Chapter 1
She was a terrible thing… Some beast with amber eyes and smooth, pale flesh.
When had that happened? When had that slip of a girl and her frizzy curls turned into this lion-maned goddess with a taste for divine vengeance?
It had all happened so fast. One minute, the halls of the castle were quiet— Perhaps too quiet, as each stone seemed to wonder where their eccentric leader had disappeared to. And then the next, every pane of ancient glass hummed with the fear-drenched screams of one Miss Dolores Umbridge.
“Have you nothing to say for yourself, Miss Granger?” Severus finally asks, scrutinizing every minute shift of the girl sitting just on the other side of his desk.
“What is it you would like to hear, Sir?” She asks, a dangerous glint just underneath her thin facade of innocence.
Just earlier that day, as the clock struck noon, every single word that Umbridge had forced a student to write with that infernal quill of hers had scratched its way into her flesh, leaving her a bloodied, agonized mess on the pink-painted stones of her office floor.
A quite ingenious curse, if he were to admit— one that not many students here would find themselves capable of pulling off.
No, none except perhaps… one.
Severus glances down at the girl’s hands folded neatly in her lap. “You’ve experienced Professor Umbridge’s rather… creative punishment,” He says rather than asks, an unexpected pang of anger rising in his chest at the sight of her scarred flesh.
“I have.”
Suddenly he’s looming over her, leaning close with one hand on the arm of her chair and drawing forward as if to chase that little glint in her gaze and catch it in his grasp, to thrust it in her face as if to prove that he can seeher.
“So you know, Miss Granger… you know how painful it is,” He murmurs darkly, somewhere between simple intrigue and accusation.
The suppressed smile touching her lips does not go unseen.
“And how long it takes to heal,” she says softly.
Yes… such a terrible, brutal, beastly creature.
“I suggest… you tread carefully from here forth, Miss Granger,” he murmurs, dragging himself from her amber depths as he straightens and turns from her. “Now get out of my sight.”
Only when the soft click of the door reaches his ears does Severus allow the faintest smirk to touch his lips.
***