Chapter 2: The Winter Garden
Three weeks of being seen.
Lunch at the Ministry café, where he orders for you without asking and gets it right, and three different undersecretaries choke on their soup. A walk down Diagon Alley with his hand at the small of your back, not quite touching, so that every shopkeeper on the street has a story by teatime. A photograph in Witch Weekly, grainy and slanted, of the two of you leaving Florean Fortescue's under a single umbrella. The caption says RIDDLE'S NEW PROJECT? and you laugh so hard at your desk that your supervisor sends you home.
He never kisses you. That is the thing that keeps you up at night.
He touches you constantly. A hand at your elbow on the stairs. Fingers brushing your wrist when he passes you a glass. His thumb, once, at the corner of your mouth, wiping away a crumb of treacle tart in the middle of the Leaky Cauldron while a table of Auror trainees watched with their jaws open. But he never kisses you. Not when the cameras go off. Not when he walks you to your door at midnight and stands on your step with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on your mouth, and you wait, and he says, "Goodnight, sweetheart," and Disapparates with a crack that sounds smug.
Adrian, for his part, has noticed. Of course he has. He's been tight-lipped and pink at breakfast for a fortnight. But he hasn't broken it off. He's polling well with the old families and the old families like a wedding. He thinks you'll get over it.
Which is how you find yourself on his arm at the Ministry's spring gala, in the Atrium under a ceiling charmed to look like a summer night, wearing green.
You told yourself the green was a coincidence. It's a lie and you know it, and so does the dress, which is the colour of deep water and cut low enough at the back that Adrian's hand, resting there, feels like a damp handprint on a clean window.
"You're very quiet tonight," Adrian says, smiling for a photographer.
"I'm conserving my energy."
"For what?"
For the moment Mattheo walks in. You don't say it. You don't have to, because he does.
He arrives late, the way he always does, and the room changes shape around him. Conversations falter. A Ministry official spills champagne. He's in black, head to toe, no tie, the collar of his shirt open, his curls a disaster, silver at his throat and on his fingers. He looks like a funeral someone's looking forward to.
His eyes find you across the Atrium in about two seconds. They go to your dress. Then to Adrian's hand on your bare back. Then back to your face.
Something happens in his jaw.
It takes him forty minutes to get to you. He works the room as if he's got all night, shaking hands with men who'd once have spat on him, kissing the cheek of a Wizengamot elder who visibly can't decide whether to faint or blush. He doesn't look at you once. You know, because you're watching him the whole time.
Then Adrian goes to give his speech, and a hand closes, warm and sure, around your wrist.
"Walk with me," Mattheo says in your ear.
He doesn't wait for an answer, but he doesn't pull either. His grip is loose enough to break. You don't break it. You follow him past the Fountain of Magical Brethren, which was rebuilt after the war and is now mostly a fountain of a witch looking stern, and through a door marked STAFF that unlocks for him without a word, and down a short corridor into the Ministry's winter garden.
It's a glasshouse, charmed and humid, full of night-blooming plants from the Department of Magical Creatures' import licences. Moonflowers. Something that hums. The air is warm and wet and heavy with jasmine, and the gala is a muffled roar through two walls.
He lets go of your wrist. He turns around.
"Green," he says.
"It's a colour."
"It's my colour. You know it is." He's not smiling. He looks almost angry, though not with you. "And you let him put his hand on you in it."
"He's my fiancé. That's what fiancés do. That's the entire point of this exercise, Mattheo, he's meant to be humiliated, he can't be humiliated if I don't..."
"I know what the point is." He steps closer. You step back, and the edge of a stone planter meets the backs of your thighs. "I wrote the point. I just didn't account for how much I'd hate watching it."
Your heart is pounding so hard you can feel it in your fingertips.
"You've had three weeks," you say. Your voice comes out lower than you mean it to. "You've walked me home every night. You've stood on my step. You never once..."
"Because the first time I kiss you," he says, "it won't be for a photographer."
The humming plant behind you goes quiet, as if it's listening.
"There's no photographer here," you say.
He looks at you. For a long moment he doesn't move at all, and you understand he's giving you one last chance to walk away, to go back to Adrian's speech and the damp hand on your back and the life you agreed to. He lifts his hand and lays it along your jaw, his thumb resting on your lower lip, and asks without asking.
You reach up, take a fistful of his shirt, and pull him down.
He kisses you like a man who's been starving politely and has just given up on manners. Deep, slow, then not slow at all, his hand sliding back into your hair, his other arm going around your waist and lifting you onto the edge of the planter so that you're at a height with him. You taste smoke and champagne and the mint he chews to cover the smoke. His rings are cold against your scalp. You wrap your legs around his hips without deciding to and he makes a noise into your mouth, rough and low, that goes straight between your thighs.
"Tell me," he says against your throat, breathing hard. "Tell me you want this. Say it, sweetheart. I won't touch you again until you say it."
"I want this." It comes out ragged. "I've wanted it for three weeks. I wanted it the first night, in your study, when you did that thing with your knuckle like you were doing me a favour. Stop asking and..."
He kisses you again, harder, and you feel him smile against your mouth.
He's not gentle with the dress, but he's careful. He finds the hidden fastening at the back on the first try, which you'll think about later, and slides the straps off your shoulders, and the green silk pools at your waist. The glasshouse air is warm on your skin. He looks at you in the moonlight through the glass, at your bare breasts and your flushed throat and your mouth, swollen now, and he says your full name very softly, like he's never said it before, like a man learning a spell.
Then he bends his head and takes your nipple into his mouth, and you stop being able to think in sentences.
You've been touched before. You've never been touched like this, with this kind of focus, as if you're a lock and he means to learn every pin. His mouth moves from one breast to the other. His hand slides up under the hem of the dress, over your knee, the inside of your thigh, slowly enough that you're arching towards it before he gets there. When his fingers finally brush you through the thin silk of your knickers, you both go still.
"Fuck," he breathes. "You're soaked."
"Don't sound so pleased with yourself."
"I'm going to sound exactly as pleased as I am." He hooks his fingers into the silk and draws it down your legs, and pockets it, which is outrageous, and then he goes to his knees on the flagstones of the Ministry winter garden in a suit that probably cost more than your flat.
The first stroke of his tongue is slow and flat and deliberate, and you have to bite your own wrist to keep from making a sound. He holds your thighs open with both hands, his rings pressing into your skin, and takes his time, learning what makes your breath catch, what makes your heels dig into his back. He doesn't hurry. Somewhere through two walls Adrian is talking about moral renewal, and Mattheo Riddle has his mouth between your legs and is humming against you, the bastard, as if he can hear it too.
When he slides two fingers into you and curls them, it ends you. You come with your hand fisted in his curls and his name breaking in half in your throat, and he keeps going, gentler, until you're shaking and have to push him away.
He stands. His mouth is wet. His eyes are black.
"Still want this?" he asks, and his voice is wrecked.
You answer by reaching for his belt.
He lets you. He braces one hand on the glass beside your head while you open his trousers and wrap your hand around him, hot and hard and heavy, and he swears, low and filthy, into your hair. You guide him to you. He stops there, just at the edge, his forehead against yours.
"Look at me," he says. "I want to see you when I'm inside you."
You look at him. He pushes into you slowly, so slowly, a long stretching ache that makes your toes curl, until he's all the way in and you can feel his heart going through his shirt.
"Mine," he says. It sounds less like a claim than a confession. "Fuck. You feel like you were made to be mine."
Then he starts to move.
It's not gentle. You didn't want gentle. It's deep and steady and relentless, his hand under your thigh holding you open, the planter's stone edge cool against your back and his body hot against your front. The glass behind you fogs with your breath. A moonflower opens over your shoulder with a soft sound like a sigh. When he slips his hand between you and finds your clit with his thumb, you come again, harder, and you feel him lose the rhythm, feel him shudder and press his face into your neck and groan your name as he follows you over.
For a long time neither of you moves.
"Well," you say eventually, into his hair. "That's going to be hard to explain at the press conference."
He laughs, shaky, and lifts his head, and kisses you, slow and almost sweet.
You're doing up the dress when you remember. You've had it in your evening bag for two days, burning a hole. A copy you made of a letter you found on Adrian's desk, under the blotter. You've read it a dozen times. It still says the same thing.
"I found your witness," you say.
Mattheo goes still, halfway through buttoning his shirt.
You take the folded copy out and hold it, and suddenly you don't want to give it to him. Suddenly your hands, which never shake, are shaking.
"It's my father," you say.