Chapter Twenty
ANATOLE
His knot released hours later and he slipped free.
Anatole felt her response through the bond, the soft noise of loss she made, the way her body tightened as if trying to hold him inside her.
He pressed his mouth to the mating mark on her neck, and the touch sent a pulse through both of them that resonated deep.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"Like someone took the fever out and forgot to put anything back.
" She turned in his arms to face him. Her eyes were fully clear, no glaze of fever, no glassy distance.
The bond between them carried the shape of her exhaustion and her relief.
underneath it all, the steady hum of a love that had survived the worst thing either of them would ever endure. "How do I look?"
"Alive." The word came out rough. He hadn't meant it to carry so much weight, but it did, because he had watched six women in this bed go from alive to not-alive, and the simple fact that Jeanne's chest was rising and falling and her eyes were tracking his face and her scent was clean was a miracle he did not have the language to contain. "You look alive."
She touched his face. Her fingers traced a line down his beard.
"It's gone," she said. “The silver-blue streak.”
He grunted. “So’s the key.”
“So’s everything to do with the damned door,” she said with a grin.
A knock came at the cabin door. "Captain." Gris's voice, muffled by the wood. "The crew is asking to see the omega."
Anatole looked at Jeanne. Through the bond, he could read her: tired beyond reckoning, sore, hungry, and underneath all of it, a readiness that had nothing to do with physical recovery and everything to do with what she'd become on this ship. The captain's mate. Pack.
"Give us ten minutes," he called.
They dressed in silence that was not silence, because the bond filled it. Through it, he watched her pulling on her clothes, and noted her wince when her arms lifted overhead. Her muscles were sore from the curse trying to shake her apart from the inside.
He crossed to her and fastened the buttons at her collar, his fingers clumsy with a tenderness that was new, and she leaned into him for a moment, her forehead against his chest, breathing his scent, and then she straightened and turned toward the door.
"Ready?" she asked.
He wasn't. He wanted to stay in this cabin with her forever. But he had a duty to the crew. They needed this almost as much as he needed Jeanne.
"Ready," he said.
They opened the door. Gris was there, standing in the corridor outside the captain's quarters, his hands clasped in front of him. The old cook looked back and forth at them, and he grinned happily.
The smile gave way quietly, the lines around his eyes deepening and his mouth pulling down. Two tears tracked through the creases of his weathered cheeks. He didn't wipe them. He stood in the corridor of the Barbe-Bleue and let them fall dignity.
"Well," Gris said. His voice held. Barely. "Look at you two."
Jeanne reached for him. The old cook stiffened, the way betas stiffened when an omega touched them unexpectedly, and then he folded, his arms going around her with the careful strength of a man holding something he'd been afraid to hope for.
Anatole watched his mate embrace the cook and he felt through the bond the wave of gratitude that moved through her.
Gris stepped back. Straightened his apron. Wiped his face with the back of his hand and reassembled himself into the cook who ran the galley of the Barbe-Bleue with the same steady competence that held the crew together in storms.
"They're on deck," Gris said. "All of them. There's no room. The door is gone."
“The curse broke when the bond sealed," Anatole said.
The cook's eyes went to the mark on Jeanne's neck.
"About damned time," Gris said, and his voice cracked on the last word, and he turned and led them toward the deck.
The morning hit Anatole like a wall. The fever had contracted his world to the space around a bed, and now the sky opened above him, blue and clean. The sun climbed the eastern horizon. The Crimson Sea stretched out in every direction sparkling like a treasure trove.
The deck was full. The seawolves went still as Anatole stepped out with Jeanne
Luc was at the center of the semicircle, where the first mate stood during formal pack proceedings.
His scarred face was composed in the expression Anatole knew best, the one that gave nothing away.
But his eyes were wrong. His eyes were too bright, and when Anatole met them, Luc's composure shifted, a fracture running through the mask so fast that if you blinked, you'd miss it.
Anatole didn't blink.
"The curse is broken," he said to the crew.
"The omega lived," Luc said. "The seventh bride survived. Our Jeanne survived."
Sébastien was the first to howl. The young beta threw his head back and let the sound tear out of him, the howl of a wolf who had been carrying dread for months and was releasing it in a single sustained note.
The scar on his face, the one Jeanne had stitched during the storm, pulled white against his skin as his throat worked.
The others followed. One by one, then in clusters, the crew of the Barbe-Bleue lifted their voices and howled.
The sound was enormous. It filled the ship, spilled over the rails, carried across the water.
The seawolves howled together, the vibration of it resonating through the deck planks and up through Anatole's boots and into his body, where it met the bond and amplified.
Through the bond, he felt Jeanne's response.
Not fear. Not the wariness that a human surrounded by howling wolves should have felt.
He felt her awe, and under the awe, a belonging so fierce that it buckled something in his chest. She was pack.
She had been pack since the night they'd witnessed her at the gathering, but the bond made it tangible, a connection between her and every wolf on this deck that ran through Anatole like a river through bedrock.
The howling tapered off. The crew was moving towards them now. Sébastien reached them first. He dropped to one knee in front of Jeanne in a gesture of pack submission.
He rose and stepped back, and the next wolf moved forward, and the next, the crew coming to their captain's mate one at a time with the reverence of a pack acknowledging a their Captain’s mate and omega.
Some of them touched her. A hand on her shoulder, a clasp of her wrist, the brief press of a forehead to her hand that was the wolf equivalent of a kiss. She accepted each one with steady composure and relief.
Luc came last.
The first mate stood in front of them, and for a long moment, he said nothing. Anatole could read the struggle in the tension in him.
"I was prepared," Luc said. "To put you down. If she died. I had the blade chosen. I had the words I was going to say to the crew after." He stopped. The muscles in his throat worked. "I am very glad I don't have to use either of those things."
Anatole gripped Luc's forearm. Luc gripped his. “Me too.”
"Right," Luc said, his voice almost normal. "Gris. Food. The captain's mate hasn't eaten in a long while."
"Already on it." Gris was already moving toward the galley, calling orders to the two betas who assisted him. "And someone bring up the good wine. Not the swill. The bottles I've been saving."
"You've been saving wine?" Anatole asked.
Gris paused at the galley entrance. "I always believed one of them would make it. Seemed wrong not to be ready."
The morning unfolded around them like a sail catching wind.
Gris produced food in quantities that suggested he had indeed been preparing for this moment, bread and cured meat and a soup that was better than anything he'd cooked in the months Jeanne had been aboard, and the crew ate on deck in the sunshine, wolves shoulder to shoulder, the rigid hierarchies of the pack loosening into something that resembled family.
Anatole ate. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the bread hit his tongue, and then the hunger arrived all at once, three days of sitting in a chair without food or water catching up with him in a rush that made his hands unsteady.
Jeanne was the same beside him, eating with the single-minded focus of a body that had been burning through its reserves for three days and was now demanding replenishment with interest.
After the meal, he went below.
He went alone. Jeanne understood through the bond, that he needed to see it. He needed to stand in the place where the door had been and verify with his own eyes what the bond and the mirror's detonation and the brides' release had already told him.
The lower decks were different. He registered it as soon as he descended past the crew quarters, the change in the air, the quality of the light, the smell.
For many years, the lowest levels of the Barbe-Bleue had carried the sweet-rot scent of the curse, the decay that lived beneath the pine tar and bilge water, the presence of magic that did not belong on a ship.
It was gone. The air smelled like what it was: old wood and salt water and the deep-hull cold of a vessel that had been sailing for decades.
He reached the corridor. The guard station was empty, the watches Luc had posted no longer necessary. He walked to where the door had stood.
Wall. Unbroken planking, the wood continuous from floor to ceiling, the grain running in uninterrupted lines.
No seams. No hinges. No trace that a door had ever been present, that a room had existed beyond it, that six women had been preserved inside it on stone platforms while a mirror of black glass waited to destroy whoever loved him next.
He stood in the corridor and breathed out a sigh of relief that shook him and what seemed like the entire ship.
Above him, through the decks, through the bond, Jeanne was a steady presence. Sitting on the main deck in the sunshine, surrounded by wolves who were teaching her another card game, her laughter carried.
She was alive. She was his. She had chosen him with her eyes open and her feet on the ground and every ugly truth about their history spread out between them like a map, and she had said I'm choosing you with the same stubborn, unbreakable will that had kept her fighting since the day she'd come aboard.
He pressed his hand to the wall where the door had been.
He stayed there for a long time. He did not pray, because he had stopped praying when Marguerite died, but what he did in that corridor, in the silence of the ship's belly, with his hand on the wood and his mate's heartbeat steady in his chest, was close enough that the distinction didn't matter.