Sinful Tales of Ever After のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 5

RUBYMy 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 cla

The wolf circled me once. Slowly. The way you'd walk around a horse you were thinking of buying, or a cut of meat you weren't sure had spoiled.I turned with it. I didn't want it at my back. It seemed like the kind of thing that should matter, even though nothing I did would matter, even though if it wanted my throat it could take it before I finished blinking.On its second circuit it stopped in front of me, close enough that its breath washed over my face. Hot, smelling of pine resin and blood and something darker, like turned earth after rain. It lowered its massive head until those burning eyes were level with mine.Then it changed.I'd watched my family shift a hundred times, and it was never pretty: bones cracking, skin splitting, the wet sound of muscle tearing and reknitting. This was worse, because it was faster. The great black body folded in on itself, the fur flowing back into skin like water draining from a basin. There was one long, ugly sound, half growl and half groan,

He was sitting on the floor of the corridor with his back against the wall and his forearms on his knees, and when the door swung open he looked up at me as if I were the one with teeth.For a moment neither of us moved. The lamp at the end of the hall had burned low. His eyes caught the light and threw it back gold."Ruby." My name sounded like a warning. "Close the door.""No."He got to his feet slowly, using the wall, as if his body didn't fully belong to him. Up close, I could see what holding himself out here had cost him. A sheen of sweat at his temples. His hands fisted so tight the knuckles had gone white. A muscle jumping in his jaw."You don't know what you're asking for," he said."Then tell me.""It's the heat. It's my blood. Tomorrow it'll pass and you'll look at me the way you looked at me in that clearing, and you'll be right to.""Maybe." I stepped out into the corridor, barefoot on the cold boards. The heat rolled through me in a long, slow wave, and I let it, and ke