Chapter 1: Black Card
The invitation comes on black card, which is the first thing you hold against him.
It's waiting on your desk at Mortlake's when you come back from lunch, propped against the jeweller's loupe like it has every right to be there. No envelope. No owl feathers. Just heavy card, gilt-edged, and a single line in silver ink that shifts slightly when you tilt it, the way the expensive kinds do.
A piece requires appraisal. Discretion assured. Tonight, eleven. The Gaunt.
No signature. He doesn't need one. Everyone in wizarding London knows who owns The Gaunt, the same way everyone knows which alley in Knockturn not to walk down after dark and which surname not to say too loudly in the Leaky Cauldron. Riddle. It still makes old witches touch their wands.
You turn the card over. On the back, in the same silver hand, smaller:
Bring the loupe. Leave the fiancé.
You put it in the bin. Then you take it out of the bin and put it in your bag, because you are twenty-five years old and you have been an appraiser of cursed objects for four of those years, and you have never once in your career walked away from a piece you hadn't seen.
That is what you tell yourself, anyway.
The Gaunt is a townhouse in Mayfair that doesn't exist on any Muggle map. From the street it's a blank door between a gallery and a shuttered bank. You knock twice, the way the card instructs, and the door considers you for a long moment before it opens.
Inside it's all low green light and cigarette smoke and the soft click of chips on felt. Witches in dress robes cut low at the back. Wizards with old money in their accents and new desperation in their eyes. A string quartet playing something mournful in the corner, enchanted instruments with no one holding them. Somewhere a roulette wheel is spinning, and the ball, you notice, is not entirely obeying the laws of physics.
A man in a dark suit meets you at the foot of the stairs. "He's expecting you," he says. "Top floor."
"I'm sure he is."
The top floor is quieter. A corridor, then a door, then a study that smells of leather and smoke and something green and bitter, like crushed basil. Bookshelves floor to ceiling. A fire that burns too blue. And behind a desk the size of a small boat, his feet up on the corner of it, a lit cigarette between two ringed fingers, Mattheo Riddle.
You've seen him before, of course. Everyone has. In the Prophet, mostly: the acquittal photographs, him walking out of the Ministry atrium at nineteen with his hands in his pockets and that look on his face that said he'd known all along. At parties, from the far side of the room, always with a drink, always leaving early, always leaving with someone. He is beautiful in the way a well-made curse is beautiful. You have spent your whole career learning not to touch those with your bare hands.
Dark curls, too long, falling across his forehead. Eyes so dark they're almost black, with heavy lids that make him look bored even when he's paying attention. A jaw you could cut glass on and a mouth that seems permanently on the edge of saying something unforgivable. Shirt open at the collar, sleeves pushed up, silver rings on four fingers. A thin white scar runs across the back of his left hand, and he catches you looking at it.
"Duelling accident," he says. "I lost."
"I doubt that."
"You're right. He lost worse." He swings his feet off the desk and stands, and he's taller than you expected, and he doesn't come round the desk. He just looks at you for a long, unhurried moment, from your shoes to your face, like he's an appraiser too, and you're the piece. "You brought the loupe."
"You said there was a piece."
"There is." He opens a drawer and sets something on the leather blotter between you. A necklace. Old gold, heavy, set with a single black stone the size of a thumbnail. Even from here you can feel it: a pull, faint and greedy, like the stone wants something from you.
You don't touch it. You take your gloves from your bag, dragon leather lined with silk, and pull them on one finger at a time, and his eyes follow each one.
"Goblin setting," you say, after a minute with the loupe. "Late fifteenth century. The stone's jet, but the curse is newer. A compulsion. Whoever wears it starts telling the truth and doesn't stop. It's not a pretty one. People have died wearing things like this. Usually because someone else heard what they said."
"Impressive."
"It's my job." You straighten. "It's also not why I'm here."
"No?"
"You could have had any appraiser in London look at that. Mortlake's has six. You asked for me by name, you told me to leave my fiancé at home, and you put it on a card designed to annoy me." You peel off one glove. "So let's skip to the bit where you tell me what you actually want, Mr Riddle, because I've had a long day and I don't play cards."
For a moment he looks genuinely surprised. Then he laughs. It's low and rough and real, and you don't like how much you like the sound of it.
"Fine," he says. "Adrian Pucey."
Your fiancé. Of course.
Adrian is standing for the Wizengamot in the spring. He has excellent teeth, a family seat in Gloucestershire, and a campaign built entirely on cleaning up wizarding London, which means, in practice, shutting down places like this one. He gives speeches about the stain of the war and the sons and daughters of Death Eaters who still walk free. He's never said Mattheo's name in public. He doesn't have to.
"He's trying to close you down," you say.
"He's trying to put me in Azkaban, sweetheart. Closing me down is a warm-up." Mattheo leans back against the bookshelves and takes a drag on his cigarette. "He's got a witness. Someone who'll say I've been moving cursed goods through the back room. All lies, obviously."
"Obviously."
"Mostly lies." He tips his head. "And I want to know who it is. And you're going to marry him in June, and you sit at his breakfast table, and you read his post when he leaves it lying about, I'd bet, because you're the sort of woman who reads everything."
There it is. Leverage. You were never the appraiser. You were the way in.
You should leave. You know that with the cool, clear part of your brain that keeps your hands steady around cursed silver. Instead you put your loupe back in its case, click it shut, and say, "And what do I get?"
He goes still. Not the stillness of surprise this time. The stillness of something that's been sitting in the dark, watching, and has just noticed that the thing it was hunting has turned around.
"What do you want?"
"Out," you say. The word comes out harder than you meant it to. "My family owes the Puceys a great deal of money. My father signed it away when I'd been at Mortlake's a few months and he was too proud to tell my mother. The engagement settles the debt. If I break it, we lose the house. If Adrian breaks it, we keep it. So I need him to break it. Publicly. With my name nowhere near the reason."
Mattheo looks at you for a very long time. The fire pops. Downstairs, someone wins at roulette and the whole floor cheers.
"You don't love him," he says.
"I don't anything him. He's a moustache with a family seat."
"He doesn't have a moustache."
"He's growing one. For the campaign. It's going badly." You pick up your bag. "Find me a way out that doesn't sink my family, and I'll find you your witness. That's the offer. You can take it or you can keep sending me cards."
He crosses the room. He does it slowly, giving you time to step back, and you don't. He stops close enough that you can smell him under the smoke, cedar and something bitter, like the inside of a wand box. Close enough that you have to tilt your head up to keep his eyes.
"You know what they say about me," he murmurs.
"I know what they print."
"And you still walked in here alone."
"I've handled worse than you with tongs."
His mouth curves. He lifts a hand, slowly, the ringed one with the scar, and lets one knuckle trace the line of your jaw, from your ear to your chin, barely touching. It is a question. He waits for the answer with an attention you feel all the way down your spine.
You don't move away. You don't lean in either. You just hold his gaze and let him see that you know exactly what he's doing.
"Careful, Mr Riddle," you say. "That one's cursed too."
He laughs again, softer, and drops his hand. But he doesn't step back.
"Mattheo," he says. "If we're going to ruin a man together, you should use my name."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a yes." His eyes drop to your mouth and stay there a second too long. "One condition."
"Which is?"
"When Pucey breaks it off," he says, very quietly, "and he will, he'll need a reason. A public one. Something he can't explain away at a press conference." He picks the black-stoned necklace up off the desk, lets it dangle from one finger between you, the gold catching the blue firelight. "So we give him one. You and me. Seen together. Often. Convincingly."
Your pulse is suddenly very loud.
"You want me to pretend to be yours."
Mattheo Riddle smiles, slow and dark and absolutely without shame.
"Who said anything about pretending?"