"You," she said. "During the heat, you held yourself at the doorway and told me to send you away. You gave me a choice when every instinct in your body was screaming to take. Afterthe heat, you taught me knots and star charts and let me tend to your crew, and when I kissed you, you sat with your hands on the chair and let me set the pace."
"That doesn’t erase the fact that you're here because I bought you."
"No. Nothing can erase that. The transaction happened, and it will always be part of our story, the same way Marc's death will always be part of our story and my father's betrayal and Morvenna's curse and every ugly, brutal thing that put us in this cabin on this ship in the middle of this godforsaken sea." She was breathing hard. The pull pulsed with every heartbeat, and she used it, let it fuel her instead of drag her, because the love that fed the pull was the same love that was keeping her standing in front of this man while he tried to convince her she was a prisoner. "But that’s not the whole story. The fact that I'm standing here arguing with you instead of packing a bag for Port Sang, that's the story. My story. And you don't get to decide it's not real because it scares you."
"That doesn't scare me. The curse does."
"It won’t kill me."
The words landed between them with the force of an anchor dropping.
"I would rather love you and face the mirror than stop loving you and survive. That's my choice. Mine. Not yours, not the curse's, not biology's. I am choosing this with everything I have, and if you send me to Port Sang, I will find a way back to this ship, and if you lock me in the hold, I will love you from behind iron bars, and if you sail to the end of the world, I will follow, because that is what freely given means. It means no one can take it from me. Not even you."
He made a sound. Low, broken, pulled from the same place where his wolf lived. His hands were shaking at his sides, and she could see the gold bleeding into his eyes, the wolf respondingto her voice and her scent and the force of what she was giving him, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
"You should hate me," he said. "I bought you. I kept you. I got your brother killed."
"The debt collectors killed Marc. My father's choices killed Marc. You weren't even there."
"I paid the debt that put the collectors there."
"Do you blame me for being the thing my father had to sell to pay off his debts?" She took the last step between them and put her hand on his chest, over the scar, over the place where Morvenna's magic had cut him open on the night everything went wrong. " Do you blame me for being born an omega?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then stop blaming yourself for the curse. Start helping me break it."
His hand came up and covered hers. His palm was rough with calluses, his fingers long enough to wrap around her hand entirely, and the heat of his skin through the linen of his shirt was the temperature of a man running a war inside himself.
"Jeanne." Her name in his mouth sounded like surrender and refusal at the same time. "If you die, it will end me. There will be nothing left. Not the captain, not the wolf, not the man. Just the thing Morvenna made me."
"Then we'd better make sure I don't die."
"And how do we do that?"
“Come into the room with me. Hold my hand. Be there when I look into the mirror. Let’s fight this curse standing shoulder to shoulder.”
He looked at her for a long time. She could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, through her palm, through the scar tissue that mapped the worst night of his life. It was fast. Not from fear, though fear was there. Fast because his wolf was running,pacing, wanting, and the man was trying to decide whether to follow.
"I can't send you to Port Sang," he said.
"No. You can't."
"Not because you won't go. Because I can't make myself do it. I have tried, in the space between midnight and morning, to imagine this ship without you on it, and every version of that future is worse than watching you face the mirror." He closed his eyes. "I should be strong enough to let you go."
"You are strong enough. You're just smart enough to know that letting me go won't save me. The pull doesn't stop because I'm off the ship. It stops because I stop loving you, and we both know that's not going to happen at Port Sang or anywhere else."
"You don't know that."
"I know it the way I know the stars are fixed and the sea is salt. It's not a belief. It's a condition."
He opened his eyes. Pulled her against him, not roughly, not with the possessive urgency of an alpha staking a claim. He pulled her against him the way a man pulled air into his lungs, because the alternative was suffocation.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his chest and breathed him in. Pine and salt and the smoke note, all of it back now, the cold winter-resin scent thawing as his wolf settled beneath the contact. She could track the change with her omega senses, the way his body chemistry shifted when she was close, the way the tension in his muscles unwound incrementally, like rigging being eased after a storm.
"I dreamed about them last night," he said into her hair. "Marguerite. Celeste. All of them. They were standing in a line, and they all had your face."
"That wasn't a dream. That was the curse playing with your head."
