The gap between us is like a necktie.
Wh-hat did ye say? I speak very quietly, my voice shaking so much that I can hardly know it.
Dad does not bat an eyelid. "You heard me. Xavier desires you as his wife. That is the deal."
Time stops.
I start to breathe through a broken necklace of glass. The room starts seeing. I look at him, then Mum, hoping a laugh, a shake of the head, a joke that had been cruel would emerge. There is nothing, however.
"Were you saying that I should marry Xavier?" The words are just barely caught on my lips, wasting and rale-like.
"Yes, sighs Mum. She has a pale face, red rimmed eyes, her voice is threadlike. There is no other choice."
I jump up and knock the table as I reach my feet. The motion shakes the empty teacups on it. In my chest the war-drums are beating.
"What! You are not serious! Xavier? And are you both crazy? And after what he has done to me?"
Mum flinches. Dad doesn't. His face is too hard and sculptured as stone, his voice is too cold as the wind once whistled through the crannies of this dilapidated house.
"Larissa, this is non-debatable." Dad said as those words stab through my heart.
I reel away as though he has hit me. The walls are closing around. My head shakes and my hands shake. I squeeze the side of the chair that was once old but seemed to be the only thing that could tie me to reality.
"You guys waste me to the same Alpha who dumped me as trash? You are trying to get me back to the pack which broke me in every sense of the word?"
Slowly Dad arises and maintains his eyes on me. "This is not the broken heart story. It is survival. This is all of what your family requires."
My lip is trembling. "So what I need does not count with you? It has never had."
Mum closes her eyes, and one tear is rolling down her face. "This is something we did not desire. This is not what we had in mind when it comes to you. But we do not have any choice, Larissa. Oh! you don't believe we have not tried?. Do you believe that makes it easy on me? and your father?.
"Oh, now, you remember you are my parents? Suddenly, when your backs are up against the wall, I am in the picture again? I step up, and my heart boils, blood thirst in my mouth. You used to leave me to stew with Aunt Clara, as on a shelf, like an old dust-covered suit-case, and now you want to sell me like cattle to the highest bidder?"
The voice of dad becomes something firm. Be mindful of what you say, girl. Not on our roof will you talk to us so.
"Then quit talking to me like I am a piece of property, I'm not a durned payment" I screamed with a voice full of frustration, desperation.
He hits his fists on the wooden table. Cups rattle the other way. I flinch.
"And you suppose I am proud of this? You believe it does not eat me alive that this is where it has got to? We had a decision, Larissa. We did it wrong. and we must live with them. Being a family." His voice is furrowed now, hacked about. No, not cold any more--but worse. Broken.
The quiet afterward is similar to being alive in a grave.
I look at him to seek the image of the father I used to love somewhere in this image of a man speaking the language of debts and deals and cold-blooded survival. I cannot find him. Not in his hard jawbone. Not in the guilt playing at his eyes. He is just a spectre of the man that used to spin me around the kitchen and joke that I was his little wolf.
"This is not family, so I am not a part of this family", I say to myself quietly.
Mum gives the sob that is so filthy it has cut through me. I detest how the pain of hers is relevant to me.
I cannot turn back.
"I am not going to marry him, I say; louder this time. I will never go back to Xavier. He humiliated me. He embarrassed me before all the people. I went to you and I besought you both and you rejected me. Now you are going to present me like a sacrifice? No. I would prefer to die."
You suppose we forget how he used you?" Mum says, and lifting her head she is trembling. I recall all the cries, all the nights you yelled to yourself to sleep, hidden under the roof of Clara, because I was not able to listen to it here. I recall your treatment of stopping to eat. You're shut down. How near you have lost your wolf. I do, Larissa. Every inch of it. That makes no difference, however, as to our obligation, on his account, to everything."
My throat twists up.
"Owes him? I repeated with a derisive laugh. Why do you owe him anything at all, why does it cost you the life of your daughter?"
Dad moves away and wipes his face across his hand. His shoulders droop down and this is the first time he ever looks old.
"It's all, he says. You see your mother and I borrowed years ago out of the pack fund. When I became ill. When there were crop failures. There was a time when we had nothing. Xavier paid the debt. All he had thrown in, down to the last coin on one condition."
My blood becomes cold.
"No… I recoil back with a shake of the head. You say this marriage was the price matter-of-course?"
Mum puts her hand over her mouth, attempting to stave the sob creeping up her esophagus.
Dad looks back into my eyes and this time, I notice a worse thing than anger.
Shame.
He said that when the time would be fit he would come back, he mumbles. We did not think,... We prayed that he might forget. That he would go on."
"But he did not", I murmur, voice without accompaniment.
Dad nods.
"And now he takes what is his own."
The room is trying to be sucked out of the air. The clock becomes more audibly in the corner, deafening.
I trip backward, barely maintaining my feet. "So that is me now? Some blood-stained pawn in a negotiating game?"
Walking up to me, Mum asks, pleadingly, "You must be our own daughter. And we do our best to preserve what remains of our lives. Xavier can kill us all in this Village. I guess he is already freezing the fields. Did you consider that nature?"
I nod, opening my mouth wide. "Threatening you with his powers? Now what does that mean? in order to drive this?"
Dad nods once slowly.
And at once something cold and old opens in me. Fear is no longer the issue.
It's fury.
He desires to play this game?
So he will find that I am not the same poor pitiful little she-wolf, whom he refused.
I set my shoulders to it. "Fine."
Mum gasps. "What?"
"I will go, I say, my lips curving with a hollow grin. I shall marry Xavier. Not, however, in your case. And not even to him."
"Then why--" says Dad, and I interrupt him.
I say finally, softly. "The girl he broke… she is gone. And a wife he shall have,--if he wants one--only not the one he thinks on."
The face of mum crumbles.
Father is devastated.
I don;t care.
Not anymore.
I wheel, my heart beating, my jaws set of stone. And as I approach the door I say that thing that I definitely know they will think about the most.
"You did not lose a daughter tonight only. You sold her off."
Then I find
myself in the darkness with no clue of where I was going.
That I never come back the same, And that is all I know.