"Probably." His arms tightened.
"What makes you so certain that going into the room willingly and together will change anything?"
She opened her eyes. This close, his face filled her entire field of vision. The lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver-blue streak in his beard, the place where the bridge of his nose had been broken and healed slightly crooked. She knew this face. She'd learned it in the dark during her heat and in the lamplight after, and she knew every version of it, the captain's mask and the wolf's intensity and the man's unguarded grief.
"Because the curse says true love, freely given, survives the seeing. Not true love, alone, survives the seeing." She kissed the corner of his mouth, the place where his almost-smile lived. "Six omegas faced the mirror alone. What if the curse requires you to be there?"
She watched him think about it.
"I've never been in the room when an omega sees the mirror," he said slowly. "The room always drew them when I was elsewhere. Sleeping. On deck. They went alone because the curse timed it that way."
"Maybe that's by design. Maybe the curse separates you because your presence in the room is the thing that could break it."
His hands slid up her back, and the contact was a language they'd been speaking since the heat, the vocabulary of touch that said everything words made complicated. She arched into him, not from biology, not from the pull, but from the simple, devastating desire.
He kissed her and she tasted the desperation in it, the salt edge that meant he was closer to losing control than he wanted her to know.
She pulled back. His eyes were gold-ringed, the wolf crowding the surface, and his scent had shifted to the deep smoked-oak note that meant his body was responding to hers.She could smell herself too, honeysuckle thickening in the air between them, her own arousal answering his the way it always did.
She pulled his shirt over his head. The scar caught the morning light, silver-white against tanned skin, and she traced it the way she always did, the route Morvenna's magic had carved across his chest. He shuddered under her fingers.
"Jeanne." Warning and want, inseparable.
"I know." She kissed the center of the scar. "I know what I'm doing."
She undressed him with her own hands, taking her time, reclaiming the territory his overnight retreat had tried to cede. Every article of clothing she removed was a wall coming down, and she watched his face as she dismantled him, saw the way his control frayed with each layer stripped away. His breathing changed when her mouth found the hollow of his throat. His hands fisted at his sides when she kissed a path down his sternum, following the scar's silver line to where it ended below his ribs.
"Sit," she told him.
He sat on the edge of the bed. She stood between his knees, the way she had the night of the mate ceremony, but the dynamic was different now. That night she'd been staking a claim. This morning she was reinforcing one. Reminding him that his attempt to send her away hadn't worked, that the walls he'd tried to rebuild overnight were rubble, that she was still here and still choosing and still his.
She pulled her shirt over her head. His shirt, actually. The one she slept in, the one that smelled of both of them. She watched the gold flare in his eyes as her scent hit him unfiltered, honeysuckle and vanilla concentrated by a night spent in his bed, and she watched the effort it cost him to keep his hands on the mattress.
"You can touch me," she said. The same words she'd used the first time, in this cabin, in this bed. The echo was deliberate.
His hands came up to her waist. The span of his fingers covered the space from her hip to her ribs, and the size of him against the size of her was something she'd stopped thinking about and started simply living inside of, the way you stopped thinking about the dimensions of a room you inhabited every day.
He pulled her down onto his lap, and she wrapped her legs around him, and they were face to face, chest to chest, her arms around his neck and his hands spanning her back, and the closeness of it drove the pull to a murmur. She rocked against him, slow, and the friction of it through her remaining clothing made them both inhale.
"I need you inside me," she said. "Not because of biology. Not because of the pull. Because last night you decided you were poison, and I need to show you you're not."
He lifted her. She shoved the last of her clothing away while he freed himself, and then he was lowering her down, slowly, the stretch and fullness of him inside her stealing the breath from her lungs. She gripped his shoulders and breathed through it, the sensation of being filled so completely that the door's hum drowned beneath the roar of her own blood.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked. Gold-blue eyes, the man and the wolf layered on top of each other, and she held his gaze as she began to move. Rolling her hips in a slow rhythm that built heat between them in increments, each movement a claim and a promise and a refusal to let him retreat into the guilt that had tried to steal him from her.
"This is real." She moved faster, and his hands tightened on her waist, and the sound he made was low and involuntary and pulled from somewhere deeper than thought. "This is not thecage. This is not biology. This is me, choosing you, while I am fully in my right mind."
"Jeanne." Her name came out broken, and his hips thrust upward to meet hers, and the angle shifted in a way that lit her up from the inside.
"Say it," she breathed.
"I love you." The words cracked out of him like something dislodged by force. His rhythm faltered and then drove deeper, and she gasped, and his hands slid to her hips, guiding her, matching her pace with his own. "I love you and it's going to kill you and I can't stop."
"It's not going to kill me. The curse is going to try, and it's going to fail, because what I carry for you is stronger than what Morvenna built." She cupped his face in both hands, holding him so he couldn't look away, couldn't retreat into the wolf or the captain or the guilt. "But I need you to believe that. Not for me. For the room. When we go in there, you can't be carrying the belief that your love is poison, because the mirror will use it. Whatever the mirror shows me, I need to know that the man beside me believes we can survive it."
"I want to believe it."
