Epilogue
JEANNE
Three months later
The coastline of Roquemort emerged from the morning mist the same way it must have emerged three months ago, when a cursed ship with black sails had come to collect its seventh bride.
Vineyards crawled up the hillsides in rows that were healthier than she remembered.
The late summer green replaced the exhausted brown of early spring.
Still huddled against the shore, it was a town that had seen better centuries.
Jeanne stood at the bow of the Barbe-Bleue and watched her old life materialize out of the fog.
She hadn't asked to come here. Anatole had altered course two days ago without telling her, and she'd known through the bond before Luc announced the heading change, the way she knew most things about her mate now: through the steady current of emotion and intention that flowed between them like water through connecting rivers.
He'd been nervous about it. It was a low buzz of anxiety that didn't match the calm sea or the clear sky, and when she'd raised an eyebrow at him across the deck, he'd sent back the image of a coastline and a question mark, and she'd understood.
She hadn't answered immediately. She'd gone to the galley, where Gris was teaching two young betas the difference between a roux and a catastrophe, and she'd sat on the counter and eaten an apple and let the question sit inside her until she knew what the answer was.
The answer was yes. Yes, she wanted to see her home again.
Not because she missed it. Not because the vineyard was calling her the way the golden door had once called her, an irresistible pull toward something she couldn't resist. She wanted to see it because she was a different woman than the one who'd been dragged from those rows of dying grapes, and the distance between who she'd been and who she was could only be measured by standing in both places.
Anatole came up behind her. She tracked him through the bond before his scent reached her.
Pine and leather was her favorite smell in the world.
Now it was layered with the subtler notes that only she could detect: the cedar of the cabin they shared, the salt of the sea that lived in his skin, and underneath it all, the low steady thread of his wolf.
He stood behind her at the rail and rested his hands on either side of hers, his body a wall at her back, and she leaned into him the way she'd been leaning into him for three months, by choice, every time.
"The vineyard is up there," she said, pointing toward the hillside where Belle Vigne sat among its neighbors. From the water, it was impossible to tell whether the rows were tended or abandoned. "Past the church. The stone wall with the broken gate."
"Do you want to go ashore?"
She considered it.
"No," she said. "I don't need to walk through it. I just needed to see it."
"And?"
She looked at the hillside where she'd knelt in the dirt and pulled weeds that didn't matter from soil that couldn't produce.
Where Marc had come between the rows with his face the color of chalk to tell her their father had sold her.
Where she'd been Jeanne of Belle Vigne, hidden omega, a woman whose entire life was organized around not being discovered.
"It's smaller than I remembered," she said.
He pressed his mouth to her hair. Through the bond, she read his response: not relief exactly, but the settling of a man who had been prepared to anchor offshore for as long as she needed and was glad she didn't need long.
"Your brother's grave is up there," he said. "Do you want to say goodbye."
After everything she had been through, the grief was still there.
It was still a stone in her chest, still the sharpest thing she carried.
It would always be there. She'd stopped expecting it to dissolve and started learning to carry it instead, the way Anatole carried the six brides, not as a weight that crushed but as a presence that informed.
"No. I don’t need to say goodbye. He’s always with me."
She was quiet for a moment. The ship rocked beneath them, the gentle swell of a calm sea, and the mist was burning off the hillside, revealing the town in pieces: the dock, the market square, the road that led up to the vineyards.
The Barbe-Bleue sailed past Roquemort. The town faded into the mist it had come from, and Jeanne let it go.
That evening, she sat in the captain's quarters while Anatole worked at his charts.
The quarters looked different now, or rather, they looked the same but the feeling of them had changed.
The weapons still hung from hooks. The navigation charts still covered the desk.
The bed still dominated one wall, massive and draped in dark fabric.
But the room no longer carried the weight of six ghosts, and the chest that had held six wedding rings sat empty in the corner, its lid open, the dark velvet inside faded where the rings had rested.
The rings were gone. Anatole had taken them from the chest the week after the curse broke and had given them to the sea, one at a time, standing at the stern in the predawn dark.
He'd said each name as he dropped each ring.
Marguerite. Celeste. Isabeau. Vivienne. Lucienne.
Adele. Jeanne had stood beside him and said the names too, because they were hers now as much as his, part of the history she'd married into when she'd bared her throat and told him to choose her.
She was working on a drawing. She'd discovered the talent by accident, charcoal sketches of the crew that had started as boredom during night watches and had turned into something the wolves actually wanted.
Sébastien had his pinned above his hammock.
Gris had his propped against the spice shelf.
She was working on Luc now, trying to capture the way the scar tissue pulled at his expression, giving him a permanent look of skeptical appraisal that was, she'd learned, not a product of the scar at all but simply who Luc was.
Through the bond, she tracked Anatole's concentration.
He was taking them south, toward the warmer waters where the trade routes converged and a ship without a curse could make an honest living.
They'd discussed it over the past weeks.
The Barbe-Bleue was fast and well-armed and crewed by seawolves who had been sailing together for over a decade.
There was work for a ship like that. Escort runs.
Cargo transport. The occasional engagement with pirates who preyed on merchant vessels, which Luc had suggested with the restrained enthusiasm of a wolf who would miss having something to fight.
Jeanne set down her charcoal. She'd been waiting for the right moment to say this, and she'd realized over the past two days that there was no right moment, that the concept of a right moment was just another form of controlling the outcome, and she'd learned from the best what happened when you tried to control outcomes.
"Anatole."
He looked up from the charts.
She waited for him to catch the new scent she had been trying to hide.
It was no longer possible, so she watched him notice it.
His nostrils flared, the way they always did when her scent changed, his wolf rising to the surface.
She watched the information travel from his nose to his brain, and saw when understanding arrived.
He stood up from the desk. Crossed the cabin in three strides. Dropped to his knees in front of her chair, which put his face level with her stomach, and pressed his nose to the fabric of her shirt. He breathed her in, and then lifted his head.
"How long have you known?" he asked.
"A week." She touched his hair, running her fingers through the dark strands. "I wanted to be sure before I told you."
"Sure." He repeated the word as if testing its weight. "You're sure."
"If I concentrate, I can feel..." She paused, searching for the right description. "A third note. In the bond. Not you, not me. Something new."
His hand came up and rested on her lower belly.
His palm was broad enough to span the space between her hips, and the touch was so gentle, so careful, that she almost laughed, because this was the same hand that had gripped a cutlass and hauled rigging and held her down during sex with a strength that left bruises she wore proudly, and now it rested on her stomach as if the slightest pressure might break what was growing there.
"A child," he said. The gold in his eyes was brightening, the wolf pressing forward, and through the bond, she was hit with a wave of emotion so vast and so layered that it took her breath.
Joy and terror. Hope and grief, and the disbelief of a man who had expected his bloodline to end with him and his wolf to die feral and alone.
"A child," she confirmed. "Yours. Ours."
He kissed her belly. Then he rose and kissed her mouth.
Later, in bed, his body curved around hers the way it always was when they slept. His hand rested over her stomach, she lay awake and listened to the ship.
The Barbe-Bleue creaked through its nighttime rhythms. The watch changed above.
The distant murmur of wolves on the night shift, voices carrying through the deck in the low registers that meant routine, that meant safety, that meant home.
No hum from below. No pull. No golden light.
Just a ship, sailing south through a calm sea, carrying its crew toward a future that didn't end in a room full of stone platforms and a mirror of black glass.
Through the bond, Anatole slept. She tracked the steady cadence of his breathing, the slow pulse of his dreaming mind, the wolf curled at the base of his consciousness, finally still.
Not the stillness of restraint. The stillness of an animal that had found its pack, its mate, its territory, and needed nothing else.
She thought about the vineyard. About the rows of dying grapes and the girl who'd knelt in the dirt, hiding what she was.
She thought about Marc, lying in the eastern corner of the church cemetery with sea lavender on his grave and a sister who had survived the monster he'd died trying to save her from.
She thought about six rings at the bottom of the Crimson Sea, and six women who had loved a wolf and died for it, and the seventh who had loved the same wolf and lived.
Anatole stirred in his sleep. His hand tightened on her belly, a reflex, the wolf's need to hold what was his, and she covered his hand with her own and let it stay.
Outside, the stars turned overhead, the same stars he'd taught her to read on a night when she'd stopped pretending she didn't love him. The sea was calm. The sky was clear.
The Barbe-Bleue sailed on.