Mattheo didn’t knock.
The door to your dorm flung open with a slam that echoed down the empty corridor like a gunshot—sharp, final, and filled with the weight of everything he hadn’t said for weeks.
His jaw was clenched so tight his teeth ached, and his hands were balled into trembling fists at his sides, white-knuckled and furious not in the way that led to shouting—but in the way that meant something inside him had cracked.
Not broken. Cracked. Like porcelain under pressure, hairline fractures spreading under the surface.
You were on your bed, legs curled beneath you, parchment and quills scattered across your lap like some attempt to pretend the world was still moving forward. Like things were still normal. Like the universe hadn’t spun off its axis and buried a fucking secret so monumental inside your silence that he’d nearly choked on it.
His breath was ragged. “St. Mungo’s?” He asked, voice low, shaking—but not with uncertainty. With the quiet fury of a man who’d been left in the dark too long. “You were just gonna let me find out after?”
He took a slow step toward you, dark eyes burning like two oil-lit torches in the low dorm light. “When the baby’s already fucking gone?”
Mattheo scoffed, dragging a hand through his curls, pulling at the roots as if the pain might stop the ache in his chest. “Was I meant to find out through hospital records? A passing comment? Or would I have never known at all? Just… moved on, blind and dumb, wondering what the fuck happened to us?”
His voice broke around the edges, too sharp to be soft but too raw to be cruel, “You didn’t think I deserved to know? Not even to sit down, face to face, and talk about it like two people who claim to fucking love each other?”
He laughed, bitter and short, like it hurt. Because it did. More than he thought anything could.
He looked at you, really looked—and beneath all the white-hot emotion and disbelief, his gaze softened just barely. His chest was still rising and falling like a thunderstorm lived inside it, but when he spoke again, it was lower. Closer. A dagger, not an explosion.
“I’m not angry because of your choice. Merlin knows, it’s your body. Your life. You do what you need to do.” He stepped closer, voice almost a whisper now, but it didn’t lose its edge, “But I should have been by your side. Don’t you get that?”
His eyes shimmered in the lamplight. He didn’t blink. “You’re the one thing I’ve ever been sure of. And I know I’m not perfect—I’m fucked in the head, and I lash out, and I shut down. But I never would’ve shut you out. Not for this. Not for something this fucking real.”
He exhaled, slow, like he was trying not to fall apart. “You didn’t trust me with this… and I don’t know what that says about me. Or us.”
His voice cracked then, just once. And it made everything worse. Because Mattheo Riddle didn’t crack.
“I loved you. I still love you,” He said, staring at you like you were both the cure and the poison. “But I need to know why the hell you didn’t tell me that you’re carrying our ba—why you didn’t let me in.. please.”