Chapter 13: The Library's Last Secret
The scorched ledger pages lay where Draco had thrown them, fragile as ancient skin against her floorboards. The scent of fire and whisky still clung to him, a bitter perfume woven into the wool of his robes and the cold sweat on his skin. He stood by her kitchen counter, breathing raggedly, his bandaged hand pressed flat against the granite as if to steady a world that kept tilting.
Hermione watched him. The violence of their coupling still throbbed between her legs, a raw, pleasant ache. But the emptiness in his eyes after was a colder thing. He had come back from that library a man who had looked into a abyss and found it was made of his own reflection.
“They’ll question it,” she said, her voice too loud in the silence. She summoned her wand with a flick, beginning to repair the torn fastenings of her robes. The fabric knit itself together with soft, whispering sounds. “Kingsley will accept ‘accidental death during evidence tampering’ for now. Harry might. But the forensics team… a head wound from a fall doesn’t always look like a head wound from a crystal decanter.”
Draco didn’t turn. “It was the hearthstone. I said it was the hearthstone.”
“I know what you said.” She finished the repairs, the robes sitting perfectly on her shoulders once more. The order of it was a lifeline. “But you’re covered in his blood. Your knuckles are split. There will be an inquiry. A formal one.”
Now he looked at her, a slow, grim turn of his head. His gray eyes were fathomless. “Let them inquire. He was destroying evidence of high treason. I intervened. He resisted. He fell. The truth is flexible, Granger. You of all people should know that by now.”
It was the ‘you of all people’ that stung. It lumped her in with the chaos, with his moral compromise. She was knee-deep in it, but she refused to let it be her nature. “The truth isn’t flexible. It’s just often inconvenient. Our story is that he fell. We will stick to it. But we need to be prepared.”
“For what? For them to take me away?” A bitter smile touched his lips. “Where would they put me? Azkaban’s full of his friends. A Ministry cell? I’d be dead by morning. My father had more lives than a cat. His legacy has claws.”
He pushed off from the counter and walked into her sitting room. He stared at the tidy bookshelves, the aligned cushions, the absence of dust. Her fortress of order. He ran a finger along a spine, leaving a faint smudge of soot. “This is what you built to keep all this out,” he said, not asking.
“Yes.”
“It’s not working.” He finally faced her. The vacant look was gone, replaced by a feverish intensity. “The poison’s in the room. It’s on my hands. It’s in you.”
She didn’t flinch. “Then we contain it.”
“How?” The word was a challenge. “By filing a report? By sitting in a meeting with Kingsley and agreeing on the right lies to tell? That’s not containment. That’s gardening. You prune a weed, it grows back twice as thick. You have to burn it out by the root.”
He crossed the space between them in two strides. He didn’t grab her, but his proximity was a physical demand. The heat of him, the smell of smoke and sex and despair, was overwhelming. “I need to go back.”
“Back? To the Manor? It’s an active scene, Draco. Aurors are everywhere.”
“Not to the house. To the library. The lower library. They’ve taken the body, but they haven’t cleared the room. They won’t, for days. It’s too magically volatile. There are things… things he said. Things in the fire I didn’t get to see.” His gaze was desperate, hunting. “He said ‘the others’. Plural. That ledger,” he jerked his head toward the kitchen, “is one. There were more. He said he was ‘purifying the legacy’. That’s not just burning account books. That’s a ritual. I need to see what he was really doing.”
It was insane. Reckless. “Harry will have it sealed.”
“I can get through his seals. You know I can.” His bandaged hand came up, hovering near her cheek. “Come with me.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t trust myself alone in that room.” His admission was stark, stripped bare. “And because you… you see patterns in the ashes. I just see fire.”
It was the closest he’d come to asking for help, for her, not just her body or her influence. The plea beneath the command was real. Hermione felt the tectonic plates of her carefully ordered life grind again. Duty said report this, stop him. Something darker, something that had tasted his desperation and found its own mirrored hunger, said go.
“Now,” she said.
They apparated to the edge of the woods, the same spot as before. The Manor was a darker silhouette now, a cut-out against the starless sky. Only one window glowed with the cool, blue light of Auror containment charms: the ground-floor library. They could see two silhouettes standing guard at the main entrance.
“This way,” Draco whispered.
He led her not to the conservatory, but to a sheer, vine-choked section of the outer wall. He placed his palm on a seemingly ordinary stone. It shimmered and became an opening, a narrow servant’s passage that exhaled a breath of damp, cold air. “For the house-elves. And for children hiding from their fathers.”
The passage was tight, forcing them to walk single file. It wound downward, then opened abruptly onto a small, dark antechamber behind a tapestry. He drew it aside a crack. They were looking into the lower library from behind a marble bust of some sneering ancestor.
The room was empty of living souls. The Aurors were outside, guarding the door. The library was a landscape of devastation. The great hearth was a blackened maw, filled with heaps of soft, gray ash. Books lay scattered like fallen soldiers, some half-burned, their pages curled. The desk was overturned. And the chair where Lucius had died was circled by a shimmering, golden Ministry cordon, the blood on the hearthstone a dark, ugly stain within it.
The air was thick. Not just with smoke, but with a cacophony of silenced magic—the echoes of destructive spells, the whimpers of poisoned enchantments bleeding out of burned objects. It pressed against Hermione’s eardrums.
Draco stepped out from behind the tapestry, his movements soundless. He went straight to the hearth, ignoring the cordon. He knelt, sifting his fingers through the ankle-deep ash. It coated his bandage, turning it gray.
“It was too hot,” he muttered. “Too thorough. Ordinary fire doesn’t consume dragonhide ledgers like this. It was augmented. A curse-fire.”
Hermione moved to the overturned desk. Parchment fragments, sealed wax melted into bizarre shapes, a snapped quill. She picked up a half-burned sheet. Not a ledger page. It was a floorplan. Of a building she didn’t recognize. A corner of it was marked with a symbol that made her blood freeze: a small, stylized ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail. It was inked in what looked like blood.
“Draco.”
He was at her side in an instant. He took the fragment, his face hardening. “That’s his mark. For his most private ventures. This isn’t a financial record. It’s a schematic.” He looked around, frantic, scanning the ashes. “There. That stack. It’s less burned.”
He crossed to a pile of debris kicked against a bookshelf. It was a bundle of parchment, tied with a singed ribbon, partially protected by the fall of a heavy leather folio. He pulled it free. Not ledgers. Deeds. Property records. And each one was stamped with the same ouroboros.
“He wasn’t just purifying the past,” Hermione said, her mind racing, connecting dots. “He was hiding assets. Liquidating them into something else. Something these deeds represent.”
Draco flipped through them, his eyes scanning. “A warehouse in Bristol. A cottage in the Orkneys. A… a vault. Number 713, Gringotts, deep vaults.” He looked up, his eyes meeting hers in the dim light. “Not his main vault. A hidden one. One I didn’t know about.”
A floorboard creaked outside the main door. A low voices muttered. The guards were checking.
Draco shoved the deeds inside his robes. He grabbed Hermione’s arm and pulled her back toward the tapestry. But as they passed the circle of the hearth, he stopped, his gaze locked on the bloodstained stone.
“He fell,” Draco repeated, his voice a hollow whisper to himself.
Then his eyes changed. The feverish intensity crystallized into something sharper, more dire. He pulled her not to the secret passage, but into a deep alcove formed by two towering shelves of legal tombs. It was shrouded in near darkness.
“They’re coming in,” he breathed against her ear. “For a routine check. They’ll be sixty seconds.”
His hands were already on her, but this wasn’t like the kitchen. There was no fury in it. It was a grim, focused necessity. A need to imprint the present, the visceral, over the ghost haunting the room. He turned her to face the shelves, his body molding against her back.
“We have to be quiet,” he murmured, but his actions were anything but. He bunched her robes up around her waist, his fingers yanking her knickers down to her thighs. The cold air of the library kissed her skin. He unbuttoned his trousers, freeing himself. She felt the hard, thick length of him press against her.
He didn’t ask. He spat into his palm, slicking himself roughly, and then he guided his cock to her entrance. He pushed in, not with a brutal thrust, but with a slow, inexorable pressure that stole her breath. She was still tender from before, and the stretch burned, a delicious, painful fullness. He seated himself completely, his hips flush against her arse, and let out a shuddering sigh against her neck.
He stayed still, buried deep. They were frozen, a statue in the shadows. From the main door, they heard the click of the lock, the groan of the hinges. A shaft of light cut across the far end of the room.
“Merlin’s balls, it’s grim in here,” a young Auror’s voice said.
“Just do the perimeter check. Confirm the containment charms are holding. Don’t touch anything, especially that.” A senior voice. Dawlish.
Draco began to move. The slightest fraction of an inch. A tiny, hidden retreat and advance. The sensation was maddening—a microscopic friction, a promise of motion withheld. Hermione bit down on her own lip to stifle a sound. The sensitive, swollen flesh inside her clutched at him, craving more.
“Ash is still hot in places. Nasty curse-work on that fire,” Dawlish muttered, his footsteps crunching on debris, coming closer.
Draco’s hand slid around her hip, under her bunched robes. His fingers found her clit. He rubbed it in slow, deliberate circles, perfectly in time with his infinitesimal thrusts. The dual sensation—the deep, almost imperceptible movement and the direct, clever pressure on her nerve-center—was unbearable. Pleasure coiled tight in her gut, a spring wound to snapping.
The footsteps were ten feet away, moving along the bookshelves parallel to theirs.
Draco increased the pressure of his fingers. His other hand clamped over her mouth, just in case. His own breathing was a ragged, controlled rhythm in her ear. He pushed a little deeper, a little harder, the pace incrementally bolder.
“Charms are stable. Nothing’s disturbed. Let’s go, the smell is giving me a headache.”
The footsteps receded. The door clicked shut. The lock turned.
The moment it did, Draco’s control shattered. The slow, hidden rhythm erupted into a frenzy of deep, driving thrusts. He fucked her hard and fast, the shelf rattling against the wall with each snap of his hips. The sound of skin slapping skin, of their choked gasps, filled the dark alcove.
“Is this disturbing enough for you?” he grunted, his voice raw. “Fucking you in his tomb, with his blood on the floor? Is this pure enough?”
She couldn’t answer. His fingers on her clit were relentless, a blur of motion. The orgasm tore through her violently, a silent, shaking convulsion that clenched around him like a vise. He drove through it, his own climax hitting him seconds later. He buried his face in her hair to muffle a guttural cry, pumping into her, his body rigid against hers.
They slumped together against the shelves, still joined, breathing in gulps of ash-choked air. The deeds in his robes crinkled against her back.
He slowly pulled out. He righted their clothing with clumsy, practical hands. He looked at her then, in the gloom. The emptiness was back, but it was shared now. A mutual vacancy.
“Vault 713,” he said, as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened. “We need to see what’s in it.”
She nodded, pushing her hair back from her face. Her legs felt unsteady. “We can’t just walk into Gringotts. It will require a warrant, or a goblin liaison…”
“We’re not walking in,” he said. His smile was a thin, dangerous thing. “I know a back door.”
They slipped out through the servant’s passage. The woods were colder. Dawn was a faint smear on the horizon. Back in her flat, the scattered ledger pages seemed childish, a petty mess.
Draco laid the singed deeds on her kitchen counter. The ouroboros seemed to gleam in the morning light.
“He was moving everything,” Draco said, tracing the symbol with a soot-stained finger. “Liquidating the old poison into something new. Something even he was afraid of.”
Hermione stared at the snake eating its own tail. An endless cycle. A closed loop. Purification by consumption.
“We break the loop,” she said.
He looked at her, and for the first time, the hollow in his eyes held a flicker of something that wasn’t despair. It was a grim, shared purpose. “How?”
“We find the vault. We see what he was building. And we burn that out by the root, too.”
She put the kettle on. The mundane act was absurd. The deeds lay between them, a promise of deeper, darker layers. The investigation had just begun, but the ground had shifted beneath them. They were no longer hunting corruption.
They were hunting a legacy that was still very much alive.
The silence after her declaration was not empty. It was filled with the slow drip of the tap, the hum of the kitchen lamps, the sound of two people measuring the depth they were willing to sink. Draco picked up the deed for Vault 713. The parchment crackled like dry skin.
“A back door into Gringotts isn’t a metaphor,” he said, his voice low. “It’s a tunnel. And it’s not mine. It belongs to a man who traffics in disappearing objects. He’ll want a trade.”
“What kind of trade?”
“Information. Ministry access. A future favor.” Draco’s gaze was flat. “The kind you keep in a drawer and hope you never need.”
Hermione thought of her desk at the Ministry, the pristine surface, the drawers of orderly files. She imagined sliding one open to find this shadow bargain coiled inside. “Is he trustworthy?”
“He’s predictable. Greed is a solid foundation.” Draco finally moved, shrugging out of his ash-coated robes. They fell to the floor in a heap, a tiny disaster on her perfect rug. “We go tonight. The goblin night audits are meticulous, but they follow patterns. There’s a window.”
“We should sleep first.”
He laughed, a short, harsh sound. “Right.”
He didn’t move toward the bedroom. Instead, he walked to her sitting room and stood before the false shelf, the one hiding the ledgers he’d first brought her. Proof of his father’s treason that now felt like a child’s scribble compared to the ouroboros. He leaned his forehead against the wood.
Hermione followed. She saw the tension in the line of his shoulders, a live wire thrumming. The adrenaline had burned off, leaving the toxic sediment of what they’d done. What they’d done in the library, over his father’s blood. Her own body felt strange, a used vessel, sore and humming.
“It doesn’t fix it,” he said to the shelf. “Fucking you there. It just… makes the stain bigger. My father’s dead on the floor and I’m coming inside you against his books. I wanted to defile it. I just defiled us.”
She didn’t offer comfort. Comfort was a lie here. “We were already in the stain, Draco. We have been since you walked in with those ledgers. You just wanted to prove you could still feel something in the middle of it.”
He turned. His eyes were pools of quicksilver, trapping the lamplight. “I feel everything. That’s the fucking problem.” He closed the distance between them. This wasn’t the desperate clutch in the library. It was slower, more deliberate. A examination. His hands came up and framed her face, his thumbs rough on her cheekbones. “You’re the only thing that doesn’t feel like his.”
His mouth found hers. The kiss was deep, searching, devoid of the earlier violence. It tasted of smoke and a profound fatigue. His tongue slid against hers, and she opened for him, a silent concession. His fingers left her face and began undoing the buttons of her blouse, the ones she’d so neatly repaired. Each pop of a button was a small defeat.
He pushed the fabric off her shoulders. It whispered to the floor. He knelt. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of her trousers and her knickers, dragging them down her legs in one motion. The air was cool on her naked skin. He didn’t stand. He looked up at her from his knees, his gaze tracing her stomach, the curve of her hips, the thatch of dark curls between her thighs.
“Look at you,” he murmured, his voice thick. “All that brilliant, ordered mind. And this.” He pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh. “This perfect, messy cunt. It’s the only part of you that’s ever honest with me.”
He pulled her to him, his mouth finding her center. He didn’t tease. He licked her with a flat, thorough stroke, parting her folds with his tongue. She gasped, her hands flying to his hair, tangling in the pale strands. He ate at her like a man starved, his nose buried against her, his tongue fucking into her in slow, deep plunges. He found her clit and sucked it hard, until her knees buckled.
“That’s it,” he growled against her flesh, his breath scalding. “Come on. Come on my fucking tongue. Let me taste what I do to you.”
The pressure was unbearable, too direct, too good. Her hips jerked against his face. A sharp, broken cry ripped from her throat as she came, the pleasure short-circuiting her thoughts, leaving only blinding, white sensation. He stayed with her, lapping gently as she shuddered, drinking her in.
Before the pulses fully faded, he was on his feet. He backed her toward the sofa, his own trousers open, his cock jutting out, thick and flushed. He fell onto the cushions, pulling her down on top of him. She straddled his hips, the tip of him pressing against her slick, swollen opening.
“You do it,” he breathed, his hands gripping her waist. “You take what you need from me.”
She sank down, impaling herself slowly, watching his eyes roll back in his head. He filled her achingly, stretching her tender tissues. She began to move, a slow, grinding rise and fall. His hands slid up to cup her breasts, his thumbs rubbing her nipples into hard peaks.
“Look at us,” he whispered, his gaze burning into hers. “Two people who think they’re solving a mystery. We’re just adding another layer to the fucked-up myth.”
She rocked faster, the friction building a new, deeper heat. “Then stop talking.”
He sat up suddenly, wrapping his arms around her, reversing their positions so she was beneath him on the sofa. He drove into her, changing the angle. Each thrust hit a spot that made her see sparks. The worn velvet of the cushion scraped her back.
“Tell me you want this,” he demanded, his pace relentless. “Tell me you want this dirty, fucking legacy I’m dragging you through.”
She couldn’t form the words. She wrapped her legs high around his back, taking him deeper, answering with her body. He groaned, a sound of pure surrender. His mouth crashed down on hers again, stealing her breath. The room smelled of sex and sweat and the lingering ghost of library ash.
“I’m gonna come,” he warned, his rhythm faltering, becoming jagged. “Where do you want it? Tell me.”
“Inside,” she gasped. It was a concession, a claim. “Do it.”
With a choked shout, he obeyed, slamming home and shuddering as he emptied himself into her. The heat of it seemed to burn through every layer. He collapsed on her, his weight a solid, suffocating comfort.
Minutes bled into the quiet. Their breathing slowed. He shifted, pulling out, and the reality of the cooling fluid between her thighs was obscenely intimate.
“The tunnel,” he said eventually, his face buried in her hair. “We meet the contact at midnight. The Leaky Cauldron back room. His name is Rook.”
“What do we bring?”
“Ourselves. And a willingness to get very, very dirty.” He lifted his head. The grim purpose was back, hardened now, tempered by their shared animal exhaustion. “This vault… it won’t be gold. He was purifying a legacy. Turning blood money into something else.”
“A weapon,” Hermione said.
“Or a foundation.” He stood, pulling her up with him. “Go shower. We’ll burn these clothes.”
She walked to the bathroom, feeling his release trickle down her thigh. A biological fact. A binding agent. Under the scalding water, she scrubbed her skin but the feeling of him remained, etched beneath the surface.
At five to midnight, they stood in the grimy back room of The Leaky Cauldron. It smelled of stale beer and damp wool. A single figure sat at a corner table, a hood shadowing his face. As they approached, he pushed back the hood.
Rook had the face of a weary clerk, but his eyes were like chips of flint. He looked at Draco, then at Hermione, a slow smile spreading.
“Malfoy. And you brought the Golden Girl. This is a premium package.” His voice was raspy. “Vault 713. Deep vaults. Nasty wards. The goblins don’t even like to go down there. What’s the retrieve?”
“Everything,” Draco said, his voice devoid of emotion.
“Ambitious. Price is a Ministry seal. A blanket artifact authentication, pre-signed, for… let’s say five future items of my choosing.”
Hermione’s blood went cold. It was a license to flood the market with forgeries or dark objects. “Impossible.”
“Then our business is concluded.” Rook began to rise.
“Done,” Draco said.
Hermione stared at him. He didn’t look at her.
Rook’s smile widened. He slid a small, tarnished silver key across the table. “This gets you into the maintenance shaft behind the waterfall in the main atrium. Follow the track down. It forks twice. Take the left both times. It ends at a grate overlooking the vault corridor. The wards on the grate are weak. They repurpose goblin steel every century; the magic wears at the seams. You’ll have ninety seconds between patrols. The vault door itself… that’s your problem.”
Draco took the key. It was icy cold.
“The seal, Malfoy. By tomorrow sunset. Or the consequences will be… infrastructural.” Rook stood, melting back into the shadows of the pub.
Hermione turned on Draco the moment they were outside in the cold alley. “A blanket authentication? Are you insane? He could legalize anything!”
“What’s in that vault could be worse,” Draco shot back, his face like stone. “We’re trading a potential future harm for a known, present evil. That’s the calculus now. Get used to it.”
They apparated to a side-alley near Diagon Alley. The Gringotts tower loomed, pale and skeletal against the night sky. The main gates were shut, the marble steps empty. Draco led her to a service entrance, a rusted door nearly hidden by scaffolding. The silver key fit. The door opened with a groan into damp, echoing darkness.
The maintenance shaft was a vertical tunnel of sheer rock, lit by faint, bioluminescent fungus. A single brass track, greasy and worn, descended into the bowels of the earth. A small cart sat on the rails. They squeezed in. With a shudder, it began to move, plummeting downward into the deep, cold silence.
The air grew heavier, tasting of metal and deep earth. The cart clattered, the sound magnified in the chasm. At the first fork, they lurched left. The second fork, left again. The tunnel narrowed until the rock walls brushed their shoulders.
It ended. The cart stopped at a rusted iron grate. Through the bars, they could see a dimly lit corridor of Gringotts, hewn from living stone. Doors of burnished metal lined the walls, each bearing a number. Across from them, glinting under a solitary witch-light, was Number 713.
It was not like the other doors. It was darker, etched not with geometric goblin patterns, but with runes that seemed to shift when stared at directly. The ouroboros was carved at its center, the snake’s eyes glowing with a faint, malevolent red light.
The patrol came then—two goblin guards in polished armor, their faces dour, their steps synchronized. They passed the grate without a glance, their lanterns swinging, and vanished around a corner.
“Ninety seconds,” Draco breathed.
He placed his hands on the grate. He muttered a string of harsh, dissonant words—not Latin, something older. The iron at the edges of the grate glowed orange, then white, becoming malleable. He peeled it back like soft fruit, creating an opening just large enough to crawl through.
They dropped onto the corridor floor. The silence was absolute, a pressure on the eardrums. They approached Vault 713.
There was no keyhole. Just the shifting runes and the glowing snake.
“Blood,” Hermione whispered, understanding dawning. “It’s a blood lock.”
Draco didn’t hesitate. He drew a silver knife from his boot and dragged the blade across his palm. He smeared his bloody hand over the ouroboros.
The runes flared. The red light in the snake’s eyes died. There was a series of deep, resonant clicks, like bones unlocking. The door slid soundlessly into the stone.
The air that poured out was not dank. It was sterile, dry, and bitterly cold. Hermione lifted her wand. “Lumos.”
The light pierced the darkness, illuminating not piles of gold, nor dark artifacts.
The vault was a museum. Or a shrine.
Polished glass cases lined the walls. Within them, floating in preservation fluid, were specimens. A hand, pale and long-fingered, suspended. A pair of vivid green eyes, open and staring. A coil of red hair, vibrant as fresh blood. A vial of silver memory, swirling violently.
And in the center of the room, on a pedestal, sat a large, ornate book bound in what looked like pale, tanned flesh. Its cover was tooled with a single, familiar symbol.
The ouroboros.
But it was the labels on the cases that stopped Hermione’s heart. Each was written in Lucius Malfoy’s elegant script.
Subject: Potter, James. Tissue Sample: Dermal. Acquisition: Post-Conflict Retrieval, Godric’s Hollow, 1981.
Subject: Potter, Lily. Tissue Sample: Ocular. Acquisition: As above.
Subject: Longbottom, Alice. Neural Extract. Acquisition: Sustained Harvest, Jan. 1982 - Ongoing.
Subject: Weasley, Ginevra. Follicular Repository. Acquisition: Hogwarts Tournament, 1995.
Hermione’s stomach lurched. She stumbled to the next case.
Subject: Granger, Hermione. Dental Enamel & Follicle. Acquisition: Ministry Medical Clearance, 2004.
Her own hair, a single brown curl, floated in a jar beside a sliver of what could only be a tooth. Taken during a routine employee health screening. Her breath came in short, sharp pants.
Draco was frozen before the central book. He had opened it. His face was ashen.
“It’s not a ledger,” he said, his voice barely audible. “It’s a recipe book.”
Hermione forced her legs to move. She looked over his shoulder. The pages were dense with diagrams of magical cores, notes on bloodline potency, theories on essence transference. It detailed a process. A purification through consumption, through replacement.
Lucius hadn’t been hiding money. He’d been collecting the biological residue of his enemies, of the war’s “victors.” He’d been trying to engineer a new kind of pure-blood. Not through lineage, but through arcane, violent alchemy. Stealing their power, their essence, to resurrect something else in its place.
On the last opened page was a complex, unfinished genealogical chart. At its top was not the name Malfoy.
It was the name Riddle.
And a single, freshly inked note in the margin, the ink still seeming wet: The vessel requires a heart that does not know its own strength. A conqueror’s will. A candidate identified.
Draco’s finger traced a line on the chart, a proposed嫁接, a grafting. It connected to a subsidiary line, a suggested donor for a particular trait. The label made the cold vault turn to ice.
Resilience & Loyalty: Canine DNA (Proposed Source: Werewolf, G.L.)
“He wasn’t just collecting the past,” Draco whispered, horror dawning in his eyes. “He was building a future. A new body. And he needed parts.” He turned to look at her, his gray eyes wide with a terrible understanding. “He’s not dead, Hermione. The legacy isn’t. This is the legacy. And we just opened its door.”