Chapter 2: Two in the Morning
"You bought my debt to find me," you say.
You're both still crouched by the box. The iron snakes have frozen halfway through uncoiling, and in the lamplight your father's knot glints up at you like a word you'd forgotten you knew.
"I bought your debt because Fenwick's ledger said a curse-breaker borrowed four thousand Galleons from him in the spring of 1998 and then vanished off the face of the earth." Mattheo stands, slowly. "The same spring somebody put that knot on my family's box. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know who paid him. You were the only thread left."
"You could have asked."
"Would you have told the Dark Lord's son anything about your father?"
You open your mouth and close it again.
"Exactly," he says. "So I sent an owl and made you an offer, and you came, and here we are." He looks down at you. "I'm not going to pretend I'm sorry. I'll tell you anything I know, though. That's the deal now. You open it, and whatever's inside about him is yours."
"And whatever's inside about you?"
"We'll find out together," says Mattheo, and offers you his hand to get up.
You don't take it. You stand on your own, and he lets his hand drop without comment, but you catch the edge of something in his face that might be amusement and might be respect, and you lie awake that night in a cold guest room at the top of the Riddle House trying to decide which you'd prefer.
It becomes a routine faster than you'd like.
You work nights. He sends the black owl at dusk, and you Floo from your workshop to the kitchen in Little Hangleton, where the range is always lit. You go down to the cellar and he follows, and you peel the curse back a layer at a time. Some nights you need him to speak to it and he crouches beside you and hisses, and the snakes on the lid shift another quarter-inch. Most nights you don't, and he sits on the cellar steps with a book on his knee and doesn't read it.
"You're staring," you tell him, on the fourth night, without turning round.
"I'm supervising."
"You're staring at my back."
"It's a good back." He turns a page he hasn't read. "Very competent shoulders."
At two in the morning he makes eggs. You would never have guessed it, the heir to the darkest name in Britain standing at a stove in his shirtsleeves breaking eggs one-handed into a pan, but he does it every night and he does it well, with too much black pepper and toast cut into triangles. You eat at the long kitchen table with your burned fingers wrapped round a mug, and he asks you about Egypt. About the tomb at Saqqara that nearly took your hand off. About Peru, and the goblin, and why anyone would choose a job where the best outcome is not being dead.
"Things that bite usually have a reason," you say. "Somebody built them to bite. If you can work out why, you can usually get them to stop."
He's quiet for a while, turning his mug.
"Is that what you think about me?"
You look up. He's watching you across the table, the firelight catching in his curls, and he's not joking.
"I think," you say carefully, "you'd like me to believe you bite."
"I do bite."
"I know. I've heard what happened to Fenwick."
"Fenwick was selling Dark objects to Muggle-borns' families and telling them it was protection." His voice doesn't change. "He's in Albania. He's alive. I'm not my father."
"I didn't say you were."
"Everybody says it. Mostly without saying anything." He gets up and takes your plate. His hand brushes your shoulder as he passes behind your chair, light, and stays a beat too long, and then is gone. "Back to work, curse-breaker."
On the ninth night, the wards scream.
You feel it before you hear it, a hard shudder through the floor of the cellar like somebody's slammed a fist into the house. Then the noise, a high thin wail from every window at once. Mattheo is on his feet before the book hits the stone.
"Stay here."
"Absolutely not."
"That's Mulciber." He's already on the stairs, wand out, and his face has gone into something you haven't seen before, flat and cold and very calm. "Silas Mulciber. His father was one of my father's. He thinks whatever's in that box will make him the next one."
"Then he's going to try and break the house wards from the north side, because that's where the old Muggle wing joins the new, and that's the weakest seam." You push past him. "I walked the boundary on the first night. You're welcome."
He stares at you for half a second. Then he follows.
There are four of them, black shapes in the frost beyond the kitchen garden, and they've hung a Blasting Curse on the north wall like a limpet, ticking and swelling with heat. You can feel it from the doorway. You go down on one knee in the frozen grass and lay your wand flat against the bricks beside it and start unpicking, fast, the way you were never allowed to work at Gringotts. Behind you Mattheo steps out into the open and draws every curse they have.
You don't watch. You can't afford to. You hear it, though: the crack and hiss of spells, the flash of red and green on the frost, Mattheo's voice snapping out shields and something low and vicious you don't recognise. One of them screams. Your fingertips burn. The limpet curse shudders under your wand, loop by loop, and then gives with a soft, sulky pop and drops off the wall in a little shower of harmless sparks.
When you turn round, three of them have Disapparated and the fourth is lying face down in a cabbage bed, Stunned. Mattheo is standing over him breathing hard. There's a long dark tear in his shirt over his ribs.
"You're bleeding," you say.
He looks down at himself as though it's someone else's problem. "Not much."
"Kitchen. Now."
He sits on the edge of the kitchen table with his shirt off, and you are trying very hard to be a professional.
The cut is shallow, a Slicing Hex that caught him as he turned, a clean line along the bottom of his ribs. You uncork the Dittany and tip three drops onto it and watch it smoke and close. You're standing between his knees to do it. That wasn't a plan. It was simply where the light was. Now you're there, with his bare skin warm under your fingertips and his breath moving the hair at your temple, and you can't remember how to leave.
"You walked the boundary," he says quietly. "The first night."
"It's what I do."
"You were planning an escape route."
"Obviously."
"And you used it to save my house instead."
"Don't make it romantic. It's a nice house." You dab the last of the Dittany away with your thumb. He catches your wrist. Not hard. You could pull free. You don't.
"There's something I should have told you," he says. "The debt. Your father's. I burned the page the night you walked into my office and knocked twice. You don't owe me a Knut. You haven't owed me anything for nine days."
You stare at him.
"Then why the hell am I here?"
"You tell me." His thumb moves on the inside of your wrist, over the pulse, which is doing something embarrassing. "I kept waiting for you to ask to see the ledger. You never did. You just kept coming back."
"Because I wanted to open the box."
"Did you?"
You don't answer. You look at his mouth, and he sees you do it, and the air in the kitchen goes very still.
"You can go," he says. His voice has dropped low and rough. "Right now. I'll Floo you home and you'll never hear from me again, I swear it. I don't want you here because you think you have to be. I won't have that."
"I know," you say. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Say it properly."
"I want this." You put your free hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and feel it slam. "I want you. I've wanted you since you told me no in your office, and it's been extremely inconvenient."
He kisses you.
It's not careful. It's nine nights of sitting on the cellar steps not reading, nine nights of eggs at two in the morning and hands on shoulders that stayed a beat too long, all of it at once. He kisses like he talks, unhurried and certain, his hand sliding up into your hair to tip your head back, and you make a sound into his mouth that you'll be embarrassed about later. You climb him. There's no other word. You get a knee up on the table beside his hip and he drags you the rest of the way into his lap, and the Dittany bottle rolls off the edge and smashes, and neither of you looks.
"Bed," he says against your throat. "Or I'm going to do this on the table, and you've just been on your knees in a frozen garden."
"Bed," you agree, breathless, "but you're carrying me, because you can't walk me through a house this size with your hands where they are."
He laughs, a rough startled sound against your skin, and stands up with you wrapped around him like it costs him nothing.
His room is at the top of the house, all dark wood and a huge old bed and a window full of frost and stars. He sets you down on the edge of the mattress and kneels in front of you, and that, of all things, is what undoes you: Mattheo Riddle on his knees on the floorboards, unlacing your boots with total concentration, looking up at you through his curls.
"Tell me if you want to stop," he says.
"If you stop now I'll curse you."
"Noted," he says, and pulls your jumper over your head.
He takes his time. You hadn't expected that. You'd expected heat and hurry, the man from the alley who walked like he owned the street, and he gives you that later, but first he undresses you as if he's unpicking a ward, piece by piece, watching your face for every reaction. His mouth finds the hinge of your jaw, the hollow of your throat, the scars on your fingertips one by one. When he gets your bra off he goes still for a moment and just looks, and then lowers his head and closes his mouth over your nipple, and your back comes off the bed.
"That," he murmurs, "I'm going to remember."
He kisses down your stomach. He works your trousers and knickers off together and spreads your thighs with his big warm hands, and when he puts his mouth on you, slow and open and devastatingly patient, you fist both hands in his hair and stop being able to form sentences. He learns you the way you learn a curse, testing, listening, adjusting, a flick of his tongue there, two fingers curling inside you there, and when you gasp his name he hums against you like a man who's found what he was looking for. You come with your heel dug into his back and the frost on the window going blurry.
He climbs up over you while you're still shaking. You get your hands on his belt and he helps, impatient now, and then he's bare and hard and heavy against your thigh, and he braces himself on his forearms over you and stops.
"Look at me," he says.
You look. His eyes are black in the dark.
"Yes?"
"Yes," you say. "Mattheo. Yes."
He pushes into you slowly, a long, stretching slide that makes you both swear, and holds there, forehead to yours, breathing hard. Then he moves. Deep, steady, rolling his hips in a way that drags against every nerve you have, and you wrap your legs around him and pull him closer and tell him faster, and he listens. The old bed creaks. His mouth is at your ear, saying things in a low wrecked voice, how good you feel, how long he's thought about this, how you looked kneeling in the frost with your wand on the wall like you'd been born to it. You come again with his hand between you, clenching around him, and it drags him over after you with a groan that you feel all the way through his chest.
Afterwards he doesn't move away. He lies half on top of you, heavy and warm, his face in your neck, and traces the scars on your fingers with his thumb, one at a time.
You fall asleep like that.
You wake at four, alone in the bed, to a sound coming up through the floorboards of the whole house. A long, low, sibilant hiss. It's the noise he makes when he speaks to the box.
Except Mattheo is standing at the window in the dark with his back to you, completely silent, listening to it too.
"That's not me," he says. "It's talking on its own."