Chapter 3: Leverage
He reads it in the corridor outside the winter garden, under a flickering Ministry lamp, while the gala applauds Adrian's speech two walls away.
You watch his face while he reads. You've spent four years learning to read objects that don't want to be read, and you're good at it. You can't read him at all.
The letter is short. It's addressed to your father, in Adrian's tidy, campaigning hand, and it is polite in the way that only very rich men are polite. It notes that the debt between their families remains substantial. It notes that certain transactions your father made through a back room in Mayfair, during a difficult year, would interest the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. It notes that a full and helpful statement regarding Mr Riddle's business would go a long way towards settling everything, and that your father would surely want what was best for his daughter's future.
Underneath, in your father's shaky hand, is a single word. Agreed.
"He sold through your back room," you say. "Years ago. After the war, when Mortlake's let him go. I didn't know. I swear I didn't know. He told us he was consulting."
"He was consulting," Mattheo says. "He was very good. He found a goblin-forged hair comb that turned out to be worth more than this building." He folds the letter along its creases, neatly, and doesn't give it back. "I liked him."
"Mattheo."
"He's the witness. If he testifies, I go to Azkaban. If he doesn't, Pucey sends him there instead." He looks up, and his eyes are very dark and very steady. "And he signed it to protect you. So you'd keep the house. So you'd marry well."
"I know."
"Do you know what I'd have done with this a month ago?"
Your throat is tight. "Yes."
"Tell me."
"You'd have gone to my father," you say, "and you'd have offered him something better than Adrian had. Money, or fear, or both. You'd have turned him. And then you'd have used him, and me, to take Adrian apart, and you'd have enjoyed it." You make yourself hold his gaze. "That's what you brought me in for. Leverage. You said so."
"I did say so." He's quiet for a moment. The lamp above you buzzes. "I'm a Riddle, sweetheart. Leverage is the family business. My father had a whole army of it."
Then he tucks the letter into his inside pocket, steps in, and kisses your forehead. Very gently. It is the softest thing anyone has ever done to you, and it frightens you more than anything he did in the glasshouse.
"Go home," he says. "Don't go back in there. Don't answer Pucey's owls tonight. I need forty-eight hours."
"For what?"
"To ruin a man properly," says Mattheo Riddle. "You don't want to rush that sort of thing."
You don't sleep. You sit up in your flat in Islington with the curtains drawn and a cup of tea going cold on the arm of the chair, and you go over it again and again: what he could do with that letter, what it would cost your father, what it would cost you. You think about leverage. You think about the way he said I liked him, in the past tense.
At dawn, an owl taps on your window. Black, sleek, with silver bands on its leg. It drops the morning Prophet on your sill and leaves without waiting for a treat, which is exactly the sort of owl he would own.
You unroll the paper.
PUCEY IN WITNESS SCANDAL, says the front page. A photograph of the letter, Adrian's tidy hand clearly visible, the name of the recipient blacked out. A statement from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement: coerced testimony is inadmissible, the investigation into The Gaunt is suspended pending review, and Mr Pucey is invited to explain himself at his earliest convenience. A smaller headline under the fold, almost an afterthought: PUCEY FAMILY DEBTS SOLD TO PRIVATE BUYER. Every promissory note held by the Pucey estate, bought up overnight through a Gringotts intermediary at a price the article calls frankly insane.
Your hands are trembling. You turn the page.
On page two, Adrian, photographed outside his Gloucestershire house in his dressing gown, moustache wilting in the rain, gives a statement that his engagement is over. He cites, with visible fury, his fiancée's "flagrant and repeated association with Mr Mattheo Riddle," and says that he cannot, in good conscience, bring such a woman into his family.
He broke it. Publicly. With your name as the reason, and nowhere near the real one.
At the bottom of the Prophet, someone has tucked a slip of black card.
A promissory note on your family's house is lying in a drawer in my study, it says, in silver ink. It's yours. Come and set it on fire. M.
He's in the study when you arrive, standing at the window with his back to you, a cigarette burning down unsmoked between his fingers. He doesn't turn around.
"The fire's lit," he says. "Note's on the desk."
You look at it. Your father's signature. Your family's name. The thing that has sat on your chest since you were twenty-one. You pick it up. It weighs nothing at all.
"You bought every debt Adrian's family held," you say. "Not just mine."
"If I'd bought only yours, he'd have known who tipped me off. This way you're one of fifty." He finally turns. He looks like he hasn't slept either. "Your father's out of it. Coerced statement, no case. I owled him at four in the morning and told him to take your mother to France for a fortnight. He wept. I've never had a man weep at me in gratitude before. I'm not sure I liked it."
"You had him," you say. Your voice cracks. "You had a letter that could have sent Adrian to prison and my father with him. You could have used it to own every one of us. Why didn't you?"
Mattheo stubs out the cigarette. He crosses the room. This time he doesn't stop at a polite distance. He takes the note out of your hand, puts it in yours again, and closes your fingers over it with his own.
"Because the night you walked in here and told me you'd handled worse than me with tongs," he says, "I stopped wanting leverage. I wanted you. And I don't ruin things I want, sweetheart." His mouth twists. "I ruin people who touch them."
You stare at him.
Then you walk to the fireplace and drop the note into the blue flames and watch the parchment curl and blacken, your father's name going up in smoke, and you turn around, and Mattheo is right there, and you go up on your toes and kiss him.
It's different from the glasshouse. Slower. He kisses you like he's got all the time in the world and intends to spend all of it on this. His hands frame your face. When you start working at the buttons of his shirt, he catches your wrists, gently, and walks you backwards out of the study, through a door you've never been through, into a bedroom with dark green walls and a bed with black sheets that is so exactly what you'd have pictured that you laugh against his mouth.
"Don't," he warns.
"Black sheets, Mattheo."
"They're practical."
"For what?"
"I'll show you," he says, and lays you down on them.
He undresses you this time like it's a ritual. Each button, each clasp, his mouth following his fingers down your body, taking his time, until you're naked against the cool sheets and he's kneeling between your thighs, still half dressed, looking at you as if he's appraising something priceless he doesn't quite believe he's allowed to keep.
"Say it again," he says. "That you want this. I like hearing it."
"I want this. I want you. Get your shirt off before I curse it off."
He laughs and obeys. He's lean and hard, his skin pale, a scatter of old scars across his ribs that you'll ask about some other night. You trace one. He shivers.
When he finally slides inside you, it's with his fingers laced through yours, pressing your hands into the pillow either side of your head. Slow. Deep. Your breath catches and he drinks it straight from your mouth. He moves like he's memorising you, rolling his hips until you're gasping, watching your face the whole time, the way he said he would.
"Mine," he says against your lips, and it's a question now. "Tell me."
"Yours," you breathe, and his rhythm falters, and you feel something in him break open.
He takes you apart slowly after that, unhurried, devastating, until you're begging, until you're clutching at his back and saying his name into his shoulder like a prayer. When you come it's with your whole body, a long rolling wave, and he follows you a heartbeat later with his face pressed into your neck and your name on his lips, wrecked and reverent.
Afterwards he doesn't let go of you. He lies with his head on your chest and your fingers in his curls, and for once he looks his age, which is to say tired and almost happy.
"Adrian's going to come after you," you murmur.
"Adrian's going to need all his money for lawyers. And he doesn't have any money. I've got it." He lifts his head. "Stay tonight."
"Just tonight?"
He looks at you for a long moment, dark eyes unreadable, and then he reaches over to the bedside table and takes something out of the drawer and lays it on your bare stomach.
The black-stoned necklace from the first night. Except it isn't cursed anymore. You can tell at once: the greedy pull is gone. The jet is just jet now, dark and clean and warm from his hand.
"I had it broken," he says. "Took a curse-breaker six days. Cost me a fortune. It doesn't make anyone tell the truth now." He swallows. "So I'll have to do it myself. I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you since you told me your fiancé was a moustache with a family seat. I don't want just tonight."
Before you can answer, something taps against the bedroom window.
It's an owl. Not his. Grey, official, the Ministry crest on its leg band. And the envelope it carries isn't addressed to Mattheo.
It's addressed to you.