'Crucio!'
Her face betrayed no emotion as the woman before her writhed pitiably, emitting a terrible scream, eyes rolling, face contorted and twisted in agony like churning clay.
Her lips, set into a thin, grim, blood red line, moved not an inch as her victim, in a vain effort to remain silent, bit down and drew gleaming blood from her own.
Her eyes, cold as arctic waters, showed no remorse; hard, wooden green orbs stared dispassionately at her prey, watching the dilated pupils of her victim's eyes rolled in their sockets like never-ending spin tops.
Her hair, cascading beautifully down her body, was a waterfall of golden brown curls. A hand crept up almost imperceptibly to push it out of the way; her prisoner's hand pulled at her own scraggly raven locks, grabbing and wrenching as a distraction from the sheer torture of the curse.
Upon the armrest of the burgundy satin sofa on which she was elegantly draped, a silver-ringed hand held a wine glass, half filled with a crimson Pinot Noir. She swirled the dark liquid slowly, watching idly as the contents snaked gently in a whirlpool, before taking a small sip, savouring the exotic flavour and bouquet as it caressed her tongue. Sweet, mellow, well-aged - perfection. Satisfied, she set the goblet down upon the glass table-top beside her, and leant back, resting a creamy white elbow upon the arm of the sofa. Chin leaning against an extended index finger, she cast her victim a look of boredom suffused with smugness.
'So, Bella, was that satisfactory, or should we go another round and make it a nice even number?' she asked conversationally.
'You dirty little whore!' snarled Bellatrix furiously. 'How dare you even suggest that I would tell you of the Dark Lord's plans! If I even knew them at all? Not only do you dare aspire to know His plans… You dare to speak to me as though you are my equal!' She spat out the word 'equal' as though it were a poison on her tongue.
'Oh, but I know quite well that you are privy to the Dark Lord's plans. You, as the Dark Lord's right hand, should know. Or have his preferences changed?' she said slyly, watching with satisfaction as Bellatrix's face grew angrier still. 'I suppose I should remind you which one of us has the wand,' she remarked idly, waving the length of wood, and Bellatrix's seized one languorously in her captive's direction. 'Bella, my dear, it's just you, me, and a bottle of wine, and we have the whole night ahead of us.'
Then, in a swift motion, she leaned over her sofa, hands gripping the sides so tightly that her knuckles blanched. Her voice took on a much darker tone as she whispered with savage ferocity, 'Every word you say that isn't what I want to hear heightens the chance of me carting you off to Azkaban. Or perhaps, better still, simply killing you and being done with it, making your end a swift and relatively painless one, rather than drawing it out over several more glasses of this wonderful wine.
She sat back once more, the pleasantly bored look again masking her face, and lifted the wine glass in her hand. 'Did Rabastan purchase this? It is in excellent taste,' she asked idly, then turned to Bellatrix again. 'So, the freedom of death or the hell of Azkaban. Your choice now,' she added conversationally, taking another sip.
'I would rather die than betray the Dark Lord's secrets to a filthy little blood traitor like you!' Bellatrix screeched, eyes blazing in fury.
A shadow passed over the woman's eyes at the words 'blood traitor', but it was gone as fast as it had come.
'Ah, but dead men, or women, as the case may be, tell no tales. You surely know that yourself, no? Besides which, what use would the Dark Lord's most faithful servant be if she was discovered dead, soulless, or, in a cruel, twisted irony of her own sins, turned mad from a prolonged session of Crucio?' she asked rhetorically, with a half smile playing at the edges of her lips.
And, with one, little word that has changed the courses of many lives the world over, the room was filled once more with agonised screams.
Even after the fourth Crucio was cast upon her, Bellatrix, blood streaming from her shredded lips, grinned madly and whispered, 'Again, bitch,' with a manic, taunting gleam.
Six curses later, Bellatrix was on her knees, angry welts and scratches on her arms where her nails dug in painfully as she clawed at herself to be rid of the pain. But still she said nary a word.
At eight curses, her head hit the floor with a dull thud as she collapsed, gasping desperately for air, chest heaving.
'Tell me where Voldemort is, you stupid little bitch!' the captor snarled, all pleasant pretences gone, her patience at an end.
Bellatrix laughed in her face, shades of insanity in her eyes.
As Bellatrix's captor lifted her wand after the tenth Crucio, Bellatrix's body shook as she coughed up blood, staining the cold tiles an ominous red.
'R-r-ro-man-nia-' Bellatrix choked out, the coughing racking her body once more.
'Romania?' she parroted, thrown off guard. 'Why Romania?'
'R-r-resi-resisten-resistenza…' Bellatrix gasped out, and the brunette looked up in surprise.
'Not the Resistenza Ultima? That hasn't been made for centuries, not even during the reign of Grindelwald!' she said enquiringly, somewhat surprised that Voldemort would even concern himself with such a thing.
'He's… sear-searching… for th-the l-lost t-t-texts…' Bellatrix trailed off faintly, then gave one last, shuddering heave and fell limply onto the floor, dark eyes empty and lifeless, face gaunt from her years in Azkaban.
The woman looked at Bellatrix with distaste because of the mess she'd made of the flooring. The fewer Death Eaters, the better, she thought, and with that, lifted Bellatrix's chin. Whipping out two long, slim, hidden daggers, she made a swift crossing stroke upon Bellatrix's chin, just deep enough to draw blood. Tossing a small, blood red rose with two leaves and two thorns, she watched as it landed neatly upon the cross, matching the blood's hue perfectly. She then draped herself upon the sofa lazily again, sipping at the wine thirstily.
Truthfully, she was astonished that Voldemort even knew of such an obscure potion as the Resistenza Ultima, created far before the time of the notorious Borgias, who had created arsenic.
No, the recipe for this particular Elixir had been written alongside the formula for creating the elusive Philosopher's Stone; carved upon the Emerald Tablet, no less. And yet, even the Ancient Greek alchemists had been unable to decipher the writings. Only in the late Renaissance had one particular individual, Romanian born and bred Lucian Miklos, made it his life's goal to translate the Emerald Tablet's writings. An expert in linguistics, with a knack for sciences and a rough understanding of the subtle art of alchemy, Miklos set out in search of a copy of the Tablet. With it, he had set upon the task of translating and learning the secrets of the Ancient Alchemists.
This presented one problem, however. Miklos had been determined to take his secrets to the grave, quite literally. His dying request was to bury his documents with him, lest a being of evil nature come across his work. Apparently, even in death, Miklos was plagued with the thought of his translations starting a chain of wars in an effort to become immortally strong.
Sadly, his wish to protect the world from his work didn't quite come true. A group of Romanian Potions Masters, under the alias 'Kelshaviks', had learnt of his request, and had stolen the papers and diaries from his grave. Before they even had a chance to so much as open a diary, however, they were discovered and brutally tortured and murdered for the grave robbery. The officials had simply been following orders, which were to attempt to find the documents, and, if they could not, then kill the perpetrators.
But the Kelshaviks were no fools. They had hidden the documents carefully, scattering them so that only they knew where they had been kept, and, should anyone accidentally discover one, they would only have one of many, many pieces of the puzzle. Try as they might, the officials had not been able to penetrate into the Kelshaviks' network (who were then killed under the pretence of passing secrets to other countries) to find the documents which might well have started a civil war.
Although it was an amazing creation, almost no one knew about it. The Ancient Alchemists preferred to keep their works to themselves, as had Miklos and the Kelshaviks, who had taken the secret to their graves. The officials who had so vainly and fruitlessly searched for the documents had hardly known what they were looking for, only that they were 'of great importance'. It had all been a great chain of subterfuge and secrecy, and the last remaining evidence of their existence had been in Romania. With the murder of the Kelshaviks, there died the largest source of the last remaining knowledge of the Resistenza Ultima, after which it had supposedly disappeared from existence.
There had been one individual, who, to this day, remained under the alias Varias, who had written a tome about the event that was so obscure to history. He summarised the potion and had gone into great detail about the events surrounding the Resistenza Ultima, but he had not been able to actually look at the documents to find out what exactly it was made of, what the ancient texts had said, etc. He had chosen to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons; no one actually knew whether he had been a Kelshavik and escaped, or an official, or even an acquaintance of Miklos himself. Whoever he was, he had very carefully revealed nothing about himself.
But even though his book, Resistenza, had been published, he had apparently been almost bankrupt and had only published a few copies to see how well they would do. Unfortunately, no one particularly wanted to know or cared about Potions at the time, and so he had died impoverished. There had been five copies in all; she knew that one had belonged to the Romanian royal wizarding family, but had been lost when their house had been razed in a stream of riots. Another had been discovered in the library of a prestigious family gone wrong (disturbingly similar to the Malfoys) and had been destroyed. The other three, however, had no existing record of who owned them or where they were.
Which lead to the current situation. Evidently, Voldemort, possibly through reading a copy of Resistenza, had learnt of the documents. And, knowing Voldemort, was most likely doing everything possible to obtain them.
The brunette set down her now-empty glass and removed any traces of her existence from the room, before leaving the building -and the body- for the Aurors to find.
As she set off the alarm and Disapparated, she could only hope that Voldemort's attempts so far had been futile.