"Is it the witch again?"
He shook his head, but still wouldn’t look at her. "There's a port three days' sail south. Port Sang. Neutral territory. Human and wolf traffic both." His voice was the one he used to give orders to crew, not the voice that said her name like she was the only woman in the world.
The scent on the coat she was still cuddling was the version from yesterday, but the scent from him as he sat there smelled and felt wrong.
"Why are we talking about Port Sang?"
"Because it's an option." He turned a page of the chart. Didn't look at her. "If we altered course, we could be there by nightfall two days from now. You could disembark. Find passage to the mainland. I have contacts who could arrange safe transport to any port on the Crimson Coast."
The words didn't make sense at first. They entered her ears and rattled around like stones in an empty room, bouncing off surfaces without sticking. Then they settled, and she understood what he was saying, and something inside her went very still.
"You want to send me away."
"I want to give you an option you haven't had since you came aboard. The option to leave."
"I've had that option since you told me the truth about the curse. I chose to stay."
"You chose to stay on a ship where every available path leads to a room that will kill you. That's not a choice. That's a lack of alternatives." He did look at her then, and the blue of his eyes was washed out, pale, the color scrubbed from them the way the greenish light of Morvenna's waters had scrubbed color from the sky. "At Port Sang, you'd have alternatives."
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I don’t want to go.”
A muscle worked in his neck. "Every time I get close to you, I lose the ability to think clearly. My wolf takes over and all it wants is to protect and claim and keep, and none of those instincts are going to save you from the curse. They never saved anyone. They're the reason the brides died. Because I kept them close when I should have sent them away."
She planted herself in front of his desk the way she had the night she'd kissed him for the first time, standing between his knees, forcing him to look at her. But this time he leaned back, putting distance between them, and the movement was sowrong, so contrary to every interaction they'd had since the heat, that it stopped her cold.
"You can’t do this," she said.
"I'm trying to keep you alive."
"By what? Dumping me at port like cargo? Putting me off the ship the same way I was put on it, someone else's decision about where I go and who I belong to?" The words came out sharp, the way her words always came out when she was scared, because being scared made her mean and being mean kept people at a distance where they couldn't hurt her. "At least my father was honest about what he was doing. He sold me and looked away. You're selling me and calling it salvation."
Grief so deep it had its own gravity cracked behind his eyes. "I am poison." The words came out stripped, bare, without the captain's veneer or the wolf's growl or any of the voices he wore like armor. "Everything I love, I destroy. Every omega who has given me her heart has died because of that heart. The curse isn't some external force, Jeanne. The curse is me. My love. The way I love. The way I take and hold and refuse to let go. Morvenna didn't create a monster. She just put a name on what was already there."
The pull hummed in her chest, steady and patient. She ignored it.
"That's not true."
"It is true. Six women loved me and six women died. The common element is not the women."
"The common element is the curse."
"The curse feeds on my love. Without it, the curse has nothing. If you stop loving me, the pull stops. The door goes quiet. You survive." He stood, and the chair scraped back against the cabin floor, and suddenly he was towering over her the way he had in those first days, all height and width and the immovable force of an apex alpha who had decided on a courseof action. "So I am giving you the chance to stop. Leave the ship. Go somewhere my scent can't reach you. Let whatever you think you feel for me die of natural causes."
"Whatever I think I feel?" She screeched in outrage.
"You were brought here in chains. You went through heat with the only available alpha. You've been trapped on a ship with no other options." His voice was rising despite his obvious effort to keep it level. "How much of what you feel is real and how much is the cage? How would you even know the difference?"
There it was. The wound at the center of him, laid bare. He didn't believe he deserved love. More than that, he didn't believe love given to him could be real, because Morvenna's curse had told him he was unlovable and all the dead omegas had had proved her right.
But the wound at the center of her answered it, because she knew exactly what it sounded like when someone told you that your choices didn't count.
"My father said the same thing," she said. "Not in those words. But when he sold me, the message was the same. That my wants didn't matter. That my choices weren't real because I was in a position where choosing was a luxury I couldn't afford." She stepped closer. He didn't step back, but every line of his body said he wanted to. "Marc died because he believed my choices were real. He died because he looked at me and saw a person with the right to decide her own life, not cargo to be loaded onto the nearest ship."
"Your brother was a good man."
"He was the only person who ever treated me like my choices counted. Until you."
Anatole went still.
