He looked past them, down the corridor to the door at the far end. It looked ordinary from this distance. Old wood, warped iron hinges, the kind of door you'd find in any ship's hold. From here, he couldn't see the golden light that leaked from beneath it, couldn't feel the hum that Jeanne described in her bones. The curse had never spoken to him the way it spoke to omegas.
He turned and climbed back up, past the lower decks, past the crew quarters where wolves slept in hammocks that swayed with the ship's movement, past the galley where Gris's banked cooking fire glowed like a low orange eye. He climbed untilhe reached the main deck, where the night air hit him clean and salt-edged, and the stars burned overhead in their ancient configurations.
His wolf was restless. Not the desperate, clawing restlessness of the early days, when it had screamedMATE MATE MATEand he'd had to chain every instinct to keep from claiming Jeanne on the spot. This was different. His wolf was pacing the borders of his mind the way it paced when it sensed a storm that hadn't yet broken the horizon. Something was coming, and the wolf knew it, and the man knew it, and neither of them knew how to stop it.
He leaned against the mainmast and closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the dead brides waited.
Marguerite first, always first. Dark hair and dark eyes and a laugh that had made his wolf go still with wonder. He'd loved her the way young men love, with the whole of himself and no reservation and absolutely no understanding of what love cost. He'd taken her secretly, bonded her in the shadow of her mother's island, and when Morvenna found out, the curse had eaten through their bond like fire through dry rope.
He'd held Marguerite while she died. Twenty years old, clutching his hands, her scent curdling from wildflowers to ash. Three days from the seeing to the end, and he'd spent every minute of those three days trying to will her alive with nothing but the force of his love.
Love hadn't been enough.
After Marguerite, he'd tried control. He bought Celeste because she was strong, a fighter, a wolf omega whose own nature gave her resistance the curse might not overcome. He'd kept his distance. Set rules.
Four months. Then the door took her too.
After Celeste, he'd tried kindness. Tried cruelty. Tried every configuration of emotion and distance he could devise. Six brides. Six different approaches. Six identical outcomes.
And now Jeanne. Who was none of those things and all of them.
What if it's you?
The thought arrived like a blade between the ribs, quiet and devastating. He'd been asking himself what Jeanne needed to survive the mirror.
But what if it wasn't all about Jeanne?
Six women had loved him. Six women had died. The common element wasn't the women. It was him.
The thought hollowed him out. He stood at the mainmast with the wind in his hair and the stars overhead and the sea whispering against the hull, and he looked at the shape of his own love and saw what Morvenna must have seen all those years ago when she designed the curse.
He loved like a cage. The way his wolf loved, all territory and possession and the snarling refusal to let anything in or out. He'd told himself it was protection. He'd told himself the walls he built around each bride were shields. But shields and cages were made of the same material, and the women trapped inside couldn't tell the difference.
You have stolen my daughter's heart.
Stolen. Not won. Not earned. Not received. Stolen. Morvenna's curse was built on the premise that Anatole's love was a form of theft, and every bride since Marguerite had been stolen too, bought or bartered or taken from lives they hadn't chosen to leave.
Including Jeanne.
He'd bought her. Paid her father's debts, put a price on her body and her scent and her potential to break his curse. She'd come aboard in chains. Whatever she'd built since then, however fiercely she'd chosen him, the foundation was theft. His theft.
What if the curse couldn't be broken because the curse was right about him?
His wolf howled, a low, anguished sound that vibrated through his bones.No. She chose us. She chose us freely. She said so.
But she'd chosen him inside the cage. Inside the ship that was his territory, surrounded by his pack, bound by his claim. She'd chosen him the way a prisoner chose to befriend the warden, because what else was there? What else could she do?
He'd told himself her love was different. But what if he was wrong? What if the curse was simply taking longer with a human host?
Then she would die. And it would be his fault. Again.
The thought was a canyon opening beneath his feet, and he stood at the edge and looked down into all the years of accumulated guilt and grief, and the shape at the bottom looked exactly like himself.
If he kept his distance. If he pulled back. If he rebuilt the walls he'd spent weeks dismantling and became the captain instead of the man, the cold strategic mind that treated omegas as tools instead of mates. If he gave her reason to stop loving him. If her love faded, the pull would fade with it, because the curse fed on love the way a fire fed on air.
If she stopped loving him, the door would stop calling.
She'd survive.
