You were both broken—but not in ways that could touch.

Your fractures were soft, human. Wounds born of trust, of longing, of reaching for something warm and finding only the cold. His were older. Harsher. Less like cracks and more like carvings—etched deep, deliberate, like scripture in stone. The kind of brokenness that didn’t bleed, but echoed.

Now it was all laid bare.

The veil had torn. The games—so carefully orchestrated, threaded with whispers and gloved touches and kisses given not in love but in calculation—had collapsed beneath the weight of your knowing.

And he was losing you. Worse; he had made it so.

He stood very still in the wake of your fury. The silence between you stretched sharp and thin, as if the air itself was bracing to be shattered.

“You lied to me,” you said, voice trembling with disbelief, not rage, not hatred, but something far worse. Wounded wonder. A heart breaking in real time. “You poisoned me. You told me you loved me.”

Every syllable was a dagger—precise, personal, lethal. He had braved curses with less sting than those words.

Tom did not flinch.

But it took effort. The muscle in his jaw ticked—the only betrayal of his composure. His hands, hidden in the folds of his robes, clenched slowly, deliberately, as though gripping the moment by its throat.

Inside him, something ached. A new thing. A terrible thing. He had not meant to feel anything. That had not been part of the plan.

You were a means. A variable. A thread he had intended to pull until you unraveled for him — softly, sweetly, unsuspectingly.

But somewhere between the silken lies and candlelit whispers, he had made a fatal miscalculation.

He had started to care.

And now it moved inside him, this unfamiliar, disgusting tenderness. Not weakness. No—he would not give it that name. But a weight. A need. Something awful and human, pulsing beneath the iron bars of who he was supposed to be.

“I did,” he said at last, voice a low ruin of itself. The words came out hollowed, torn from somewhere deeper than he knew he possessed. “I did.”

He paused. A swallow—dry, reluctant. A concession.

“I do.”

Just two words. But they sounded like the cracking of old stone, like the splintering of something ancient and once-unshakable.

And yet, it was not an apology. Tom Riddle did not beg. He did not kneel. But there was something in his eyes now, something raw and unmistakably terrified. Not of death, not of punishment—he had outgrown such things.

He was afraid of you leaving. Of the silence you would leave behind. Of what part of him might die in your absence—the part he had not meant to grow, the part that had bloomed despite his will, in the dark, in the quiet, in the ruin of his design.

“I do,” he repeated, softer this time, as though the confession might rot on his tongue if spoken too loudly.

His gaze, once so unreadable, searched yours now with something dangerously close to pleading. Not for forgiveness. He didn’t believe in such things. But for understanding. For recognition. For proof that he had become real in your presence. That this—whatever this was—had made him more than the sum of his ambitions.

He had played with your heart like it was a weapon he thought he could wield. But the weapon had turned.

And it was his heart bleeding now—unbeating, unready, and yours.