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Chapter Text

On the freshman year aquarium trip, Tom knows Hermione will sit on the bus with that spacey blonde girl. 

She’s on the outs with Weasley and by proxy Potter, according to her escalated tone in the hallway this week. 

It’s about Weasley again. 

This time his dalliance with Lavender Brown (clearly the nation’s highest grossing customer for Bath and Body Works) has triggered her jealousy. She’s still in denial about it.

Nothing is more infuriating than watching his girl begging for table scraps of affection from that impetuous, mealy-mouthed swine.

The pang in his chest twists, sweetly bitter.

…Why can’t you see that I’m the one who understands you?

Time to have Beringer Freight give Arthur Weasley another slipped-up paycheck. (Yes, Beringer is a subsidiary of Nagini, lucky for Tom, unlucky for Arthur et al.)

The trio march up and down the school’s halls in their uniform moody garb, all black rain clouds and My Chemical Romance, unaware of him just a locker away. 

Unaware that he’s the author of those carefully-crafted notes slipped into her locker, no matter how artfully he references the things she says in class. 

Unaware of the bug slid into the seam of a rarely-used pocket on her threadbare Jansport.

…Been here all along, why can’t you see?

Right now she’ll be pouting into her Neil deGrasse Tyson book, glancing over the binding at Weasley and Brown making out six rows ahead, all the way to the blasted aquarium.

Tom sighs.

He listens to the flickering voices on the ill-tuned television in the next room. 

The sound pauses and he holds his breath.

A commercial blares through the wall and Tom sinks onto the pink, childish bedspread, ratty springs groaning under his newly-bulking frame.

For now, Tom has learned that delight comes not only from getting what he wants, but from building a grand orchestra out of his goals: each interlude moving, weaving together, and building—ever building—to that glorious climax.

He shuts his eyes, bringing the musky PowerPuff Girls panties to his lips with a drag of his tongue up her little salt-sweet stain.

Tom moans, low and rough.

…You belong with me…

Hermione has everything under control.

She has all the paperwork in a neat leather folio.

The route has been google-mapped and printed.

The Lexus RX-450 is humming under the carport. She had Dobby get the oil changed this week.

The diaper bag hangs from her shoulder packed and prepared for every possible situation in the multiverse of afternoons her darling colicky fusspot could throw at them.

Nothing can go wrong.

Except…

“Tom, are you ready?”

She sets the car seat down on the hardwood. Sleeping Hesper makes a soft murmur but she doesn’t stir. 

He’s standing with his hands settled in the pockets of his slacks, gaze fixed out the enormous A-frame window at the seething shoreline.

She drifts to him, placing her hand on his arm like a gentle question.

He inhales quickly, blinking as if waking up.

“Mmmm?”

“What were you thinking about?” Hermione hums.

“The Sound,” he says. “Three empty freighters just went by.”

He seems reluctant to move.

“Tom,” she says. “You promised.”

He stirs, turning toward the door and carding a hand through his dark waves.

“Ah, of course.”

Discomfort dips through Hermione.

On what planet is Tom all spaced-out and forgetful?

If he’s really given up, then does any last-ditch clinical trial have a chance of saving him?

Does he really want to die that badly?

The clinic is on Alaska Way on the 44th floor of the Angelos Building. Seattle glitters rain-slicked behind the desk of Dr. Amelia Bones, a three times board certified surgical oncologist and a Fred Hutchison clinical researcher.

“You are a good candidate for the study, Mr. Riddle.” Dr. Bones sets Tom’s charts back onto her huge, lacquered desk. “I want you and your wife to be aware of the risks.”

Her gaze falls to the tiny face peeping out of the baby wrap strapped around Hermione and her expression softens.

Bingo.

“The article said the study was in its early phases, but if it could give Tom a chance to take Hesper to kindergarten.” Her throat constricts, eyes glossing with unshed tears. “If there’s a chance she could know him…”

“I’ve personally joined this study because I believe in this drug’s promising early results,” the doctor says, her voice level with measured reassurance. “We want to offer Tom a place in the next round of trials.”

Hermione’s heart floods with elation.

“God!” she bursts. A trickle, this one less calculated, escapes from Hermione’s eyes. “What a relief… oh shit…”

Tom clasps Hermione’s hand, bringing her knuckles to his lips. She wipes her eyes.

“I am wondering, Dr. Bones,” Tom says, as if broaching this subject carefully, “one of the side effects listed with the drug is infertility.”

“Our first trials showed that male subjects had a reduced sperm count by 50 to 80%, yes,” the doctor replies, her tone the sort of even-handed factuality Tom generally seems to find palatable in people.

But something is not right.

Hermione senses him tighten, though his face remains exactly the same.

“You’re concerned about your ability to have more children?” Dr. Bones reads him. “Freezing samples is always an option.”

“Tom…” Hermione’s face flashes with heat. “Without intervention, when do you think we would…?”

His thumb strokes the top of her hand with increasing speed.

“I just want all the facts,” he says with a casual finality.

“Of course you do.” Dr. Bones’ lips curve with a sensitive weight to her smile, as only a doctor who sees dying person after dying person can. “Which is why I have to also explain a difficult and sometimes painful aspect of this study.”

The doctor’s pause is meant to be sympathetic but Hermione finds it oddly frustrating.

“Only 60% of participants will receive a dose of the drug, while the others will receive a placebo. This means that while Tom participates in the study, he might be part of the control group.”

Hermione’s first instinct is point blank refusal. Her mouth opens before she can control it.

“But that’s barbaric! How could you offer us hope and then only deliver it to little more than half of your participants?”

“Angel.” Tom smooths his palm down her arm and Hermione realizes she’s half out of her seat. “We’re deeply grateful, Dr. Bones, for this chance. Regardless of the outcome.”

Hermione sits back down, the frightened rabbit in her heart soothed to stillness by the assurance woven into Tom’s bassy lilt.

“There’s always a chance that the drug doesn’t impact Tom’s carcinoma, there’s also the potential for early positive results and then a later progression of the disease…” Dr. Bones' voice goes underwater in Hermione’s ears.

Tom can’t die.

Hermione won’t let him.

A ridiculous potato of a Bulgarian exchange student thwarts the sophomore year homecoming.

The lights go on in the gym and Tom stands in the center of the basketball court with 100 roses (one for every day she filled his head) all spelling out, HOMECOMING, HERMIONE?

She is forty minutes late—at least according to his calculated 20 minutes per clue, beginning with the one in her swimsuit drawer. (Of course, he thought she would solve each riddle in 10 minutes or less, given her typical mathematics performance.)

But silhouetted at the locker room entrance is not his little starlight, but Pansy Parkinson with a cheer clipboard in one hand and the other on her hip.

She smacks her gum.

“You know the dumb borscht guy living with the Weaselbutts already asked her, right?”

Tom drops his bouquet.

Pansy wanders across the gym, muttering darkly.

All homecoming night, Tom’s girl astounds in her black glitter manic-pixie fuckgirl gown. She is glory, swanning among her peers with self assured poise. Such a pity she’s on the arm of that hideous, mumbling meat slab.

Tom seethes by the punch bowl, a senior French exchange student sighing and rolling her eyes at his side.

An ICE agent shows up at the Weasleys the following day.

Hermione leans back in the rocking chair, the wind-whipped waves outside rushing in time with the blood pounding in her ears.

There’s a storm in her head too.

In her arms, Hesper curls against her breast, asleep after a night feed. No one said how lonely this would be sometimes.

The fact is, Hermione can’t accept 60% odds on getting a supposedly 70% effective drug for a papillary carcinoma with a 90% fatality rate. There are too many unknowns. Too many variables.

The middle of her chest aches like a bruise. 

She imagines this house, seventeen years from now, empty of Tom. 

It’s too big.

Hermione would have to cram as much stuff in it as she can, so she won’t remember the bassy lilt once filling its hallways. 

Papers. Magazines. Things—she can’t let go of anything he touched. She’d need a buffer lining these walls, keeping her in. Cocooning her from the brutal ache of emptiness.

The TV couldn’t be off, even for a minute. No stillness. No quiet. 

No silence like his stilled lips.

As if the television noise could replicate that chaotic cacophony of living in Tom’s shitstorm. Ha!

Ultimately, her answer to a life without him is no.

Just… No.

She would sit in the middle of the house and refuse to accept it. Her life can pile up around her for all she cares—it’s still a fuck no.

Hesper’s tiny frame twitches against Hermione’s still-soft body. She makes a little warbling cry and Hermione replies with a comforting murmur, pulling the baby closer. Hermione nudges the rug with her toe and the rocker sways at a lulling pace.

She stares down into her baby’s face, moonlight slanted onto her small brow—so like Tom’s.

Hermione can’t just give up and succumb.

It would be so easy. God, the idea of life without him hurts too much to bear!

But as vividly as her mind inhabits the woman pining on the couch for her lost love, she knows what it’s like to be buried alive with her mother in a grave of clutter. 

Hesper shouldn’t have to live like that.

Hermione can’t let this little girl grow up without her father.

She won’t.

When at last the baby seems truly asleep, she places her in the bedside bassinet and creeps down the hallway to her office.

The room was once her first bedroom here, complete with the bed with its secret restraints latched underneath. Tom, you fucker.

She wiggles the mouse and her brand new Dell blinks to life. 

Hermione works in the darkness until the gulls begin to call over the pink-soaked Puget Sound.

Sweat soaks the collar of her night shirt. Her palms are clammy.

But she’s done it.

The mainframe of Fred Hutchison’s cutting edge, cloud-based software files crack open for her and bare their raw contents, so vulnerable under her fingertips.

Her heart races.

She snatches up Tom’s paperwork and calls up the study by number.

It’s here.

Her insides twist, tumbling over themselves with wrongness and giddiness and guilt and wild hope and bile.

Tom is coded into the double blind study. The effort it takes her to break into the personal data makes her forget it’s a wretched violation until she’s sitting there, about to open Tom’s study details.

She shouldn’t do this. It would be wrong to know.

Hermione opens the file.

Her hands drop to her sides.

Horror floods her body, the screen blurs.

#479268/CONTROL

The emptiness closes in, the stacks of newspapers folding around her like death.

“No!” Hermione cries.

She attacks the keyboard, fight surging back into her veins. 

Peeling back the data’s layers, she masks her IP source as part of the hospital’s network. 

With the deftness of a surgeon, she changes #479268’s location in the collated subjects. Tenderly, she cradles his precious code, drawing him from death into life.

#479268/GROUP3

He fits so neatly in the ranks of the saved, her heart blooms. 

It’s horrible that she has to switch him with another person, the guilt gnaws at her. But it doesn’t hurt worse than the thought of losing her Tom.

She rebuilds the file path to erase the record of her sins, removing the mark of her wild, obsessive love for him.

Hermione logs off and puts her head between her hands.

The baby is still asleep.

There’s a stirring downstairs, the whirring of the coffee grinder. A pan clinks.

He’s making her breakfast again.

Her heart hammers raw against the weak spot in her chest.

She’ll never let him go.

“Your report card shows an A- in Sophomore English.”

Father still doesn’t look up from his macbook.

Why does the old man bother to take a lunch if he’s just going to bring his laptop to the sofa set ten strides from his desk?

Forty stories below them, Seattle’s notorious traffic crawls: as fixed a feature in the cityscape as the Space Needle.

Tom takes a sip of coffee, adjusting his tie.

“Flitwick deducted points from my last essay for style,” he says.

“Ah. So you found it difficult to adjust your pompous tone to satisfy the man’s tastes or have you forgotten the purpose of communication?”

Tom doesn’t need this today. 

If Riddle Sr. is going to spend the entirety of spring break nitpicking Tom’s flawless performance at Nagini, then he should at least forgo the school commentary.

“Someone in my class argued for a ridiculous analysis of the novel, which my essay decisively proved false. Flitwick himself encouraged a more critical—”

Riddle Sr.’s eyes flick up from the monitor and settle onto Tom like ten thousand pounds.

“The only reason you deliver words to another person is to get them to do exactly what you want. What do you want from your teacher?”

Tom spears a bit of his salad, letting his teeth drag along his fork.

“A 4.0 grade point average.”

“Why.”

“So that I can graduate with advantageous prospects.”

His father slams the macbook shut.

“Wrong.”

Riddle Sr. leans across the coffee table, his hawkish gaze flaying into his son.

Never forget that your mother was a presumptuous intern. 

Acid hatred burns in Tom’s throat.

“Your prospects rise and fall with my assessment of your performance: the only determining factor in your entry placement at Nagini,” his father says slowly, as if Tom didn’t already know.

Tom thinks of the stack of brochures from UW, Western, WSU hidden under his girl’s mattress so Ron and Harry won’t see them. She’s the only one with a real chance to earn a spot at one of those schools.

He can still see her face that day in English class, plunging headlong into a debate with him in the middle of the lecture. Her face flushed with self-belief.

Breathtaking.

A bloom of rebellion unfurls in Tom’s chest.

“What if I want to study for networking reasons?”

An unhinged growl issues from his father, the sort reserved for slipped-up accountants and sharp market downturns.

Tom fucked up.

“Only peons need a bunch of neutered liberals to hand them a participation trophy for four years of sycophantic pandering. If you so choose to waste your time, the only position you’ll find when you get back is the mail room since you’re so keen on chasing useless pieces of paper.”

“I understand,” Tom hisses. “No college.”

Riddle Sr. opens his laptop again, smoothing his cruel, slicked-back hair.

From the city below, distant in the mist off the Sound, a siren wails.

“You already own the world. Perfection is just armor: a tool to keep people in line.”

Right.

Let’s see how perfect you are, old man, after I rifle through your dirty secrets.

Hermione tip-toes out of Hesper’s bedroom, holding her breath as she shuts the door.

Salty June air sighs through an open window, toying with her curls.

Hoarse coughing echoes from upstairs.

Hermione chases the noise to the bathroom door, pushing it open.

“Tom?”

He’s on his knees, his elbow braced on the rim of the toilet and a frightening pallor haunting his face.

Tom hits the flush with a murderous glance at the bowl.

“Please let me fill Dr. Bones’ anti-nausea prescription,” she says, her socks hushing against the black marble. She crosses the room and kneels beside him.

Grabbing a hand towel, she blots the gleaming sweat gathered at Tom’s neck and hairline.

He shuts his eyes, submitting, perhaps even drinking in her attentive touch.

“Ah yes,” he says, his voice roughened, “I take those and then it’s a parade of twenty more pills, each with their own list of side effects.”

As if to illustrate, Tom leans over the toilet again spilling his guts, his shoulders wracked with spasms. The blades of his sweaty hair cling to his forehead.

Hermione rubs circles into his back, humming little sympathies. She dabs his face when he comes up for air. It’s so easy to feel sorry for him when he’s doing what she wants.

The more ruined Tom seems by the clinical trial’s medication, the more her heart lifts with hope.

It worked.

Hermione saved him.

She gets him water and he accepts it with a wrecked grunt.

When he swallows the thick band of his throat rolls under his surgery scar like a memory.

“Our caps and gowns came in the mail,” she says.

“Grrrugh.”

“If you’re feeling better, I think we should walk.”

Tom looks up, his bleary eye betraying a hint of his usual curious malice.

“Dobby will watch Hesper,” she says. 

Tom chuckles darkly.

“You want to listen to the band butcher the Star Wars theme again? And of course Mr. Lupin will moralize for an hour. Then the valedictorian will say something about how we had the time of our lives. Surely that looney blonde girl got it, what was her name?”

Hermione smiles.

“I want to see all their faces when they realize we actually graduated.”

“There was no dispensation, starlight,” he says.

He stands, splashing water onto his face from the sink.

“We made up every assignment, circumstances be damned,” he continues. “We don’t need a cap and gown to prove we earned it.”

“Yeah.” She shrugs. “But our transcripts and a note about class ranking came too.”

Tom winches off the water with a quick twist.

“Oh?”

“The administration said despite four years of perfect academic records and stellar extracurricular performance, they didn’t want to award the valedictorian and salutatorian because of their abysmal attendance this spring.”

He meets her gaze in the mirror.

“…But,” she goes on, “the school board voted to proceed. Do you know anything about this?”

Tom’s face disappears into his towel and comes out impassive as ever.

“Was it something about the headline in the Des Moines Register, ‘Teen parents achieve top graduating grades amid cancer battle’?” he says. “I’m only surprised it didn’t get picked up for morning television.”

Hermione inhales sharply.

“What the hell, Tom! You put us in the paper? What if your former Nagini staff saw that and found out some high school kid was their boss?!”

“Wouldn’t that be a surprise?” 

He spreads a wicked crocodile’s grin, looking every bit the man who ran a company, an AP-everything school career and her life at the same time. While he was dying.

Hermione shakes her head.

“You are so full of shit. But no, they mentioned a different publishing. A paper for which Mr. Lupin received an academic award about Bridge’s Constructive Analysis. He included my notes on the book and published it with me as a co-author!”

Tom double blinks, unused to surprise. 

For a moment, Hermione thinks he’s about to be angry, but then the flush crests his cheeks. The usual hardness in his eye goes a little gauzy: worshipful, perhaps. 

A melting warmth spreads over Hermione like liquid sun.

Tom loves her.

“I suppose what you’re trying to tell me is that we’re officially forced to attend this weekend,” he says, giving her a reproving look. “And speak, for that matter.”

“Um, yeah.”

She blushes, still hardly able to believe it herself.

Tom sighs.

“I still say we donate an endowment, have the gym renamed in our honor and never set foot at another school function again.”

“I’m not passing this up, Tom.”

His lips part, his dark gaze igniting with something like awe, something like lust.

He hurls the towel at her.

“You stole it from me!” he snarls, laughing.

Hermione shrieks and Tom snatches her by the waist.

“I beat you!” she cackles. “I’m valedictorian!”

The summer before junior year, Harry Potter smacks on the window of Tom’s brand new Bugatti in the marina parking lot.

Tom lowers his window. 

Well this is a surprise.

Potter huffs, flipping his petulantly-styled fringe of hair back from his narrowed, guy-lined eyes.

“I know you’re following me!” he snaps.

Tipping his aviators down, Tom gets a better look at the apoplectic boy.

“Too much weed perhaps, Potter?” he replies. “I watched a dreadful 60 minutes segment about the psychological effects of marijuana on developing minds.”

“Don’t give me that shit!” Potter is nearly foaming at the mouth. “You’re at Wendy’s like, all the time when I’m there! Yesterday at the mall, you sat outside Hot Topic the entire time I was shopping with my friends. Not to mention how every afternoon when I’m at the coin laundry you roll by like you’re dealing coke or something.”

Tom blinks upward like he’s adding a sum. 

Then, he chuckles, shaking his head.

Foolish, narcissistic Potter. ‘The boy who lived,’ father’s close associates at Nagini called him. Tom has read some things in Riddle Sr.’s office about the Potters and their risky gambits. Harry is simply lucky they didn’t blow him to bits with their own sorry asses.

In fact, all Tom had to do was corner his wily old man with the name “Potter” and boom, he was in on the real side of the business. Thanks to the Potters, Tom bought this Bugatti himself.

“I know you’re hiding what actually happened to my parents!”

Potter’s clammy hands grip the half open window and Tom hits the power lock.

“Don’t smear the glass,” he says, lazily rolling up the window.

Shouts muffled, Potter smacks on the window.

“Your father murdered them! They were just minding their own business and your evil corporation took them out because they were in your way!”

Tom turns over the ignition and his music blares on mid-song. He cranks up Death Cab’s walking bass, backing slowly out of his parking spot.

Gulls wheel over the pier. Tom takes a final glance at one of the benches where a frizzy tangle of auburn curls drift in the breeze.

She’s always out of reach.

Ignoring him after their lively discourse in class. Never even giving his tastefully-subtle overtures a second glance.

How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me… 

The woman is perpetually entangled with the dull problems of her friends, maxing out her energy and meager resources to swoop in and save them again and again.

Why doesn’t she tire of them?! They don’t make her think, make her feel!

How many times will she bend herself to breaking for people who refuse to help themselves?

…You’ve gotta spend some time, love, gotta spend some time with me…

“I’ll find proof your father did it!” Potter shouts, following the Bugatti. “I’ll bury him and the whole company!”

It must be such a chore thinking the entire world revolves around you.

Tom speeds off in his sexy new car, clutching the white, sticky napkin she threw in the trash when she walked by.

He smells it, imagining the taste of soft serve on her tongue.

…I will possess your heart…

Later, he pumps his cock until his come ices every inch where the paper touched his girl’s mouth.

The school’s banners snap in the thick, salt-to-the-taste wind off Elliot Bay.

The last strains of the processional go silent, and nearly a thousand bodies stand up with a chorus of shuffling. The silence from Memorial Stadium’s brimming stands is like a held breath.

Hermione wonders what her parents would be doing today, if things had been different. She imagines them in the front row of seats at the 10 yard line, holding Hesper instead of Dobby. Maybe she wouldn’t have had a kid.

Her father would have a small gift for her, like a bag of Werther’s Originals butterscotch or a classic paperback with a gently creased spine. Her mother would hug her, smiling with trails of glossy tears, I’m so proud of you, sweetie.

But the image fades almost as soon as she thinks it. 

Their absence feels like a choice.

Her metal chair creaks under her, its legs punching into the pungent grass.

At the very center of the green and silver podium, the microphone picks up the faintest draw of breath as inches from its hearing, Tom’s lips move. Hermione almost forgets the meaning of his words when the smooth timbre of his bass pours out of the PA system into the football field like whiskey filling a glass. 

The whole stadium stands.

He places his hand over his heart and pivots away from the microphone toward the flag, his sonorous voice obscured as hundreds join the familiar chant.

She watches the perfect slant of his jaw. The idle stray of a few dark curls from under his cap. The breezy splash of the silver tassel against the cruel ridge of his cheekbone.

Effortless, all-American Tom.

It was impossible to feel anything but beautiful as Hermione processed beside him at the head of their class, their hands clutched. 

Tom’s gilded, dazzling grin burned the path ahead of them and her gleeful little smirk shot down the bastards lurking behind.

She lapped up the coldness in her classmate’s stares, the judgment, the jealousy.

Nobody can stop her.

Not even fucking cancer.

Tom sinks into the chair next to her as Principal Dumbledore’s doddering voice begins his annual wandering through the usual tropes of academic achievement or whatever.

She gives him a smile meant to congratulate him on doing his part, but Tom’s wry, devil-can-fuck-himself smirk sends a coal of heat all the way through her body.

He leans to her ear.

“Lupin won’t stop giving you hangdog looks, I think he’s about to base his entire speech on your fascination with that calculus book he gave you.”

The tiniest touch of sadness stops the warmth from spreading through her.

“Oh,” She glances at the man in his sweater vest, sitting with the teachers and shuffling an unwieldy pile of notecards. “He’s disappointed I’m not enrolled in college this fall.”

Tom makes a tsk tsk .

“Well then perhaps he’s not really the math teacher we thought if he can’t calculate the interest draw-down on a 1.3 billion dollar investment portfolio.”

His grin is like sunlight, like victory in its purest form. 

But Hermione can’t quite muster a smile in return.

Dumbledore wraps up his remarks to the polite-but-disengaged clapping of the stadium.

A rush of adrenaline climbs up her spine.

She stands and crosses the grass, climbing the steps. Hermione vaguely hears her name, followed by the coveted title:

Valedictorian.

The best, the brightest student of her age.

The fact that she, a self-styled rebel and a teen mother, achieved the highest rank in her class must mean something.

Is living off Tom’s money really the best she can do?

“Congratulations, class of 2007,” she begins, the double echo of her voice out in the field like a ghost of herself calling back to her.

“We’ve put four years of our best effort into learning, and our test scores relative to the state indicate that this group knows quite a lot.”

A whoop sounds from the audience, and Hermione can’t imagine who it could be, given the distant expressions on her classmate’s faces. 

They don’t get it. They don’t know her.

But it doesn’t matter.

“Nineteenth century mathematician Ada Lovelace once said that for all our learning, knowledge can only scratch the surface of how the universe is connected. 

“‘Mathematical science shows what is,’ Lovelace said. ‘It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able to fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.’”

Hermione looks up from her notes.

“Lovelace went on to enshrine the mathematical principles upon which modern computers have been built, connecting our world. She saw that unseen possibility as a great and thrilling void beyond what anyone in her era could have imagined.”

Lupin’s eyes glisten.

There’s a flash of red in the corner of her eye, only a few rows from the back. A familiar figure shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

She made Tom drop all the charges. Ron Weasley had been allowed to walk after committing to fulfill his community service requirements in the custodial department at the school.

The red tilts toward a mop of dark brown. Glasses flash in the sunlight like a bolt of lightning.

Hermione hardens.

“I know many of you didn’t believe I could be standing here today, addressing you from this most honored position in our class. I had challenges this year. My mother died. I had a daughter. I got—I’m married.”

The silence staring back at her grows taut as a thread.

“But I worked hard at this school, not just to do what was necessary to get all the good grades and extracurriculars, but to see those unseen worlds of connection, of possibility.”

Hermione was going to say something about Lupin’s published paper, about the delight of teaching herself to code, but she stops.

Tom is looking at her, his hands folded easily on his lap. That cobra chin tilted with the kind of listening that happens when hearing a favorite song again.

All her explaining feels silly now. Why does she feel the need to hint that she deserves what she’s got?

“What I mean is…” She lets her notes go. “Others’ expectations and the scripted path in life isn’t enough to lead you to something that will truly give you meaning.

“You have to look past what you’ve been given and appreciate what other people can’t see. To feel it. To seize it, no matter the cost.”

Tom’s expression glows and emotion surges in her throat. 

She feels luminous, incandescent.

“Thank you, and good luck to the class of 2007!”

Her heartbeat clangs in her ears and she can hardly hear the cheers and clapping, ushering her from the stage.

Tom kisses the edge of her brow, his hand squeezing hers like she finally understood something he’s been trying to tell her all along. 

Lupin’s speech embarrasses her with all the bragging and gushing the teacher’s pet in her soul could ever desire, but for some reason Hermione doesn’t feel satisfied. She picks at frayed strings in the cheap fabric of her gown and stares at the grass.

Tom’s speech is short, with a military brand of eloquence entreating its hearers to be the sort of virtuous heroes of a gilded age that never was: not stating but somehow leaving the impression that this very archetype stands before them now.

And instead of feeling a little insulted (as Hermione does for a moment or two), the crowd erupts with feverish applause and howls of excitement.

Incredible. 

As he descends the stage, Hermione once again feels the distinct conflict inside her. 

The eyes of the school still on him, Tom takes Hermione into his arms and kisses her full on the mouth. 

The crowd frenzies with delight.

Fever washes through her.

The perfect couple, valedictorian and salutatorian, young parents, rich, gorgeous. 

All Hermione has to do is keep Tom alive and she’ll be happy.

Right?

Tom paces the beach. 

He’s supposed to be studying for fall midterms but something far more important occupies his mind.

And at any rate, he could earn a sleepy A- in every single test and still walk away with a perfect GPA. That’s what a little flirtatiously-earned extra credit will buy.

Tom likes his filling-out body, the way his shoulders sway when he walks and the way women young and old linger their gaze on him like he could satisfy them. (He could.)

But now Tom’s testosterone boils like an acid storm, frying his brain livid.

He’s worked out a few things from Old Man Riddle’s not-so-secret files.

The employee coded in his father’s notes as “Wormtail” was not the only crony involved with the Potter fiasco. There was another Nagini employee found dead at the scene. Bodies mean forensic identification, and that means “Hampstead” would need to deal with it.

Only it would seem that this paper trail was too dangerous to leave loose ends.

Tom takes a tide-smoothed stone in his hand and sends it skimming across the water’s surface.

Wormtail offered Riddle Sr. damning collateral in exchange for staying alive. Hampstead seemed less lucky, vanishing from the record entirely after that. 

His father made a note in the margin of this entry, just a series of digits.

The number led Tom to a cold murder file in 1999.

Geoff Granger.

Killed in his own dentistry practice. The case files said the man’s wife and daughter found him.

Tom hurls a stone into the water, the spray skirting upwards.

What are the chances?

His father ended hers.

Which means the reason he has everything is because she has nothing. 

Had Granger lived to divulge the identity of the John Doe at the Potters’ pier, Nagini and all of its drug-importing underdealings would be finished.

Tom imagines their roles reversed: his father in jail without a penny to his name and his little treasure in a brand new house on the south Sound, her dentist parents flourishing in their practice.

The thought almost dizzies him, only he knows this was never a real possibility.

Some people are born to be at the helm of a ruthless vessel of capitalism, tearing through anyone in their way. Others lose what tiny business they have because they’re always bending to every demand made of them by someone with a stronger spine.

Her fate begins and ends with him.

“Mr. Tom?”

He turns around.

Dobby stands on the bulkhead, his thumbs twisting around each other in dead giveaway that his father is in another foaming rage.

“Mr. Riddle is asking Dobby to be fetching you, sir.”

“What does he want?”

Tom sends another stone chipping its way across the bay.

“Dobby isn’t knowing.”

Inside, Riddle Sr. stands at the kitchen counter, poring over a stapled document in his hand, its read pages hanging from the creased corner.

Tom folds his arms.

“You wanted something?” 

“These reports.” His father slaps the papers onto the granite countertop. “Your margins are far too aggressive. I’ve told you precisely the rates I want Beringer to record and over half of these accounts have padded ten to fifteen percent above that. Do you understand what would happen if that company was audited?”

“I imagine Beringer’s accountants would have one hell of a time.” Tom serves up a malicious smirk, imagining the Weasleys in turmoil yet again. 

What a pleasant thought.

“I’m pulling you off all freight companies. Apparently you can’t be responsible for your schooling, your insipid debate and rowing and the like and keep up with your duties at the company.”

Tom scoffs.

“I bring more cash through and you punish me? You critique my methods when my bottom line is nearly 15% higher year over year? Haven’t you paid attention to the markets—lending is at an all time high and Beringer is now one of our top suppliers of housing materials. You honestly thought all of that growth was fake?”

Riddle Sr. steps closer to Tom, red creeping down his forehead along his salt-scattered coif of dark hair.

“I’m not the one to convince, the FTC watches all Nagini’s subsidiaries, and—”

“Oh come now, Commissioner Fudge is a loyal customer, he would never—”

“Flying too close to the sun isn’t the half of it! You deliberately disobeyed my order, you foolhardy child!”

“Says the man who roped his son into the money-laundering arm of his drug cartel!”

“Any part you play in my enterprise is at my discretion,” Riddle roars. “Have I made myself clear? Never forget that your mother was—“

“—A presumptuous intern, I know!” Spittle flies from Tom’s words. “You always conveniently leave out how you rap—“ 

His father’s knuckles meet Tom’s lips before he can react. There’s a flash as his teeth clack and Tom thinks of Riddle Sr.’s class ring.

He’s always understood why a man so unsentimental about education might wear it.

Tom spits blood on the counter.

His father won’t fire him or kick him out of the house.

He has too many company secrets now. 

“Keep your freight companies,” he says, sticky warmth trailing down his lip. “I make gold out of shit and you know it.”

The floor creaks, Riddle Sr. leans in and Tom smells cologne in the old man’s sweaty aura of anger.

“You’ll learn to stay in line, boy.”

Tom turns away.

“And another thing. Stay away from the Granger girl.”

Tom doesn’t even pause. 

His veins go icy and he keeps his steps smooth.

Tom’s anger takes the shape of a calendar, of neat phases, steps, materials to gather. Plausible deniability.

Tom climbs the stairs, muttering just loud enough,

“What Granger girl?”

The night after Tom gets his latest scans back, Hesper has trouble sleeping.

“It’s the chocolate,” Hermione moans, “she’s awake from the caffeine in my milk.”

“You had one slice of German chocolate cake with lunch, I hardly think the dosage would result in a relevant volume of caffeine.”

Tom sits on the edge of the bed, bouncing Hesper the way she likes: with her little head cradled in the palms of his big hands and balanced on one knee which vibrates like he’s sitting at a desk in a dull class.

Still, she fusses.

“I know it’s something I ate, she was sleeping perfectly last week and I had only… well, I suppose I had…”

“Not everything is your fault, angel,” Tom says, patient yet final. 

Emotion knots in her throat.

He notices.

“Treasure, you can’t control everything.”

Gray blankets the room, with just a small nightlight casting gentle yellow underneath his face.

Hesper waves her tiny arms, pedaling with indignation. Her face wrenches up like a cross little raisin.

Hot tears slip down Hermione’s cheeks.

Her pajama blouse hangs unbuttoned and open, her oversupply pushing a feverish tightness in her breasts. They’ve already been through two rounds of change-feed-hush but the baby refuses to sleep.

All of this magnifies the news from the scans, from a punch in the gut to a stab in the heart.

Tom stands, tucking Hesper against his shoulder. His body finds that soothing rhythm every human parent finds in these moments of desperation.

His tumor is the same as before.

Six weeks and the miracle drug hasn’t even moved the needle a millimeter.

“This is no reason to be disappointed,” Dr. Bones said on the phone earlier. “Many test subjects with positive outcomes don’t experience results immediately.”

“But how is that helpful when a papillary anaplastic carcinoma can grow in days?!” Hermione snapped.

“The fact that it hasn’t grown is really good news, Mrs. Riddle.”

But Hermione wonders. Dread lurks in her mind.

Hesper’s scuffing cries slow to a whimper, then to even breathing.

Tom bounces her another fifteen minutes before risking the bassinet.

Hermione’s tears flood again when he places his daughter in her bed with a heart-wrenching linger of his lips on her downy head.

One girl soothed, Tom wastes no time crossing the dark room to the rocking chair.

He gathers Hermione out of the padded seat and settles into it with her in his lap.

She rests her head on his shoulder, crumpling into exhausted tears.

“Shhhhhh,” Tom resumes his lulling sounds.

“Jesus, what a wreck I am,” Hermione whispers. “These stupid boobs. Insomnia. Useless drug trial. Fuck.”

“You dwell too much on me,” Tom says, his sternness tenderly hedged. 

“Yeah, well everything going on with me is run-of-the-mill new mom shit, meanwhile you… You’re…”

“I’m well enough, starlight. I’m here.”

He plants a steadying hand on her sternum.

“Meanwhile, your body sacrifices all day and night for my child. That’s a much greater cost, too much to compare.”

Hermione’s throat dries.

The way he looks up at her, venerating, worshiping, sends a bolt of electricity from her chest to her cunt.

He sweeps his thumb along the underwire of her bra, coasting his fingers like a breath around her sensitive fullness. The pad of his middle finger presses the fabric covering her nipple and pressure triples in her sensitive tip.

She gasps and grinds against his lap.

Tom unsnaps the cups of her bra, peeling them back like two large tulip petals and her bare breasts strain upward in furiously-full points.

“My poor little sweet,” he purrs. In the dark, his eyes gleam: feasting down at her naked breasts. “You always have so much to give, but you never ask in return.”

He tilts his head, looking at her like a provocation as his lips brush one stiffened peak.

“Oh…” Her spine buckles.

Hermione lets her head drop back, the tension in her breasts burning.

“Ask me,” he whispers, the movement of his mouth striking her nipple with delicious agony.

“Tom,” she mouths his name. Fire bursts between her legs. “If you would—”

He chooses the role of the starved man, wrapping his mouth soft and wet around the peak of her breast and drawing his teeth together until her nipple pangs. The sensation would be jarring, were it not for the soothing work of his tongue just where he bit.

He bites and sins and smooths it away, building pressure in her clit and in the point of her breast to pure fire.

She fishtails on his lap, her middle a lake of heat. 

Then, Tom swirls his tongue, nudging just the spot, and the dam breaks. She gushes for him and it’s like coming.

“Oh my god,” Hermione moans. Her breast throbs like a heartbeat.

Tom makes a low pleasure noise that reverberates deep in her flesh.

Gripping her waist, he swallows and her pussy aches for him. 

He drinks and her chest softens, first one side then the other. The tension eases and gives way to a surge of lust. She cants her hips and whines.

Her body is a sea of highs and lows, and Tom is the black hole pulling her chaos into sweet oblivion.

“Do you feel that, Hermione?” he rasps. “That’s all I’m here for, angel, to make you feel good. I’m here for you.”

Oh Tom. 

Moisture prickles behind her scrunched eyes.

How does he make himself so impossible to live without?

Sliding his other hand up the leg of her silk shorts, he teases the soft excess of her thigh. His fingertips are tinder on her skin, heat stoking up into the furnace of her pelvis.

His searching touch finds the dripping cleft between her legs and he plunges into her. Where his fingertips drag, lightning jolts her cunt.

“Ugh, yes…” she hisses.

She parts her legs on either side of his knees and grinds into his hand.

Hermione comes hard, like a plate shattering on a tile floor. 

Tom lifts her off his lap and lays her down onto the carpet. He strips off her clothes and runs his fingertips along the live-wire places on her hot skin.

“Stay there,” he says, getting up and opening a drawer.

Hermione watches him, still panting. Her back prickles with sweat against the rug’s grain.

She’s not sure what he’s doing until there’s a small clicking sound, then a low burr.

He kneels over her.

“Shut your eyes,” he whispers.

He clicks twice and the whirring sound pitches upward.

Her clit pulses with anticipation, every inch of her body waiting on him.

The vibrator kisses the soft dip of her neck and Hermione gasps.

“Keep them shut,” Tom’s deep voice scolds.

Slowly, with featherlight contact, he drags the pulsing vibrator down her collarbone and up the hill of her breast. She squirms with the contact, so tantalizingly buzzy and yet not where she wants it most.

The soft-thudding surface hits the peak of her breast and Hermione whines softly.

No sooner does her mouth open, when a familiar thick shaft shoves into her throat.

Her eyes fly open and she looks square between Tom’s legs, kneeling on either side of her ears.

Holy God, the man is sitting on her face, stuffing his dick in her mouth and teasing her trembling body to the point of excruciation.

How the fuck is she married to this man?

Tom cycles his hips in a fluid motion, fucking her mouth. She flattens her tongue for him, tears gushing from her eyes. The soft head of him drags down her throat.

He traces the vibrator down past her hips to the insides of her thighs and her knees start to quake. Her clit stings, angry to be touched. Thrumming with jealousy.

Tom pauses just at the edge where her leg meets her hip, mere inches from the right place.

“Suck harder, angel,” he purrs.

Hermione whines, hollowing her cheeks if it’s the last thing she does. 

“Ah, that’s it.”

She rocks her head up and down, taking him deeper, her jaw opening wider for him. With frenzied lust, she swirls her tongue and swallows his tip. 

His hips tense.

He grinds out,

“Good girl.”

The burring touches the cleft between her legs with the voltage of a lightning bolt.

Hermione screams around Tom’s cock.

“Hush,” he chuckles, pistoning his shaft deeper in her throat.

He stirs the vibrator in and up against her clit, sweeping the fiery apex of her until her embers crackle, then roar. Her brink comes closer then slides back, then draws nearer still.

She’s thrashing under him.

Tears pour down her face, Tom hammers her mouth and grunts.

Just as he spills down her throat, he revs the vibrator into her clit and her senses burst with molten light. Heat ripples from her pelvis to the very tips of her fingers and then collapses back in wave after wave after wave.

Moments later, they’re lying side by side, his six to her nine. They pant up at the ceiling.

Tom clasps her hand.

“You keep saying stuff,” Hermione says, her voice shaky, “like about how I do too much and give too much.”

His grip tightens.

She sniffs.

“I’m just doing it for you.”

“Of course, Mr. Fudge, I want you to think of me as a seamless replacement for my father. You’re still dealing with Tom Riddle at the head of Nagini.”

Tom leans back in the office chair, watching through the office window the waves as they foam eagerly onto the beach.

“Yes, sepsis is a very dangerous condition, please keep my father in your prayers. Goodbye.”

Tom crosses the last name off his list.

Well, that was fairly straightforward.

Every liability seems well in hand, and he didn’t even need to take more extreme measures to win over the board, the shareholders and all the ‘sensitive accounts’.

That’s the thing about having all the cards. No one at this level of business trusts the others enough to put the information together and call his bluff. Plus, the old cunts just don’t give a shit.

Tom clicks on the little hanging lightbulb and trots down the stairs to the cool, musty basement.

His father lifts his head, the side of his face purple as rotting fruit.

Clasping his hands behind his back, Tom paces around the chair where Riddle Sr. is strapped down with duct tape.

“Did you know the board just voted me in as president of the company today?” he asks. “Imagine that! They chose a high schooler to replace you. That was some canny foresight on your part, lying to them about my age in case they asked questions about my employment.”

Red fills the space between Riddle Sr.’s bloody forehead and the tape covering his mouth. His veiny eyes go wild.

Tom draws the butcher knife from his jacket, flipping it neatly in his hand.

“Some of those doddering silverheads on the board have grandchildren in my grade, but do they give a rat’s ass about junior’s world? No. Not in the least.”

He lines the knife up along the scabbing, meat-caked furrows cut into his father’s thighs. With a squelching scrape, he slices into the skin. The blade sticks in the bone’s wood-like give.

Fascinating.

“You know, I’ve seen one or two board members at my debate tournaments or rowing matches, do you know what they’re doing?” He flicks his gaze up from the skirting blood to his father’s eyes. “They’re glued to their blackberries.”

Tom shakes his head with a tsk tsk.

“I would point out their blindness, how the emperor has no clothes, et cetera. But we both know I’m brilliant. You’ve watched me beguile entire staffs into selling me on how they’re going to make me more money.”

He rocks the knife loose from where it sticks wedged into the bone and his father gives a thin grunt.

Riddle Sr.’s shoulders brace, his left lower lid trembling with effort not to give Tom the satisfaction of  reacting.

Always the tough character, are we?

Let’s see how much you can take.

With the tip of the bloody knife, Tom neatly slices the button threads on his father’s tattered shirt, flicking aside each button with a deft twist. 

He runs the blade down the stained white tee underneath, ripping it aside to reveal the Spartan planks of his father’s body dusted with coarse, steel hairs.

Several punctures, aimed carefully for the rib bones, mar the man’s sides, but Tom has so much more planned now that he has the monster’s underbelly exposed.

“I’m better than you, father,” he says. “Do you want to know why?”

He touches the tip of the knife to Riddle Sr.’s collar bone, leaning closer, his voice dropping to nearly a whisper. 

“You noticed a woman who worshiped your power and you saw her as nothing more than a presumptuous intern. You used and disposed of her. Meanwhile, I have taught myself how to cultivate a woman’s adoration and turn it into a weapon.”

His tongue curls inside his mouth as he watches himself puncture the hoary skin. The two halves of his father’s chest peel aside like a zipper as he draws slowly, so slowly down the middle.

Riddle Sr. screams into the duct tape.

The knife tears easily through the wet fabric of him, juddering down at the pubic bone.

Tom nudges aside the open halves of skin and inspects the wet coils of soft-gurling organs pulsing against the fascia’s thin, white webbing.

Glorious.

Riddle Sr. has passed out, his head lolling to one side.

Tom slaps him.

“Wake up, old man.”

Thickly, his father rouses.

His voice is a burst of fevered sorrow against his taped lips. 

Riddle’s organs bulge from between the bloody curtain of sliced skin and muscle.

Tom nudges one of the steaming water balloons with the tip of his knife. He really should have been a surgeon.

But, of course, surgeons need college.

Something gives inside Riddle’s body cavity and a great pinkish-red gush spurts from the open wound.

Perhaps the cut wasn’t as clean as he thought.

Ah well.

Probably only moments left now.

Tom lifts his father’s chin with the edge of his knife.

He knows Riddle is no longer seeing. The man’s gaze films over, crazed with pain and fear and life draining out of him.

“Merope Gaunt would have loved you,” Tom says. “Do you know what you could have accomplished with the devotion of a woman as loyal as her?”

Leaning with his lips inches from his father’s ear, he whispers.

“You’ll never find out.” He smiles. “But I will.” 

Rearing back, he plunges the knife into his father’s eye, forever stilling that ruthless, back-stabbing, eternally-indifferent mind.

That evening, after Tom has parked his boat, put away the extra crab-trap weights and taken a long, pleasant shower, he gets into his Bugatti and drives down to the car wash.

The sun is fading when he pulls in, a neon sign blinking overhead.

She’s the last one on shift.

Hermione Granger watches him wheel around the parking lot, holding her place in the car wash bay. 

Not moving. 

Soapy water drips from the sponge in her hand.

Tom puts a foot on the brake, his heartbeat speeding up like a freight train.

He rolls down his window.

“Standard or double wash?” she says, brushing back a damp curl from her forehead.

It’s unusual to see her hair piled atop her head in a bun, as if she hates confining her wild hair as much as her spirit.

Tom draws in a slow breath.

“What’s the difference between a standard and a double wash?”

“Not much, honestly. I’m supposed to go over the back twice but it doesn’t make much of a difference. You get an air freshener though.”

“Six extra dollars seems like a lot for an air freshener.” 

He gestures to the sign with the prices listed.

She turns away but he knows she’s rolling her eyes.

Lust lights up inside him. 

His girl looks so put out , he could bite his fist.

She grasps a long sprayer hose attached to the wall and tests the pressure with a loud hiss.

“So, standard, then?”

He meets her impatient glare, drinking her in. His pause is just a beat long enough for a hint of warmth to curl on the edge of his mouth. Her gaze tightens.

He doesn’t have her interest yet.

“I’ll take the air freshener.”

She nods and takes his cash, motioning for him to roll up his window.

Tom studies her movements as she paints the car with suds. The beads of water catching the sunset are a bokeh of pink, ochre and violet; her body is a sun-golden blur.

She picks up her sponge.

Tom rolls down his window.

He untwists a little gold wrapper.

“Butterscotch?”

Hermione pauses. 

“Uh, sure.”

She wipes a hand on her low-cut jean shorts.

Tom’s cock muscles against the front of his slacks.

He curses every customer who’s seen her in this triangle bikini top.

He wants to rip out every eye who’s beheld the way the curves of her breasts bounce when she walks. The way her freckled waist dips down to a v that sinks beneath the waistband of her shorts. 

Her jeweled belly ring winks at him. 

He’s going to sink his teeth into her pretty abs, right above that glittering eye. He’s waited years, now all he needs is five minutes.

Just watch.

She steps up to his window and he tips the bag of Werther's Originals, dropping one shiny wrapper into her open palm.

He puts his own into his mouth, the creamy, false-sweetness melting on his tongue. The large candy clicks against his teeth as he shoves it in his cheek.

For this part, he didn’t script himself.

“My father loved these,” he says. “I don’t even actually like them.”

She’s scrubbing the side of his car, but in the mirror he sees her brows twitch.

She takes the bait. 

“You know what, they’re not even that good.” 

There’s that little smile.

“My dad would get them every time we stopped at a gas station, though,” she says. “Now it feels weird if I get gas and don’t buy butterscotch.”

“Not the worst thing he could pass along, I suppose,” he says.

She glances at his side mirror and catches his eye.

“I guess not.”

Tom waits.

He twirls the candy over his tongue, the tension twisting in him.

Come on, starlight.

“So, are you doing another AP english class this fall?” she asks. Her voice pitched to sound casual. Not too interested. Like she’s hiding her true feelings.

Pleasure blooms in his chest.

“I am, American Literature,” he replies. 

“Me too.”

I know, angel. 

Tom leans forward in his seat.

“I didn’t think you recognized me,” he says, hinting at the theme burned so searingly in him, these words almost physically hurt him to say.

She shoots him an incredulous look, her politeness dropping like a fallen mask.

“Are you serious? You argue with me in every class,” she says with a barb in her voice, “of course I know who you are.”

Tom bites hard on his tongue.

Vexing you is as close as I could get to fucking you.

The leather of his seat creaks as he adjusts, trying to regain control.

“Oh,” he says, twisting his lips against the threat of a wicked grin.

She scrubs more furiously.

“Oh what?”

“You didn’t like it.”

Her scoff reminds him of the indignant bark of a creature in heat.

“Well, of course I didn’t like it, more than once you called my analyses ‘ill wrought’ or ‘misguided’! You always corrected me or refined my point with your own unsolicited opinion! You’re kind of an ass!”

Desire fizzes down his spine and pulses in his hardened cock.

She is perfection.

“I had no idea, Granger,” he says. “For my part, I found you to be the only one interesting enough to intellectually spar with.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” 

She moves to the tail of the car, still yelling.

“Like, ‘Oh, when he’s a jerk to you, he’s actually paying you a compliment.’ Nobody believes that tired, sexist bullshit anymore!” she says.

He can see her in his rearview mirror, but she can’t see him through the tinted glass. 

She glances every other moment at his dark shadow inside the car, her mouth moving silently in a series of curses.

Tom chuckles to himself.

This is why planning his words made no sense: she is a lightning rod, but he is made for her. His chest tugs like a hook set in her angry little body.

They’re moments away now.

He rolls down the passenger window when she starts scrubbing the far side.

“You know, your car will never get clean if you keep rolling down windows.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he calls. “If you let me take you out, I promise to stop giving better answers than you.”

He sinks his teeth into his lower lip.

Her sponges drop from the car and she appears at the passenger-side window, her face haloed with frizz. Red pours into her cheek with disbelief.

Tom flashes her his most roguish smile.

“If you think I—” she stutters, “that I would ever consider—“

Tom pulls the butterscotch out of his cheek and lines it up on the flat of his tongue.

He smiles at her, sweet as a martyr.

Then, as if he’s about to say something that will change her mind, he inhales.

With a wheezing sound, the butterscotch lodges deep in his throat.

“—I mean, without even an apology!” she continues.

Tom’s eyes water.

He beats his fist against his chest, blinking down at the steering wheel.

Fucking hell, this candy scratches like the devil.

“You don’t even bother to explain yourself, it’s just ‘boom: go out with me’?”

Tom looks up at her, sweat starting to form on his forehead. 

His lungs burn.

She’s still laying into him.

Ah, my treasure. You are fire.

His body begins to swarm with physical alarms, the edges of his vision prickles with grainy darkness. 

He puts his hand to his throat.

“…That, at least, would have made sense. Tom?”

His eyes meet hers and the blood drains from her face.

“Shit!”

There’s a scrambling of footsteps, his door pops open and small arms haul him out of the Bugatti.

“Oh my god, okay…!”

She tumbles with him into the pool of sudsy water on the concrete, her body curved around his, her scent thick on his neck. 

Her arms around him are practiced and sure. Digging into his rib cage from below, her fists leverage just the right force.

“Come on, Tom, breathe for me! Breathe!”

The butterscotch dislodges and Tom gasps. His adrenaline at her touch electrifies him like cocaine.

When he folds back in her arms, her limbs go shaky, her voice quavers.

“What the fuck, you idiot! You scared the living shit out of me!”

He’s still breathing like a racehorse, a torn wheezing coming from his throat.

Her disheveled hair tilts to one side and her hazel eyes rim with red, her lip trembling. 

She is so beautiful.

Tom tries to form words, but he didn’t anticipate losing his voice.

Damn.

Forgoing his carefully-prepared speech, he drifts his hand to her face, cupping her cheek. 

She shuts her eyes, shedding big tears.

Clarity snaps in his brain. 

While her emotional attachment is easy to decode through her scolding and snobbish arguing, this fragile expression shows him something new.

She can’t bear to lose anyone. 

But it’s more than that.

She thinks that when someone disappears from her life, it’s her fault.

Sitting up, Tom shifts the dynamic, pulling her close to him like a child. 

When she looks up into his face, the hesitation is gone.

The wall breaks.

Tom takes hold of her chin and tilts it just so. Then slowly, savoring their tense breaths, he covers her mouth with his lips.

You’re home now, starlight.

Hermione murmurs a sigh that sounds like relief, opening for him. Her mouth tastes like watermelon lip gloss, innocently youthful against the old-fashioned flavor on his own tongue. 

He kisses her like she is the air he was missing.

She ignites under his passion, answering fire for fire. 

Sliding her knees around his hips, she rubs the rough seam of her shorts up and down the tented fly of his slacks. Her greed astounds him.

So this is what you were thinking about, writhing alone in your bed.

A wolfish murmur burrs in his chest.

Their bodies chase the same rhythm as their debates. For each of her movements he presses a counterpoint, pushing her toward a gorgeous frenzy against him.

Tom slides his grip down from her shoulders, settling his hands on her bare waist. He traces those perfect divots in her hips and a brilliant zing of arousal jolts through him.

If she keeps raking his hair like this, if she keeps pouring herself into every delirious kiss… 

She reaches for his belt, but he catches both her wrists.

His lips curl against her mouth with a snake’s smile.

“Slowly, angel,” he rasps like a hanged man, “I want to savor you.”

Hermione pulls back from him, blinking, not quite waking up.

Tom doesn’t want her in a fevered moment of lust.

He wants so much more.

“Come with me,” he says.

He pulls one of her hands up to his lips and kisses the paper-thin skin of her wrist.

Just there, she smells like sunlight and soap.

His girl hesitates, but only for a moment.

“Alright,” she says, a flicker of trust in her wide eyes.

It’s like she shocked his veins.

Yes, give over to me.

Minutes later, the sprayers are shut off, the neon light is dim. The last rays of evening streak across the ultramarine-soaked sky.

Tom zooms off into the night with his prize, curled up beside him in the front passenger’s seat.

They reminisce over their past quarrels, their voices low with desire.

“Of course you were right about Catcher in the Rye , Granger,” He murmurs, so generously gifting her this concession as he wraps his possessive hand around her thigh. “Holden Caulfield is a token misogynist.”

“I know, right? The way he tries to control his sister! Gross!”

Her smirk effuses with delight.

Tick, check, tick, he measures how well he checks off her boxes by the fade of apprehension under her skin. She pulls closer to him.

At the drive in, The Phantom of the Opera plays on the big screen, but they don’t watch. They barely notice the swells and drifts of the movie’s orchestra: it’s the soundtrack behind their own fervent scene.

The Bugatti’s center console keeps their hips apart, drawing out the exploration phase into a cartography expedition of her body, a master class of her paces.

She has a faint mole he didn’t know about just below her shoulder blade. Her ribs are darlingly ticklish, good God. When he brushes the inside of her thigh, she reacts infinitely different than when she does it to herself.

Because it's him.

Elation is like helium in Tom’s chest, he might as well be floating to the ceiling.

It’s her pliable little breast in his palm, her neck under his teeth, her little squeals and mews as he takes teasing swipes at the soaking seam of her shorts.

All of it is a thousand times more gratifying than the grainy videos, or sitting under her cracked window in the summer.

He’s the one unraveling her now.

…Down we plunge to the prison of my mind…

Hermione grazes her sweet little hand over the tent in his trousers.

Her eyes open, shining in the dark like innocent lights.

“Want me to…?”

She touches the fabric separating her from his hot, pulsing length and Tom holds back a gasp, hissing instead.

He gives her a stern shake of his head.

“You first,” he whispers, his pulse pounding.

Her lashes drop by half, a feminine sound humming in the back of her throat.

Hermione unsnaps her shorts and shimmies them down to her ankles.

The matched bottoms to her bikini top aren’t there.

Tom sucks in a raw breath, shutting his eyes for a moment and reeling back the powerful swell of his orgasm. 

Not yet!

He grits his teeth.

She pulls her knees apart, clearly trying to kill him.

Between the marble sheen of her thighs, her downy lips part and the pink cleft of her spreads with delicate glistening threads.

“Holy Mother of God…” breathes Tom, who has never been religious a day in his life.

His heart drums like everything has been building to this moment.

…Silently the senses abandon their defenses…

“Well?” she says. “Are you going to touch me?”

Tom rouses, his lips parting in shock.

She expects him to just dive in without permission?

Who is this girl?

“Granger, I’ve never seen such a perfect pussy.” His raspy voice drops a note deeper. “You’ll thank me to take a moment of reverence before I ruin it.”

Hermione swallows hard, a spark of lust flashing in her features.

Leaning one elbow casual-as-you-please on the middle console, he brushes the back of his fingers up the coarse down of her lips. She shudders.

Slowly, memorizing the look on her face, he breaches her for the first time.

She is exquisite.

Her pussy grips him with every fierceness he expected from her.

He narrows his gaze to keep his eyes from rolling back.

Swirling his fingers inside, he uses her spend to slide all around the mouth of her slit. She sighs and squirms, thrusting herself into his hand.

All the books suggest that this is a good sign, but he decides he wants to hear it for himself.

“You like that?” he says.

“Ung…!” she mewls pathetically. “Uh-huh!”

With another careening high, Tom thinks perhaps all the obsessive, manipulative shades of his personality were made for the sole purpose of pleasuring his woman.

He was born for this.

“Tip your seat back,” he commands.

When she’s reclining, he pushes her knees apart further and works a steady rhythm around her clit. 

The moment her sawing breaths turn to gasps, he leans over, perpendicular to her. 

Oh Christ. Jesus fucking God.

The flickering screen illuminates the red flower of her: her dripping petals, the swollen tip of her clit peeking shyly from its hood. 

He’s imagined this moment a thousand times, his own cock in his fist.

The music swells and he channels every ounce of his adoration into his tongue on her clit.

…There will never be a day I won’t think of you…

“Y-yes, oh yes just there,” she cries.

She’s over the edge and spasming with desperate cries, and he’s not even finished enjoying the noises he gets out of her.

So he keeps going.

Tom thrusts his fingers into her pussy and strums the apricot-shell surface just inside, licking and sucking her clit all the while. If he does this right…maybe…

Her knees start to shake. Her ass squirms on the seat leather and her cries pitch upward.

She’s coming again, crushing his fingers and howling like a madwoman.

A pool of warmth fills his hand and he grins against her snatch like a crocodile.

“Oh my God!”

She sits up looking gorgeously wrecked. With a panicked expression, she surveys the dark stain on his leather seat.

“That’s not what you think it is,” she pants, embarrassment and arousal giving her bare skin the most beautiful sheen.

Tom wipes his Cheshire smile with the cuff of his shirt.

“I know what it is,” he says, ever the calm to her storm. “I made you do that, my girl. And I’ll do it again.”

She gives him a keen look.

“How do you know all this? I’ve come twice and your dick isn’t even wet.”

“I’m a good student,” he replies. (The answer is books and porn, made by women.)

“Yeah…” She rolls her eyes. “But like, I’ve never noticed you with a girlfriend…”

Oh Tom could cream himself right here.

She noticed him. How the devil did she hide the fact that she noticed him?!

“I haven’t had the time for one,” he says evenly.

“Just hookups then?” she asks, almost sounding shy.

Starlight—no! Are you jealous?!

Tom is tempted to toy with her jealousy, but in the end, the truth is just too good.

“I’m not really into hookups.” He shrugs.

“Okay…so, wait! You’ve never?” Her eyes go wide.

He gives his head a little shake, no.

“You’re really a…?”

“An archaic concept, don’t you think?” Tom can’t resist.

“Well sure…” She flushes. Her shock is just too delicious. “But like, you waited this long, don’t you want your first time to be with a girlfriend or something?”

You are, treasure. You just don’t know it yet.

Tom smooths his hand behind her hair, holding her neck. 

Her body is arcs of magenta and gold, illuminated by the screen.

“Starlight,” he begins, and her pupils blow dark like black glass, “I haven’t been interested in other girls, because I wanted you.”

Her brows draw, as if turning his words over from several angles.

It’s too much too soon, he knows, but at the same time she’s never had someone offer themselves to her undivided—in any sense.

This is why Tom turned down chances to experiment on lesser females. (Besides the fact that he is repulsed by his whining peers, and most people in general.) 

He knew she’d be struck by the thought of someone denying themselves for her, instead of requiring her to deny herself like everyone else does.

What he didn’t anticipate, however, is that she wouldn’t know what to do with him.

“Wow,” she hums, pulling back. “This is kind of a lot of pressure.”

“Not at all. Your pleasure is mine, angel,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. There’s a little rattle at the end of her exhale, betraying her body’s victory over her mind. 

It occurs to Tom that her deliberate movements, the way her hips rise to his mouth with a pure assurance, is unlike the way she takes up space in school, or even in her home.

Underneath him, her body leads her. There is no performance or hesitating shyness, as if anything below her neck is exempt from the fine mesh she uses to dither over every decision.

Tom adores this.

He makes her come again before the credits roll.

The screen flickers off, the lot empties and he brings her to screaming twice more.

His desire stabs like a knife between his legs, but he’s still not had enough of her astonishing loveliness when she breaks apart for him again.

They drive out to a moonlit lake and pile up eiderdown comforters at the end of a rocking pier.

“You drive around with a bunch of spendy bedding in your car?” she says.

“Just picked them up from the dry cleaner’s,” he deflects.

Kneeling in the cloud of spun-sugar softness, she unzips his slacks.

“Ready?” she says, her voice like music among the insects singing from the shore rushes.

What an adorable question.

“I am,” he replies on behalf of the last 1,198 days. Or maybe his whole life.

The moment she touches his cock, Tom knows it’s all been worth it. 

Through dragon-slitted eyes, he watches her face as she explores his hardened length.

Her eagerness strikes him as delightfully selfish: pure wanton desire, solely for her own pleasure. In Tom she finds no obligation, no duty, just his big, thick cock: poised to obliterate her taste for any other.

Hermione wraps her hand around him and pumps.

“Good girl,” he hisses.

Her sweet lashes widen, her lips parting with aroused shock.

“That’s right.” He gives her a benevolent look. “You’re my perfect girl, grasping my cock like you’re desperate for me.”

In the moonlight, a brilliant sheen rises to her skin. Her pupils go dark as the lake.

You love it when I see you, starlight.

His girl gorges herself on his praise, her throat swallowing, choking, open like a black hole for his every tender word. She is such a darling little slut for his esteem, blossoming for him as he fucks her mouth.

He nearly spills into her, but holds back with every fiber of his restraint.

The sun cracks in candy-pink filaments over the jagged Cascades, painting gauzy gold across her naked body. Tom pulls out of her mouth and pushes her onto her back.

He plants his hands on either side of her head.

“I want you to feel more than just needed, my girl,” he says hoarsely, nosing aside her hair. “I’m taking you because I want you. You are wanted.”

“Uh-huh,” she coos back.

She blinks up at him, gauzy-eyed like her arousal makes his words sound a thousand miles away.

Nevermind then, starlight, I’ll show you.

With a gritty inhale, he lines up with her and slides home, inch by heart-wrenching inch. 

Tom gasps; his veil torn with dizzying awe.

She grips him dearly, taking him with a priceless little squeak. 

With a wry hitch of his lips, he imagines himself carving a place inside her, making his home forever.

You are mine.

He pistons his hips, sliding out and back like he wants only to marry their bodies again and again. 

His girl guides her pelvis to meet him, her knees lolling apart with the prettiest sound from the back of her throat. She is killing him.

Tom’s heart hammers against his chest like any moment it could burst out and go skipping across the lake.

He drills into her soft-clenching warmth, then grinds his docked cock inside, crushing her clit. Her soft noises ratchet up to unhindered cries.

Power builds at the base of his spine as her movements escalate. She starts hiccupping her release in darling chokes as the rush of static bursts from his pelvis, whiting-out all senses. He spends into her like their mingling bliss will fuse them forever.

He returns to himself with a hot rush of euphoria, panting beside her, one of her curls in his mouth and his hand flat over her thudding heart.

Hermione kisses him, curling herself sweetly against the broadness of his chest. Offering herself to hide in his shelter. Contentment purrs in her.

So this is losing one’s virginity? Strange, it feels like gaining the world.

Eventually, the dark curiosity wins again. 

Hermione opens the browser and finds herself retracing her way back into the bowels of Fred Hutchison’s testing database. 

It’s 3:45 a.m.

When she glanced at Tom after putting Hesper back to sleep, he was out, with one arm flung over his forehead. Pretty cute, but weird that his shoulder doesn’t fall asleep or something. 

She crept to her office and spent the next hour breaking back into the clinical trial.

Just to check.

The thought has been gnawing at her when she’s doing the dishes, when she’s rocking Hesper, when she’s driving back from baby yoga.

What if there was some kind of mix-up or mistake?

Could it be that Tom is getting the placebo instead of the drug meant to save him?

What if the hospital staff had some kind of physical document that they noticed was out of alignment with the digital version and switched him back?

A quick peek won’t hurt.

The sin has already been committed, now she’s just following up to make sure—

What in the living hell???

Her guts jolt into her throat.

#479268/CONTROL

Three feelings bloom in her chest at the same time. 

First: validation that she knew something was off, second: horror that her Tom has been deprived of the drug that will keep him alive, and third: a storming burst of vigor to fix this shit immediately.

Then, panic hits her like a brick. 

Did Fred Hutch’s IT notice a breach in their system?

Even with shell IP addresses, Hermione could possibly be traced if security knew what to look for.

Paranoia prickles over her skin with a wave of goosebumps.

She has to change it back, but not here.

Hermione crawls back into bed, a sheen of sweat sticking her skin to the sheets.

Tom stirs beside her with a gruff murmur.

She lays there, watching the night slowly fade to morning on his dreamy, guileless face.

By the time his dark lashes slowly flit open, she has a plan.

Two weeks later, all the pieces are in place.

“My, you look nice.”

Tom scans her up and down, sipping his coffee.

“I just wanted to look professional in case I got to meet the speaker,” Hermione says, her heels clacking on the hardwood.

“Perhaps you’ll seduce this speaker,” he says, crowding her back against the counter, her ass biting into the granite. “How can those computer-science types resist such a clever beauty after years hunched over crusted keyboards?”

He grinds against her, his knee pushing the hem of her skirt up to indecent heights.

“Ugh! A rude stereotype!” she says with a little gasp of arousal.

She pushes Tom aside with a quick kiss and grabs her purse.

“I’ll be back before 3:00,” she says.

He regards her with a penetrating expression.

“When you head back, be sure to take—”

“—South 405, I know,” she cuts in.

There’s a beat when his face softens, and it occurs to her that his bossy driving directions are a quiet I love you. 

Why didn’t she notice that before?

Her chest pulses like an open wound.

“See you later,” she says, sliding up against him one more time.

“See you,” his chest rumbles.

They kiss and her pulse triples its speed.

This has to work.

When she pulls up to Fred Hutch, her heart rate still hasn’t slowed.

Hermione is not a liar.

So this is going to be extremely difficult.

“Millicent Bulstrode?” the shiny HR administrator greets her with that fake Monday chipperness.

“Yup,” Hermione says, following the woman to a back room full of brand new Dell computers.

She sits through an hour of onboarding for her new IT internship, tapping her nails on her knee and nearly bolting for the door twice.

Fucking finally, the bubbly HR administrator parks her in front of a computer and leaves her sitting alone with a pair of headphones. And an open ventricle to the entire building’s network.

The irony that the hour-long video she’s supposed to watch is about privacy and security is not lost on Hermione. She opens another terminal and plunges into the server.

The clinical trial database is even easier to access here. 

God, this place needs better security.

It takes her forty minutes to mimic the access chain so it looks like her precious #479268 was always in Group #3. The beauty of a double-blind study is that whoever has been inputting Tom’s scan results and data points into his file will never know he changed groups several times.

This thought makes Hermione wonder if she could possibly identify who changed Tom back to the control group.

She opens the network’s source code and peels through its shifting architecture.

The back of her neck prickles.

Something isn’t right.

There’s twenty minutes left on the video. Bubbles will be coming back soon.

Hermione crouches over the keyboard, cold sweat trailing down the back of her starched shirt.

The first time she catches the token, her heart stops cold.

/scabbers/

Holy fucking God.

Anger jolts through her body like a hot knife.

It’s another RAT hack.

Latching onto an IP address, she sources it.

718 East 54th Ave, Tacoma.

“WHAT THE FUCK, TOM!”

There’s a beat of silence in the open office and a dozen glances shoot in her direction, but Hermione doesn’t even bother shrinking down in her cubicle.

With a snarl, she builds a search process looking for every digital file stemming from Pettigrew’s RAT, and the rows and rows of results send waves of horror down her spine.

He’s been slipping page after page into Tom’s digital cancer treatment file: scans, bloodwork results, chemo records…

The monitor swims in front of her eyes.

Hermione stops typing and puts her head between her knees.

The truth clarifies, like the shape of her shoes growing sharp again in her vision.

Rage pounds in her head like a migraine.

She sits up and studies the details.

A quick google search shows there’s no Dr. Rufus Scrimgeour.

The man doesn’t even exist.

But Tom’s surgery! It was real! 

He has a scar, and takes medication to replace the function of his thyroid every day!

She digs into a different part of the hospital and finds a data-sharing access canal into Seattle General’s files. When she opens the surgical notes, her throat constricts.

He really removed his thyroid. 

Pettigrew uploaded a bunch of phony test results showing hypothyroidism, and a real surgeon (with an actual footprint online) removed the organ on the day she sat in his hospital room. 

She squints at the time stamp.

His surgery was over and he woke up long before she remembers them wheeling him back into her room.

The edges of her vision go dark with rage.

That motherfucking liar. 

Oh, he’s sick alright, but the disease is something far more unpredictable than cancer.

This man is unfathomably broken.

Hermione clicks out of her terminals, wipes her recent activity and gets up from the desk, shaking.

On the hallway out, the HR administrator calls to her, but she doesn’t listen.

She jumps into her Lexus and rips out of the parking lot, half blinded by wrath.

On South 405, her anger becomes a feral, animal thing.

She grips the steering wheel and shrieks like a demon.

Tom never had cancer.

It was all a lie.

Tom scans the labels. 

Advil. Tylenol. Aspirin.

He lingers his hand on the grocery aisle’s rack, leaning in. To anyone passing by he looks like someone very scrupulous about getting a deal on painkillers.

He can hardly breathe.

“I know it’s totally out of your way, I’m so sorry to even ask,” comes that voice he’s been aching to hear.

Through a gap in the store’s shitty aisles, a mess of curls flashes by.

“It’s just that my pinto is broken down at the moment.”

The snap of her flip flops pauses.

“Yes, I used to ride with Ron and Harry to school last year, but we sort of had a falling out over the summer.”

There’s a sigh.

She carries so goddamn much.

An elderly woman wanders down the drug aisle and Tom grabs an Ibuprofen bottle off the rack, inspecting the label.

“It was a disagreement, I guess. I don’t know. Sometimes Harry clings to his opinion of people and he takes attempts to change his mind as betrayal.”

Tom would snort, only his chest buzzes with an unfamiliar sense of unhinged anticipation.

“Thanks Luna. I really appreciate it. 7:15 is perfect. It’s just until I can get enough cash to take my car to the shop. Seriously, thank you.”

There’s a snap of her flip phone and then a tense stillness.

Tom shuts his eyes.

It’s clear she held it together for the phone call, now that she’s alone with her thoughts.

Her silence is like a wave of fear crashing into her.

You don’t have to be alone, angel, his chest beats painfully.

He’s tried nearly everything since she ended their summer fling.

Tom sent her an edible arrangement. He mailed her Husky tickets. He got UW’s dean of admissions to personally send her an invitation to apply with a waived entrance fee. 

He even called up low-self-esteem Daphne Greengrass and spent the entire first week of school letting her drape herself all over him in the halls, just to get Hermione’s attention.

Nothing worked.

She hustles from class to class, not giving him a second glance.

His girl won’t admit to herself what she wants.

It infuriates him.

Her breathing is slow and ragged on her side of the aisle.

There’s a few steps and the faint rattle of a little box.

Tom’s adrenaline surges.

She quickly turns and hastens back up the aisle.

He trails her, keeping his distance as she snatches several bags of chips and a box of Mint Milano cookies.

When she heads toward the youngest female cashier, Tom slips past the checkout area and pushes the women’s bathroom door open.

The blank fluorescent space is mercifully empty.

He pauses, calculating.

She’s anxious to find out, and too nervous to do it at home near her mother, so she’ll come in looking for the most private space. 

Unlike most people, his girl wouldn’t choose the ADA stall at the end of the row furthest from the door, wanting to leave it open for someone who needs it.

Quiet as a ghost, Tom opens the stall two to the right of the ADA stall and steps reproachfully onto the back water tank. Sinking down into a crouch, he presses his spine into the dingy wall.

Anything for you, my girl.

He leaves the door barely cracked as if no one is there.

The bathroom door squawks open and flip flops chase each other into the bathroom. Anxious steps echo off the tile.

He would know her by the slightest sound.

There’s a long, unspooling breath, as if to thank the deity of dingy washrooms that this one is empty.

The stall next to Tom bangs open and the lock slides with secretive haste.

A box rips, and staggered breaths whoosh.

There’s a tick, tick, tick of plastic against shaking hands and the hasty unfolding of paper.

The silence feels more raw than bleeding.

Tom’s teeth grit together like a vise.

He felt her slipping away before that night she turned him down.

There was a fight between her, Potter and Weasley.

What could those buffoons possibly offer her above Tom’s lavish—everything?

But more than her rift with her best friends, he sensed her begin to chafe at him.

Or rather, at the very act of receiving from him.

At first, she seemed to thrill at the downtown dinners, the Space Needle, the shopping at Westfield’s and the lazy evenings on his boat.

It was one night, when he was eating her out below deck while the waves nudged the bow of his Chris Craft and the salty breeze crept around them. He gave and gave without pause or the slightest hint of tiring and after her third peak she shut her legs, sitting up. 

A shadow of guilt hung over her lovely face.

“What is it, treasure?” he asked, stroking her thigh.

“Hmm. I’m just finished, and uh, I feel bad, but…”

“Never,” he bassed. “Feeling bad is the last thing I want for you.”

Her brows climbed her forehead.

“Hooooboy.” 

She puffed out a billow of air. 

“Do you believe me,” he asked, tenderly firm, “when I say I’m satisfied just touching you?”

“Yeah. I don’t know.”

She shrugged, an awkward look twisting her mouth.

“Tell me, starlight.”

“I just feel weirdly indebted to you in a way that I’ll never be able to balance out, you know? Even just you going down on me so much I’m too wiped out to reciprocate.”

“Why must you reciprocate? Why won’t you allow me the pleasure of giving to you?”

Her features narrowed with suspicion.

“It’s simple math, honestly. You’re giving me so much, it gives me the feeling you want a lot from me in return. More than I’m really ready to give.”

“I’ll never ask you for more,” he replied.

“Okay.” 

She looked at him like a skittish animal ready to bolt.

He smoothed his palm down her bare knee.

“More than anything, I want you to come to me, Hermione.”

But eventually, she did the opposite.

Tom bites the tip of his tongue as a stream hits the bowl in the stall next to him.

The hollow sound of a cap echoes, along with the tiny beep of an unfashionable watch.

Her breaths are coming hard and fast now.

Tom hangs his head, tightness coiling in him, constricting his lungs.

He listens to her try and grasp control of herself: whispering formulae.

The corner of his mouth curls ruefully.

Only she would find comfort in numbers.

The watch beeps, the rasp of her tension kicking up again.

In the long, frozen moment that follows, Tom holds his breath, his eyes pinched shut.

“Oh God…no!” comes a wavering cry. “Jesus fuck! No, no, no!”

Quiet sobs fill the bathroom and Tom’s soul pitches out of his body, soaring up somewhere in the heavens.

He covers his mouth, exhaling tremorously without a sound.

His heart beats inside of her right now.

In the thumping twist in his chest, he can feel the glow of them bound together in this tiny spark.

Her sniffs and jagged breaths whisper off the tile, and Tom burns with instinct to snatch up her frightened little body.

He would kill to comfort her now.

Silently, he places his hand on the wall between them.

Her crying slows: her shock and overwhelm hardening into something resolute.

There’s a rustle of jeans sliding up her thighs and the crumple of paper.

When she exits the stall, the door bangs, sending Tom’s stall door creaking dangerously open.

She’s at the sink to the far left, splashing water on her face.

Just one glance up at the mirror and she would glimpse the shadow lurking behind her.

Tom stays perfectly still, watching her.

Hermione plants her hands on either side of the sink and sucks in a grounding breath. She avoids the mirror, as if unwilling to look herself in the eye.

She leaves the bathroom with a cold, unflinching stride. 

His angel has always accepted her fate with such grit; it galls Tom that she will not ask herself what she wants. That she won’t consider herself enough to accept respite or help.

Or love.

When a solid minute has passed, Tom jumps down and pushes aside the wadded paper towels in the trash. 

There, at the bottom, sits the lonely test with two lines.

His chest gives an aching soft-kick. 

He fishes it out and tucks it in his pocket.

In the mirror he catches himself, seeing for the first time the reflection of Tom Riddle: a father. He tilts his chin, noticing how the last year has changed him into the image of his old man.

Tom knows his mother was obsessed with his father, that’s why she took whatever brutal attention he gave her and kept the child he forced on her, using it to trap him into marriage. 

He imagines his mother, calculating the fragility of his father’s carefully-crafted image. Turning his weakness into her strength. Tom doesn’t blame her at all. 

Now, the roles are reversed.

Tom has studied his girl and he knows her pressure points, just as he learned the tells of her body. He is his mother, the manipulator: dissecting his beloved’s psyche to find a way in. He is his father, the rapist: glossing over the discussion or even thought of protection.

There is no other way, he tells himself. 

Hermione won’t notice anyone unless they need her, least of all herself.

Tom knows of a surefire way to get her to pay attention to her body, her perfect flesh that’s drawn to him like a moth to the flame. Put someone more vulnerable than her in there.

And what better way to bind her to him than a helpless being that shares his blood?

He follows his mother’s wisdom: a baby really does change everything.

With this forever link, he’ll save her by giving her someone to save.

Tom will let her play the hero as often as she likes.

Just as long as she comes to him.

Hermione slips down to the beach and opens the unlocked sliding glass door to get into the house.

Her chest pounds with danger.

She’s not sure whether she wants to confront him, or to flee before he notices.

Two goals drive in her skull over and over like a hammer on her temple.

Grab the baby. Get out.

Creeping up the steps to the main level, she spots Dobby sitting on the couch holding Hesper.

“Little miss was waking up early from her nap!” the elderly man says in his creaky voice.

“Thank you, Dobby,” Hermione says, sounding like a ghost.

Hesper blinks her dark blue eyes up at her, wakeful but quiet.

She scoops the little bundle out of his arms, trying not to show her feelings.

“Dobby was listening for Miss Hesper while Mr. Riddle was running, he will be back any moment, he said.”

Adrenaline hits a new high in Hermione’s body.

Shit, is this what cardiac arrest feels like?

“Uh…” She collects herself, clutching the baby closer. “Tell him I forgot about an errand…I’m already super late.”

She whirls around and darts into Hesper’s room, snatching up the diaper bag with one hand and shoving into it anything she can reach—onesies, diapers, her little coat, the best swaddle blanket.

“Is Mrs. Riddle needing anything?” Dobby hovers at her elbow, fidgety in the wake of Hermione’s frantic energy.

“Nope, no…um…everything is fine.” Hermione doesn’t want to leave the man suspicious, but it hardly matters.

Tom will know what happened anyway.

He always knows.

She hauls the spilling bag and squirmy baby to the door, kneeling over Hesper’s car seat.

Her hands are shaking as she settles her daughter into it.

Hermione fumbles with the buckles, her trembling fingers unable to clip the right ones together.

“God dammit!”

Finally, the puzzle snaps together.

The security system beeps and her blood runs cold.

“Front gate,” the calm female voice announces disaster.

“Shit! Shit shit shit…”

Hermione snatches the BMW key and bolts out the door.

A dozen yards away, the gate is slowly creaking open like a lazy executioner.

Weighed down on both sides, she struggles to the garage and watches the slowest garage door on the planet lumber open while she curses, casting furtive looks at the open gate and the road behind it.

When there’s enough room to squeeze under, she rips open the Beamer’s sleek doors and buckles Hesper inside. Thank God Tom bought a car seat base for all twelve of his fucking cars.

Half a second later, she’s in the driver seat, her hand trembling as she shoves the key in the ignition.

“No no no…”

In the side mirror, the foreboding, lithe form of her husband slows from a run to a walk.

Panic climbs up her throat.

He tilts his head, approaching the open garage door.

Brows raised, his lips mouth her name.

Fuck no.

She twists the ignition, slams the Beamer in reverse and stomps on the gas in one fluid motion.

The Beamer was made for this. 

It flies backward out of the garage, sending Tom diving to the left.

Without looking to see if she’d hit him, Hermione hauls on the wheel and peels out of the driveway just as the gate starts to close.

With a rush of exhilaration, the road opens up before her.

Des Moines whizzes by in a blur. Her mind races.

Did he run in the house and grab the keys to his Bugatti?

The Bugatti is faster than the Beamer.

Did she hit him? She doesn’t remember a thump. Or maybe there was?

Her breaths saw in and out of her open mouth.

Which route will be the least obvious if he’s following her?

Where can she go so that he won’t find her?

She blows two red lights, chased by angry honking, and doesn’t slow down as she merges onto I-5 north.

He’ll think she’s headed to Canada…or maybe to California. If she goes east, he’ll chase her down on I-90 and they’ll be alone in the mountains, no no no…

Hermione reams through the list of places he’ll expect her, people she could turn to.

The Weasleys? She could never.

Bill and Fleur? There’s no way she’ll go back to the pot farm.

Harry? That’s a burned bridge if ever there was one.

Nobody else in her class stuck up for her or checked in on her all year. Nobody cares.

Tom is the reason she’s alone.

With an icy wave of shock, Hermione realizes she left her purse in the Lexus, which is parked at the boat launch three doors down from the house.

She has no money, no phone, no ID or even a driver’s license.

Hot tears bead in her eyes, but she blinks them away.

Can’t panic now.

Hermione finds a twenty dollar bill in the middle console and decides to blow half of it on a risky move.

She drives downtown and buys a ferry ticket out of Seattle and sits in the lot, chewing her nails while the lazy boat crawls in the distance toward the dock. Ten minutes until the next departure.

Hesper is still sleeping.

Sweat makes a damp patch in the middle of Hermione’s back.

Every time a car enters the ferry lot, she studies it, dreading the sight of the Bugatti and a familiar pair of prowling eyes at the wheel.

Slowly, the lot fills up.

The ferry lurches to the dock with a rush of foam. Cars from Kingston pile off and Hermione can’t stop biting her nails.

He could still come.

Then, she’d be trapped with him on a freakin boat.

This was the stupidest idea.

She should back out of her spot and get the fuck out of here.

Hermione is about to shift her car in reverse when the blaring horn signals it’s time to board.

The blast wakes the baby in the back seat. Hermione’s nerves teeter on a thin edge as she follows the line of cars onto the ferry, cooing at wailing Hesper and trying not to hyperventilate.

He’s not here.

She watched the entrance like a hawk and he didn’t come in.

They’re gonna make it.

Hermione repeats these mantras, reaching behind her to comfort the baby.

An eternity later, the ferry emits a long blare and the engines begin to whir. With a gentle lurch, the ground under her parked car moves.

In her rearview mirror, the dock pulls away with a wake of churning water growing between it.

She did it.

Even if somehow Tom knows she took the ferry, it would take him two hours to get to Kingston by land, and by that time she’ll be long gone.

Hermione gets out of the Beamer and scoops whimpering Hesper out of her car seat. Hoisting the bag over her shoulder, she climbs the stairs to the ferry’s passenger deck.

In a quiet corner, she leans against a massive window and tucks Hesper close. 

The Sound slips by: its forested, rocky beaches and sapphire water. The massive houses, all grasping at their own brand of haughty pretense.

As the ferry boils along, a lounging sea lion hobbles off its buoy. Hermione watches it vanish beneath the rippling waves. 

Without the shadow of pursuit looming directly behind her, she starts to breathe more deeply.

For a split second, she thinks of the expression on Tom’s face in the driveway.

His look was the sort of surprise one might make when finding an unexpected gift.

A treasure.

Her chest twists.

But no.

He’s a liar. 

Murderer!

He tricked her, and used lies to weaponize her against her friends. He kidnapped her, married her against her will and isolated her so she would be totally at his mercy.

It’s the most narcissistic behavior to never be in a textbook, and she fell for it.

What an idiot.

The brightest student in her class, valedictorian: duped by the psychopath who got her pregnant on purpose and then killed her mother. The callous villain who used her for his own purposes at every turn, even when she was shoving his child out of her body. 

What the fuck! She is so insane for sticking around as long as she did.

Hermione whacks her head against the window, the bruising sensation like relief for her frying brain.

Her mind races through every scene he used her:

   He drugged Ron and sicked the CPS on her to get her out of her mom’s house and into his.

   He put her with that misogynist from Gryffin Shipping so she would go ballistic. 

   He used her fucking water breaking to secure his business sale.

   He turned her attempt to save his life at the Miyun Resort into a flight from the FBI, and got away from the feds only because she was breaking in half right there on the goddamn lawn!

   He even harassed her during the math-a-lon for fuck’s sake!

   And then the cancer thing. Oh my fucking God-in-a-shit-sandwich.

Tom has always lined up every detail, predicting with violating accuracy how she would react. He unleashed her, letting her self-righteous storm burn down everything else for his own ends. 

He aimed her like a gun.

What was his goal?!

She looks up at the water-stained ceiling. Her lashes flickering.

Was it really just for his own benefit?

What the hell is pushing him past the point of insanity—cutting out his own fucking thyroid for no reason?!?

Why would Tom do all of this to her?

At this thought, a vastness opens up at the center of her chest.

Tom loves her.

No—it can’t really be that simple, can it?

For a moment, she stares blankly, unable to accept the truth.

She doesn’t want to believe it.

Hermione remembers their last liaison. 

The one that probably started this whole mess. 

It was the final week of August. The sun soaked everything it touched with a saturated convection, making the seawater a cleansing relief. 

She and Tom brought boxes of takeout on his Boston whaler and motored to a private inlet where they jumped in and out of the icy water until hot food sounded good.

His gaze was thoughtful into his box of mian tiao, Hermione could feel the edge of a question before he spoke.

“Why don’t you come and live with me?” he said finally, stirring his chopsticks into the box as if asking something far more casual. “That great big house is too quiet.”

“I can’t leave my mother,” she answered, not even pausing to consider the idea.

He surveyed her like a lockpick or a thief might.

“Wouldn’t you feel more at home with room to breathe?” he said.

She flicked a suspicious glance at him. Did he know about the hoarding thing?! She was careful not to mention it.

“Without your mother breathing down your neck,” he amended. “You told me she doesn’t care much for you.”

Her hackles smoothed. She did tell him that.

Her mother died the day they found her father dead.

“It will be fine living with her until it isn’t, I guess,” she said with a shrug.

“Don’t you think you deserve so much more?”

When she looks at him again, the afternoon light struck his hair like molten bronze. His russet-black waves are actually the very darkest shade of red. 

The attraction she felt for him stood somewhere outside her regular life. 

Tom made all of her senses richer, brighter like she could squeeze the world and sweet would drip from between her fingers instead of bitter. She had styled herself as someone fighting for what’s right, and all of Tom’s indulgent pleasure seemed incongruous with the exasperation she normally wore in her dark clothes, her shadowed eyes and her rage against the machine. She didn’t want to be his cliché.

“Why,” she smirked, “Do you think I deserve more?”

At this, he gleamed. His lips crooked with something pleased and feral.

“Yes, I do,” he purred.

Tom set down the takeout and grasped her arm, pulling her into his lap. The boat rocked underneath them, adding sweet friction where they touched.

He opened his salt-damp shorts and pushed aside her bikini, sinking her down onto him.

“You deserve everything,” he whispered, his hard length filling her like he is the only one to ever complete her body this way. 

The rich boy with the nice shit had been easy to distance herself from emotionally, but the powerful lover, sheltering her from her own moral anxiety, was much more difficult to ignore.

“Oh…fuck…” she squealed, lifting her hips up and down.

He snatched up the back of her neck and kissed her hard enough to rattle her ghost.

“I’m going to give you everything, Hermione,” he said between gritty gasps, “and I won’t let anything stand in your way.”

A short blast signals the ferry’s final approach to Kingston.

Hermione is sobbing.

She looks down at Hesper. 

Over the last few weeks, the baby’s eyes have darkened to increasingly deeper shades of navy. Now, her eyes are nearly identical to the dusky gaze of her father. 

How often has Hermione stood in her own way?

She gathers up her bag and returns to the Beamer, a strange emotion running up and down her whole body.

The timeline of her and Tom pixelates, and then re-arranges in a new light.

He’s right. Hermione did let many things stand in her way.

Tom lied and manipulated—and even killed—to get her away from people who cared more for their own feelings than for her. He tricked her out of a hoarder house and into a gorgeous, beachfront mansion to keep her safe at a dangerous moment of her pregnancy when she could have died.

Leveraging her shitty attitude, he secured 1.3 billion dollars—money to which she’s had unlimited access with zero oversight or restriction.

He lied to her. 

But how else was she going to escape her own rigidity?

He became the sinner so she could be the saint.

Who else has gone that far just for her?

On the deck of the ferry, the cars around her thrum to life and Hermione twists the ignition.

She drives onto land, her blood singing in her veins.

Hermione missed something. 

In all her fury and struggle with Tom, she never recognized his motivation. 

And now that she understands, she makes a crucial realization.

She has always had all the power.

“One ticket to Seattle, please,” she says at the ferry window, handing over her last ten.

It’s nightfall when the gate opens in the Beamer’s headlights.

The garage door sits open where she left it.

An olive branch, or a warning?

Hermione shivers.

She enters the house holding her breath, her arm hooked under the car seat and her keys jingling.

When she opens the door, Tom is sitting at the dining room table with half a glass of scotch.

Her heartbeat stammers.

He stands and crosses the house. He’s trying to move fluidly; only the very tiniest stiffness in his gait betrays her suspicion.

She definitely hit him.

There’s a red whorl of road rash on his chin.

Damn.

His expression is easy, completely veiled.

“Have a nice afternoon on the ferry?” he says, kissing her forehead.

Her gut plunges.

He takes the car seat from her arm and crouches, unbuckling Hesper.

“Uh-uh,” she finds her voice. “We’re not doing this your way.”

He meets her gaze, his eyes seized with a raw glitter.

“I know everything, Tom,” she says.

He murmurs, a deep velvet sound of pleasure.

“And you came back,” he says.

“I finally understand.”

Tom nods slowly, she must have really fucked up his neck.

He gestures to the table.

“Sit. Tell me what you want.”

They settle Hesper in her swing and Tom pours Hermione two fingers of scotch.

He waits, watching her with the curiosity of a predator.

She steels herself.

“No more lies,” she says. “If you’re up to something sordid, I don’t want to know or be involved. And the fallout can’t impact me or Hesper. I know you’re sharp enough to think through all possible outcomes—so keep us out of whatever you do from now on.”

Tom nods.

“I want 50 million in assets in Hesper’s and my name alone, legally isolated from you.”

“Agreed,” he says.

“If I find you’ve fucked with me again, it’s over. If you end up in jail, I divorce you and liquidate everything. Sound fair?”

He smiles like a fox.

“Perfectly.”

“Also…” She swallows hard. “I’m going to UW to study computer science. Then, I’m going to work full time. I don’t care if we can live off your money, I want my own. I want to build something in the world that’s all mine, separate from you and my kid.” 

Tom presses his lips together.

She braces to argue, but it’s not disagreement coiling at his mouth, but desire.

“Done,” he says. “I want ten.”

Hermione is still dizzy from his ready acceptance, she doesn’t understand the last part.

“Ten children,” he clarifies.

“—The fuck?!” 

“I will stay home with them.”

Hermione’s mouth drops open.

“Four,” she counters.

“Eight.”

“Tom, my body will give out!”

“How much trouble can I get into with eight school, sports, music and tutoring schedules?”

His wicked grin is just too charming, her chest squeezes.

She sighs.

“I’ll give you six more, that’s my final offer.”

“Sold!” 

Tom smacks the table with his glass. He raises the scotch to his lips, looking smug enough to hit again with her car.

Hermione wonders who’s the clear winner of this situation. 

When he grasps her hand, placing a kiss on her palm she knows it’s always been her.

Fifteen years later...

Hermione kicks off her shiny new Doc Martens. She sets the plastic drugstore bag on the counter and her keys hit the granite with a cheery little ka-clink!  

The motion-sensing lights in their sleek, recently-remodeled kitchen fade on.

She pulls open a cabinet door and takes down a glass, unlatching her bra with her other hand.

The drugstore bag stares at her from behind.

Shit.

This is going to be…God.

How did she let this happen again?

Her chest flits with a hundred little dragonflies.

On the fridge hangs several handprint drawings in colorful construction paper. Basketball league photos. A program for the high school production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, with the show’s youngest-ever leading lady printed in all caps, 

HESPER RIDDLE.

Hermione sticks her cup under the faucet.

The kitchen is spotless as always. How Tom gets through breakfast without a single soggy cheerio in sight is beyond her. Last Saturday, while she managed the morning alone during his triathlon, breakfast was chaos.

She wonders if he’ll be surprised.

Of course he won’t.

She sips slowly, her gaze resting on the framed, blown-up photograph across the room above the slate stone fireplace.

Their faces are sharp, each of them marble-hewn and regal, with scattered glimmers of guile among those who inherited his mischief. Most of them did.

Seven. 

He promised her seven was enough.

Well, fuck.

The security system chimes from the entryway,

“Front gate,” the automated voice proclaims in a new accent. New Zealand maybe? 

Ugh. Ossian had better quit scrambling the house’s security programming, or she’s gonna…

Meh.

Hermione sighs, tucking the glass in the dishwasher as the front door opens.

“Mom!” 

Nine-year-old Chrysanthe bursts into the house smelling like dirt, her green and gray Slitherers uniform smudged with valiant efforts on the field.

“Daddy got kicked out again!”

Hermione frowns.

Are you fucking kidding me?

What the hell, Tom...

Ossian and Rex tumble in close behind, each hand gripping plastic bags steaming with takeout, their laughter wickedly gleeful.

“You should have seen Mr. Potter.” Ossie sets the food on the counter. At 13, he looks almost like a young adult when he pinches his face in parody. “This is totally not allowed, Riddle, you snake!”

“You snake!” 11-year-old Rex parrots.

“Ossie, we do not mock Mr. Potter,” Hermione says. “Hesper, what has your father done now?”

The eldest girl and youngest boy enter the house with little ceremony, both of a quieter sort with hair as dark as coal. Five-year-old Ulysses blinks his baby lashes and grips his sister’s hand.

Hesper rolls her eyes. 

“Chrys hit the ball clear out to center field and the next five kids in the lineup got fat base hits until the other coach, who happened to be Mr. Potter, called a timeout and somebody ratted out Dad for hiring the batting coach from Japan...”

Hermione gawks.

“From… Japan?”

Hesper’s eyes narrow judiciously, her youthful curls falling down her brow so like her father’s. 15 years and she’s just the age Hermione locked eyes with Tom across the gym at their first mathlete practice.

“Come on, Ulysses.” Hesper tugs the young one’s hand. “Let’s get your shoes off.”

Last to come in is the familiar footfall that makes Hermione’s heart double kick. The door opens and seven-year-old Rusetta’s whimpers fill the entryway. 

She’s red-faced with her auburn-bobbed hair clinging to her damp cheeks from under her green hat. 

Tom’s voice drips with warm bass, unintelligible from the other side of the door. He steps across the threshold in a Slitherers ballcap and a new black Patagonia jacket. 

With his luxury track pants clinging to that ultramarathoning ass, he exudes cool dad to levels previously considered impossible. 

He is the picture of calm with toddler Xoe on one hip and an arm tucked around Rusetta.

“…And we can never play tee-ball again!” she double-hiccups.

“They’re just not willing to explore your potential, dearest, it isn’t your fault. Go and have a cookie from the takeout bag.”

Tom locks eyes with Hermione.

“You’re home after all,” he says, a spark of delight glimmering around the edges of his poise.

“Bug fixed, product launch rescued… Day saved,” Hermione sighs. “I am so tired, like, so tired.”

“We’ve seen hardly a glimpse of you for weeks,” Tom murmurs. 

Hermione takes Xoe from his arms with a peck on his cheek.

“Oh, I nearly forgot!” 

She trots back to the kitchen counter with Xoe’s tiny legs wrapped around her waist and digs precariously with one hand through her purse. Pulling out a white box, she hands it to Tom.

“And this is what the fuss is all about,” he muses, taking out the iPhone 14, glinting sleek in his hand like a trophy.

“Sounds like you hardly deserve it after hiring a professional batting coach for the girls’ tee-ball team?” Her voice pitches upward. “Seriously, Tom, how many junior leagues do you have to meddle with before our kids get blackballed from every sport in town?”

Tom lets out a low, easy laugh.

“Chrys,” he says, glancing mischievously up from his new phone, “hit one nearly to the fence.”

“And…” Hermione stutters, “—And I’m really proud of her, but…”

A flush of emotion rushes over her, damming her mouth and blooming red in her cheeks.

She should tell him.

The kids whirl around them, setting the table, scooping out steaming xiaolong bao and congee onto their plates. Laughing, chatting, bickering. Someone turns on the Seahawks game.

Tom pockets the phone and fixes her with a stare that fizzles all the way down to the base of her spine.

“Dr. Quirrel’s office called,” he says.

“Yeah?” 

He’s watching her, she can feel his energy sifting over her. He knows something’s up.

“The sample they took came back positive, which means they’ll have to reschedule me for another procedure. Pity, it was such a bother having you wait on me for three days.”

Her gut bobs.

“So, it didn’t work,” she says slowly.

He slides in closer to her.

“Apparently not.”

She lets his canny gaze and the sly twitch of his lip tell her.

He knows.

“I guess that explains it,” she sighs, rolling her eyes.

Tom crowds her against the counter, gripping the marble slab on either side of her hips.

“Ah, well. One extra can’t hurt,” he purrs.

He coasts a hand down the waist of her pencil skirt, his possessive grasp settling low on her belly.

“I know you planned this,” Hermione growls, kissing him.

“I can’t help it,” he breathes into her neck. “I can’t get enough of you.”

“You’re the scorpion who can’t resist stinging to save his own life, is what you are,” she snarls back, knocking off his hat and running her fingers through his hair.

“And yet you stay.”

“Yeah.” She gasps at the friction of his hips. “I’m stupid like that.”

“Lucky me, married to the most brilliant woman in Seattle—who’s still foolish enough to allow me my indulgences.”

“I’m not allowing it for you, maybe I just want to see you at the wheel of a minivan for another 18 years.”

His chuckle is like dark liquor.

“You minx.”

She serves him a victorious grin.

“You owe me big time, asshole.”

Tom unbuttons the top of her blouse and kisses her paper-soft skin.

“I can never repay you for what you do for me,” he says, his bass reverberating deep in her body.

Hermione tilts her head back. This is what their early years of scorekeeping have evolved into: pragmatic acceptance, regular appreciation, occasional bursts of awe.

“Ew, Mom and Dad,” Hesper’s voice echoes from the living room. “Get a room!”

“Where does she learn such talk?” Tom scowls.

Hermione laughs.

Happiness is a thing she’s cultivated on her own terms. It flowers everywhere now.

Tom closes the blinds, looking out over the smooth, glassy Sound. Quite calm for midafternoon.

He picks up the worn lovey off the floor and treads lightly across the gray-shadowed room.

Xoe was snoozing the moment her curly head hit the pillow.

He leans over the edge of the crib.

Her impossibly thick lashes rest on her scrumptious cheeks. She tangles in her blanket, her pudgy hand open like every moment of her three years has taught her only to trust.

Precious sweetling.

She’ll have to skip tumbling Thursday if he’s going to get her into an early interview at Cove Garden. Perhaps another donation might bump them up the admission list.

Tom tucks Xoe’s toy beside her.

His chest soft-kicks.

She’s not his youngest anymore.

He’s sure Hermione is carrying a boy.

Finally. A matched set.

His phone buzzes.

It’s probably Abraxas, who can wait.

The shadow imports business is quite flexible.

Tom lingers a kiss on Xoe’s hot little forehead. He closes the door with painstaking conscientiousness.

Down the hall, their latest portraits are blown up and individually lit like a museum with their names printed underneath.

Hesper Lilith, 

Ossian Atrax,

Rex Huron, 

Chrysanthe Sebastianne, 

Rusetta Circe,

Ulysses Alexian,

Xoe Surelia.

Tom’s eternity.

He pulls his new iPhone out of his pocket and dials a number off Google search.

The line burrs in his ear.

Down the hall, Hermione’s voice echoes in the shower. Sweetly tuneless.

God, Tom loves her.

“Dr. Quirrel’s office.”

“Hello,” Tom says. “I have a referral to schedule a vasectomy.”

“Do you have a preferred date?”

From their bathroom, Hermione is singing, 

“Want you to make me feel… Like I’m the only girl in the world…”

The corner of Tom’s lip twitches.

“...Like I’m the only one who understands… How to make you feel like a man…”

Thud-thud goes his heart.

That woman.

He may be the deceiver, but she’s the one who secretly removed her IUD.

She beat him at his own game.

He counts in his head.

“Next April would be ideal.”

“Are you a new patient of Dr. Quirrel or returning?”

Tom smiles.

“New.”

THE END