Stone corridors after curfew carried a different sound, not footsteps so much as breathing held too long. Torches burned low, their smoke clinging to the ceiling in thin, dirty lines. The castle never slept, but it watched. Gabrielle Riddle moved through it without hurry. Sixth year. Slytherin prefect. The badge caught the light and then lost it again. Her hair fell loose down her back, black and heavy, the shine dull only where torch smoke touched it. Her face stayed composed, pale against the green of her robes, lashes dark around eyes so light they almost looked colorless in shadow. The set of her mouth never changed. No fear. No curiosity anyone could read. Doors opened. Empty classrooms. A Ravenclaw desk overturned, ink dried like old bruises. A smear of blood on a stone step outside the Charms corridor where someone had tripped and scraped skin earlier that evening; it had been cleaned badly, leaving rust-colored traces in the grout. Rule-breaking students always bled a little when caught by the castle. Gryffindor laughter echoed far away, then cut off. Someone had run. Someone had been found. The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom was the last door on her route. The air there smelled wrong—sharp, metallic, layered with something bitter and stale. Not dust. Not parchment. Potion fumes. The door opened. The classroom was lit though it shouldn’t have been. Not warm light. Harsh, focused. The walls were crowded with dark objects that looked like they had been dragged out of evidence rooms rather than ordered from school storage. Chains. Cursed trinkets. A spider crushed under a boot heel near the desk, its legs still twitching. At the center of the room, Barty Crouch Jr. stood without turning. He was straight-backed, tense, motion held too tightly rather than slouched into habit. No limp. No theatrical injury. His build was lean, narrow, contained. Dark hair fell in loose, uneven curls, damp at the temples. His face was sharp and pale, eyes sunken slightly, alert in a way that never rested. His mouth twitched faintly even when still, as if thought never stopped pressing forward. On the desk: parchment covered in cramped handwriting, diagrams of spells half-scratched out and rewritten harder. A bowl with dark residue crusted at the edges. Drops of potion splashed across the wood like oil, some fresh enough to shine. A flask lay on its side, the metal dented, the cap wet. He reached for it, fingers twitching, then stopped. His eyes lifted instead, locking onto her reflection in the glass of a cabinet before he turned. A thin smile cut across his face, wrong on it. Too pleased. “So,” he said, voice low and rough, the sound of gravel being ground underfoot. “They let the little snake patrol at night now.” He turned fully then. Up close, there was no disguise to admire. No performance. Just intensity held barely in check, eyes that watched too closely, too deliberately. He lifted the flask but did not drink. The smell of Polyjuice lingered in the room anyway—rot and copper and hair and something old. He set it back down untouched. The real Moody was nowhere near this room. Locked away, drugged, used, and forgotten by everyone but two. Gabrielle didn’t react. Her eyes tracked the desk, the spells, the residue. She already knew what he was working on. The plan had been laid out long before Hogwarts, long before the Goblet burned blue and spat out names it shouldn’t have known. She had stood in a circle once, candlelight flickering over masks, blood warm on her palm where the Dark Mark had been pressed and cut into skin. She went every week. She listened. She remembered. “Out after curfew catching children,” he went on, voice sharpening. “Funny thing is, you don’t look like the sort who’d bother with rules unless they suited you.” He stepped closer. His boots scraped stone. There was dried blood on the edge of his cuff, dark and flaked. Not his. Never his. “I know what you are,” he said softly, savoring it. “Born into it. Never had to earn a thing. Daddy’s little proof that breeding still matters.” His smile twitched,