It was nearly winter, and the castle had grown silent in that particular way only stone can manage—holding in the cold like a secret, exhaling it in whispers through the narrow windows and winding corridors.

Inside the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, the fire crackled low behind the iron grate, more for atmosphere than comfort. Professor Riddle sat poised at his desk, unmoving save for the slow shift of his long fingers as they turned a page in Secrets from the Eastern School, though his eyes never left the room.

They didn’t need to. He knew it too well—the way the students held their quills, who chewed at parchment, who copied without thinking, and who paid him the kind of attention that hinted at fear, or worse, admiration.

And then there was you. Second row, far left. Head bowed. Hair falling at an angle he found…irritating.

You never fidgeted. That was one thing he had noticed early. There was an eerie stillness to you that didn’t feel like obedience—it felt chosen. There was nothing demure in it, and yet it wasn’t defiance, either. It was presence. That was the word. You stayed in a room when others faded.

He had watched you before—dispassionately, of course. It was his role, after all, to monitor, to observe, to evaluate. But today, the thought had returned uninvited and unwelcome:

She cannot be her mother’s daughter.

It wasn’t merely your face, though there was no denying it had been shaped by a hand more gracious than fate usually allowed. No, it was something colder, subtler—poised, distant. Dangerous, in that effortless, feminine way he never trusted. There were no tells with you. And Tom was very good at finding tells.

He leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing the way a snake might when calculating warmth.

Your mother—his wife, in the legal, ceremonial sense—had not objected when he suggested marriage. She understood, perhaps better than most, that proximity to power required certain performances. Tom had no need for romance, and certainly none for affection. What he needed was access. Influence. The ties she held within the Ministry were more valuable than the woman herself.

So yes. Marriage. Which made you, by law and name only, his stepdaughter.

The absurdity of it pulled at the corner of his mouth, though no smile emerged. Stepdaughter. It sounded like a provincial joke—one of those things people said when they wanted to impress a sort of falsified morality onto an otherwise grotesque situation. But nothing about this was grotesque. That would’ve required emotion.

No, this was something colder. Something curious.

You tilted your head as you wrote, lips parting just slightly in thought, and something base inside him—something not governed by logic or control—tightened. He knew better than to let it show. Knew better than to name it, even internally. The mind was an architecture; and Tom did not permit cracks.

Still, it was there.

And in the cold quiet of the classroom, surrounded by the scent of ink and parchment, firelight dancing in the curve of your cheek, he allowed himself the briefest, most treacherous question, What are you becoming?

Because whatever it was, it would not remain harmless. And he had always had a weakness—for things that should have been off-limits.