Chapter Seventeen #2
The room, the brides, the ship, the sea — all of it vanished under a tide of images so vivid they weren't images at all. They were moments. Lived again. Felt in the body the way the body felt cold or heat or the touch of another person's skin.
He saw Jeanne in chains.
Not through her eyes. Through his own. The dock at Roquemort, the gray morning light, the stink of fish and poverty, and a girl being marched toward his ship by four wolves while her brother's body cooled on the cobblestones.
He saw her the way he'd seen her that first day: cargo.
A transaction. A human omega purchased for the price of a gambler's debts, brought aboard to serve a purpose that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the curse that was eating him alive.
The mirror showed him his own assessment. Cool, clinical, the mind of a captain evaluating a tool. Small. Fragile. Human. She might survive where the others didn't. That is the only reason she is here.
Then the mirror shifted, and he saw Jeanne kneeling in the dirt of a vineyard, pulling weeds from soil that would never bear fruit, and Marc was running toward her with fear on his face, and the moment her world ended was playing out in front of him like a scene from someone else's tragedy.
Except it wasn't someone else's. It was his. He had paid for this moment. He had set it in motion with gold and debt collectors and the cold calculation of a man who needed an omega and didn't care which one.
The mirror didn't stop. It peeled through layer after layer, showing him every moment of their history from both sides at once: what he had felt and what she had felt, the two experiences laid over each other like transparencies, and where they didn't align, the gap between them was visible as a crack running through glass.
He felt her terror on the ship that first night.
The animal fear of a human omega surrounded by wolves, locked in a stranger's cabin, unable to sleep because the man who owned her might come through the door at any moment.
He felt it from the inside, the way she'd felt it, and it was nothing like what he'd assumed.
He'd told himself she was brave. She had been.
She'd also been so frightened that she'd bitten through her own lip to keep from screaming.
He felt her heat the way she'd felt it. Not the intoxicating rush of an alpha responding to an omega in need.
The pain of it. The vulnerability. The moment his wolf had broken the chains and appeared in her doorway, and the relief of his presence had warred with the humiliation of needing him, of her body making a decision her mind hadn't authorized.
He felt the moment she'd placed her hand in his on the deck beneath the stars, and what he received was the shape of a choice being made inside a cage, a woman deciding to love the man who kept her because the alternative was despair, and the love was real, the love was genuine, but the cage was also real, and the mirror would not let him pretend otherwise.
Beside him, Jeanne made a sound. He turned to look at her and the mirror's visions fractured, splintering between them, and he saw her face in the golden light and her eyes fixed on the glass.
"I can see it," she said. Her voice was steady in the way that a bridge was steady just before it collapsed, all the structural integrity present and none of the safety. "I can see us. Both sides."
"What does it show you?"
"Everything. The way you saw me on the dock. The way I saw you." Her hand tightened in his. "It's not death. It's truth."
The mirror pulsed, and the visions intensified, and he felt a new layer peeling back, deeper than the history, deeper than the memories.
He felt the root of the bond. Not the love they'd built, not the intimacy or the tenderness or the choice.
The root. The transaction. The purchase.
The chains. The dock. The dead brother. The price paid in gold for a human girl's body.
And the root was rotten. It had always been rotten.
Whatever had grown from it, however beautiful, however strong, however freely given, the foundation was purchase, and the mirror was saying: This is what your love is built on.
This is what lies beneath every kiss and every kindness and every night you held her.
You bought her. She was cargo. And love that grows from cargo is not love freely given, no matter what either of you tells yourselves.
The curse's logic. Morvenna's argument, presented not in words but in lived experience, irrefutable because it was true. The transaction had happened. The chains had been real. The root was rotten.
He felt the argument settle into his bones, and he felt the weight of it, the terrible logic that said love grown inside a cage was captive love, and captive love could not survive the seeing because the seeing stripped it down to the root and the root was always, always, always purchase.
This was what had killed the others. Not the vision of death. The vision of truth. The truth that their love was built on transaction, and when the mirror showed them that truth, their love collapsed, and without love to sustain them, the curse devoured them from the inside.
And then Jeanne did something none of the other brides had done.
She spoke.
"It’s all true and I’m not afraid of that.”
The mirror's light flickered. Not dimming. Uncertain. As if the magic behind it hadn't expected an answer.
The visions shifted. He felt the mirror trying to push deeper, to find the crack in her acceptance, the place where the truth would overwhelm her the way it had overwhelmed the others.
It showed her the heat, the biological compulsion, the way her body had responded to his before her mind had chosen him.
It showed her the scent that had made her slick without warning on the first day, the omega biology that turned her into a creature of need in the presence of an alpha she hadn't consented to.
It said: Even your body's response was not freely given. Even desire was a cage.
Jeanne's breathing changed. He felt it through their joined hands, the quickening of her pulse, the shallow pull of air that meant the mirror was reaching her. Her scent shifted, the honeysuckle thinning, and beneath it, something wrong. Sour.
The curse was activating. Despite her defiance, despite her words, the mirror's truth was doing what it always did.
"We need to leave," he said.
"No," she said through gritted teeth.
"Your scent is changing. The curse is activating."
"I know. I can feel it. The fever is starting." She turned to face him, and her eyes were glassy with the beginning of whatever the curse did to an omega's body after the seeing. “I won’t leave until this is over. Until it’s shown us all the ugliness and I’ve proven that it doesn’t matter to me.”
The mirror was now showing him himself. Not through Jeanne's eyes.
Through his own. The man who had bought six women and watched them die.
The man who had stood at the dock at Roquemort and assessed a human omega with the eyes of a trader.
The man whose love was a cage, whose protection was a prison, whose every attempt to save the women he claimed had resulted in their death.
This is what you are, the mirror said. This is what she loves. A buyer of women. A jailer. A man whose love is indistinguishable from captivity.
He did not look away.
"Yes," he said. "That's me. That's what I did. I bought her. I kept her. I told myself it was for the curse, and then I told myself it was for love, and both of those things are true."
The mirror's light flared. His vision blurred. The room tilted, and beside him, Jeanne swayed, and her scent was wrong. The honeysuckle curdled into a bitterness that made his wolf howl with anguish.
He caught her before she fell, and her weight against him was lighter than it should have been, as if the curse was already drawing substance from her body.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you. I'm here."
"The mirror," she said. Her voice was fading, the edges going soft. "I saw us the way the mirror sees us." She pressed her face into his chest, breathing his scent, and he could feel her body temperature climbing, the fever building in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"I need to get you out of this room."
He lifted her. She weighed nothing in his arms, the way she always weighed nothing, his body built for carrying weight that would crush a normal man.
He turned from the mirror, and as he did, the glass went dark again, the visions cutting off as abruptly as they'd begun.
The room was just a room again: six sleeping women, a black mirror, the stale air of a place sealed by magic.
Except now there was a seventh platform. Stone, draped in white cloth, positioned at the end of the semicircle beside Adele's. Waiting.
His wolf snarled at the sight of it, and for one feral instant, the animal wanted to shift, to tear the platform apart with claws and teeth, to destroy the room that was already preparing a place for Jeanne among the dead.
He held the shift down with an effort that made his vision blur and carried her through the door.