Chapter Nineteen
JEANNE
The fever dreamed her. It had taken her body and was using it to dream its own dreams, and she was along for the passage, a passenger in her own skin while the curse did its work.
She was in the vineyard.
Not the real vineyard, the one with the dead vines and the cracked soil and her father's debts rotting the roots.
This was the vineyard as it should have been, as it had been while her mother was alive.
Green and heavy with fruit, the grapes fat and dark on the vine, the air thick with the smell of sun-warmed earth and growing things.
Jeanne stood between the rows and the soil was cool beneath her bare feet and somewhere in the distance, Marc was laughing.
She turned toward the sound and he was there, leaning against the stone wall at the edge of the property, young and whole, squinting against the light. He was wearing the blue shirt she'd mended twice.
"You look terrible," he said.
"I'm dying."
"I know. I've been watching." He picked a grape from the vine and ate it. "You always had to do things the hard way."
"Marc." Her voice cracked on his name. "I'm so sorry. I should have gone more willingly. You didn’t have to die.”
"Stop." He held up a hand. "I didn't come here to talk about that. I came to ask you a question."
"You didn't come here at all. You're the fever."
"I'm the fever using the shape of your brother because your mind needs a face to talk to. Does the distinction matter?" He took another grape. "Here's my question. When Father sold you, what did you lose?"
She stared at him. The vineyard hummed around them, insects in the vines, wind in the leaves, the particular drone of a summer afternoon that she hadn't heard since she was little.
"Everything," she said.
"Be specific."
"My home. My freedom. You."
"And what did you keep?"
The question confused her.
"A few trinkets," she said.
"You’re being too literal." Marc leaned back against the wall. The sunlight caught his hair the way it always had, turning the brown to copper. "Let’s try another way to look at this. When you came aboard that ship, what did the alpha take from you?"
She wasn’t sure where he was going with this line of questioning, if there was even a point or if this was just the fever.
"I just told you."
"What else?"
She thought about it the way she'd think about a problem in the vineyard, turning it over, examining the roots. "Nothing else."
"Nothing?"
She let out a shaking sigh. Anatole gave more than he took.
"He didn't take my voice. He didn't take my ability to fight back.
He didn't take away my right to say no, even though it cost him.
" She was speaking faster now, the words coming from somewhere the fever hadn't touched.
"He gave me run of the ship. He taught me things.
He never forced a bond. Even during the heat, he came to the door and said 'tell me to leave. ' He gave me the choice every time."
"Interesting." Marc smiled. It was his real smile, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and even knowing he was a fever dream wearing her brother's face, the sight of it made her happy.
"The other brides," he said. "Did they get choices?"
The vineyard shifted. Not collapsing or dissolving the way fever dreams usually did, but rearranging itself, the rows of vines becoming corridors, the grapes becoming lanterns, and suddenly she was standing in the forbidden room on the Barbe-Bleue.
The six brides lay on their stone platforms, preserved and silent, and the broken mirror reflected nothing from its shattered face on the far wall.
But the brides were not still. They were sitting up, one by one, and turning their heads slowly.
Marguerite was the first to speak. "I wanted adventure," Marguerite said.
"From the moment I saw Anatole I knew I could have that type of life with him.
I married him in secret and was so relieved to finally be free of my mother.
" Marguerite's hands rested on the stone beneath her.
"But I was wrong. I was never free. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a girl who had married a wolf in the dark and called it romance. It might have grown into love, but the curse didn’t give me the chance. "
The second bride, Celeste, spoke from her platform.
She was compact and fierce, with the look of a woman who had fought every day of her life.
"My pack alpha sold me to Anatole because the price was right.
I tried to kill him the first night. He respected me for it.
" A brief smile crossed her face. "I lived to best him, best the curse.
I loved him, but I loved the challenge more. "
The others spoke too. Isabeau, Vivienne, Lucienne. Each story different in its details, each one arriving at the same place. Isabeau had been seeking status. Vivienne wanted a cure for her loneliness. Lucienne was grateful for Anatole rescuing her from a worse alpha.
And then there was Adele. "I loved him and I knew exactly what I was doing," Adele said. "But I wanted to be a mother more than anything else. More than being an omega, more than being a wife.”
Six women. Six loves.
"I was sold like Celeste. I was lonely like Vivienne. But I wanted to stay in my vineyard, not run away like Lucienne, and I didn’t want adventure or status, like Marguerite and Celeste.”
Marguerite tilted her head. "And now?"
“I love the adventure of being with Anatole. Aside from my brother dying, I’m glad I left the vineyard. I love the challenge of his life and I’m his equal. Anatole saw to that. I have status on the ship. I’m no longer lonely, and I never will be again. I want to be a mother, an omega, and a wife.”
One by one, the brides disappeared.
The room pulsed. Jeanne's vision wavered, the edges of the dream going soft, the fever pulling at her like a current.
The fever broke.
She came up gasping, the way a diver breaks the surface after too long underwater, her lungs hauling in air that tasted of salt and wood and the sour-sweet wrongness of her own changing scent. The cabin was dim. A single lantern swung from the beam above, casting moving shadows across the walls.
Anatole was beside her. Sitting in the chair he'd pulled close to the bed, his hand wrapped around hers, his body curved forward like a man bracing against a wind that wouldn't stop.
He hadn't slept. She could see it in the hollows beneath his eyes, the way his skin had gone gray with exhaustion, the stiffness in his shoulders that spoke of hours spent holding the same position because moving would mean letting go of her hand.
She came back to herself in pieces.
"Bond me," she said.
The gold flared. "Jeanne, you’re sick...”
“Not anymore.”
“You’re too weak.”
“No, I’m not.” She released one of his hands and reached for the collar of his shirt, pulling him toward her. "Stop protecting me. Choose me. I need you. I need this, if I’m too survive."
“You’re delirious.”
“I’m not. I’m coming back. Can’t you scent it.”
His nostrils flared. “This can’t be real.”
“It’s real.” She put his hand on her forehead.
“It’s cool,” he said wonderingly.
He kissed her slowly, tentatively, as if she would break.
His tongue swept against hers and the taste of him made her slick and she rejoiced omega.
The need that lived in the marrow of her bones came alive.
Her alpha's mouth was on hers and his hands were in her hair.
The bond they'd been circling for weeks was about to snap into place and she couldn’t wait.
This is what they needed to do to break the curse.
She would be the omega to finally do it. Not Celeste.
Slick gathered between her thighs, her body preparing for what it had always known was coming.
Anatole groaned against her mouth when he scented it. His hands slid from her hair to her waist, pulling her against him, and she went, the fever's weakness falling away as if the proximity to her mate burned through the curse's grip and found the strength the fever had been stealing.
"Jeanne." Her name in his mouth was ragged, worshipful. His cock strained against his breeches, hard against her thigh, and her hips rolled into him without conscious decision, her body seeking the pressure it needed.
"If this is too much..."
"The fever has been too much. This is not too much. This is exactly enough." She pulled at his shirt. "Off."
He stripped it over his head in one motion, and she pressed her palms to his chest and abs.
She knew the ridges and valleys of them the way she knew the rows of the vineyard she'd never see again.
She kissed right over his heart, and she heard the sound he made, low and wrecked and not entirely human.
"I need..." He was shaking.
"I know what you need." She pulled him down onto the bed.
He went, lowering himself over her, bracing his weight on his forearms, and the size of him over her, around her, was the same overwhelming rightness it had been every time, the alpha's body built to cover the omega's, to shield and claim and fill. “I will give it to you.” She’d give him the child that Adele never had a chance to.
She arched up against him, and the contact dragged a moan from both of them. His cock was an iron line against her thigh through the fabric, and she reached between them, her fingers finding the laces of his breeches, pulling them loose.
"Wait." His hand closed over hers. "Let me. I want..."
He pulled back enough to strip the breeches off, and she watched him, the body she'd learned over weeks of intimacy, the broad shoulders and thick thighs and the cock that had split her open during the heat, flushed and hard and already leaking.
The knot at the base was beginning to swell, and the sight of it sent another pulse of slick through her, wetting her thighs, filling the cabin with the scent of omega arousal cutting through the fever's sourness.