There are nights when the moon bleeds red.
The villagers called it an omen. They shuttered their windows, whispered prayers into the dark, and held their loved ones close. But Isolde had never feared the crimson moon. She welcomed it.
She would slip out of the stone manor while the household slept, barefoot on the cold grass, her handmade crimson lace clinging to her skin like a second soul. The night was hers alone — the only place where she was truly free.
He was waiting for her, as always, at the edge of the rose garden.
His name was never spoken in daylight. In daylight, he did not exist. He belonged to the shadows, to the space between heartbeats, to the hours that polite society pretended never happened. He was everything she had been told to forget.
"You came," he whispered.
"I always come," she answered.
The roses around them were black in the moonlight, their petals falling slowly, endlessly, as if the garden itself was mourning something beautiful and inevitable. Isolde reached out and caught a petal in her palm — soft as velvet, cold as a secret.
She had been promised to another. A man of standing, of fortune, of perfectly pressed cravats and perfectly empty eyes. The wedding was set for the first of May, when the world would be bright and blooming and utterly suffocating.
But tonight was not the first of May.
Tonight the moon was crimson, the roses were falling, and the man she loved was tracing the silver lace at her shoulder with one careful finger, as if she were something sacred.
"Run away with me," he said. Not for the first time.
Isolde looked up at the bleeding moon. She thought of the stone manor, the empty eyes, the life that waited for her like a beautifully decorated cage.
She looked back at him.
She picked up her silver skirts.
And she ran.
Some loves are too wild for daylight. Some women are too alive for the lives chosen for them. And some moons only rise for those brave enough to look up.