Epilogue
JEANNE
Three months later
The coastline of Roquemort emerged from the morning mist the same way it must have emerged three months ago, when a cursed ship with black sails had come to collect its seventh bride. Vineyards crawled up the hillsides in rows that were healthier than she remembered. The late summer green replaced the exhausted brown of early spring. Still huddled against the shore, it was a town that had seen better centuries.
Jeanne stood at the bow of the Barbe-Bleue and watched her old life materialize out of the fog.
She hadn't asked to come here. Anatole had altered course two days ago without telling her, and she'd known through the bond before Luc announced the heading change, the way she knew most things about her mate now: through the steady current of emotion and intention that flowed between them like water through connecting rivers. He'd been nervous about it. It was a low buzz of anxiety that didn't match the calm sea or the clear sky, and when she'd raised an eyebrow at him across the deck, he'd sent back the image of a coastline and a question mark, and she'd understood.
She hadn't answered immediately. She'd gone to the galley, where Gris was teaching two young betas the difference between a roux and a catastrophe, and she'd sat on the counter and eatenan apple and let the question sit inside her until she knew what the answer was.
The answer was yes. Yes, she wanted to see her home again.
Not because she missed it. Not because the vineyard was calling her the way the golden door had once called her, an irresistible pull toward something she couldn't resist. She wanted to see it because she was a different woman than the one who'd been dragged from those rows of dying grapes, and the distance between who she'd been and who she was could only be measured by standing in both places.
Anatole came up behind her. She tracked him through the bond before his scent reached her. Pine and leather was her favorite smell in the world. Now it was layered with the subtler notes that only she could detect: the cedar of the cabin they shared, the salt of the sea that lived in his skin, and underneath it all, the low steady thread of his wolf.
He stood behind her at the rail and rested his hands on either side of hers, his body a wall at her back, and she leaned into him the way she'd been leaning into him for three months, by choice, every time.
"The vineyard is up there," she said, pointing toward the hillside where Belle Vigne sat among its neighbors. From the water, it was impossible to tell whether the rows were tended or abandoned. "Past the church. The stone wall with the broken gate."
"Do you want to go ashore?"
She considered it.
"No," she said. "I don't need to walk through it. I just needed to see it."
"And?"
She looked at the hillside where she'd knelt in the dirt and pulled weeds that didn't matter from soil that couldn't produce. Where Marc had come between the rows with his face the colorof chalk to tell her their father had sold her. Where she'd been Jeanne of Belle Vigne, hidden omega, a woman whose entire life was organized around not being discovered.
"It's smaller than I remembered," she said.
He pressed his mouth to her hair. Through the bond, she read his response: not relief exactly, but the settling of a man who had been prepared to anchor offshore for as long as she needed and was glad she didn't need long.
"Your brother's grave is up there," he said. "Do you want to say goodbye."
After everything she had been through, the grief was still there. It was still a stone in her chest, still the sharpest thing she carried. It would always be there. She'd stopped expecting it to dissolve and started learning to carry it instead, the way Anatole carried the six brides, not as a weight that crushed but as a presence that informed.
"No. I don’t need to say goodbye. He’s always with me."
She was quiet for a moment. The ship rocked beneath them, the gentle swell of a calm sea, and the mist was burning off the hillside, revealing the town in pieces: the dock, the market square, the road that led up to the vineyards. The Barbe-Bleue sailed past Roquemort. The town faded into the mist it had come from, and Jeanne let it go.
