"Tell me something," she said. The way she always did, when they were tied. "Something true. Something the curse can't touch."
He thought about it. The list of things the curse couldn't touch was getting shorter by the day.
"My brother Niles," he said. He hadn't spoken about his family in years. "He’s two years older than me. He inherited the pack when our father died, so I took to the sea because there was nothing for a second son on land."
"Is he still alive?"
"Last I heard. We haven't spoken since the curse. He tried to help, in the beginning. Sent wolves, sent gold, sent a healer from the eastern packs. None of it worked, and after Isabeau died, he stopped trying." Anatole paused. "I think he decided it was easier to have a dead brother than a cursed one."
"That’s awful."
"Family is a weakness. People who love you either sacrifice for you or sacrifice you. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground."
"Marc sacrificed for me." He could feel the echo of old pain through the closeness of their bodies. "My father sacrificed me. Both of them loved me, in their way. The difference was what they were willing to lose."
He held her tighter.
"What are you willing to lose?" she asked.
"Anything. Everything. Whatever it takes to keep you alive."
"That's not what I asked. I asked what you're willing to lose. Not what you're willing to give up for me."
The question sat between them. His knot pulsed, and she gasped, and for a moment neither of them could think aboutanything except the place where their bodies were joined. When the spike of pleasure faded, the question was still there, patient and unanswered.
He didn't know. That was the honest answer, and it was the one that scared him most, because he suspected the thing he needed to let go of was the very thing he'd been clinging to hardest.
Control.
JEANNE
ON THE FOURTH MORNING, the greenish sky broke into rain that smelled like copper and tasted like grief.
Jeanne stood on the main deck, face turned up to the strange rain, and let it soak through her clothes. The crew avoided it, ducking under awnings and below hatches, their wolves whining at the wrongness of water that fell from a sky that was the wrong color. But Jeanne stood in it because the rain was cold and real and it gave her something to feel besides the pull.
It was no longer a tug or an ache or even a chain. It was a tide, rising inside her, filling spaces she hadn't known existed. Every thought bent toward it the way iron filings went toward a magnet. She'd be in the middle of a conversation with Gris and realize she'd lost five minutes, her mind gone blank while the door called to her.
"Little one." Gris appeared beside her with a coat. "You'll catch your death in this rain."
"I'm fine." But she took the coat and pulled it around her shoulders. "How long can the witch hold us?"
"I don't know. We’ve all been trying to break free of the current for three days. The captain’s barely sleeping."
She knew. She could see it in the hollows forming beneath his eyes, and in the tension that never left his shoulders. He was trying to control the situation with the sheer force of an alpha's will, and all of it was sand against a tide.
"You've been on this ship for twenty years. You've seen six brides come and go. Tell me the truth, not the version you think will keep me calm. Am I going to open that door?"
Gris was quiet for a long time. The copper rain ran down his weathered face, collecting in the lines of decades at sea.
"Every omega who has come aboard this ship has opened that door," he said. "Fighters, scholars, gentle souls, brave women. Six different kinds of strength, and none of it was enough. The door doesn't overpower you with force. It wears you down. It finds the gap between your resistance and your need, and it slips through."
"What gap?"
"Different for each of them. For Celeste, it was the need to conquer. She couldn't stand being told there was something she couldn't defeat. For Isabeau, curiosity. For Adele..." His voice roughened. "For Adele, it was hope. She thought the room held answers. Thought if she understood the curse, she could break it for the captain. For the baby."
Open the door and save him. The answer is inside. All you have to do is look.
"You think my gap is the same as Adele's," she said.
