The meetings had been happening for weeks now, one pure-blood family after another stepping over the polished threshold of the manor, shedding winter cloaks, and pretending their smiles weren’t calculated. Harry met them in the drawing room, voices muffled through half-closed doors, while Tom, age 8, was ushered elsewhere with the smaller, less important appendages of these old names—their sons. It was, apparently, “a way to build familiarity among future allies.” Tom knew better. It was a distraction. Something to keep him occupied while Harry handled matters too dull for Tom to bother with, and yet too important for him to interfere in.

He loathed it. He loathed children—the noise, the sticky fingers, the way their faces were never still. He loathed having strangers in the home that belonged to him and Harry, the one place in the world that felt untouched by the filth of everyone else. Most of all, he loathed every minute Harry spent in another room, speaking to other people instead of looking at him. The ache it left was sharp, petulant, and impossible to ignore.

Still, Harry had given him a task. Tom was nothing if not dutiful when it came to Harry’s trust. And so, he endured. The guests were confined to the lower right wing of the manor—Harry’s rule, one Tom enforced with silent precision. The rest of the house remained theirs alone.

Today’s crop was no better than the last: Abraxas Malfoy, hair so pale it made him look half-faded, like someone had left him too long in the sun. Orion Black, with the pinched, haughty face of a boy who thought glaring could pass for substance. Marcellus Lestrange, wide-eyed and faintly twitchy, as if the slightest gust might send him skittering off. And Lucien Avery, whose dull gaze suggested it would take three lifetimes before he thought of anything original. All male heirs. All convinced of their importance. All younger than Tom by mere months, yet somehow managing to look years behind him.

They were easy to lead. Too easy. Within ten minutes, they were hanging on his every word, following him through the permitted rooms like ducklings trailing after something infinitely more interesting than themselves. They watched his hands the way others might watch fireworks, rapt when he summoned objects with a flick of his fingers, or coaxed a flame to dance in midair just long enough to make them gasp. Their admiration was intoxicating in its simplicity. Of course they looked at him like that. Who wouldn’t?

Tom could feel the corners of his mouth curve, faint and knowing. He liked this part—being seen the way he saw himself: singular, untouchable, a thing to be admired. It was his natural state. The petty insults running in his head only made it sweeter. Malfoy, already fussing with his cuffs like a fussy old governess. Black, straight-backed and brittle, the sort of boy who would break before he bent. Lestrange, blinking too often, as though trying to keep up with a conversation that hadn’t even started. Avery, plodding and vacant, clearly born to follow.

They didn’t see the disdain behind his smile, just as they didn’t notice the sharpness in the way he moved—fluid, deliberate, every step as if he already owned the ground they walked on. And perhaps, in this space, he did. The air seemed to shift around him, as though recognizing the inevitability of his presence.

They had gathered in the sunlit sitting room, winter light spilling pale across the polished floor. A kiddy chessboard sat between Malfoy and Black, though every move they made had been quietly orchestrated by Tom, ensuring neither came close to besting him when he inevitably stepped in to play. Lestrange was attempting—poorly—to balance a silver goblet on his fingertips at Tom’s prompting, while Avery obediently sorted a deck of enchanted cards into suits that shifted whenever he blinked. Tom lounged in the armchair by the fire, watching them all with the satisfaction of a king surveying his court.