Mattheo Marvolo Riddle
The boy who swung fists before words. Who wore bruises like medals and smirked through split lips. If Tom Riddle was the serpent—cold, patient, calculated—Mattheo was the venom. Reckless, scorching, impossible to contain. He didn’t just wound; he lingered, spread, and consumed.
The Riddle name had already cursed him. Voldemort’s son. The second heir. A shadow to the throne his father once tried to carve. But Mattheo hadn’t needed blood to make his name feared—whispers followed him down every corridor long before anyone dared compare him to his father.
His circle only added to the storm. Malfoy, all polish and ambition. Zabini, sharp smiles and sharper words. Berkshire, charming and dangerous in equal measure. Regulus Black, brilliant in ways no one should be. Theodore nott, the quiet shadow that never missed a thing. And Tom—the brother whose silence alone commanded attention. Together, they were untouchable, a kingdom of arrogance and power.
Everyone assumed Mattheo’s type. A girl as fierce as him. Someone ruthless, cunning, dark. The kind who would claw back when he pushed too far.
But they were wrong.
His eyes had already chosen.
It wasn’t a Slytherin. It wasn’t someone who mirrored his venom. It was her. A Hufflepuff.
He remembered the first time clearly her third year-his fifth. A Charms exam, results pinned outside the corridor. She’d beaten them all—Ravenclaws, Slytherins—and instead of boasting, she’d simply tucked her hair back and smiled, soft and unassuming. In that moment, something sharp twisted inside him.
She was… different.
Where Hogwarts had sharpened everyone else, she was still soft. She cried easily. Blushed when teased. Raged against unfairness with tears in her eyes. She carried a kind of tenderness that shouldn’t have survived in their world.
It made no sense. But he couldn’t look away.
At first, it was just his gaze trailing after her in the Great Hall. Finding her across the crowd without meaning to. Watching when she walked past. Theodore noticed first, then Tom, both of them quietly amused. But they never guessed how far it went.
Because Mattheo hadn’t just been watching.
He’d been planning.
It started with scraps of parchment slipped into her books, tucked away where only she would find them. Short, sharp lines that lingered in her mind. Then came the letters—longer, darker, laced with pieces of him he’d never dare say aloud. And he found the perfect messenger: her Birman cat.
It hadn’t taken long to win the creature over—treats slipped from his pocket, scratches behind its ears in quiet corners. Soon, the cat knew him, trusted him, and carried his words tied with a black ribbon.
Through it, he learned her world. Her patterns. The little cracks in her armor. And sometimes, when ink bled too raw across parchment, his hunger for her showed.
She felt it too. He could see it. The way she lingered on his letters. The way her gaze flicked through corridors, searching shadows. The flush that rose on her cheeks when she thought no one was watching while reading them.
Mattheo told himself he could keep the mask on. That the game could stretch forever.
Until the cologne betrayed him.
It was a weekend, the castle quieter than usual. She walked through the corridor, her cat cradled in her arms. He leaned against the wall with his friends, laughter buzzing faintly around him, but he heard none of it. Because the moment she passed, the Birman’s head lifted, those blue eyes locking on him.
And she slowed.
Her gaze flicked back—sharp, unblinking. Straight at him.
The scent clinging to him, the same that clung to the ribbons and parchment she’d treasured, sealed the truth.
In that heartbeat, he knew she had him.
His fists curled. His chest burned. His friends were still talking, but the world had gone silent.
There was only her.
And that look—the one that told him the secret he had guarded was gone.
The game was over.
Or maybe, just maybe—
It had only just begun.