Chapter 2: The Gallery
You sent no reply. On Friday, at eight o'clock exactly, he knocked on your door anyway.
You'd known he would. You'd had the house-elf, Pip, who'd come with the house along with everything else, lay two places in the small dining room. You'd worn green, because it was your colour, not because of his old House, though you'd caught yourself wondering whether he'd think so. You'd put your wand up your left sleeve in a sheath your aunt had had made for you in Cairo. You'd put a phial of something in a drawer in the hall and told no one what it was.
He was carrying flowers. Black hellebores, which was either a joke or a threat, or both.
"You came," you said.
"You didn't tell me not to." He handed you the flowers. "I've been here before, of course. It hasn't changed."
"I haven't changed it."
"No," he agreed, looking past you into the hall, at the stuffed Jarvey and the umbrella stands and the old portraits of your aunt's dead husbands. "You've kept it like a museum. Or a crime scene."
He said it pleasantly, and you smiled pleasantly back, and you both went in to dinner.
He was wonderful company. You'd known that he would be. He'd read everything, and he could talk about any of it, and he listened to you as if your opinions on Bathilda Bagshot's chapter on the goblin rebellions were the most important thing he'd heard all year. He told you about the scrying bowl, which Borgin had sold that afternoon to a Belgian for four hundred Galleons, despite your note. He told you about the Hand of Glory, and the cabinet in the corner, which was half of a pair, the other half lost. He did not tell you anything about himself at all, and you noticed that he didn't, and he noticed that you'd noticed, and somewhere around the pudding you both put your forks down and simply looked at each other across the table.
"You aren't charmed," he said.
"No."
"Most people are. I've made something of a study of it." He turned his wine glass slowly by the stem. "Madam Smith adored me. Mr Burke adores me. I've talked a witch out of a family heirloom she'd sworn never to sell in under half an hour. It isn't difficult. People want very simple things. They want to be looked at, and listened to, and told that they're right." His dark eyes moved over your face. "You don't want any of that."
"I want my aunt's cup back."
"Ah." He smiled. "That I can't give you."
"Can't?"
"Can't," he said. "Not won't. You'd prefer I didn't lie to you. I find I'd prefer it too, which is novel." He set his glass down. "You know I came here tonight to look at your aunt's cabinets."
"I know."
"And you let me in anyway. With a wand up your sleeve. And something in a drawer in your hall that you keep thinking about, every time I look towards the door."
You didn't answer.
He stood up. He came round the table, unhurried, and stopped beside your chair, close enough that you had to tip your head back to look at him. You didn't move. You didn't reach for your wand. You looked up into that beautiful, cold, attentive face and you knew, very clearly, that you were the most dangerous thing you'd ever let into your aunt's house. And you knew the same was true for him.
"Show me," he said.
The gallery took up the whole of the second floor. Hepzibah had knocked through three bedrooms in nineteen twenty to make it. Glass cases from the floor to the ceiling, lit from inside, full of the strange bright treasures of a long and acquisitive life. Goblin armour. A unicorn's horn carved into a flute. A Stradivarius that played itself if you asked nicely. A whole case of lockets and rings and brooches, some charmed, some cursed, all labelled in her round violet hand. And in the middle of the long room, a case that stood by itself on a stand of black marble. Inside it, two empty velvet cushions.
He walked straight to it. Of course he did.
You watched him from the door. He stood looking down at those two empty cushions for a long time, his hands folded behind his back, and his face in the light from the case was very still and very private. You'd seen men look like that in churches.
"It was here," he said at last. "Both of them."
"I know where they were."
"She showed them to me. She made me promise not to tell Burke." His voice was quiet. "She told me I had such a lovely face."
"You do."
"I know." He turned his head and looked at you down the length of the gallery. "You're standing in the door so I can't reach it before you can reach your wand."
"Yes."
"Will you come away from it?"
"Will you give me a reason to?"
He came towards you, not quickly. You watched him come between the glass cases, the light sliding over his face and away, over and away. You thought about the drawer in the hall. You thought about what was in it. Your hand stayed where it was, an inch from your sleeve, and when he stopped in front of you he looked down at that hand and then at your face, and he smiled.
"Keep it there," he said softly. "I'd think less of you if you didn't."
You kissed him.
You'd decided to before he came up the stairs. Before he came to the door. Possibly the moment he'd looked up at you from his ledger in Knockturn Alley. You put your free hand flat on his chest and pushed him back against the nearest glass case, hard enough to rattle the brooches inside, and you kissed him the way you'd been wanting to for a week, and he made a sound against your mouth that was nothing like anything he'd said all evening. Low. Surprised. Real, you thought, and then stopped thinking.
He kissed you back like he'd been starving. His hand came up into your hair, cool fingers on the back of your skull, and the other found your waist and pulled you in until there wasn't any space between you, and you could feel all of him against you, the long hard length of him, and the fact that he wanted this, wanted you, as badly as you wanted him. You bit his lower lip, and his hand tightened in your hair.
"You know what I am," he said against your mouth. Not a question.
"I know what I think you are." You pulled back far enough to look at him. "Stop me. If you're going to stop me, stop me now."
"I've no intention of stopping you." His eyes were dark. In the light from the case behind him, for a moment, you could have sworn there was red at the very centre of them. "Do you want this?"
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
"I want you," you said. "Here. Now. With my wand where I can reach it and the lights on so I can see your face."
Something passed over his face that you thought, later, might have been the nearest he ever came to being moved. "Then you'll have it," he said, and turned you round, and pressed you back against the glass.
Your aunt's gallery had a long velvet couch under the window, where she used to sit and admire her things. He walked you to it, kissing you, his hands working the buttons of your green dress with a precision that made you shiver. You pushed his coat off his shoulders and let it fall on the floor. His shirt next. He was pale and lean underneath, all long muscle and no softness, and his skin was cool under your palms until you touched him and then it wasn't. When your dress slid off your shoulders and pooled at your feet, he stood back and looked at you, and you watched his composure go, piece by piece, the way you'd watch a curse come off an object you'd been working on for hours.
"Lie down," he said. Then, after a beat, very low, "Please."
You lay down. You put your wand on the floor beside the couch, under your hand. He watched you do it and his mouth curved.
He was slow. You hadn't expected that. He knelt between your knees and kissed his way down your body like he was cataloguing it, your throat, your collarbones, your breasts, taking his time over each, his tongue cool and then hot on your nipple until you arched up off the velvet and grabbed his hair. He made a pleased sound and kept going. Down your stomach. Over your hip. He hooked your knee over his shoulder and looked up at you, once, a question, and when you said yes he put his mouth on you, and you had to bite the back of your own hand to keep from crying out.
He was very good at it. You hated how good he was at it. He found what made you shake and he did it again, and again, with his long fingers inside you and his tongue moving slow and then not slow at all, until you were gasping and pulling at his hair and the whole room had narrowed to his mouth and the light and the glass cases glittering around you. When you came, it went through you like a hex, your back bowing off the couch and your thighs locking around his head and his name coming out of you, Tom, not Riddle, not Mr Riddle, Tom, before you could stop it.
He rose up over you, his mouth wet, his eyes black. "Say it again," he said.
"Get your trousers off," you said, "and I'll think about it."
He laughed, breathless and astonished, and did.
When he pushed into you, slowly, one hand braced on the back of the couch above your head, you both stopped breathing. He was thick and hard and he filled you so completely that for a moment you couldn't do anything but hold onto his shoulders. He held still, shaking, his forehead against yours.
"All right?" he said, in a voice that had lost every bit of its polish.
"Move."
He moved. Long, deep, deliberate strokes, rolling his hips into you, watching your face the whole time like he was learning it. You wrapped your legs around his waist and pulled him deeper and he made that low wrecked sound again. He kissed you, hard. You raked your nails down his back and he shuddered and drove into you faster, the couch creaking under you, the brooches in the case rattling with every thrust, and you could see your reflections in the glass, his pale back and your hands on it, both of you lit gold from inside the cases like something on display.
He reached down between you and touched you, exactly right, and the second time you came you took him with you. You felt him lose it, felt him go rigid and gasp your name into your neck and spill inside you, his whole body shaking, his hand fisted in the velvet beside your head as if he was holding on to something to keep from falling.
Afterwards, he slept. Or pretended to. You lay on the couch with his head on your chest and his arm heavy across your waist and listened to his breathing go slow, and you waited a long time. Then you slid out from under him, carefully, and picked up your wand, and knelt on the floor where his coat had fallen.
You went through the pockets with your fingers, silently. A pocket watch. A few Galleons. A wand-cleaning cloth. A folded receipt from Borgin and Burkes. Nothing else. Nothing gold, nothing with a badger, nothing with an S.
A hand closed around your wrist.
You froze. He hadn't moved on the couch. His eyes were open, dark, entirely awake, watching you in the light from the cases. His grip was not tight. It didn't need to be.
"It isn't in there," Tom Riddle said quietly. "You won't find it in a pocket. Put the coat down, and ask me what you want to ask me."
Your heart was going so hard you could feel it in your teeth. You didn't put the coat down. You didn't look away.
"Did you kill my aunt?" you said.