"The omega?"
Anatole finally lifted his head. In the dim light filtering down from above, Luc's scarred face was unreadable. "She’s fine."
"I saw you catch her." Luc settled against the opposite wall. "I also saw the way you were holding her."
"Don't."
"I'm not judging, Captain. Just observing." Luc was quiet for a moment. "She's different from the others. I've been saying it since she came aboard."
"Different doesn't mean she'll survive."
"No. But it means something." Luc pushed off the wall. "Her heat's close. I can smell it even from here. Another day, maybe two. What are you going to do?"
Anatole closed his eyes. "Chain myself here. Same as always."
"Will the chains hold this time?"
The question hung in the air between them. Anatole thought about the way his wolf had surged when Jeanne was in danger. The way every instinct he had screamed to claim her, protect her, make her his.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I honestly don't know."
Chapter Four
ANATOLE
The hold smelled of rust and salt and old fear.
Anatole stood in the center of the cramped space, running his hands over the chains bolted to the hull. Iron links as thick as his thumb, designed to hold a shifting alpha in the grip of rut. He'd had them forged specially after the third bride died, when he'd realized his wolf couldn't be trusted around an omega in heat.
Twelve years, these chains had held him. Twelve years of ruts spent alone in this darkness, his body tearing itself apart with need while his wolf howled for a mate it couldn't have. Twelve years since the last omega died.
He tested the first shackle, then the second. The metal groaned but held. It would have to be enough.
It will not be enough,his wolf said.Not this time. Not with her.
Anatole ignored it. He'd been ignoring his wolf's opinions about Jeanne since the moment she'd come aboard, and he wasn't about to stop now.
But the wolf wasn't wrong. He could still feel her hands on his face, gentle as she'd tended his wound. Could still smell her scent clinging to his skin even after he'd washed. Honeysuckle and vanilla, threaded with the rising musk of approaching heat.
Two days. Maybe less. And then...
He closed his eyes and saw Marguerite. Not as she'd been at the end, gray-skinned and gasping, the curse eating her from theinside out. But before. Laughing in the sunlight on her mother's island, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, reaching for him with hands that had never known cruelty.
I love you,she'd said.Nothing can change that. Not my mother, not her magic, not anything.
