The girl had been a disruption from the beginning.

Riddle permitted no chaos he did not author himself—and yet you had been granted passage, a quiet fixture among the Knights of Walpurgis. Not as one of them, no, not fully, but near enough. The only girl. A variable.

A problem Abraxas had, at first, approached like any other: with scrutiny sharpened by suspicion, and the clinical detachment of someone who had never needed to understand anything he could not dominate.

You smiled too easily. You spoke too little. You listened like a Legilimens, and worse—you knew when not to speak. That made you dangerous.

He remembered the first time you entered the room where Riddle gathered his Knights like serpents in a pit. Avery had leered. Lestrange had made some comment about your bloodline—like it was a dish to be tasted. Rosier, ever the poet, remarked on your eyes. Abraxas hadn’t said a word. He simply watched. Tall, cold, spine straight against the stone wall, hands folded behind his back like the proper heir to centuries of conquest. You had looked at him for a moment too long. And smiled—but not at him.

He told himself it was contempt he felt. It wasn’t.

Weeks passed. You were always there, lingering like a whisper behind Riddle’s shoulder, cross-legged at the corner of long-forgotten libraries, your wand movements precise, elegant, wrongly beautiful. Abraxas noticed the details. Of course he did.

The way you transfigured your quill not out of necessity, but boredom. The way your eyes darted to Lestrange’s fingers when he tapped them—just before you hexed him under the table with something silent and biting. The way your magic didn’t flare, it coiled. Serpentine. Controlled.

You weren’t like the other girls. That was obvious. But what haunted Abraxas—what sickened him, truly—was that you weren’t like him, either. You didn’t seek power for pride. You didn’t manipulate because it made you feel taller. You simply were. And still, people listened.

One night—early winter, 1943—Abraxas found himself lingering outside the empty Charms corridor, as if by coincidence. It wasn’t. He knew your schedule. He told himself it was strategic. That you were a variable, still. One Riddle seemed to value.

But when you emerged, scarf loose at your neck, he felt something seize in his chest like a curse misfired.

You paused. Said his name like you knew it wasn’t just a passing encounter.

“Walk with me,” he said, because asking was beneath him. But his voice lacked its usual edge. Measured. Not soft, never soft, but… tempered.

The snow outside hadn’t yet started, but the air was full of it, taut and cold like something about to break.

“You shouldn’t spend so much time near Rosier,” he said, as you kept pace with him down the sloping stone steps. His hands were gloved, of course. Everything about him always was. “He thinks your silence is submission. He’ll learn otherwise—violently—but I’d prefer to prevent the lesson.”

It was the closest thing to concern he’d ever voiced.

You said something clever. You always did. But Abraxas wasn’t listening to the words. He was watching your mouth. Your cadence. The ghost of frost on your breath. He was counting your steps beside his and noticing, for the first time, that they matched.

He didn’t touch you. But he wanted to. Not for possession, not to claim, as he had done so many things before, but for something he didn’t understand. Something dangerously gentle.

In the silence between sentences, he felt it. That damned flutter beneath his ribcage. Like a hand curled around the bones of his chest, slowly tightening.

He looked at you sidelong. Platinum hair swept perfectly into place, cold eyes narrowed. Calculating. But there was something there—a flicker beneath the ice. A struggle.

“I don’t court lightly,” he said at last, his voice low. “Or often. Or… at all.”

A pause.

“But I would… like to try.”

There. He’d said it. Laid it bare in the cool night air between you, the most vulnerable admission of his life, disguised in seven syllables and a glance that refused to meet your eyes.