Tiranë

A few weeks before mission launch, I admitted something to Harry.

We had been in the arena for 13 hours, sweat clung to the neck of my tee shirt.

“Stop,” Harry called, rubbing his forehead. “Andrei, your footwork is still off.”

Harry released his imperius and the six of us sagged.

I planted my hands on my knees and watched a trickle of perspiration slide off my nose and plink onto the spongy blue floor mat.

Andrei Dalca, yes the Romanian seeker (and I promise to clear up the story of how he died), rounded on Harry in protest.

“I’m giving you complete control, Potter!”

“You’re still resistant on the left side,” Harry argued. “On the balance beam—didn’t you feel it?”

Dalca cast an angry look at Thorne, who sat in an elevated chair above all the muggle gymnastics equipment, watching our progress with a viewer like a giant magnifying glass. Her head looked like a ferocious blob in reverse.

Thorne touched her wand to her throat, and her stern voice filled the vaulted room.

“Dalca, I suggest you empty that pretty head or a slipped foot might send you pitching off an Albanian rooftop. Come now! It’s the eleventh hour, people, no time to review beginner schematics!”

Stretching his arms and legs, Dalca gave Harry an apologetic nod.

“It’s just nerves,” Harry said, which reminded me of the fishing line tug in my own stomach every time I thought about the launch.

We took our places in the arrow-shaped starting formation, and the sweet haziness slipped over me again with Harry’s imperius curse.

The next moment we were marching fluidly, leaping over the foam blocks like a flock of birds and landing with a single soft thud. Harry straightened us into two rows and we climbed a pair of balance beams.

Harry’s influence always came easier to me than the others. 

I already had nearly ten years trusting him implicitly, so once he became the captain it was simply a matter of learning to invert my anti-imperius training. 

The “Клин” (Klin) formation comes from ancient teachings believed to have been re-discovered and cataloged by noted Durmstrang headmaster Harfang Munter in the 17th century. It is not known if Munter ever used the Klin, but certain Mongolian texts indicate that groups of Bulgarians fought their riders “as one man.”

It’s really difficult stuff. 

After teaching you to fight off the Imperius curse for three years, you learn to allow it in measures. To control its influence and allow the captain to direct you like a puppet. Just a fancy bit of occlumency, that’s all.

“Better!” Thorne’s voice boomed. “Soften up a little, Thistlewick.”

As a single, breathless corps de ballet we pivoted in unison and switched to balancing on our left feet. If it weren’t so relaxing letting the Imperius flood my brain, my calves would have been screaming after this long.

Finally, Thorne signaled the end and Harry let us go.

“Good work!” she said, climbing the ladder down her chair.

Everyone looked tired, but electric with the anticipation of our upcoming mission.

Giada Malaspina sat on the mat and folded herself over her outstretched legs with a quiet, “Uffa!”

Unspeakables generally frown upon complaining about anything physical, a sign of unreliability, but I was a little gratified to see twenty-eight-year-old Gigi in as much pain as me, at over a decade and a half her senior.

I did some standing stretches before collecting my things and hitting the showers.

I’m not sure if it was Harry or I who started it, or which of us tailored our routine to match the other, but when I exited the women’s locker I met Harry in the corridor, same as every day.

He shouldered his leather satchel (a monogrammed gift from Ginny five or six Christmases ago) and walked silently alongside me. The luminous white walls lit up the streaks of gray in his hair.

He halted in front of the elevator.

“Fancy a pint?” he said, his hand poised on the large red time naturalization dial.

I was absolutely knackered but I imagined my cold kitchen, the heaps of laundry on Rose and Hugo’s floors.

“Why not!”

Harry nodded, twisting the dial until the time read “4:00 p.m. GMT”, an hour earlier than usual.

The elevator doors clanked open and we climbed aboard, casting quick imperturbable charms. Harry cast his on his satchel, while I protected my finicky hair.

“O'Dair's then?” Harry asked as the water flushed into the chamber, gurgling around our ankles.

“Oh, not there, they have all those football games blasting from every direction.”

The water was up to our shoulders now.

“What about The Bristol?” Harry said, tilting his head up as the flood reached his ears.

I nodded, already submerged.

When the entire chamber filled, we lifted off the ground. Our clothes and hair drifted around us; Harry’s tie snaked out like seaweed.

Green light issued from the elevator’s mirrored interior and a high whine rattled the chamber. The taste of metal stung my mouth. 

I always shut my eyes, but that horrible sensation lasts only a moment before it all halts with a loud “clunk.” 

The water drained out and we landed on our feet. 

“The Bristol sounds nice,” I said, spelling myself dry and straightening my collar.

“Right, then,” Harry replied.

The street was pleasantly busy for a summer’s afternoon. Flocks of tourists and bustling officials flooded the sidewalk, everyone with somewhere important to be. Harry and I were swept into the crowd.

It was always our unspoken agreement to visit the muggle pubs and skip the gossipy, hob-nobbing magical ones. 

While Harry was eager to dodge reporters from the Prophet, they were no longer a worry for me. Sometime after my thirty-eighth birthday or so, I had become invisible.

Hermione Granger-Weasley: mother of two, mid-level ministry employee, friend to The Chosen One and wife to his best friend. Not a lot of headline-worthy material.

The Bristol’s customers were sparse and kept to a cluster of silver-headed regulars huddled around the bar. 

A strong odor of stale cigarettes wafted from the burgundy carpet as Harry and I made our way to a shadowy booth, frothing mugs in hand.

We sipped silently for a moment before I made my confession.

“I don’t think I’ll like the taper period,” I said.

Harry rolled his eyes.

“Oh come off it,” he chuffed, wrinkling the foam atop his ale.

“No really,” I insisted. “I don’t want to be taking increasing increments of time off work before the launch—shouldn’t we be honing the team? Drilling the intervention?”

“How much more can we practice, Hermione?” Harry laughed. “We’ve rehearsed the same afternoon over and over for five years. My dreams have become a sort of nightmarish groundhog day.”

The pleather seat under my skirt creaked as I shifted uncomfortably.

Easy for him to say—I was going to be the one luring the dark lord.

“I prefer to keep focused,” I said, and gave a shrugging motion as if to shake off his appraising look.

He sniffed.

“You prefer to lose yourself in work.”

“I do not.”

“Really? When’s the last time you and Ron had a proper holiday?”

It took me a full beat, but I fired back, “Cornwall last summer!”

“That was two summers ago, and bringing Rose and Hugo doesn’t really count for a romantic getaway.”

I stared at the smudged window pane.

Had I really gone nearly two whole years without sex?

I remembered Ron shuffling out of his baggy swim trunks, hurriedly locking the hotel room door and collapsing me into the squeaky bed. One of his fingernails was too long and I spotted a water stain on the ceiling as he thrusted. 

My body was like the tired springs: resistant. 

Ron patiently tried to finish me with his fingertips, yawning and blinking dolefully. 

My mind flitted about desperately for one of my usual vignettes, but every time I thought about Viktor’s chest Ron’s wretched fingernail pulled me out of it. 

Finally I gave a long sigh which he could interpret as an orgasm if he didn’t want to ask. I pulled up my swimsuit bottoms, smiling appreciatively at him.

When we were young we bickered constantly, but for a while now we’ve been very polite. 

“I just don’t think more time at home will make it any easier when we launch the mission,” I said. “If anything it will be more difficult.”

Harry nodded, his face sobering.

His marriage and children were unlikely to be altered by the timeline intervention. His Potential Impact Shift Score was far lower than mine.

Still, I knew any change in his family would break his heart. 

“I’m taking Gin and the kids to Surrey next week.”

“For a visit with Dudley?”

“I’m not certain I’ll even know him after the intervention,” he murmured, looking grim. “Dudley would have never opened up if it weren’t for the dementor fifth year.”

“I thought you two didn’t start really talking until your uncle passed,” I said.

“True, but Aunt Petunia had completely cut off my mother and father from the start. I would have never known him in a world where they lived.”

Sympathy washed over me. 

“So, this is goodbye.”

Harry nodded, drinking slowly. I put my hand on his arm for a moment.

I hadn’t really thought about goodbyes, not because I don’t love my family fiercely—goodness no. 

It’s just that when I was at home, there were so many other things to think about. Ron’s latest row with George, Rose’s dull but kind pureblood boyfriend pressuring her to get married, Hugo’s endless quidditch chatter and broken bones.

Then there was dinner, all the laundry and tidying-up to do. The bills and schedules and groceries. 

Even when the children were off at Hogwarts I could still hardly keep up with the house, it got quite filthy the years I would apparate to Hampstead every evening to care for my father in the last stages of his Alzheimer’s.

But of course Ron always did the dishes. He’s not like most wizard husbands I know, he did help me with chores when he could. 

I would never tell Harry, but Ginny whinged endlessly about “her fourth child” lounging around all evening after work, never lifting a finger. Can you imagine?

I know it might sound daft, but my work was something of a respite. Time suspended, and the only person I had to worry about was myself.

All of this was difficult to explain to Harry.

He stared across the pub, as if studying the patrons with a wistful distance in his eye.

“Think about it, Hermione. A whole new past.”

The corner of his mouth ticked up, and I knew he was watching one of the elderly men—someone who would have been his father’s age. 

“A new future, without Voldemort,” he said.

If we succeeded, James and Lily would not die in 1981. 

Harry would grow up with a family.

When I inhaled, my lungs were tight.

“You’re worried,” Harry said, as if noticing my tension for the first time. “I’m sorry, I’ve been a sop about my parents and the past, and here you are, possibly about to change everything in your life.”

I gripped the glass charger. A hairline crack darted into the clear handle like a bolt of lightning.

“That’s just it, Harry,” I breathed. “I—I could lose it all.”

Why was my heart pounding? Why did my chest feel like a helium balloon?

“I believe you and Ron would have found each other, Hermione. The odds are that your life won’t change,” he said reassuringly.

His eyes had a sheen like he couldn’t bear the thought.

“Of course,” I said. I was eager to banish the dread on his face. “I don’t believe it will change anything.”

That instant, I was cold.

I followed Harry out of the pub feeling as though I was sinking.

A walled, limestone courtyard materialized around me. I took in the manicured topiaries, the olive trees and vivid tumble of flowers, the sound of a trickling fountain.

The wind had a heavy, salty scent, telling me we had apparated to the coast.

Voldemort had me by the waist but I spun from his grasp. 

I resisted the urge to swat wildly at him with the open stinger of my ring, thereby giving away my intent. The final blow would only work if it was a surprise.

His grip closed around my coat and he yanked me off balance. 

In an instant, I had my wand out and shot a series of close range spells. 

“This again?” he chuckled, his voice a pleased burr.

While he deftly blocked the two petrificus totalus bait spells, he opened his flank just enough for me to hit him with a little freezing jinx that locked up his knee.

The moment his attention shifted, I slammed him with a knock-back jinx that shifted his weight backward but he did not let go of my coat. 

Voldemort maneuvered around me with graceful calm, a patient smile curled on his lips. 

With a tight movement of his wand my coat swirled around me like a straight jacket, pulling my legs off balance.

Quickly, I vanished the coat and pulled in a coil of moisture from the air, isolating the salt into many tiny blades.

Voldemort held up a shield as my salt knives pelted from above, leaving his feet neatly exposed.

A swinging rope from my incarcerus spell flew at his ankles, and as he halted his shield to smugly vanish this feint, I launched a petrificus totalus at him.

When he skidded to the side to dodge my attack, I thought I had kept my offensive lead but clearly Voldemort’s strategy had been to employ a passive subversion technique the whole time—damn it.

Perhaps he knew my weakness was getting too involved in my own attack, perhaps he was just that good.

Either way, Voldemort must have gathered a substantial quantity of lime dust behind me while I thought I was tricking him with my fancy spell work. By the time I realized what he was doing, the lime solidified around me in a stodgy plaster, ringing my middle body like a vise.

I couldn’t move my wrist to vanish the stone.

I tried to apparate, but hit the numbing fuzz of blood-coded anti apparition wards (which explains why he was able to enter the perimeter, while I was unable to exit it.)

It shames me still that a silly tripping jinx was all he needed to bring me crashing to the ground.

“Immobulus,” he said softly, and I halted in midair, hovering with my nose above the stone pathway.

He crouched beside me.

“That was quite shorter than last time,” he hummed. “Perhaps you’re losing your touch?”

I rolled onto my side in midair, and spit into his face, nonverbally transfiguring my saliva into a weak acid (being that I couldn’t move my hand to concoct a stronger one.)

This was enough to put him on his back foot with a snarl.

Hitting the ground, I reared up on my knees and hurled myself against the paved path, cracking the lime plaster.

The bonds crumbled just enough to get my hands free.

But Voldemort was too fast.

“Petrificus totalus,” he said, and I froze.

He stood over me, brows quirked.

“Remarkable.”

The breeze tugged at his dark blades of hair, now falling from its cruel, slicked-back style.

He levitated me off the ground and floated my prone body down the pathway. 

I could only see the ground but the shadow of a colonnade crept up my left as we approached a building. A great creak signaled the opening of a door.

Inside was cool and nearly as breezy as outdoors. I watched a series of ornate wool and silk Turkish rugs pass below me as he brought me deeper inside.

Finally, his crisp footsteps on the tile stopped.

“And who’s this then?” came a young, male Scottish voice.

“An old friend a little less forthcoming about her intentions,” Voldemort replied. 

The man made a Scottish hum of curiosity. 

I couldn’t see him, but the depth of his voice told me he was large, which made him a close ID match for Corban Yaxley.

But that’s odd—we pinpointed the 1970s for Yaxley’s initiation as a death eater. 

How could he know Voldemort now?

“Clean her up and have her restrained in my suite,” the dark lord said.

“Your…suite? My lord?” came Yaxley’s reply.

There was a silence in which Yaxley made a little “ah” sound, and I could only assume Voldemort had given him an incredulous look. If I knew anything about the dark lord, it was that he did not give orders twice.

Voldemort pivoted, and his ram-rod steps faded back down the hall. 

My heart triple-thudded at the sound of my mark disappearing, my mission thoroughly compromised now and blown through every contingency.

It was over.

Only one option lay before me now: the little gray pill behind my ear.

A swell of emotion surged against the clamped-down edges of my occlumency shield.

“Well then, lass.”

Yaxley levitated me along several corridors and up a flight of stairs. 

The tiles and carpets passed in a blur.

Usually, we wouldn’t have time to think like this once a mission reaches critical overwrite territory. The protocol is, if you’re fully off the historyline and out of options, you take the gray pill immediately.

It might sound cruel, but it’s the right thing to do to avoid completely scrambling the entire flow of history. Even pausing for a moment is too tempting. We’re trained to take the pill by taking hundreds of placebos during simulations. 

Had I not been frozen, I would have done it the moment I realized Voldemort had bested me in the courtyard. 

Instead, I had to drift along, knowing the pill was coming.

Images flooded my mind. 

Hugo’s freckles. 

Filtered sunlight through the lace curtains in my parents’ kitchen. 

Healers placing the warm, squalling baby Rose on my chest. 

Ginny laughing, cheeks pinked with wine.

My nose stung.

I tried to savor my last minutes, to flip slowly through these postcards of my life, but a dreadful thought kept jarring me—

How did Voldemort know me?

What did he mean by calling Hermione Granger his old friend?

I would never know. 

I’d take the pill first chance to avoid ruining the future any more than I already had. 

But what if I’d already mucked up something more than anyone could have predicted? Surely I should find out how this happened, and find some way to warn Harry!

Another heavy door swung open and Yaxley lowered me to the cool, tiled floor.

There was a squeaking of a tap and a rushing sound into a tub.

I knew every scrap of my clothing had vanished, first because I no longer felt the weight of my velvet dress. Then, a Mediterranean breeze breathed up my naked body.

Yaxley levitated me again, hovering me over an azure-tiled tub sunken in the ground like a Roman bathhouse. Steam wafted from the water.

I rotated midair like a rotisserie, giving me a solid look at my captor. 

He was tall, bulky in a youthful way, and platinum blonde with a trickster’s face. Definitely a young Corban Yaxley who must have been eighteen or nineteen at this point.

I’m not really a modest person—mostly because I care more about substance than appearances—but I was suddenly aware of the loose skin around my stomach, the striping stretch-marks on my thighs. 

It’s embarrassing for me to admit that I even cared, but I did. I knew my glamours were all but nullified by the petrificus totalus, and every sag and wrinkle was now bared.

By Yaxley’s bored expression, however, he did not seem particularly repulsed or interested in the sight of a naked forty-five-year-old. 

This lack of interest proved not in my favor when he lowered me into the water, not bothering to angle my face above the surface. 

Hot water closed over my eyes and the colorful mosaic on the ceiling swirled in my vision.

I came up sputtering involuntarily, still frozen-faced. Water sluiced around me in a noisy rush, pouring from my sopping hair.

My passive system could cough enough to clear my airway for a moment but my nose was still flooded with water.

Were it not so thoroughly careless, I would have thought he was torturing me on purpose.

He dunked me again and this time water slipped into my mouth. 

When I came up a moment later my throat and nose burned. Through barely moving lips, I choked.

A horrific gurgling sound was coming from my chest and my lungs were on fire. 

Yaxley bent over me frowning.

“Evanesco,” he muttered, and the water vanished, leaving my nose and throat dry. I coughed raspily.

Apparently two dunks was enough. 

Clumsy brute.

Yaxley spelled me dry and floated me out of the bathroom and into a suite with a Danish-inspired midcentury sitting area at one end. At the other stood a lavish bed like a white cumulus cloud.

The building had a distinctly Greek style with rounded edges and brilliantly-white plaster.

The breeze plucked at my bare skin. The sound of rolling waves drifted in through two sets of flung-open windows and a balcony door.

I coasted over to the bed, where Yaxley rotated me upright before sinking me onto my knees and sitting me back on my heels.

He conjured two long ropes and fussed with tying them to bolts he magicked into each opposite wall.

The gray pill was looming close now.

I occluded myself against the clawing of my psyche which reached for the scent of the ocean, the delicious sensation of crisp percale against my bare legs. 

The mind gasping for its last tastes of life.

With a tingling rush, he changed the freezing spell from a stiff-board petrificus totalus to the more loose-limbed immobulus, and he tied the ropes to each wrist. 

An immobulus controls the somatic nervous system, blocking the ability to make voluntary movement, but it doesn’t control the eyes.

I stared up at Yaxley and with a wrenching feeling. He would be the last person I saw. 

Somehow this made him seem less cold. Loose filaments of his hair escaping his ponytail seemed almost boyish, and I wondered what fond little pet name his mother had given him.

“You’ll wait for him here,” Yaxley said gruffly.

I blinked back at him. Goodbye. And I meant it. 

As I sat alone for a moment collecting myself a warm spot in the center of my chest seemed to get bigger and bigger, until I felt no ill will toward anyone.

I forgave everyone I could think of—my mother, who was still sore about the obliviation. Pansy Parkinson. The times Ginny inadvertently implied that I was a poor mother for working full time.

From my seat at the foot of the bed, the ocean was visible: spread like glittering topaz to the distant, band of far coastline. Italy.

I should have taken the pill by now. 

The warm acceptance of my death began to trickle away, replaced by nagging thoughts.

If Voldemort knew me, what else did he know?

How could I leave behind such a puzzle—not to mention a liability? My department had no clue their biggest target in a century had seemingly intimate knowledge of a senior operative. 

Truth be told, I thought the whole thing was somehow my fault. 

I probably would have popped the pill instantly had not a seed of noxious guilt been planted the moment Voldemort said my name. 

Across the bedroom was a teak set of drawers with a large mirror hung above it, framing my reflection from the bed, my arms stretched out. 

My limply dry hair hung about my shoulders and my face held a calm detachment.

The pill, Granger. It’s time.

But the longer I waited, the more the scales in my mind tipped toward staying alive. 

Dying would be a mistake if there was a chance I could find out how my identity had been leaked to Voldemort. If this was somehow my fault, I owed that much to Harry.

The ropes around my wrist were a rough, hairy double-ply, probaby jute. Perhaps I could summon something sharp to cut it.

I scanned the room.

The dark lord is notably a private person, which is why I had been surprised he had directed his follower to bring me to his suite. Looking around however (in my narrow field of vision) it was clear that any personal affects were either hidden or nonexistent. The room was as blank as a hotel.

Neither my department nor the DMLE had ever found a cache of Voldemort’s personal possessions. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he never kept any physical objects at all.

There was a vivid blue stoneware vase on the coffee table in the corner of my eye. Perhaps I could smash it, and levitate a shard—ah but levitation would be a fool’s errand.

Directing wandless magic is like writing a birthday card by gripping the pen in the crook of one’s elbow. Sure, you can get something out, but any kind of specificity is an arduous long shot. Plus, spells dependent on isolated wand movements, like for example finite incantatem, are impossible.

Add an immobulus charm on top of that, and there wasn’t much I could do.

I met my own eyes in the mirror and directed a thought like a volley at the glass.

Lumos!

A filament of light shot out and beamed off the mirror, shooting a momentary ray back at me. 

I could only hold it a moment.

Letting out all the air in my lungs, I reached deep within myself for calm, precision, focus.

Lumos!

The light held longer, a beam triangulating from my wand hand off the mirror and onto the bed.

For the next three hours, I sent beams of light from the mirror, eventually determining how to angle the beam toward the rope again and again.

Sounds began to trickle up the hallway from the floor below.

They came in waves: first a few, then a whole chorus of laughing, lilting, regaling voices low and high. There was a familiar whooshing of people joining from a floo, the sound of a great party grew steadily louder.

A piano struck up a jazz motif that wandered louder, then softer among the carousing noises. 

Glasses and cutlery began to clink and a jab of hunger reminded me that I hadn’t properly eaten since 4:30 a.m. on October 15, 2024.

I ignored this, focusing on my tiny blade of light hitting the rope over and over.

Shadows fell across the room and for about thirty minutes, the angled sunlight was blaring in my eyes until it finally sank behind the distant Italian coastline.

Only when it became dark did I finally scent a hint of smoke.

By then, the sounds from the lower floor had hushed: only the piano and a single female voice rang through the house. Her velvety alto crooned out a wistful ballad, something one might have heard in a 1960s Harlem nightclub.

In fact the tune did seem somewhat familiar.

Was Voldemort sitting down there, one leg crossed over the other, a scotch in hand, listening to a death eater singing Aretha Franklin?

It boggled the mind.

Only then did I realize the smoke scent was not the success of my focused point of light, a curtain of fresh cigarette smoke had finally made its way to this room and I had the pleasure of inhaling second-hand death eater cigarettes.

Damn.

An applause carried up through the floor, followed by the hum of voices: low with the satiating power of fine drink and music.

The rope in my right hand was beginning to warm against my skin, yet still I didn’t smell the telltale scent of singeing fibers. Steady on, I continued pulsing the weak lumos into the mirror.

The little flashes in the dark were like my heartbeat.

I knew Voldemort was coming when the sleepy murmur downstairs pitched upward. 

The muffled banter below punctuated with laughter and I could hear from voices low and high that familiar double syllable which could only be “goodnight”.

Every hair on my skin stood.

The marble tile in the hallway measured his approaching footsteps.

The beams between me, the mirror and the rope became like a brilliant blur and finally I smelled burning—

A soft light filled the suite, its slow fade-in tense with anticipation like the opening of a play.

When he stepped into the room, his dinner jacket was folded over his arm and his hair gleamed, set like a movie star from a black and white film.

I could only see him from the corner of my eye, but I was fairly certain the thing he was tossing and catching in one hand was an apple.

In the other, he held a glass goblet of dark red liquid.

He set everything down on the coffee table, then stood just out of my field of vision, studying me.

“I thought about what I would do if you came back,” he said.

His pause left a space that seemed like he expected me to answer, but of course I could not.

“Can you imagine?”

He was pacing toward me now.

“All the things I’ve thought of doing?”

The cool ocean air slipped across the goosebumps on my skin.

Everything in me clanged with alarm, but I couldn’t twitch a muscle.

Grasping my chin, he tilted my face upward.

I was ready for hatred, for the vile look of triumph.

Instead, the dark lord’s eyes shone…with the gleam of unshed tears?! 

He smiled, looking at me as if I had torn out his heart.

Then, he palmed the back of my head and slammed my skull into the footboard of the bed.

My brain swam like a shaken fishbowl.

He was in my mind before I could get a hold of the spinning, deeper than I had ever let an intruder. 

The sudden terror was like being a child again with inferior skills, going up against adult wizards. Filthy mudblood.

I was a fool to think I could succeed this far off the historyline.

Why the devil hadn’t I taken the gray pill!

Like a drunk, I snatched one at a time the pieces of my occlumency armor from the whirlpool of my brain and set a meager defence. 

My forehead throbbed. A warm trickle passed over my lips. 

Copper.

Voldemort had already darted through these walls and snatched at the kite strings of my current thoughts. 

Good god, this was dire. 

I fought to hide these critical threads of reasoning and fed him my recent emotions: my surprise at his expression. The pain radiating through my skull.

Men typically hate that technique, but Voldemort sifted through these abstract sensations without recoiling.

When he saw my pain, he cupped a hand around my cheek.

“Shhhh now, let me in and it will all stop hurting.”

Nausea rippled through me. Perhaps a concussion?

I couldn’t go on like this.

Voldemort shoved his way toward my critical barrier, the thoughts of my mission, my identity as an Unspeakable.

I needed a diversion with enough emotional weight to attract his attention.

It couldn’t be a secret from the war, nor from the ministry. It had to be something he knew I would never willingly divulge. 

Drawing a memory backward from his advance with the slightest quaver, I let him seize upon it.

The scene opened on Christmast morning, Rose and Hugo at five and three years old raced toward the tree gilded with ornaments of paper and modeling-clay. Ron settled into an armchair and I sat next to Hugo on the carpet, helping him untie a velvet ribbon.

Voldemort watched the memory just long enough for me to clear my mind and reassemble my occlumency shields.

I braced for another attack, but he slipped out of my head like a poisoned tendril. There was relief with his exit, but the inside of my skull twinged as if everything he touched was now an oozing infection.

When my vision cleared, he was glaring down at me.

“You’re a mother.”

I nodded, finding that Voldemort had removed the immobulus. I swayed where I sat, my sore, stiff limbs coming online like an internal scream.

Why would he care?

“And you left?”

There was a hideous cold to his voice. 

The accusation hit me like a gut punch, deeper than I could have anticipated. 

I left them.

“No—I mean…They’re both adults now,” I said. Why was I trembling?

His jaw flexed.

“I see.”

A flare of anger surged in me and I nearly chided him on whether he’d ask his male associates why they aren’t tending their children—but then, I recognized the absurdity of this whole scenario.

I had stayed alive to find out how he knew me, and to relay that information to Harry.

If Voldemort had proven one thing, it’s that an incapacitated subject is much easier to scour for information.

Fortunately, the rope around my right hand had been silently singing along, and the trickle of dark smoke had been easy enough for me to spell away the moment Voldemort had released me from the immobulus.

In the span of one heartbeat, I yanked the half-burned rope and tore my right wrist free.

“Sectumsempra!” I screamed.

A curtain of hot blood sprayed my face.