Chapter One - Questions Remain
Blaise has always been a free spirit. Even when we were at Hogwarts, during those lengthy and dark days of the war, he reamined a constant source of positivity and lighthearted fun. He lifted everyone's mood just by walking into a room and cracking a well placed joke about the somber atmosphere. Even some of the Gryffindors allowed themselves to smile or laugh with the easy going Slytherin.
When the war was over and he was assumed to be in league with the Death Eaters because of his deceased father's shady background, Blaise retained a constant smile and an upbeat attitude that he would be acquited of all charges. People wrote horrible things about him in the Daily Prophet and tore his reputation to shreds with rumors of illegal tradings and consistent allegations of paying for prostitutes and escorts. Hardly anyone stood by him as every day a new set of lies were spread across the front page. All of his Slytherin schoolmates abandoned him in fear that they too would be pulled into a legal storm of false allegations and absurd accusations.
But Blaise held his head high and plowed through the trial as if it was a boring class that he was required to attend, his lawyers sweeping the evidence into the rubbish bin as if flicking off a fly. And at the tender age of nineteen, just two years shy of the war's anniversary, Blaise Zabini was found innocent on all counts and charges of murder, conspiracy, and tyranny.
That was all long before I knew him though.
By the time he and I became acquintances, then close friends - then something more, Blaise had matured and grown up. The Wizenemgot proceedings had hardened him in subtle ways that were only nurtured as the years passed and he came into his own as an adult. His childish antics and constant tomfoolery remained but soon enough the business persona that he had created after the trial took full control of his life and he became a workaholic of epic proportions.
I have never pitied him for the role he was forced to take on in order to dodge the public spotlight - the duties he shouldered himself to keep the rumors from swirling and the reporters off his back. Blaise has always had a way about himself - an air of bravado and masculine confidence - that speaks about his young maturity and the depth of his character. There have been many, many nights that I have fallen asleep in his arms as he whispers an exotic story from his childhood in my ear, an outrageous tale of a lavish vacation curteousy of one of his mother's husbands. But there have been other nights when I am the one holding him as he darkly recounts the few memories of his father he has, snippets of occurances and situations that an innocent child should not know of.
His father mysteriously died when Blaise was six years old, leaving the young boy to care for his grieving mother. But it didn't take Lucia long to bounce back and since then she has had five husbands. Five different men in twenty years and Blaise has not had an agreeable thing to say about any one of them. Throughout that time he was forced to grow up and look after his flighty mother, arranging his trips to Diagon Alley when he was preparing for Hogwarts every August and even planning his own birthday parties some years.
Blaise has never spoken ill of Lucia, though, and for that, I admire him. Many evenings we have returned to our London brownstone and I have cursed that woman up one side and down the other. She infuriates me to no end, doing her best to get under my skin - but I know it is only because she sees how happy I make her son. Despite the war and the humbling she should have received, Lucia still raises her nose at the mere mention of her only child - her darling little boy - dating a Weasley. At any turn, to any person who asks about Blaise and how he is doing, she points out that we only met because I was working for him.
She claims that Blaise must have wanted to help the less fortunate after everything he had been through and that I must have bewitched him somehow in the process. Though he would never speak disrespectively to her, Blaise is always quick to correct Lucia by saying that he was the one who put me under his spell.
The first time he blushingly admitted that he had had a crush on me back at Hogwarts, I was inwardly - okay, probably outwardly, too - floored. Most of the times that I had seen or interacted with Blaise had been when he was casually hanging back behind Draco Malfoy as the ferret taunted me. I had hardly thought that I had garnered his attention when I was swearing like a sailor and cursing Malfoy's name to all hell but Blaise has repeatedly told me since then that my fiery spirit is what he was first attracted to, even at twelve years old.
It was sheer fate that I even happened to see the job opening in the Daily Prophet. I had been living at the Burrow after Harry had dumped me four months prior, slightly depressed and in dire need of some motivation to get away from my mother's constant harping about me doing something - anything - to get Harry to take me back. She had finally driven me so crazy that I woke up one morning - to her none-too-subtle ranting about my likely spinsiterhood, mind you - declared that I was moving out, and opened the paper to the help wanted ads. Anything would work for me as long as I was making money and able to afford my own apartment.
The first day none of my Floo inquiries were returned with positive answers and I became frustrated. I had spent five years with Harry, traveling and following his every move across Britain, not once considering what I wanted to do. Not once thinking that my wants and desires could be different than his, that I could be more some lovestruck fool who had lost her independence when Voldemort was defeated. During my Hogwarts years I had fantasized about playing professional Quidditch but the war diminished my chances of playing straight out of school and by the time I fleetingly considered the idea again, Harry was proposing this grand whirlwind tour of the Mediterranean.
Every morning when I opened up the Prophet, I immediately scanned for new ads. Finally, after a fortnight of puffing up my chest with a waning bravado, my luck turned. A small, neat box in the bottom right corner of the Prophet caught my eye and I greedily read and reread the minimal posting.
Entry level position available. Pay negotiable depending on final placement. MNZ Enterprises. Direct applications to Floo grate #85379.
A lightbulb had gone off when I read the companies name and a moment later I was stunned to realize who's name the business belonged to.
MNZ Enterprises - or the longer version, Malfoy, Nott, and Zabini Enterprises.
My first instinct was to divert my attention and find another ad. But as I scanned the jumbled pages, my eyes kept going back to that smaller-than-the-others posting. Harry, for one, would be outraged at the very idea of me even considering employment at his childhood nemesis' company. My parents and most of my brothers would be irate that I would choose a job with people who were still thought of as Dark wizards. But those reactions only furthered my interest in the opening.
I did not need Harry's reputation or someone else's recommendation to find a job. I could land a highly paid position without anyone else's help and I could definitely find something that would eliminate the burden of living with my parents at the age of twenty three.
The woman who answered the Floo call was snooty looking, her blonde hair pulled back in a severe bun at the base of her skull, so much so that her face seemed to be stretched tight over her petite bone structure. Clarisse, as she snippishly introduced herself as, lifted a brow when I told her I would like to put in my resume for the job opening from the Prophet. Apparently Clarisse didn't think I was MNZ material.
"One moment - " her lips twitched as she read over the scroll containing my accomplishments. "I'll send this to the Human Resources Assistant Director – "another pause, as if she hoped to not continue on with what she knew she was about to say, "and notify you of your scheduled interview."
I remember spending the next few days in a panic at what to wear, how to sit, how to speak and respond appropriately - the whole thing had me nervous beyond anything I had experienced in several years. Though, it turned out I didn't have much to worry about, but I didn't know that for another week until I was hired.
Pansy Nott, nee Parkinson, was the Chief Human Resources Officer and was grinning from ear to ear when I walked into her office for my formal interview. Instantly I was terrified that I wouldn't get the job - many Hogwarts alumni still carried grudges against the pathetic Slytherins who dared to offer Harry up to Voldemort in the Great Hall - and that Pansy would use this opportunity to belittle me and rub my unemployment in my face.
I was so very wrong.
Pansy made small talk about what my brothers were doing and who had children, both in my family and in a familiar group of acquintances, and smirked like the canary who ate the cream as I stammered through my slightly confused responses. Ten minutes into the interview she stood up, walked around her enormous desk, and offered me her hand. Pansy happily told me that MNZ Enterprises would be proud to add me to their staff and handed me the necessary paperwork that I would need to fill out before I started the following Monday morning at nine o'clock.
If I had known then how much that one little decision would change everything - my entire life - I probably would still have done everything as I did it then, as I have done it up until now. I can't say that I regret any of the things that I have done, whether done forcibly or by choice. But now the questions remain - the unanswerable queries that have rendered me incapable of thinking of anything else since I unpresumably walked outside to my sleek (almost) new BMW and popped open the trunk.
Who killed Blaise Zabini? And why was his dead body left in my car?