Her eyes were bright. Not with tears, though he could smell the salt of them hovering at the edges.
"You are pack," he told her. "From this moment forward. Whatever happens."
"Whatever happens," she echoed.
He kissed her forehead. Not her mouth. Not with the heat and hunger that lived between them whenever they touched. This was something older. A benediction. A promise made in front of witnesses that couldn't be unmade.
The crew broke the circle. Someone produced a bottle, and then another. Gris appeared with food that was better than his usual fare, and Anatole suspected the old cook had been preparing for this since the morning Pleisse's ships appeared on the horizon. Music started from somewhere, a fiddle and a drum, and wolves who'd been wary of Jeanne for weeks were now toasting her, pressing cups into her hands, telling her stories about the ship and the sea and the captain who'd smiled more in the last month than in the previous twelve years combined.
Anatole watched from the edge of the gathering. Luc found him there, as Luc always did.
"When was the last time you saw the crew like this?" Luc asked.
Anatole searched his memory. Before Celeste. Before the curse had ground the last of their optimism to dust. Before his seawolves had learned to dread the arrival of each new bride because it meant another funeral.
"Years," he said.
"They needed this. You needed this." Luc nodded toward Jeanne, who was sitting cross-legged on the deck while three beta crew members taught her a drinking game that involved cards and an alarming amount of rum. She was laughing. He'd never heard her laugh before, and the sound of it reached into his chest and wrapped around something that had been cold for a very long time.
"She's going to have a headache tomorrow," Anatole said.
"Let her. She's earned one good night." Luc was quiet for a beat. "They all have."
He was right. And for one night, surrounded by lantern light and laughter and the sound of his mate's voice rising in delight as she apparently won another hand, Anatole allowed himself to believe that it might be enough.
That she might be strong enough.
Chapter Thirteen
JEANNE
The rum had made her bold.
Or maybe the evening had done that. She'd spent her whole life being hidden, invisible, the omega tucked away so the wolves wouldn't find her. Tonight she'd stood in the center of a wolf pack and been seen.
Marc would have been proud. The thought came without the knife-edge of guilt she'd been carrying since his death. Just a quiet warmth, like sun on skin. He would have been proud of her for finding a place in the world, even one as strange and dangerous as this.
She found Anatole at the rail, away from the gathering, watching the crew.
"You're lurking," she said, leaning against the rail beside him.
"I'm supervising."
"You're lurking at your own mate's celebration. That's pathetic, Captain."
