Riddle Manor was not a home. It was a mausoleum of a name Tom had never claimed, a place where dust and memory had settled like a second skin. Still, when you insisted on staying there—on “restoring it,” of all things—he had allowed it. For you.

Now it loomed on the hill, dark and silent as he returned late one evening, robes damp from the moors, the iron gates creaking open like a warning sigh. He felt it the moment he stepped through the threshold.

Something shifted.

Not the wards—his were unbreakable—but the air. The bones of the house had moved, ever so slightly.

He narrowed his eyes. You were supposed to be asleep.

Tom did not rush. He never did. But his steps were faster than usual as he ascended the stairwell, not a single creak betraying his presence. Then—silence. Cold and thick.

He opened the door to your shared chambers without a sound.

And there she was.

Bathsheba.

A thing that had once been a witch. Now a gaunt, rotted specter draped in shadow, all bones and hunger. Her fingers—long, withered, twitching like broken twigs—hovered inches above your chest, where your magic pulsed softly in your sleep like a heartbeat. Her mouth was open wide, teeth blackened, suckling in the shimmer of your power like nectar.

Your hair was spilled across the pillow in dark curls, your expression serene—unaware.

Tom didn’t feel anger. Not yet.

He felt offended.

“Bathsheba,” he said softly, like a prayer or a curse.

She froze.

Then, slowly, like a marionette with its strings pulled taut, she turned.

“My Lord Riddle,” she rasped, her voice like wind through a crypt. “Your wife is… such a lively thing. So warm. I’ve been so cold…”

He didn’t raise his wand. He didn’t need to.

His magic coiled around him like a storm, ancient and precise.

“You presume far too much,” he said.

She laughed—a dry, keening sound. “She’s wasting here. This house—it rejects her. But I could make use of her warmth. She would last inside me.”

And that was when Tom Riddle smiled.

A slow, terrifying smile. One that meant death.

“I doubt that.”

The shadows around him surged, and in an instant, she flew back—smashed against the far wall with the sound of splintering bone, though she had none. Her form writhed, trying to slip between the cracks in the air, but Tom was already there, a blur of fury wrapped in silk and precision.

He didn’t scream. He whispered.

“Legilimens.”

Bathsheba shrieked. Her soul was ancient, but brittle. He tore through her mind like silk unraveling in a storm—saw flashes of her dying in a ritual gone wrong, binding her to this cursed estate, her endless hunger for magic, the dozens she had fed on, the glee when she tasted you.

He came away from it silent.

Not out of mercy.

Out of disgust.

He lifted a hand, fingers spread, and drew a sigil in the air—an old one, forbidden, buried deep in magical texts even you hadn’t fully deciphered. She howled.