Love After Heartbreak

RUBY

My grandmother told me red was my color the same night she sold me to a monster.

She said it softly, the way other grandmothers say I love you. I was twenty-two that night, standing in the cold front room of the Ashgrove house with a box open in my hands, and I believed her. That's the part I still can't forgive. Not her. Me.

"Go on," Grandmother Morwen said. "Try it on, child."

Nobody had given me a birthday gift since I was eight. That was the year of the fire, the year my mother and father went to sleep in our little house by the mill and never came out of it. After that, my birthdays in the Ashgrove house were ordinary days with a cake I baked myself and ate alone in the kitchen, because the rest of the family didn't sit at a table with me.

I was the stain. Everyone knew it. My father had been an Ashgrove wolf, a pureblood heir, and he'd married a human woman who sewed dresses in the village. Then he'd had me: a daughter who never shifted, never heard the moon, never grew claws when she was angry. A daughter who was, as far as the family could tell, entirely and disappointingly human.

So when Grandmother set the box on the table and said, Happy birthday, Ruby, my throat closed up.

Inside was a cloak. Heavy red wool, the color of fresh blood on snow, trimmed at the hood and hem with silver thread that caught the firelight like frost. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever touched.

I already owned a red cloak. My mother had made it for me when I was seven, and I'd let out the seams so many times the wool had gone thin as paper. I wore it everywhere. The cousins called me Little Red behind my back, and not kindly.

"Grandmother, I—" My voice cracked. "Thank you."

"It suits you." She fastened the silver clasp at my throat herself. Her fingers were cold. Morwen was always cold; the old wolves ran that way, as if the moon took a little more of their warmth each year. "Red is your color. It always was."

Her eyes held mine a moment too long. I thought it was affection.

I was such a fool.

*   *   *

Dinner was set for eight, which should have been my first warning. The Ashgroves did not eat dinner with me. But that night the long table in the hall was laid with the good silver and the old candles, and Aunt Cressa had roasted a lamb, and my cousins sat in their places and didn't kick my chair.

They didn't look at me, either.

I noticed it the way you notice a draft. Something cold at the back of the neck. My cousin Fenn, who had once held my head in the horse trough until I blacked out, kept his eyes on his plate and cut his meat into smaller and smaller pieces without eating any of it.

"You're quiet tonight," I said to him.

His knife stopped. "Eat your dinner, Ruby."

Not runt. Not stain. Ruby.

The cold at the back of my neck spread down my spine.

The knock came at nine. Three slow blows on the front door, heavy enough to rattle the plates. Nobody at the table looked surprised. Grandmother set down her wine glass and dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

"That will be the elders," she said. "Fenn, let them in."

Six of them came in out of the dark. I knew them the way you know faces in church windows: old wolves from the four border families, gray-haired and broad, smelling of pine smoke and something wilder underneath. They wore the ceremonial sashes I'd only ever seen at funerals. Black, with a single red thread.

Red thread. Red cloak.

I stood up so fast my chair fell over.

"Sit down, child," said Elder Harrow. His voice was gravel.

"What is this?" I looked at Grandmother. "Grandmother, what is this?"

She folded her napkin. She took her time about it, creasing it into a neat square, and when she finally looked up, her face was serene. Kind, even.

"You know about the Pact, Ruby."

Everyone on the border knew about the Pact. Across the river, in the black pine country, lived the Blackthorn pack, and the Blackthorn Alpha's line was dying. Every few years, by an agreement older than any of us, the border families sent him an offering. A woman. A vessel. The stories said he marked them, and they burned up from the inside before the next sunrise. Eleven girls marked. Eleven girls buried. The villages had a name for him that mothers used to frighten children into bed.

The Breeder.

"No," I said.

"It's the Ashgroves' turn," Grandmother said. "The elders wanted one of your cousins. I offered them you instead."

There's a particular sound a heart makes when it breaks. Nobody else can hear it. It isn't loud. It's more like a door closing somewhere far away inside you, in a room you didn't know you had.

"You offered me," I repeated.

"You're of no use to this family as you are. This way, you'll serve the bloodline." She tilted her head, considering me. "Honestly, Ruby, it's the most use you'll ever be."

I ran.

I didn't make it three steps. Fenn caught me around the waist and slammed me into the wall, two of the elders took my arms, and somebody produced a length of silver-braided cord. I kicked. I screamed. I bit Elder Harrow's wrist hard enough to taste blood, and he backhanded me so hard the room went white.

When it came back, my wrists were bound in front of me and I was on my knees on the flagstones, the red cloak pooled around me like spilled wine.

That was when I understood the cloak. The ceremonial garment of the Offering. She'd had it made for this. She'd fastened the clasp at my throat with her own cold hands, and smiled, and called it a gift.

I'd seen that glow all my life. It came when the family was angry, or hungry, or close to the change. I had never seen it come over her like this: slow and warm, the way a cat's eyes go soft in the sun.

"Grandmother," I whispered. "Why are your eyes glowing?"

She bent and kissed my forehead.

"So I can watch you go, darling."

*   *   *

They put me in the back of a wool cart at midnight. My aunt threw a basket in after me: a loaf of bread, a bottle of dark wine, a jar of honey. Gifts for the Alpha. An old ritual, Harrow said, from the days when the offerings were taken in daylight with flowers in their hair.

Nobody put flowers in my hair.

I lay on the boards with my bound hands against my chest and watched the house shrink behind us. Every window was lit. Somebody had started playing the old piano in the parlor. They were celebrating.

The last thing I saw before the trees closed over the road was a single figure on the front step, small and straight-backed, wrapped in a gray shawl.

She didn't wave.

The cart turned toward the river, and the dark took everything.