Tom had never needed to come home to anything, or anyone. The words itself once struck him as sentimental drivel—an invented softness for lesser minds to cling to when they had no greater legacy to build. But since you, it had taken on shape. Never warmth. But form, structure, gravity. You, quiet and clever and impossible to look away from, had become the fixed point in a world he intended to set spinning.

And so it was on that particular evening—rain sleeting like silver knives across the soot-colored streets of Knockturn Alley—that he returned from Borgin and Burkes with a sense of subtle anticipation. Not joy, no. But something that might have passed for it if he still believed in the word.

The flat above the apothecary was dark. Not in the usual way, with shadows pooling like ink between candlelit corners—but empty. Wrong.

No creak of the loose floorboard you always forgot to step around. No teacup abandoned mid-thought on the window sill. No trailing scent of your perfume, which he’d never admit lingered in his mind long after you left a room. No note. No trace.

The silence was not quiet. It screamed.

By the time Abraxas arrived—summoned not by request but by command—Tom had slammed his fist against the mirror and let the blood run down his fingers.

His hands trembled. Not visibly. Not to a fool. But to Abraxas, who had known him since prefect patrols and secret curses scrawled under breath, it was a seismic shift.

“She is gone,” Tom said flatly. But his voice cracked like frost splitting stone.

Abraxas blinked. “Who?”

“Do not play stupid with me!” The words lashed through the dim room like a whip, too loud, too raw, too human. “You know exactly who I mean.”

Abraxas froze, uncertain. “Tom, I don’t—”

“Where is she?” His eyes, always cold, were wild now—obsidian with fracture lines of lightning. “WHERE IS SHE?”

“I swear I don’t—”

“Swear?” Tom spat, advancing in a glide so smooth it looked inhuman. “You swear, Abraxas? The most loyal of my Knights? The only one who knew where she stayed, when I couldn’t be here? You swear, do you?”

“Tom—”

“You were supposed to watch her!”

“I did.”

“Then where is she?”

It wasn’t accusation anymore. It was grief, dressed in rage.

Tom’s hands fisted at his sides, nails biting half-moons into flesh. Magic coiled in the air, thick and stifling. Bottles trembled on their shelves. The light warped, flickering with his pulse.

“She is not just—” he choked, then caught himself, nostrils flaring. “She is not disposable.”

Abraxas dared a step forward. “You love her.”

Tom’s head turned with a slowness that threatened violence.

“Do not mistake possession for love,” he whispered. But even he heard the lie in it.

He stood motionless for a long moment, staring past Abraxas, as if trying to divine you out of the air. The truth was unbearable. That someone—anyone—had dared to take what was his. That he had not foreseen it. That he hadn’t protected you. That he couldn’t find you.

And somewhere deep in the marrow of him, colder than hate and sharper than vengeance, bloomed fear. Not for himself. But for you. And that was unacceptable.

Tom turned away, voice low and lethal now. “Find her,” he ordered, no longer shouting. That was worse.

“I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who it costs. If she bleeds, I’ll burn half the world to make the other half confess.”

And Abraxas, for all his breeding and iceblood charm, stepped back.

The room trembled. Books fell. Candles shattered in their sconces. Tom stood amidst the wreckage, breathing hard, lips curled, eyes gleaming with something worse than fury: loss.

And beneath it all—beneath the threats, beneath the rage—there was a single, terrifying truth.

If he could not find you, there would be nothing he would not do. Nothing he would not burn. Not even the world.

“Find her,” he said at last, voice almost hoarse, as if he’d spoken something holy and wasn’t meant to. “Find her, or I will burn this city until it screams her name back to me.”