Tiranë

Tiranë was where I found him.

His back was to the wall in a little café and he wore a plaid smoking jacket that looked new. 

There was a local paper spread before him, but he wasn’t looking at it. Every so often, he turned a page or thumbed the edge like he enjoyed the sensation of a near-paper cut. 

His gaze, however, gave him away with its softened, iris-blown quality suggesting he was reading anything but the paper. And by anything, I mean anyone.

It shames me, I’ll admit, that the first thing to cross my mind was a very minor annoyance. A stupid thing, really.

The moment I slipped into that café and beheld thirty-four-year-old Voldemort, I spotted him puffing a slender cigarette. He drew on it, then snuffed it out with the comfortable familiarity of a regular smoker (my grandmother was one, so I know the look of it), and all I could think was, damn you, Harry. 

None of our research indicated Voldemort smoked. 

Not one hint. 

It wasn’t actually Harry’s fault in particular. Nothing in the detailed accounts taken from Death Eaters sentenced after the first war, all the hours of pensieve viewings and transcriptions, nor the lost journal of Rufus Avery requisitioned by the ministry after the second. No notes about smoking.

Suddenly, the great chasm of the unknown yawned back at me and I dizzied at its brink.

Here I was: traveled to 1960 with perhaps the most elaborate operation dispatched by the Unspeakables since Ernesto el Aniquinator (there’s a reason you’ve never heard of him).

Our task force had parsed out Voldemort’s exact location and dealings for almost 78% of his life. We used both records and dubiously-legal prisoner legilimency to reconstruct what the man had for breakfast on most of those days, if not his direct actions which begat two of wizardkind’s deadliest wars. (For breakfast: Voldemort typically had an egg or nothing.)

But really, no one could be bothered to jot down that the dark lord was, at least in 1960, an absolute stovepipe of a smoker?

It took me several moments to collect myself, ordering a coffee and crispy phyllo pastry. 

Voldemort would notice me, that was the plan. Whether he had or not was now precious information I had squandered by losing my focus for mere seconds.

I have taken an unbreakable vow not to disclose the training which all Unspeakables undergo to achieve the rank I held at this point in my career. I can, however, indicate that I am able to suspend an object of medium weight midair for 36 hours using only my mind. The level of focus we are required to maintain is the subject of much praise in the highest tier of the Ministry. I’m not bragging, that’s just a fact.

I sank down into my seat facing Voldemort, but I did not look at him. Instead, I chose a short, middle-aged woman at a round table for the first triangulation.

Mercifully, the muggle was a textbook candidate for this tactic. I slid into her mind with a gentle imperius curseand took another appraising glance at the dark lord through her eyes.

Now, I know what you must be thinking. Hermione Weasley-Granger, Dumbledore’s Golden Girl, using an unforgivable? Well, they don’t call us Unspeakables for nothing. And with all that’s happened, I’m hardly interested in doctoring my image with half-truths now. 

Through the faint haze of the muggle’s repressed will, I watched Voldemort blink twice. No doubt he was releasing his hold on another subject’s mind. It might have been disastrous had we both popped into the head of the same person, but I would have been shocked to find him in the brain of this unassuming, motherly-looking woman.

This was the advantage, my team had argued, of targeting Voldemort with a female operative. All evidence showed he was more or less blind to certain kinds of people: children, the very old, and women who don’t appear physically similar to those chosen for the covers of men’s magazines.

It’s also one of the reasons this operation appealed to me. I was being sent in to draw the attention of the most putrid filth of a man, as I saw him then. A man who I assumed would recoil if he really saw the unglamored lines around my eyes, the softness at my waist and hips hidden by my trench coat. My stretch marks. I would look him in the eye and mock him with my mudblood mediocrity.

But of course he never would see all of me, or at least that was the plan. 

A little makeup, some wrinkle glamors, and a hair-dye spell, and our production analysis team deemed me similar enough to the Irish woman with whom Voldemort would have a brief encounter on April 21, 1960 at a café on Rruga Njazi Meka in the capital city of Albania.

The only question that remained was if the scene would play out the same way with me in her place.

When I turned to the left, just like Siobhán O’Sullivan’s memory, Voldemort folded his paper precisely as he had in the Pensieve drills.

I finished the sip of my coffee, touching the back of my cup-holding hand to my lips. The messy-but-cute thing. 

Through the eyes of a rough-hewn workman a few tables down, I watched Voldemort double-glance in my direction. 

There it was. 

Interest.

No matter how many hours I’ve logged practicing, recreating the past always gives me a skin-thrumming thrill. It’s the perfectionist’s ultimate test, a moment-by-moment pageant of precision that can be thrown into chaos with a single ill-placed breath.

Inhale - two - three, glance at his watch - two - three - four - set aside the paper.

I put down my cup, my insides suspended. My blood was ice.

First contact: Voldemort’s eyes weren’t as red as O’Sullivan’s memory. The irises were almost amber, like the flecks of warmth typical in brown eyes—only brighter, like the heat had been turned up. 

We knew he had been training his body during this era of his rise to power, but still, it jarred me seeing his sharp edges fleshed out. The high ridges of his cheekbones had the unmistakable flush of outdoor exertion.

When O’Sullivan gave us her memory of this moment, we had to rely on her verbal account to script my reaction to Voldemort.

“His face held my attention,” the aged woman recalled in her third interview. “I felt as if I was brushing with a film star or someone who would become the prime minister one day.”

I cleared my mind of what I knew Voldemort would become, and held the idea of a different future for him in my thoughts.

I’m looking at the world’s most powerful death-cheater, perhaps he could have saved so many lives with that mind.

But Voldemort’s face did not reciprocate with the gleam of fascination he gave O’Sullivan.

A disturbing shade of blood red flared in his eyes. He tilted his cobra-sharp chin and studied me, the gauziness of lust vanished from his expression.

He read me as a threat.

I sank back in my chair, tilting my shoulders in a vulnerable, open stance. Glancing up at him shyly, I played a teasing smirk on my lips. 

His gaze tightened, and I had precisely three seconds to nudge him back into the historyline before the whole operation risked veering into atemporal territory.

I made a bold play.

Putting up only the lightest occlumency shield, I opened the forefront of my mind.

Sure enough, the dark tendrils of his legilimency crept up to my shields and I let him press into me with only the barest resistance akin to a very intelligent muggle.

Voldemort glanced at the waiter as he rummaged through the curated thoughts I had placed for him there. His face was impassive.

So handsome, and what a perfect jawline. Just like Clark Gable. How I’d like to sink my teeth into his lip—

His brow twitched and the movement caught my eye. The instant I recognized his ploy, he seized upon my brain with his talons sinking into multiple planes at once. 

The trick here is not to fight back. 

I fed him such deep wells of Siobhan O’Sullivan’s backstory, it validated every moment I spent shadowing her over the previous year, living whole days in her memories.

Voldemort’s attack was vigorous. He tore into my thoughts without care for their integrity after, leaving some of the memories tattered with holes. 

In a moment, the waiter would ask Voldemort if he wanted more coffee. In the original historyline, he refused. He handed the waiter enough Albanian leks to abandon his half-eaten plate, stand, and initiate a conversation with O’Sullivan.

Now, I feared, the overwrite was steadily drifting somewhere new. My department hates new—for good reason.

I was running out of material to misdirect Voldemort, and toward my left the waiter approached with a silver carafe. I couldn’t be sure of the dark lord’s next move.

“Më shumë kafe, zotëri?”

Voldemort blinked up at the waiter with nonchalance. I held my breath.

With a curious, sideways glance at me, he paid the waiter and stood, buttoning his jacket. A perfect replay of the original historyline. My heart buoyed.

Finally, we were back on track.

I pushed my sleakeasyed curls over my shoulder, casting him a glance of warmth. Come get me, bad boy. There was a spoon on the table, returning my reflection all warped and upside down.

But instead of sauntering my way with all the casual ease of a man about to have a quick hookup, Voldemort moved on me like a vulture.

He cut the distance between his table and mine with a stride sharper than a slicing hex.

The moment we locked eyes, I knew the mission was compromised.

This is my confession: I should have apparated right then. 

Had I followed protocol, I would have destroyed only an inconsequential moment in time instead of an entire war. Entire futures. 

Harry would still be alive.

I could have even apparated when he leaned over me, his eyes blazing like hellfire.

But I didn’t.

Between training and working in the field, I have abandoned hundreds of missions for reasons smaller than that look on Voldemort’s face. He could have shredded half my living memories and crucioed me for hours and I still would have had the strength to apparate out. 

I spent two decades becoming not just any operative—but the best operative in my department. One who should have nipped out of there in a second like I had so many times before. 

This is what I want you to understand: when Voldemort grabbed the lapel of my trenchcoat and dragged me outside, I was afraid of what I had already done. I know, it doesn’t make sense.

I stumbled out the door with him, and he pushed me against the pale orange stucco of the café’s outer wall. Wrath gleamed on his face like a polished coin. I knew then he was more beautiful than anyone could have told me in words or memories.

With his forearm he pressed against my sternum, his cold yew wand thrumming at my throat. My breaths came shallow and tight.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded.

My mind went blank.

This isn’t supposed to happen.

“Well?” His voice was rough, low with familiarity.

Like we’d spoken before.

Hideous fear flared up in me: guilt like nothing I had experienced in my life.

“I…” I gasped, “I don’t know you!”

His expression tightened, searching my face. The red in his gaze dimmed.

Voldemort laughed.

The sound twisted my insides. I had always been prepared to fail. Ready, even, to die. But I wasn’t prepared for this.

“Of course you know me.” Voldemort smiled. He idled his fingertips on a loose curl of my hair. 

“You’re Hermione Granger.”