She'd hate him. But she'd be alive.
Alive and hating him was better than dead and loving him. He had six graves to prove it.
JEANNE
THE HAMMOCK WAS USELESS. The open deck was worse. Three nights of sleeping under that poisoned green sky withAnatole's arm locked across her waist, and every morning she woke a little further from where she'd started, her body inching toward the stairs in her sleep like a compass needle that only knew one direction.
She went back to the cabin. The nest she'd built weeks ago was still there, but three days of sleeping on the open deck had left the cabin cold and stale, the scent fading from the sheets, the air tasting of nothing but wood and bilge. Marc's candle still sat beside the compass on the desk. The curtain she'd tied back hung limp.
The hum was louder down here. Two decks closer to the door, and she registered the difference in her teeth, in the thin bones behind her ears, in the spaces between her ribs where the pull lived. Standing in the cabin doorway, she had to grip the frame with both hands and hold herself still for a count of ten before the urge to keep walking, to keep descending, to follow the hum down to its source, released enough for her to think.
She wasn't here to give in. She was here to build.
The old nest was dead. Not dismantled, but drained. The scent had thinned to nothing and the borders had gone flat, and the cabin smelled like absence. Absence was exactly the kind of gap the curse slipped through.
She started with his coat.
It hung on the hook by the door where he'd left it that morning, heavy canvas lined with wool, salt-stiffened and carrying his scent so strongly that when she pressed her face into the collar, the hum in her ribs dropped by half. Not gone. Nowhere close. But quieter, the way a storm sounded from inside a house instead of out in the wind.
She spread the coat across the center of the bed, open, sleeves wide like arms waiting to close. Then she went to the trunk.
She was not gentle about it. She had no time and no peace of mind, and the pull was a constant pressure behind her sternum, a hand pushing her toward the stairs, and every second she spent in this cabin was a second she had to actively choose not to walk out the door and down. She hauled blankets out by the armful, stripped the cold sheets and replaced them with ones from the bottom of the chest that still held a ghost of his scent trapped in the weave.
His watch shirt, the one he wore on late nights at the helm. She knew it by the salt stains on the cuffs, had learned to track his moods by which shirt he chose each morning, and this one meant long hours and hard thinking. She pressed it against the headboard like a compress against a wound.
His vest went on the left wall. The linen undershirt from the hook behind the door on the right. A wool blanket she'd never seen before from the very bottom of the trunk, so old and worn it was more texture than fabric, and it smelled like years. Like the ship itself had seeped into the threads. That one she wrapped around the pillows until the headboard became a barricade.
The bed was becoming a rampart.
Higher than the ceremony nest, denser, the walls thick with layered fabric, his scent concentrated in every fold. She built it up on all four sides until the center was a deep hollow, a pit lined with everything that smelled like him, and when she crawled into the middle and pulled the coat over herself like a second skin, the hum in her ribs dropped again.
Still there. She could still hear it, still feel the pull threading through the layers of pine and salt and gunpowder, worming its way between the folds. But it was muffled now, filtered through so much of his scent that the curse had to work harder to reach her, and the difference between working hard and working easy was the difference between drowning and treading water.
She pressed her face into the collar of the coat and breathed.
The dead brides were talking. They'd been talking all day, their voices louder in Morvenna's waters, overlapping and urgent.Come to us, Jeanne. The door has answers. The mirror will show you how to save him. All you have to do is look.
"I know what you're doing," she said into the wool. Her voice sounded strange in the hollow of the nest, close and muffled, as if the walls of fabric were absorbing it the way they absorbed scent. "You're using my love for him as bait. Telling me the room holds the answer, that if I just look, I'll know how to break the curse. You did the same thing to Adele."
Adele didn't love him the way you do,Marguerite's voice answered. Marguerite was always the loudest. The first bride, the truest loss.Adele loved what he could give her. You love what he is. That's why the answer would work for you.
“You’re not real,” Jeanne said. But they were.
She pulled the coat tighter, burying deeper. His scent rose around her, dense and complicated, the pine sharper this close, the salt almost briny, and underneath it a gunpowder trace that meant he'd been handling weapons that morning. Cleaning the cannons, preparing for threats that came from outside the ship while the real threat sang its patient song from within.
The pull pushed against the scent and the scent pushed back and she lay in the middle of the fight, eyes closed, breathing in counts of four. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The rhythm Marc had taught her when she was ten and having nightmares about wolves at the vineyard fence.When you can't stop being scared, count instead. Your brain can't count and panic at the same time.
Marc had been wrong about that, actually. Her brain could absolutely count and panic at the same time. But the counting gave the panic a shape, a structure, something to lean against instead of free-falling through, and she held onto it the way she held onto the coat.
Twice, the pull surged hard enough that her legs tensed, her body trying to swing itself off the mattress before her mind could intervene, and both times the scent-saturated walls caught her like a net, the concentration ofhimso thick that her omega instincts overrode the curse's pull with a more fundamental command:Stay in the den. Stay where the alpha's scent is strongest.
It was a lie, that last part. The curse could reach her anywhere. But it was a useful lie, the kind her body was willing to believe if she gave it enough evidence, and the nest was evidence. Piled high and layered deep and smelling so strongly of Anatole. Eventually, she was able to rest.
She knew something was wrong before she opened her eyes. The scent changed when he walked into the cabin. While his scent was there, salted pine and the leather note that clung to his clothes, the layer underneath had shifted. During the past weeks, his scent had carried warmth she didn't have a name for, a deepening that Gris had told her meant an alpha whose wolf was content. Settled. Certain of its mate.
That layer was gone. In its place, something older and colder, like pine resin in winter, stripped of sap and hardened to glass.
She opened her eyes. He sat at his desk, scowling down at his charts. He didn't look up.
