JEANNE
It started with the blanket.
She hadn't meant to take it. She'd been walking past the crew's quarters on her way back from the galley, where Gris had pressed another cup of bitter tea into her hands, and the folded wool had been sitting on a barrel outside the door. A spare, maybe, or something left out to air. It was soft, dark blue, and it smelled like tar and old wood.
She picked it up and kept walking.
By the time she'd climbed the stairs back to the captain's quarters, she had already tucked it under her arm like it belonged there. She didn't question it. Her skin was buzzing too much for questions, her thoughts slippery and strange, and the blanket was the first thing all day that had made the buzzing quiet down, even a little.
She spread it across the foot of the bed and stood back to look at it. Something about the placement bothered her, though she couldn't have said what. She moved it to the left side, then the right. Folded it lengthwise. Unfolded it. Laid it at an angle across the pillows.
No. None of that was right either.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples. What was she doing? She had bigger problems than bedding arrangement. Her heat was close enough now that her clothes chafed no matter what she wore, and the pull toward the forbidden door had become a constant low hum in her ribcage,like a second heartbeat keeping its own time. She should be planning, thinking, anything other than fussing over the placement of a stolen blanket.
But when she stepped away from the bed, her hands itched to go back to it.
She found the second blanket in the trunk at the foot of the bed. A heavy thing, quilted, with a his scent. She buried her face in it. Pine, salt, and gunpowder. Her whole body loosened, tension draining out of her shoulders and spine like water through a cracked hull.
His.This was his. And her omega instincts were rolling in it like a cat in sunlight.
"Stop," she told herself, the word clipped and sharp in the empty cabin. She meant to put it back in the trunk. Close the lid. Walk away.
Instead, she carried it to the bed and began layering it over the first blanket, tucking the edges in to form a wall along one side.
The sane part of her mind watched this with a kind of horrified fascination. She knew what this was. She had read about it in the books about omega biology that Marc had smuggled to her after she'd presented.Nesting,the books called it. The instinct to build a safe, scent-saturated space before heat, somewhere soft and enclosed that the omega's body could interpret as shelter.
She had never nested before. Six years on suppressants had kept her heats shallow enough to avoid it, and she'd always had the herbs to dull whatever instincts pushed through. Now, with no suppressants, no herbs, and an apex alpha's scent saturating every plank of the ship, her body was making up for lost time.
She understood all of this. She could observe herself doing it with clear, rational awareness. And it made not one bit of difference, because her hands were already moving again,pulling the sheets free and rewrapping them so the folds created a raised border on the other side of the bed.
She needed more.
The thought arrived fully formed and non-negotiable, the way hunger or thirst arrived. Not a preference. A requirement. She needed more soft things, more layers, more of the architecture her instincts demanded before they would let her rest.
She searched the cabin. Navigation charts were useless. The weapons on the wall made her skin crawl when she got too close to them. But she found a shirt in the wardrobe, linen worn thin from washing, and when she held it to her nose, his scent rolled through her like a tide.
This was the shirt she had woken up clutching that morning. Or one like it. She should have been mortified. She had thrown it across the room hours ago, disgusted with her own weakness.
Now she folded it and tucked it into the center of the nest, arranging it so it would be near her face when she lay down.
She pulled two more shirts from the wardrobe. A vest. Something heavy and dark that might have been a coat. Each item she held up and smelled, and her body gave a verdict:yesornot this one.The ones that carried his scent most strongly went into the nest. The rest she discarded on the floor without a second glance.
The pile was growing. Blankets, his clothes, the sheets rearranged into ridges that formed walls on three sides. She'd pushed the pillows against the headboard to create a fourth wall, and the center of the bed was now a shallow bowl of layered fabric, enclosed and protected.
She climbed in to test it.
She relaxed the moment she lay down. The buzzing under her skin didn't stop, but it shifted, became something she could live with instead of something she wanted to claw out of herself.His scent surrounded her on all sides, layered and complex, and her omega instincts stopped clawing at the inside of her skull and settled into a low, steady purr.
She closed her eyes. For the first time in days, the pull toward the forbidden door faded to background noise.
Safe,something in her whispered. Not her mind. Something older, something that lived in the base of her spine and the marrow of her bones.Safe here. His scent. His den. Ours.
She opened her eyes and stared at the canopy above the bed.
Not ours. Not his den. She was a captive in a dead woman's place, building a nest out of a monster's wardrobe, and tomorrow her heat would hit and she would burn alive while he chained himself in the hold and pretended that distance could save either of them.
She should tear the whole thing apart. Throw his clothes back in the wardrobe. Strip the bed down to bare mattress and lie on it like a person with some dignity left intact.
