with me. Hold my hand. Be there when I look into the mirror. Let’s fight this curse standing shoulder to shoulder.”
He looked at her for a long time. She could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, through her palm, through the scar tissue that mapped the worst night of his life.
It was fast. Not from fear, though fear was there.
Fast because his wolf was running, pacing, wanting, and the man was trying to decide whether to follow.
"I can't send you to Port Sang," he said.
"No. You can't."
"Not because you won't go. Because I can't make myself do it. I have tried, in the space between midnight and morning, to imagine this ship without you on it, and every version of that future is worse than watching you face the mirror." He closed his eyes. "I should be strong enough to let you go."
"You are strong enough. You're just smart enough to know that letting me go won't save me. The pull doesn't stop because I'm off the ship. It stops because I stop loving you, and we both know that's not going to happen at Port Sang or anywhere else."
"You don't know that."
"I know it the way I know the stars are fixed and the sea is salt. It's not a belief. It's a condition."
He opened his eyes. Pulled her against him, not roughly, not with the possessive urgency of an alpha staking a claim. He pulled her against him the way a man pulled air into his lungs, because the alternative was suffocation.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his chest and breathed him in.
Pine and salt and the smoke note, all of it back now, the cold winter-resin scent thawing as his wolf settled beneath the contact.
She could track the change with her omega senses, the way his body chemistry shifted when she was close, the way the tension in his muscles unwound incrementally, like rigging being eased after a storm.
"I dreamed about them last night," he said into her hair. "Marguerite. Celeste. All of them. They were standing in a line, and they all had your face."
"That wasn't a dream. That was the curse playing with your head."
"Probably." His arms tightened.
"What makes you so certain that going into the room willingly and together will change anything?"
She opened her eyes. This close, his face filled her entire field of vision.
The lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver-blue streak in his beard, the place where the bridge of his nose had been broken and healed slightly crooked.
She knew this face. She'd learned it in the dark during her heat and in the lamplight after, and she knew every version of it, the captain's mask and the wolf's intensity and the man's unguarded grief.
"Because the curse says true love, freely given, survives the seeing. Not true love, alone, survives the seeing." She kissed the corner of his mouth, the place where his almost-smile lived. "Six omegas faced the mirror alone. What if the curse requires you to be there?"
She watched him think about it.
"I've never been in the room when an omega sees the mirror," he said slowly. "The room always drew them when I was elsewhere. Sleeping. On deck. They went alone because the curse timed it that way."
"Maybe that's by design. Maybe the curse separates you because your presence in the room is the thing that could break it."
His hands slid up her back, and the contact was a language they'd been speaking since the heat, the vocabulary of touch that said everything words made complicated. She arched into him, not from biology, not from the pull, but from the simple, devastating desire.
He kissed her and she tasted the desperation in it, the salt edge that meant he was closer to losing control than he wanted her to know.
She pulled back. His eyes were gold-ringed, the wolf crowding the surface, and his scent had shifted to the deep smoked-oak note that meant his body was responding to hers.
She could smell herself too, honeysuckle thickening in the air between them, her own arousal answering his the way it always did.
She pulled his shirt over his head. The scar caught the morning light, silver-white against tanned skin, and she traced it the way she always did, the route Morvenna's magic had carved across his chest. He shuddered under her fingers.
"Jeanne." Warning and want, inseparable.
"I know." She kissed the center of the scar. "I know what I'm doing."
She undressed him with her own hands, taking her time, reclaiming the territory his overnight retreat had tried to cede.
Every article of clothing she removed was a wall coming down, and she watched his face as she dismantled him, saw the way his control frayed with each layer stripped away.
His breathing changed when her mouth found the hollow of his throat.
His hands fisted at his sides when she kissed a path down his sternum, following the scar's silver line to where it ended below his ribs.
"Sit," she told him.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She stood between his knees, the way she had the night of the mate ceremony, but the dynamic was different now.
That night she'd been staking a claim. This morning she was reinforcing one.
Reminding him that his attempt to send her away hadn't worked, that the walls he'd tried to rebuild overnight were rubble, that she was still here and still choosing and still his.
She pulled her shirt over her head. His shirt, actually.
The one she slept in, the one that smelled of both of them.
She watched the gold flare in his eyes as her scent hit him unfiltered, honeysuckle and vanilla concentrated by a night spent in his bed, and she watched the effort it cost him to keep his hands on the mattress.
"You can touch me," she said. The same words she'd used the first time, in this cabin, in this bed. The echo was deliberate.
His hands came up to her waist. The span of his fingers covered the space from her hip to her ribs, and the size of him against the size of her was something she'd stopped thinking about and started simply living inside of, the way you stopped thinking about the dimensions of a room you inhabited every day.
He pulled her down onto his lap, and she wrapped her legs around him, and they were face to face, chest to chest, her arms around his neck and his hands spanning her back, and the closeness of it drove the pull to a murmur.
She rocked against him, slow, and the friction of it through her remaining clothing made them both inhale.