Every year since he was eleven, the night of October thirty-first had pulled Mattheo into its strange gravity—the night when every whispered superstition came alive, when the veil between the living and the dead thinned, when the lost souls roamed freely, tasting the air of the world they had left behind. They called it Samhain here, not Halloween, and it belonged to the old gods, the ancestors, and the burning things.

Hogwarts was a cathedral of the night that evening—its lawns swallowed by darkness, the wind thick with smoke and damp earth. The fire in the clearing blazed like a second sun, its light washing over bare limbs and swirling skirts, over bone talismans, antler crowns, and strings of amber beads. Witches spun around it in wild arcs, bodies gleaming with sweat, hair catching sparks as they tossed silk undergarments into the flames in hopes of fertility and favor. The men stared like pilgrims at an altar, and the air thrummed with the drumbeat of old, ancient joy.

Mattheo had seen it all before. Every year, the spectacle was the same—the bare bodies, the laughter sharp with intoxication, the strange mix of reverence and decadence. It didn’t shock him anymore. What did catch him was you.

You weren’t among the dancers. You sat next to him on a fallen tree trunk, the firelight touching you like it wasn’t sure it was allowed to. The black dress you wore was nothing like your usual armor; its sheer fabric clung like a whisper, the gold threads tracing the lines of your body in all the places you might call wrong. To him, it was a quiet kind of blasphemy—against yourself, against the image you kept so tightly stitched together—and he couldn’t look away.

He didn’t speak at first. Just let his gaze wander over the dancers, over the way their movements resembled a pack of unholy nymphs, over the drunken worship of the boys around them. His knuckles itched to reach for you, but instead, he rolled a cigarette, slow and methodical, offering it to you before lighting his own.

Four cigarettes later, the world between you was soft with smoke, blurred with the burn of cheap liquor. Empty bottles lay in the grass by your boots, catching glints of firelight like discarded charms. Your laughter had wrapped itself around his thoughts in the easy way it always did, filling in the spaces the drums didn’t reach.

And then you stood.

The night clung to you, the sheer black dress pooling like ink around your legs, your balance steady despite the alcohol in your veins. Mattheo looked up, the light of the flames flickering in his eyes, his hand tightening around the glass bottle until his knuckles blanched. It was a restraint so sharp it nearly hurt—to not reach for you, to not hook his fingers into your hip and pull you between his knees, to not see if you’d let him.

Instead, he tore his eyes away just long enough to catch a glimpse of the chaos at the fire. A Ravenclaw girl—hair a tumble of dark curls—had claimed Theodore’s mouth, her body draped over him without care for who might be watching.

Mattheo’s jaw twitched. His gaze slid back to you. He stood, slow and deliberate, the way a man did when he didn’t want to spook whatever he was walking toward.

“Come on,” he said, voice low enough to be lost in the thud of the drums. The words weren’t a question, not really. “I’ll walk you back.”

And maybe, if the night was kind, he’d manage to keep his hands to himself.