"No," she said through gritted teeth.
"Your scent is changing. The curse is activating."
"I know. I can feel it. The fever is starting." She turned to face him, and her eyes were glassy with the beginning of whatever the curse did to an omega's body after the seeing. “I won’t leave until this is over. Until it’s shown us all the ugliness and I’ve proven that it doesn’t matter to me.”
The mirror was now showing him himself. Not through Jeanne's eyes. Through his own. The man who had bought six women and watched them die. The man who had stood at the dock at Roquemort and assessed a human omega with the eyes of a trader. The man whose love was a cage, whose protectionwas a prison, whose every attempt to save the women he claimed had resulted in their death.
This is what you are,the mirror said.This is what she loves. A buyer of women. A jailer. A man whose love is indistinguishable from captivity.
He did not look away.
"Yes," he said. "That's me. That's what I did. I bought her. I kept her. I told myself it was for the curse, and then I told myself it was for love, and both of those things are true."
The mirror's light flared. His vision blurred. The room tilted, and beside him, Jeanne swayed, and her scent was wrong. The honeysuckle curdled into a bitterness that made his wolf howl with anguish.
He caught her before she fell, and her weight against him was lighter than it should have been, as if the curse was already drawing substance from her body.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you. I'm here."
"The mirror," she said. Her voice was fading, the edges going soft. "I saw us the way the mirror sees us." She pressed her face into his chest, breathing his scent, and he could feel her body temperature climbing, the fever building in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"I need to get you out of this room."
He lifted her. She weighed nothing in his arms, the way she always weighed nothing, his body built for carrying weight that would crush a normal man. He turned from the mirror, and as he did, the glass went dark again, the visions cutting off as abruptly as they'd begun. The room was just a room again: six sleeping women, a black mirror, the stale air of a place sealed by magic.
Except now there was a seventh platform. Stone, draped in white cloth, positioned at the end of the semicircle beside Adele's. Waiting.
His wolf snarled at the sight of it, and for one feral instant, the animal wanted to shift, to tear the platform apart with claws and teeth, to destroy the room that was already preparing a place for Jeanne among the dead. He held the shift down with an effort that made his vision blur and carried her through the door.
Chapter Eighteen
ANATOLE
The corridor was dark after the golden light. Luc was there, at the top of the stairs. The first mate took one look at Jeanne in Anatole's arms and his face went blank. He cleared the way through the lower decks, while Anatole carried Jeanne up through the levels of the ship, past the hold, past the crew quarters, past the galley where Gris's banked fire still glowed, and up to the captain's quarters where the portholes showed the first gray light of dawn spreading across the Crimson Sea.
He laid her on the bed. She was conscious, her eyes tracking his face, but the focus was going in and out, the fever already stealing her concentration.
"Cold," she said, her teeth chattering while she was burning up.
He pulled the blankets over her. Stripped his shirt and pressed it against her chest because his scent had always calmed her. Maybe the same chemistry that soothed the door's call could slow whatever the curse was doing to her body.
"Stay with me," he said.
A ghost of a smile. "Can't exactly run at the moment."
