Disclaimer: It's too bad that I don't own Harry Potter. The Black sisters would've had a much more fulfilling ending.

Hatred

It was a secret that many acknowledged as fact and few verified: Bellatrix Lestrange hated her husband. He was tolerable at Hogwarts, when he was her friend, just another pureblood in Slytherin to accentuate her own brilliance and charm. She'd let him hold her hands a couple of times and even conceded a few stolen kisses.

The moment she learned that he was to be her husband, and that the betrothal papers had already been drawn up, she hated him with a loathing that she mustered for very few things. There she was, Bellatrix Black, daughter of Cygnus and Druella Black, eighteen years old and at the height of her beauty, with her future shimmering before her, to be married to the besotted fool of a Lestrange!

No, she thought, as her parents spoke of marital and monetary arrangements. No, she thought more fiercely, clenching her hands into fists as she assessed the admiration on Narcissa's face and the scorn on Andromeda's. No, she wanted to scream, when she saw her future husband's smug face at the engagement ball a few evenings later. Rodolphus Lestrange did not deserve her. Bellatrix Black was not a prize easily given to a useless pawn; she needed to be won.

Therefore, Bellatrix punished Rodolphus in the cruelest manner she knew. She began an affair with his master, Lord Voldemort.

Bellatrix was a young bride when she first met the Dark Lord, newly returned from a honeymoon spent in the French Rivera. Before then, she had heard his name spoken among her family's circle of friends, first with doubt and then with reverence. Rodolphus, too, spoke of his master with worship and fear. And so Bellatrix insisted that she would meet him, despite her husband's protests that their gatherings admitted no women.

Lord Voldemort, however, allowed Bellatrix to come. He had known Druella Rosier back at Hogwarts. He watched her as he conducted his meeting, the way she looked at her husband, the way she attracted stray glances from other men.

After the meeting adjourned, he asked to meet her in an empty parlor, while her husband waited outside. She stood before him, her face turned toward his, her dark eyes holding a challenge. She reminded him of her mother, as expected, but the daughter's beauty was savage and unrelenting.

"Bellatrix Black," he said, purposefully omitting her married name. "I've met your parents."

"Yes."

Her gaze was direct, unwavering. She did not look away from his ruined face the way his Death Eaters were prone to do. He smiled and drew out his wand. "Tell me, Bellatrix Black," he drawled, "can you duel?"

Before he could react, she had drawn her wand and yelled, "Expelliarmus!" His wand flew into the air and she neatly caught it in her hand.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I can duel."

He smiled coldly in return. "But I see that you have much to learn."

When she was thrown back against the wall in punishment, she only laughed as she gazed up at his face. She knew, as did he, that she had passed the test.

She was branded with the Dark Mark three days later. That night, with her inner arm still tender, the Dark Lord found Bellatrix Lestrange in his chamber, where she proceeded to slip off her robes with calm precision.

The Dark Lord made love in a way that Rodolphus never could: the Dark Lord was not alive, was no longer a man of flesh and blood, and so he treated her like a machine, hurt her like an object, and Bellatrix liked it. She liked it because it was a challenge and because she enjoyed seeing him surrendered to her by the end of the night.

Bellatrix never bothered to hide the affair from Rodolphus. After the first night spent with the Dark Lord, she came back to the Lestrange manor as if nothing had happened.

"Where were you last night?" Rodolphus demanded, throwing down his silver fork during breakfast.

Slowly, she folded down the collars of her robes to reveal the red marks that blazed against her pale skin.

Rodolphus narrowed his eyes. With a sudden burst of anger, his hands were around her neck. "How dare you?" he spat, and then, "Who was it?"

"My Lord," Bellatrix replied.

The fire went suddenly from Rodolphus' eyes and his hold on her neck loosened. Bellatrix took the opportunity to push him away and give an order to the house-elf. Then she smiled at him.

"Just so you know, Rodolphus," she drawled, upending a goblet of Firewhiskey, "do not expect me in your chambers tonight either."

The relationship was never a secret. If Rodolphus looked at him with something other than fear and reverence, Voldemort did not notice. If the other Death Eaters shied away from her, Bellatrix did not care to discern whether it was out of disgust or respect, or perhaps both.

"I don't like it," Druella Black said, during her daughter's visit one morning. "But I can't stop you."

"No," agreed Bellatrix.

Her mother smiled. "I was once in love with him too, at Hogwarts," she said. Bellatrix set down the hairbrush and turned. Two pairs of gray eyes locked. "He was so handsome, so talented. Then I found that he was a half-blood."

Very slowly, Bellatrix put her hands on her lap. Then she said, "I see."

A month later, staring across the banquet table into her mother's eyes, Bellatrix Lestrange announced her pregnancy.

Bellatrix had chosen the name before the child was born, perusing through ancient texts until the name sang to her. As the pregnancy began to show, she announced to the world that it was Elizabeth Lestrange's first grandchild, though nobody doubted that it was Voldemort's child, least of all Rodolphus.

Voldemort continued to teach Bellatrix dueling and the Dark Arts during the day, and surrender to her passion at night. He never openly acknowledged the child as his, nor did Bellatrix ever bring up the topic. Several months into the pregnancy, however, she woke up and found his hand on her belly, with a pensive expression on his face. When he caught her watching, he bent his mouth to hers to seal off any and all questions.

The birth was successful and the baby was a girl, as Bellatrix knew she would be. Though her daughter had lived within her for months, the young mother looked at the baby without emotion, without love, only with a twisted sense of pride that the girl resembled her, down to the heavy-lidded eyes. She ran a finger over the smooth wood of the expensive cradle, resting on the engraved words, Cassiopeia Aquila Lestrange.

Rodolphus winced when people congratulated him on his daughter, some with sympathy and others with sardonic glee. He treated the girl with care and caution, as if she were a dangerous creature.

The child slept in a room, richly furnished, though her only companion was usually an ancient house-elf.

When the girl was a month old, the Lestranges held a ball to celebrate. The Dark Lord was invited and attended, and everybody watched as the young mother, clad in a revealing lavender gown that showed off her recovered figure, spent the night with her bare arms curled around the father of her baby.

When the girl was half a year old, the house-elf who watched over her ran into her master's bedroom one evening. "Young mistress is not in her room, sir!" she shrieked in distress.

Rodolphus did not turn from the books he was perusing. "Is your mistress in the house?"

The house-elf came back minutes later. "No, mistress is not. Is master thinking that mistress is with young mistress, sir?"

Rodolphus considered the tattered tapestry that he'd seen only weeks earlier in the noble and ancient House of Black, noting that the name of Cassiopeia Lestrange had yet to appear.

"Yes, that is so," he said. "Now bring me a goblet of Firewhiskey."

When she returned, holding a bundle of blankets, Rodolphus knew, even before the house-elf started screaming, "Young mistress dead!"

He opened his mouth to taunt her, but then he raised his eyes to her face and saw, marring Bellatrix Lestrange's striking and aristocratic features, a sorrow determinedly repressed.

"Quiet," Bellatrix snapped to the house-elf, handing over the child. Rodolphus cringed when he saw the girl's head loll lifelessly. "Haven't you ever seen a dead baby before?"

After the house-elf retired, she made her way into the parlor, her movements as imperious and graceful as always. She looked up with understanding eyes when her husband handed her his unfinished goblet of Firewhiskey.

"We will have a rich funeral," he said hesitantly.

"Yes, a lavish funeral," Bellatrix said, "and she will be buried in the family plot, of course."

Rodolphus bowed his head in acquiescence, knowing that by "family" she was not referring to the Lestranges. Later, he found her bent over the cradle, rocking her daughter. The scene was so grotesque that he wanted to leave, but she spoke to him without raising her head.

"He didn't kill her, you know," she said. And then she began to laugh.

The end came unexpectedly. When Lord Voldemort disappeared, defeated at the hand of a young infant, Bellatrix Lestrange became very quiet. She knew that Rodolphus expected her to fly into a rage and destroy everything in her sight, but she merely smiled and complimented the house-elf on her cooking.

Then just a few months later, she was standing before the Longbottoms, screaming as she tortured them. "Where is he? Where is he?"

They didn't answer her and she couldn't stop. The wizard and witch kneeling before her had long ceased being Frank and Alice Longbottom. Her voice rose to a shrill and suddenly everything was quiet, too quiet. Bellatrix was staring down at the two limp forms. Then she pushed back her hair, straightened her robes, and slipped her mask back on. Only when she was sure that she'd regained control did she turn to her comrades.

"Cast the Dark Mark, Rabastan. Let's leave before they start to stink."

The chains rattled. Azkaban was dirty and cold, the long nights filled with screams. Rodolphus sometimes wondered whether death was a more merciful sentence. Then he heard the approaching footsteps of a new prisoner.

When Bellatrix saw him peering out, she stopped. The Dementors, to his mild surprise, stopped as well. He felt the cold clamminess and wondered why his wife was so unaffected.

He wondered if she expected him to speak, if there were even words left between them to be uttered. But it was Bellatrix who made the move, who closed her fingers around one of the bars in his cell. Her fingers were long and beautiful, and upon her ring finger the wedding band glowed.

"Rodolphus," she breathed, her gentleness a promise that he couldn't trust. "Before I go, and perhaps am never to see you again, you deserve to know –"

He wasn't aware of leaning in until he saw the smirk that distorted her face.

"The baby," whispered Bellatrix, as the Dementors began to lead her away, "was yours."

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--Moon