He caught Bellatrix alone on a Tuesday.
Not by accident — Rodolphus didn't do anything by accident. He had waited for a specific window: after dinner, before the common room filled up, in the corridor outside the Defence classroom where Bellatrix sometimes stayed late to review the day's practical work. He was there when she came out, leaning against the wall with the patient ease of someone who had been waiting a while and was fine with that.
Bellatrix clocked him, clocked the corridor — empty, deliberate — and kept walking.
"A moment," he said.
"I have somewhere to be."
"This won't take long."
She stopped. Turned. Looked at him with the expression she kept specifically for things she found beneath her attention but was giving it anyway out of pragmatism.
"Well?" she said.
Rodolphus straightened off the wall. He was doing the thing he did — using his height, his steadiness, the particular quality of a man who had decided the conversation was already over and was just waiting for the other person to arrive at the same conclusion. It had probably worked on most people he'd used it on.
"I'll be direct," he said.
"Please."
"I know the Peverell documentation was constructed." He said it the way you say something you're certain of — no emphasis, no drama, just fact delivered cleanly. "The Welsh family records are good. Very good. But there are two inconsistencies in the 1847 census documentation that shouldn't be there if the line is genuine." He paused. "I have someone who found them."
Bellatrix said nothing.
"I'm not interested in taking it to the families," he said. "That's messy and public and ultimately bad for everyone including me. What I'm interested in is a resolution." He let that sit for a moment. "End this. Whatever it is. Come back to the original arrangement and I bury the investigation. Nobody loses face. The families are satisfied. And your — friend — finds somewhere else to direct her attentions."
The corridor was very quiet.
Bellatrix looked at him for a long moment with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. Not anger. Not calculation. Just the particular stillness of someone who had heard a thing and was deciding where to file it.
"I'll consider it," she said.
Rodolphus studied her. Looking for the tell. "How long."
"As long as I need." She held his gaze. "Was there anything else?"
A pause. He'd expected more than this — she could see him recalibrating slightly, the absence of reaction throwing his read of the room. "No," he said.
"Then goodnight, Rodolphus."
She walked away. Even, unhurried, not a degree faster than usual.
She didn't go to the common room. She went to find Mia.
Mia was in the library, which she always was at this hour, at their usual table in the back corner with three books open and a fourth in her hand. She looked up when Bellatrix sat down and read her face immediately.
"Tell me," she said.
Bellatrix told her. Precisely, completely, in the order it happened. Mia listened without interrupting.
When she finished Mia set down her book.
"The 1847 census inconsistencies," she said.
"Minor. A date discrepancy and a naming convention that was slightly off for the period." Bellatrix's jaw was tight. "I built them in deliberately."
Mia stared at her. "You built in inconsistencies."
"Small ones. Plausible ones. The kind a real old family record would have because records from that period were imperfect." She paused. "The kind that look like genuine flaws until you understand that someone who built a false record perfectly would look more suspicious than someone whose records had the normal imperfections of age." She looked at Mia. "I didn't anticipate someone looking hard enough to find them and sophisticated enough to understand what they'd found."
"Rodolphus didn't find them himself."
"No. He has someone very good." She was quiet for a moment. "Better than I expected."
"The Gringotts vault," Mia said. "Does he know about it."
"He knows. It's why he hasn't moved formally yet — the vault contradicts his case. He has inconsistencies in paper records and we have a physical vault with centuries of magical provenance." She tapped her finger on the table once. "What he's doing tonight is testing whether the vault shakes us. Whether we know about his investigation or not. Whether I care enough about whatever this is between us to make a deal."
"And you said you'd consider it."
"I said I'd consider it," Bellatrix confirmed. "Which tells him nothing except that I'm not frightened. Which is true and useful for him to know." She looked at Mia directly. "I have absolutely no intention of considering it."
"I know."
"I want to be completely clear—"
"Bellatrix." Mia met her eyes. "I know."
A pause. The tension in Bellatrix's shoulders dropped slightly.
"He's not going to stop," Mia said. "Telling him you'll consider it buys us time but he's committed now. He's going to find a way to present this formally regardless of what we do defensively." She looked at the table. "We need to make his investigation irrelevant. Not difficult. Irrelevant."
"Yes."
"Which means we stop defending and start—"
"Building something he can't attack," Bellatrix said. "Something that makes the question of the documentation not just answered but beside the point." She was quiet for a moment. The focused energy had come back, the anger sublimating into something more useful. "He has a case built on paper. We need something that operates on a different level entirely."
"The ring already does some of that."
"The ring establishes the bloodline. It doesn't establish standing." Bellatrix looked at her. "Standing in pureblood society isn't just blood. It's alliances. Endorsements. Relationships that people can see." She paused. "We've been operating quietly. On purpose. But quiet has a cost — it leaves room for other people's narratives."
Mia looked at her. "You want to come out."
"I want us to stop being something that can be described as hidden." She said it steadily. "Rodolphus's leverage depends partly on the idea that what we are is something we're concealing because we're not certain of it. If we're not concealing it—"
"His narrative loses its power."
"Considerably." She looked at her hands. "My family knows. Andromeda knows. Narcissa knows. Avery has drawn his own conclusions." She paused. "My grandfather signed the contract. He knows what it means."
"So we stop performing indifference in public."
"We stop performing indifference in public," Bellatrix confirmed. "We let people see what we are and we do it before Rodolphus gets to define it for them."
Mia looked at her across the table. The library was quiet around them, torches burning low, the familiar smell of old books and Bellatrix's particular brand of focus.
"Are you sure?" she said.
"I'm sure." No hesitation. "Are you?"
Mia thought about every careful distance maintained, every half-step of separation in corridors, every moment of performed indifference. The weight of it. How long they'd been carrying it.
"Very," she said.
Bellatrix looked at her with something that was relief and determination together. Then she reached across the table, right there in the library with anyone potentially walking past, and took Mia's hand.
Just that. Palm to palm, fingers closing.
Public. Real. Decided.
Mia looked at their joined hands on the library table and felt something she'd been holding brace against relax entirely.
"Right," she said. "Now what do we do about his researcher."
Bellatrix picked up Mia's quill with her free hand, pulled a blank piece of parchment toward her, and started writing. "I've been thinking about that since the corridor," she said. "If we can identify the specific person—"
"We already know it's someone in Crouch's office."
"We know it's someone with access to Crouch's office. That's not the same thing." She wrote something, crossed it out, wrote it again. "Rookwood was at the gathering. Rookwood has Ministry access. But Rookwood is Voldemort's — which means if Rodolphus is using someone from Crouch's office who is also Voldemort's—"
"Rodolphus is working with Voldemort's people directly," Mia said. "Not just reporting to him. Actively coordinating."
"Which means this isn't just a personal vendetta anymore." Bellatrix looked up. "This is Voldemort taking an interest in us specifically through Rodolphus as a proxy."
The library felt slightly colder.
"He's not patient because he's polite," Mia said. "He's patient because he has multiple pieces moving and Rodolphus is one of them."
"Yes." Bellatrix looked at her steadily. "Which means our next move has to account for that. Not just Rodolphus. The whole board."
They looked at each other.
"We need Avery in this conversation," Mia said.
"I know."
"Tonight."
"I know." Bellatrix squeezed her hand once and let go and started writing again. "Go find him."
Avery took it better than expected.
He sat in the library across from them with the expression of someone receiving a military briefing and listened while Bellatrix laid out the full picture — Rodolphus, the researcher, the Voldemort connection, the coordination between them. She told him enough to be useful without telling him everything, which was the right call and Mia noted that she'd made it instinctively.
When Bellatrix finished he was quiet for a moment.
"So Rodolphus isn't operating independently," he said.
"He's operating under a larger strategy," Bellatrix said. "Whether he knows the full shape of it or not."
"And you need to know who specifically in the Ministry is doing the research."
"I need a name and a method of access."
Avery was quiet again. He looked at the table, not evasively, just thinking. "Rosier's family has Ministry connections that go through Crouch's department," he said. "Not Rookwood specifically — different section. But overlapping enough." He looked at Bellatrix. "I can find out who's been making unusual archive requests. I know someone in records."
"Carefully," Bellatrix said.
"Obviously carefully." He paused. "I want to understand something first." He looked between them. "You're not just trying to protect the contract. You're doing something bigger."
"Yes," Bellatrix said.
"Something that has to do with why you've been spending every other weekend off campus."
Mia said nothing. Bellatrix said nothing.
Avery looked at them for a long moment. "You don't have to tell me what it is," he said. "I'm not asking for the details. I'm asking whether it matters."
"It matters more than anything else currently happening in this school," Bellatrix said, with the flat certainty that she only used about things she was completely sure of.
Avery held her gaze. "Right," he said. "I'll have a name by Thursday."
He had a name by Wednesday.
Delivered at breakfast, in the same casual indirection he'd used in the common room — sliding into the seat beside Mia, saying Croaker, Department of Mysteries liaison, Crouch's office Tuesdays and Thursdays into his pumpkin juice and then talking about Quidditch for five minutes before leaving.
Bellatrix, across the table, had heard.
Her eyes met Mia's briefly.
Department of Mysteries.
Not just a records clerk. Someone from the department that had sent Mia back through time in the first place, running investigations for Rodolphus on behalf of Voldemort's people.
The board was more complicated than they'd thought.
They found an empty classroom after dinner.
Not for strategy this time. They'd been in the library for three hours after Avery's breakfast revelation, mapping implications, running calculations, and they had arrived at a plan that was solid and would take two weeks to execute and they both knew what the next two weeks looked like, which meant that right now, in this empty classroom with the door locked and the evening ahead of them, they were done thinking about it.
Bellatrix sat on the edge of one of the desks and looked at Mia with the expression that meant all the thinking had been deliberately set aside.
"Two weeks," she said.
"Two weeks," Mia confirmed. "Then it's done."
"Then it's done," Bellatrix agreed. "And Rodolphus has nothing."
"And Rodolphus has nothing." Mia stepped closer. "But right now—"
"Right now," Bellatrix said, and reached for her.
Bellatrix’s hands were already on her, pulling her in, the kiss tasting like shared exhaustion and defiant heat.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a reassertion of a truth no contract could touch. Mia met it with equal force, her fingers tangling in the thick, dark curls at the nape of Bellatrix’s neck, holding her there as if she might vanish.
They broke apart, breathing hard. Bellatrix’s obsidian eyes were dark and intent. “Two weeks is too long,” she said, her voice rough.
“I know.”
Bellatrix’s hands moved to the buttons of Mia’s school blouse. Her fingers, usually so deft, fumbled slightly. A rare, unvarnished show of need that made Mia’s chest ache. She covered Bellatrix’s hands with her own, stilling them, and finished the buttons herself.
The air in the classroom was cool against her skin. Bellatrix’s gaze tracked the exposure, the sharp line of her collarbone, the swell of her breasts above her plain cotton bra. Her thumb brushed over one peaked nipple through the fabric, and Mia gasped, the sound loud in the quiet room.
“Bellatrix.”
“Say it again.”
“Bellatrix.”
A low, satisfied hum vibrated in Bellatrix’s throat. She leaned in, her mouth hot and open against Mia’s shoulder, biting down just enough to mark, not to break skin. The sting was a bright, clean anchor. Mia’s head fell back.
Her own hands worked at the tie of Bellatrix’s robes, then the crisp white shirt beneath. She needed to feel her, skin to skin, to quiet the cold dread the name ‘Croaker’ had left in her gut. When Bellatrix’s shirt fell open, Mia pressed her palm flat over her heart. The beat was frantic, a wild bird against her ribs.
“Here,” Bellatrix breathed, guiding Mia’s hand lower, over the flat plane of her stomach, to the waistband of her skirt. “I’m here.”
Mia’s fingers slipped beneath the wool, finding the wet heat of her through her knickers. Bellatrix shuddered, a full-body convulsion, and her forehead dropped to Mia’s shoulder. “Merlin, yes.”
The fabric was soaked. Mia rubbed slow, firm circles, feeling the shape of her through the lace, learning the rhythm that made Bellatrix’s breath hitch. She was already so close. The tension of the day, the confrontation, the planning—it had all coiled tight inside her, and now it had a single, burning release valve.
“Don’t stop,” Bellatrix muttered against her skin, her own hands gripping Mia’s hips, nails digging in. “Don’t you dare stop.”
Mia didn’t. She pushed the knickers aside and slid two fingers inside her, deep and sure. Bellatrix cried out, the sound echoing off the stone walls, and her knees buckled. Mia held her up, pressed her back against the sturdy edge of the teacher’s desk, and kept moving.
It was fast and desperate. Bellatrix’s climax tore through her a minute later, her body bowing tight, a silent scream pressed into Mia’s neck. She pulsed around Mia’s fingers, a hot, rhythmic clenching, and then went utterly boneless, her full weight sagging into Mia’s arms.
They stayed like that for long moments, Bellatrix trembling through the aftershocks, Mia holding her, her own arousal a dull, persistent throb between her legs. The urgent edge had bled away, leaving something warmer, more possessive.
Finally, Bellatrix lifted her head. Her eyes were glassy, her lips swollen. She looked thoroughly ravished and utterly in command. She cupped Mia’s cheek. “Your turn.”
She turned them, guiding Mia to sit on the desk. She knelt on the cold stone floor without hesitation, pushing Mia’s skirt up to her hips. Her eyes locked on Mia’s as she hooked her fingers into the sides of Mia’s plain cotton knickers and drew them down.
The air was cool. Then Bellatrix’s mouth was hot.
She didn’t tease. She licked a broad, slow stripe through Mia’s slick folds, then closed her lips over her clit and sucked, hard. Mia jolted, her hands flying to Bellatrix’s hair, fisting in the dark curls. A low, broken sound escaped her.
Bellatrix hummed, the vibration shooting straight to Mia’s core. She worked her with a focused intensity that was entirely Bellatrix—relentless, consuming, leaving no room for thought. Mia’s thighs tightened around her head, but Bellatrix didn’t relent. She added a finger, then two, curling them just so, and Mia came apart.
The orgasm was a sharp, blinding rush that wiped the board clean. Croaker, Rodolphus, Voldemort—all of it dissolved into white noise. For ten seconds, there was only this: Bellatrix’s mouth on her, Bellatrix’s magic humming against her skin, the solid, real weight of the woman she loved holding her through the storm.
When she could breathe again, she gently tugged Bellatrix up. Her lips were glistening. Mia kissed her, tasting herself, tasting Bellatrix, a messy, profound mingling.
They dressed in slow, shared silence, their movements languid now. Bellatrix fastened the last button on Mia’s blouse, her fingers lingering. “He thinks he’s backing us into a corner,” she said, her voice quiet but clear, all the earlier roughness smoothed into steel.
Mia nodded, securing her own tie. “He’s just showing us which wall to break down first.”
A slow, sharp smile spread across Bellatrix’s face. It was the smile Mia had seen in duels, in strategy sessions, in the moments before a perfectly executed plan snapped shut. It was a promise. “Exactly.”
The classroom was dark by the time they left it, both slightly dishevelled and taking the back corridors to avoid Filch, which was a practical decision they'd gotten very good at.
In the corridor Bellatrix straightened her robes and Mia fixed her own hair and they walked back toward the common room side by side, shoulders touching, not talking much.
"The joint casting," Bellatrix said eventually.
"Tomorrow," Mia said.
"We need to practice the sequence."
"Tomorrow, Bellatrix."
"The methodology specifies—"
"It will still specify it tomorrow." She looked at her sideways. "Can you go one evening without—"
"Probably not," Bellatrix said, quite honestly.
Mia laughed. Bellatrix looked faintly offended and then not.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Fine."
"Thank you."
"But early."
"Early is fine."
"Six."
"Six."
"The sequence requires—"
"Fine," Mia said. "Six. You're lucky I love you."
Bellatrix was quiet for a step. Then, with the slight deliberateness she always brought to it, like choosing it every time: "Yes," she said. "I am."
Mia looked at her.
Bellatrix looked back with that expression — warm and unguarded and entirely certain, no management anywhere in it.
The castle at night was a different beast. The torches burned low, painting the stones in deep amber and long, stretching shadows. Their footsteps were soft echoes, swallowed by the sheer age of the place. The air tasted of cold stone and, faintly, of the greenhouses—damp soil and growing things.
They passed a suit of armour, its helmet tilted as if listening. Bellatrix’s hand brushed Mia’s, then her fingers linked with hers. A simple, solid connection. The Peverell ring on Mia’s finger was a warm, constant weight against Bellatrix’s skin.
They didn’t see Filch, but they heard Mrs. Norris meow somewhere far above, a spectral sound in the stairwells. Bellatrix’s grip tightened for a second, a spark of shared, silent amusement. They were ghosts in their own castle, moving through its veins.
The entrance to the Slytherin common room lay ahead, the blank stretch of wall awaiting the password. Bellatrix didn’t let go of her hand to say it. “Serpentis sanguis.”
The stone wall rippled and opened. The common room within was a study in low light and green-tinged shadow, the fire in the great hearth reduced to embers. It was nearly empty. A lone seventh-year—Avery—glanced up from an armchair near the dying fire, gave them a slow, knowing nod, and returned to his book. His silent approval was a brick in their emerging fortification.
They moved to their usual corner, a secluded nook of deep leather sofas facing the black lake windows. The giant squid was a faint, drifting silhouette in the dark water. Bellatrix sank into the cushions, kicking off her shoes and tucking her feet beneath her. Mia settled beside her, close enough that their legs pressed together from knee to hip.
For a while, they just watched the squid. The quiet was a living thing between them, comfortable and charged. The adrenaline of the confrontation, the sharp heat of the classroom—it had settled into a deep, humming readiness. The plan was in motion. Rodolphus had shown his hand.
“He’ll expect an answer soon,” Mia said finally, her voice quiet. Not a question.
“He’ll have one,” Bellatrix said. Her eyes were on the window, but she wasn’t seeing the squid. She was seeing moves on a board. “A public one. Irrefutable.”
“The Yule Ball.”
Bellatrix turned her head. A slow smile touched her lips. “Three days before his deadline. Perfectly timed social pressure. You’ve been reading my notes.”
“I live with you.”
“A hazard.” Bellatrix’s smile deepened. “We arrive together. We leave together. We dance every dance the etiquette will allow, and a few it won’t. We make it a performance. A declaration.”
“And when he objects?”
“He’ll look like a petulant child denied a toy.” Bellatrix’s voice was cool, analytical. “The optics are everything. A public, graceful claim versus his private, grubby threats. The families will see a stable, powerful alliance. They’ll see a Black heiress aligning with an ancient name, not breaking a contract with a Lestrange.”
Mia leaned her head back against the sofa. The leather was cool. “We make his investigation irrelevant by making *us* undeniable.”
“Yes.” Bellatrix reached over, her fingers tracing the line of Mia’s jaw. “We stop defending a fiction. We become a fact.”
It was a good plan. Clean. Strategic. It played to their strengths—Bellatrix’s social mastery, Mia’s flawless performance. It went on the offensive, exactly as they’d decided.
Mia caught her hand, pressed a kiss to her palm. The skin there was soft, but the magic beneath it was a live wire. “I like it.”
Bellatrix’s obsidian eyes held hers. The warmth was still there, but beneath it ran that dark, thrilling current of pure Black determination. “We’ll gut him with courtesy.”
They sat in the quiet a while longer, the embers cracking in the hearth, the plan settling into their bones. Two weeks seemed both very long and very short and the ring was warm on Mia’s finger and it was, despite everything pressing in from every direction, a good evening.
A very good evening.