The chandeliers of Malfoy Manor glowed like captured stars, their light casting long, trembling shadows across the ballroom floor. Gold and silver gleamed beneath careful hands, and laughter—sharp and false—spilled like perfume. Every note of the music rang hollow, every smile practiced. It was the sort of gathering Abraxas Malfoy had learned to command: elegant, powerful, utterly devoid of warmth.

And yet, that night, he could not command himself.

Because through the swirl of satin and whispered devotion to their Dark Lord, he saw her.

He had not seen her in years, and still, the sight struck him like a curse. His breath caught, his pulse stumbled, and for one ruinous moment, he was twenty again—before power, before duty, before he’d traded the one thing that had ever made him human for the Malfoy name carved in marble.

She stood at the far end of the ballroom, dressed in soft gold that made her glow beneath the candlelight. Her hair was pinned elegantly, her posture regal, her every movement quiet and sure. But the curve of her mouth—that was the same. It trembled faintly when she smiled, as though she still fought to hide the ache beneath.

And then he saw him—her husband—standing beside her, his hand resting with casual ownership on her arm. Abraxas’s throat went tight, fury and longing twisting together like twin serpents. That man had no right to touch her. To stand where he once had. To look into those eyes and see the same light that had once burned for him alone. He turned slightly, pretending to study the guests, but his gaze was drawn back again and again. He could feel her even when she wasn’t looking—her presence like a ghost pressing at the edges of his carefully built walls.

He’d told himself long ago that he did not love her anymore. That love was weakness. That he’d done what was necessary—ended it before she could destroy everything his family demanded of him. But as the music swelled and the crowd shifted, she laughed at something her husband said, and the sound—light, fleeting—undid him.

He remembered that laugh in the dark, tangled in whispered confessions and defiance, when she’d begged him not to follow Riddle’s path. When she’d told him he was too good, that the world did not have to make him cruel. He’d kissed her instead of answering, because the truth was too heavy to speak: he would always choose the Malfoy name over her. He would always choose the power that made him worthy in his father’s eyes, even if it damned him in hers.

And it had.

Now she belonged to another man. Wore another man’s ring. Smiled through another man’s gaze. Yet she still haunted him, still lived in the corridors of his mind where her perfume lingered like sin.

He thought of going to her. Just once. To say something—anything. But what could he offer now? Apology? Regret? Those were luxuries for better men.

So he stayed where he was, a silent specter at the edge of his own life, watching the woman he had destroyed try to live without him.

He told himself it was for the best. That she was safer away from him. That he’d given her up for something greater. Power. Legacy. Immortality in the service of a new world. But even as he repeated those lies, the truth clawed at him from beneath the polish of his pride. He'd traded her for power

He thought of the future he was expected to build—the wife he’d eventually marry, the heir he’d be required to produce. The continuation of the Malfoy name. The perfection of bloodlines. He could almost see it: a boy with hair like his, eyes like hers. Eyes that could never truly belong to him.

That, he thought, was his punishment. Not damnation. Not the loss of his soul. But the haunting certainty that the only eyes he would ever love would belong to the children of another man. And somewhere, beneath the polite music and hollow laughter, Abraxas Malfoy smiled—a cold, elegant thing that did not reach his eyes.

Because he knew now what it meant to love something so completely that you destroy it to keep it.

And what it meant to spend the rest of your life regretting that you did.