The deck was full. The seawolves went still as Anatole stepped out with Jeanne
Luc was at the center of the semicircle, where the first mate stood during formal pack proceedings. His scarred face was composed in the expression Anatole knew best, the one that gave nothing away. But his eyes were wrong. His eyes were too bright, and when Anatole met them, Luc's composure shifted, a fracture running through the mask so fast that if you blinked, you'd miss it.
Anatole didn't blink.
"The curse is broken," he said to the crew.
"The omega lived," Luc said. "The seventh bride survived. Our Jeanne survived."
Sébastien was the first to howl. The young beta threw his head back and let the sound tear out of him, the howl of a wolf who had been carrying dread for months and was releasing it in a single sustained note. The scar on his face, the one Jeanne had stitched during the storm, pulled white against his skin as his throat worked.
The others followed. One by one, then in clusters, the crew of the Barbe-Bleue lifted their voices and howled. The sound was enormous. It filled the ship, spilled over the rails, carried across the water. The seawolves howled together, the vibration of it resonating through the deck planks and up through Anatole's boots and into his body, where it met the bond and amplified.
Through the bond, he felt Jeanne's response. Not fear. Not the wariness that a human surrounded by howling wolves should have felt. He felt her awe, and under the awe, a belonging so fierce that it buckled something in his chest. She was pack. She had been pack since the night they'd witnessed her at the gathering, but the bond made it tangible, a connection between her and every wolf on this deck that ran through Anatole like a river through bedrock.
The howling tapered off. The crew was moving towards them now. Sébastien reached them first. He dropped to one knee in front of Jeanne in a gesture of pack submission.
He rose and stepped back, and the next wolf moved forward, and the next, the crew coming to their captain's mate one at a time with the reverence of a pack acknowledging a their Captain’s mate and omega.
Some of them touched her. A hand on her shoulder, a clasp of her wrist, the brief press of a forehead to her hand that was the wolf equivalent of a kiss. She accepted each one with steady composure and relief.
Luc came last.
The first mate stood in front of them, and for a long moment, he said nothing. Anatole could read the struggle in the tension in him.
"I was prepared," Luc said. "To put you down. If she died. I had the blade chosen. I had the words I was going to say to the crew after." He stopped. The muscles in his throat worked. "I am very glad I don't have to use either of those things."
Anatole gripped Luc's forearm. Luc gripped his. “Me too.”
"Right," Luc said, his voice almost normal. "Gris. Food. The captain's mate hasn't eaten in a long while."
"Already on it." Gris was already moving toward the galley, calling orders to the two betas who assisted him. "And someone bring up the good wine. Not the swill. The bottles I've been saving."
"You've been saving wine?" Anatole asked.
Gris paused at the galley entrance. "I always believed one of them would make it. Seemed wrong not to be ready."
The morning unfolded around them like a sail catching wind. Gris produced food in quantities that suggested he had indeed been preparing for this moment, bread and cured meat and a soup that was better than anything he'd cooked in the months Jeanne had been aboard, and the crew ate on deck in the sunshine, wolves shoulder to shoulder, the rigid hierarchies of the pack loosening into something that resembled family.
Anatole ate. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the bread hit his tongue, and then the hunger arrived all at once, three days of sitting in a chair without food or water catching up with him in a rush that made his hands unsteady. Jeanne was the same beside him, eating with the single-minded focus of a body that had been burning through its reserves for three days and was now demanding replenishment with interest.
After the meal, he went below.
He went alone. Jeanne understood through the bond, that he needed to see it. He needed to stand in the place where the door had been and verify with his own eyes what the bond and the mirror's detonation and the brides' release had already told him.
The lower decks were different. He registered it as soon as he descended past the crew quarters, the change in the air, the quality of the light, the smell. For many years, the lowest levels of the Barbe-Bleue had carried the sweet-rot scent of the curse, the decay that lived beneath the pine tar and bilge water, the presence of magic that did not belong on a ship. It was gone. The air smelled like what it was: old wood and salt water and the deep-hull cold of a vessel that had been sailing for decades.
He reached the corridor. The guard station was empty, the watches Luc had posted no longer necessary. He walked to where the door had stood.
Wall. Unbroken planking, the wood continuous from floor to ceiling, the grain running in uninterrupted lines. No seams. No hinges. No trace that a door had ever been present, that a room had existed beyond it, that six women had been preserved inside it on stone platforms while a mirror of black glass waited to destroy whoever loved him next.
He stood in the corridor and breathed out a sigh of relief that shook him and what seemed like the entire ship.
Above him, through the decks, through the bond, Jeanne was a steady presence. Sitting on the main deck in the sunshine, surrounded by wolves who were teaching her another card game, her laughter carried.
She was alive. She was his. She had chosen him with her eyes open and her feet on the ground and every ugly truth about their history spread out between them like a map, and she had saidI'm choosing youwith the same stubborn, unbreakable will that had kept her fighting since the day she'd come aboard.
He pressed his hand to the wall where the door had been. He stayed there for a long time. He did not pray, because he had stopped praying when Marguerite died, but what he did in that corridor, in the silence of the ship's belly, with his hand on the wood and his mate's heartbeat steady in his chest, was close enough that the distinction didn't matter.
