Chapter 1: Knock Once
The letter arrives on a Tuesday, delivered by an owl so black it looks cut out of the night, and it says only this:
Madam, Your account is due. Mr Riddle would like to discuss settlement in person. Ouroboros. Ten o'clock. Come alone. Come sober.
There is no signature. There doesn't need to be. Everyone on Knockturn Alley knows the coiled snake stamped in green wax, the way everyone on Knockturn knows not to walk past the second lamp after midnight and not to buy anything from Borgin's nephew that hums.
You read it standing in the doorway of your workshop, which used to be a pawnbroker's and still has the iron grille on the window. Your hands smell of salt and dittany. Behind you, on the bench, a cursed music box you've been taking apart for three days plays four notes of a lullaby and then tries to bite you. You flick it shut with your wand without looking.
Four thousand Galleons. That's what your father owed when he walked out of your life nine years ago and didn't come back. The debt passed down to you like a bad ring, and you paid it in dribs and drabs for years to a moneylender called Fenwick who had wet hands and a dead eye, and then last spring Fenwick disappeared and the paper changed hands. You never found out how. You just started getting the receipts on thick cream stationery with a snake on it.
You've never met him. You've seen him. Everybody has. Down at the bottom of the alley, coming out of the club with men twice his size walking half a step behind him, tall and dark-haired and wrapped in black, looking at the street like he owns it, which he does. Mattheo Riddle. The Dark Lord's son. Twenty-seven years old and running every illegal thing between Knockturn and the river.
You go sober. You do not go alone, exactly. You take your wand, a vial of Dittany, a Shield Charm already half-cast in the back of your mind, and a curse-breaker's habit of noticing exits.
The Ouroboros is under the street, behind a door that looks like brick until you show it the wax seal. Stairs go down further than they should. At the bottom it opens out into a long, low room like an old wine cellar, all green-glass lamps and black velvet booths and people who stop talking when you walk in and start again a beat too late. Somebody's playing a piano. The air smells of firewhisky and expensive tobacco and something sharper underneath, like the moment after a spell goes off.
A man with a face like a closed fist takes your coat and does not give you a ticket.
"Office is at the back," he says. "Knock once."
You knock twice, because you're annoyed. The door opens on its own.
The office is smaller than you expected, and warmer. A fire burns in a grate carved with snakes. Books line one wall floor to ceiling, and they're read, the spines cracked white. There's a desk of dark wood and a decanter on it and, behind it, a man doing paperwork.
He doesn't look up straight away. He finishes the line he's writing, blots it, sets the quill down. Then he lifts his head, and you get the full force of Mattheo Riddle's attention for the first time, and it's like walking into a room where someone's just cast a very large charm and the air hasn't settled.
He's beautiful. That's irritating. The rumours didn't mention it, or they did and you assumed exaggeration. Dark curls falling over his forehead, a sharp jaw shadowed with stubble, a mouth that looks like it's used to getting its way. Dark eyes, so dark brown they read as black in the firelight. His shirt is black and the sleeves are rolled to the elbow, and there's a silver ring on his right hand with a green stone in it. On his left forearm, where you might expect a Dark Mark, there's nothing but a long pale scar, like someone once tried to cut something out.
"You knocked twice," he says.
"I was told once."
"And you wanted me to know you don't do what you're told." He leans back. His voice is lower than you expected, unhurried. "Noted. Sit down."
"I'll stand."
"You'll get tired. This might take a while." He gestures at the chair across the desk, and when you don't move, something flickers at the corner of his mouth. "I'm not going to hex you. If I wanted you hurt, I wouldn't have sent an owl."
You sit, mainly so your knees stop being the loudest thing in the room.
"I can pay," you say. "Not all of it. Not today. But I've got work coming in. A cursed tiara for a widow in Chelsea, a whole cellar of hexed wine in Bath. By March I can—"
"I don't want your money."
"Then what do you want?"
He studies you for a long moment. His eyes move over your face, down to your hands where they're folded in your lap, and stop there. You know what he's looking at. The tips of your first three fingers on both hands are shiny with old burn scars, the mark of every curse-breaker who ever touched something too soon.
"Gringotts trained you," he says.
"Five years. Egypt, then Peru."
"And they sacked you."
"I quit."
"You punched a goblin."
"I quit," you say, "and then I punched a goblin. The order matters."
That gets him. It's not a smile, quite. It's the shape a smile would be if he let it out. "I want you to break a curse for me," he says. "One curse. A strongbox that's been in my family a long time and that nobody, including me, has ever managed to open. Your father's debt is cleared the night it opens. Until then, you work on it every night. Here, or wherever I say. In person. You don't send notes, you don't send apprentices. You."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the best freelance curse-breaker in Britain and you're cheap, because you owe me." He says it simply, not cruel. "And because I've had four curse-breakers look at it already. Two said no. One said yes and then left the country. The last one is in St Mungo's learning to use a spoon again."
"That's comforting."
"I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it so you'd know what you're agreeing to." He turns the silver ring round his finger. "You can say no. I'll take the gold in instalments and you'll never hear from me except on cream paper. I'm not Fenwick."
You believe him, which is alarming. You look at the fire, and the cracked spines of the books, and the scar on his arm.
"I'll need to see it before I agree."
"Obviously."
"And I'll need you to stop looking at me like that."
He doesn't pretend not to understand. He holds your eyes, slow and deliberate, and says, "No."
The word lands low in your stomach and stays there.
He takes you by Side-Along. His hand closes around your wrist, warm and dry, and the world squeezes flat and you come out on a hill at night with the wind in your face and frost in the grass. Below you there's a village, a few lit windows, a church. Above you there's a house.
"Little Hangleton," he says. "My grandfather's family had it. The Muggle side." He doesn't let go of your wrist straight away. You notice that. You notice he notices you noticing, and lets go.
The Riddle House is huge and dark and half-dead, ivy thick over the windows, but inside somebody has been living. There are rugs. There's a lit range in the kitchen and a loaf on the table. He leads you through it and down a flight of stone steps to a cellar, where a lamp hangs from a chain over a single wooden table, and on the table sits the box.
It's iron, black with age, about the size of a hatbox. Snakes are worked into the lid, coiled around a shield that bears a crest you half-recognise: a serpent, an S, a ring. Gaunt. The oldest, ugliest pure-blood line in Britain. Even from the doorway you can feel the curse on it. It presses against your skin like heat from an oven door.
"Don't touch it," he says.
"I wasn't going to touch it. I'm not an idiot." You walk round the table slowly, wand out, letting your senses unspool the way they taught you in Cairo. Layers. There are layers, a dozen at least, old work over older work, Dark and clever and patient. You crouch so you're eye level with the lock. "Has anyone spoken to it?"
"Spoken to it?"
"Parseltongue. It's a Gaunt box. Half the old Gaunt wards answer to it."
He's quiet. When you look round he's watching you with an expression that's harder to read than anything on the box.
"Not many people would know that," he says.
"Not many people have been sacked from Gringotts for arguing with a goblin about Slytherin's vault protocols. Can you speak it, or not?"
For answer he crouches beside you. Close. His shoulder brushes yours, and you're very aware of the warmth of him in the cold cellar, the smell of smoke and something green on his skin. He leans towards the lock and makes a sound that isn't a word, a long low hiss that lifts every hair on your arms.
The snakes on the lid move.
They uncoil slowly, iron scraping on iron, and pull back from the centre of the shield to reveal a second layer beneath. And worked into that layer, so fine you need to lean right in to see it, is a counter-ward in a style you know better than any style on earth. A spiral knot, three loops, a finishing flourish that kinks to the left.
You learned that knot sitting on a stool in a workshop that used to be a pawnbroker's, while a man with burned fingertips guided your hand.
"That's my father's," you whisper.
Beside you, Mattheo Riddle goes completely still.
"I know," he says. "Why do you think I bought the debt?"