Chapter Twenty
ANATOLE
His knot released hours later and he slipped free. Anatole felt her response through the bond, the soft noise of loss she made, the way her body tightened as if trying to hold him inside her. He pressed his mouth to the mating mark on her neck, and the touch sent a pulse through both of them that resonated deep.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"Like someone took the fever out and forgot to put anything back." She turned in his arms to face him. Her eyes were fully clear, no glaze of fever, no glassy distance. The bond between them carried the shape of her exhaustion and her relief. underneath it all, the steady hum of a love that had survived the worst thing either of them would ever endure. "How do I look?"
"Alive." The word came out rough. He hadn't meant it to carry so much weight, but it did, because he had watched six women in this bed go from alive to not-alive, and the simple fact that Jeanne's chest was rising and falling and her eyes were tracking his face and her scent was clean was a miracle he did not have the language to contain. "You look alive."
She touched his face. Her fingers traced a line down his beard.
"It's gone," she said. “The silver-blue streak.”
He grunted. “So’s the key.”
“So’s everything to do with the damned door,” she said with a grin.
A knock came at the cabin door. "Captain." Gris's voice, muffled by the wood. "The crew is asking to see the omega."
Anatole looked at Jeanne. Through the bond, he could read her: tired beyond reckoning, sore, hungry, and underneath all of it, a readiness that had nothing to do with physical recovery and everything to do with what she'd become on this ship. The captain's mate. Pack.
"Give us ten minutes," he called.
They dressed in silence that was not silence, because the bond filled it. Through it, he watched her pulling on her clothes, and noted her wince when her arms lifted overhead. Her muscles were sore from the curse trying to shake her apart from the inside.
He crossed to her and fastened the buttons at her collar, his fingers clumsy with a tenderness that was new, and she leaned into him for a moment, her forehead against his chest, breathing his scent, and then she straightened and turned toward the door.
"Ready?" she asked.
He wasn't. He wanted to stay in this cabin with her forever. But he had a duty to the crew. They needed this almost as much as he needed Jeanne.
"Ready," he said.
They opened the door. Gris was there, standing in the corridor outside the captain's quarters, his hands clasped in front of him. The old cook looked back and forth at them, and he grinned happily.
The smile gave way quietly, the lines around his eyes deepening and his mouth pulling down. Two tears tracked through the creases of his weathered cheeks. He didn't wipe them. He stood in the corridor of the Barbe-Bleue and let them fall dignity.
"Well," Gris said. His voice held. Barely. "Look at you two."
Jeanne reached for him. The old cook stiffened, the way betas stiffened when an omega touched them unexpectedly, and then he folded, his arms going around her with the careful strength of a man holding something he'd been afraid to hope for. Anatole watched his mate embrace the cook and he felt through the bond the wave of gratitude that moved through her.
Gris stepped back. Straightened his apron. Wiped his face with the back of his hand and reassembled himself into the cook who ran the galley of the Barbe-Bleue with the same steady competence that held the crew together in storms.
"They're on deck," Gris said. "All of them. There's no room. The door is gone."
“The curse broke when the bond sealed," Anatole said.
The cook's eyes went to the mark on Jeanne's neck.
"About damned time," Gris said, and his voice cracked on the last word, and he turned and led them toward the deck.
The morning hit Anatole like a wall. The fever had contracted his world to the space around a bed, and now the sky opened above him, blue and clean. The sun climbed the eastern horizon. The Crimson Sea stretched out in every direction sparkling like a treasure trove.
