"I think you love the captain and are willing to sacrifice your own safety for his sake." Gris gripped her shoulder. "And I think the curse knows that's your weakness. That you'd walk into that room and face the mirror if you believed it would save him."
"Then what do I do? How do I fight a temptation that's built from my own love?"
"I don't know, little one. I've watched six women fail and I don't know."
The rain kept falling, wrong and copper-tasting, and the ship drifted in its unnatural circle, and the door hummed its ceaseless song from the deck below. But Gris's words settled into a place beneath the pull, beneath the hum, beneath the constant erosion of her will.
Could she face the mirror and break the curse?
She held onto that thought the way she'd held onto Anatole's shirt during her heat, pressing it close, breathing it in, letting it become the thing she reached for when the door called loudest.
THAT NIGHT, THE SHIPbroke free.
Jeanne was on deck when it happened, sitting beside Anatole at the helm, her head on his shoulder while he steered by starlight. The green had finally left the sky around sunset, and the stars had come back, and the Wolf's Eye was burning in its accustomed place above the northern horizon.
One moment the Barbe-Bleue was caught in the slow, sick circle that had held her for four days. The next, the current released, like a fist opening, and the ship surged forward on a clean south wind. The sails filled with a crack that echoed across the water, and the rigging sang, and the crew let out a collective breath that was half-howl.
Anatole's hands tightened on the wheel. "She couldn’t hold us any longer. It’s a small victory, but a good one nonetheless."
But the pull was still there. Stronger than ever. She knew now it wasn’tifshe went to the door, butwhen. There had to be a way to beat the witch’s curse. As the south wind carried them away from the Scattered Isles, she thought long and hard about what to do. The air cleared up with every league of open water between them and Morvenna's islands.
“Maybe the answer isn't keeping me from the room. Maybe the answer is making sure what we have is strong enough to endure what I find there," she said, out of any other options.
His hands went white on the wheel. "You're talking about walking into a room that has killed every omega who's entered it."
"I'm talking about the possibility that the door is inevitable, and we need to stop fighting the inevitable and start preparing for it."
"No. I will not accept that the door wins." He was shaking. She could see it in his arms, the tremor running through muscle and bone. "I have buried six women. I have put six rings in that chest. I will not put a seventh. I will not."
She didn't push. Not tonight. He wasn't ready to hear what she was beginning to understand, the thing Gris's words had planted and Morvenna's waters had nourished. She would open the door. She leaned against his shoulder and watched the Scattered Isles disappear behind them, dark shapes against a dark sky, and said nothing more.
But in the silence, she began to plan.
Chapter Sixteen
ANATOLE
He went to the forbidden corridor alone. The upper decks carried the accumulated warmth of bodies and cooking fires and the friction of living. Down here, the air thinned. The smell changed. Pine tar and bilge water and something underneath that had no natural origin, something sweet and decaying that made his wolf flatten its ears and press itself against the back of his mind.
The guards Luc had posted stood at the corridor's entrance, two betas from the night watch. They straightened when they saw him. Good men. Loyal wolves. They would stand here until their relief came, and the next pair would stand here after them, and none of it would matter.
"Captain." The taller one, a wolf named Corentin, kept his voice low. "No activity tonight."
"Good. Stay sharp."
