The stretch. God, the stretch. Her body was oversensitized, every nerve ending raw, and the thick slide of him pushing inside her lit up pathways the fever had been using to carry pain and repurposed them for something that was neither pleasure nor relief but was, in some fundamental way, the opposite of dying.
"More," she breathed. "All of it."
He sank deeper, inch by inch, and she took him the way she'd always taken him, with her breath held and her nails in his shoulders and the impossible fullness of it pushing everything else out, the fever, the curse, the six women on their platforms, until there was nothing in the world except his cock inside her and his weight on top of her and his breath against her throat.
He bottomed out and held still. Both of them breathing hard, adjusting, the connection between their bodies humming with a frequency that had nothing to do with the curse and everything to do with what they were to each other.
"I love you."
She rolled her hips, drawing him deeper, and he groaned. "I love you too."
He moved, his hips urgently driving into her, as if his body understood that they were racing the curse and the only way to outrun it was to fill her so completely that the fever had no room left to occupy.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper with every thrust. The sound of their bodies was wet and raw. Her arousal coated him, dripping between them. The cabin smelled like pine and leather, but honeysuckle rose through their mating was burning the curse out of her scent.
"There," she gasped as he hit the spot that made her vision white out. "Right there, don't stop."
"Never." He gripped her hip with one hand, angling her, and drove into the same spot with a focus that obliterated thought. "Never stopping. You're mine. Say it."
"Yours." The word punched out of her on a moan.
His knot was beginning to swell, catching on her rim with every thrust, the stretch of it building, building, and her inner walls clenched around him in response, her body preparing to take it, to lock him inside her, to hold him where he belonged.
He thrust deep and his knot swelled past the point of withdrawal, locking them together, and the stretch tore a cry from her throat that was pleasure and pain and the absolute rightness of being filled by her mate. He was coming. The hot pulse of him flooded her, his seed filling her in thick waves, and her body responded with a clench that dragged her own orgasm out of the depths of the fever like pulling light from a dark well.
“You’re mine,” she said fiercely. “You’re not my escape or challenge. And I’m yours, whether you’re the captain of this ship or a beggar in the streets.”
She came around his knot, her inner walls rippling, squeezing, milking him, and the pleasure was different from the heat, different from the lamplight night. It was deeper. Older. It came from the place where the bond lived, the place between theman and the woman that the curse had been trying to destroy. It was not destroyed. It was blazing.
"Now," she said. "The bite. Do it now."
His wolf surged. She could see it in the gold of his eyes, the elongation of his canines, the way his body tensed over hers. This was the moment he'd fought against for their entire history. Every heat, every knotting, every time his wolf had lunged for her throat and he'd redirected it into a pillow or the headboard or the sheer force of his will. He had been controlling this moment, preventing it, managing it, for as long as she'd known him.
He wasn't controlling it now.
"Jeanne." Her name was barely human in his mouth. "Once I bite, it's permanent. The bond can't be broken. You'll feel me. Everything. Always. There's no taking it back."
"I don't want to take it back. I want to take you." She tilted her head, baring the mating gland at the base of her neck, the gesture as old as the designation system itself. Omega submission, freely offered. Not demanded. Not coerced. Given.
Words that were not just her own took over. "Bond your last omega and be free.”
His teeth sank into her mating gland.
The pain was exquisite. Sharp and deep and radiating outward from the point of contact in waves that synchronized with the pulse of his knot inside her, and for one suspended instant, the pain was all there was, his teeth in her flesh and his cock locked inside her and the hot spill of his release still flooding her.
Then the bond opened.
It was like a door. Not the golden door that led to the mirror and the curse. A different door, one that had existed between them since the dock at Roquemort, closed and lockedand waiting for the key that was his teeth in her skin. The door opened and everything poured through.
She felt him, unfiltered and uncontrolled. His devotion rushed through the bond and into her like the sea through a broken hull. The size of his love was staggering, so vast it had no edges. It was a love that had survived six deaths and twelve years of the slow annihilation of hope. She felt the wolf, not as a separate entity but as the bedrock of him, the animal foundation on which the man was built, and the wolf was singing, a high clear note that resonated through the bond like a bell, the sound of a creature that had found its mate after a lifetime of searching.
She felt his fear. The terror he'd been carrying for three days, the certainty that she was going to die and that his love would be the cause. Right now, Anatole was vulnerable in a way he had never permitted himself to be with any living person.
She felt his grief. Six women, their faces stored in his memory like portraits in a gallery, each one loved, each one lost. The grief was not diminished by Jeanne's presence. It was present and acknowledged and carried with an honesty that made her love him more, not less, because he had not asked the new love to erase the old.
She poured her love back.
He gasped against her neck, his teeth still in her gland, as her side of the bond flooded through him. She gave him everything. The vineyard and Marc and the grief she carried for a brother dead on a dock. The terror of the first night on his ship and the fury that had sustained her through weeks of captivity. The moment his scent had made her wet and angry and alive. The heat that had stripped her bare and rebuilt her around the shape of him inside her. The night she'd kissed him by choice, the most frightening thing she'd ever done, more frightening than the mirror and the room and the fever combined. The love, which was not a single thing but a thousand choices made in sequence,each one building on the last, a structure assembled by hand from the materials of an impossible situation and standing on nothing but its own integrity.
