A/N: well, I can't say much in favour of my updating, but I'm sure you'll forgive me, once again….. thanks for all your reviews, I hope I answered them all!

Kazza: thank you very much for your review! I'm terribly flattered and hope this chapter won't make you change your mind.

Musical Hermione: wow, I have a new reviewer!!!! And a awfully revengeful one as well!!! I'm so flattered, and I hope you keep reading this story, even if you don't review very often…

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that J.K. Rowling does….. is that clear enough for you?

PART XX

"Severus, old boy, how nice to see you!!!" said Lucius joyfully as he entered without knocking into the Potions Master office. Snape gave him a wary look, which promptly shifted to where Svetlana was sitting near to a fuming cauldron.

"Lucius" acknowledged Snape darkly; Svetlana had warned him of Lucius' impending visit, but it only made him more suspicious //Suspicious? Jealous, more like!//. "What are you doing here?"

"It almost sounds as if you weren't glad to see me" commented Lucius with a smirk "I'm here because the board of governors chose me to give the first verbal warning to Dumbledore; besides, I also needed to talk to Draco about an important matter concerning his future. And last, but not least, I came to visit you"

Both Svetlana and Severus gave him peculiar looks: Severus' shone with deep mistrust, and Svetlana's with light amusement, but Lucius remained impassive, braving the couple's looks.

"How thoughtful" spat Severus, slamming a pile of essays into his desk. Suddenly, he was *very* angry, remembering how his supposed best-friend had been socially seeing his wife for twelve long years, without giving him any indications of the fact.

"What is the matter, old boy?" asked Lucius, frowning at Snape's obvious foul mood.

"Nothing" deadpanned Snape, forcing himself to look calm; he would have managed it, if not for the meaningful look from Svetlana to Lucius.

"Severus….." said the eldest Malfoy, reading in Svetlana's eyes a plea to try and get Snape's secret out. But the Potions Master interpreted it as the complicity between lovers he had been dreading all along, and it was enough to breach his self-control.

"What do you want, Lucius?! If you came here looking for a private rendezvous with my wife, and my mere presence is inconvenient, just say the words and leave my office!"

So *that* was what was bothering him after all. Lucius braced himself for the confrontation, not risking another look to Svetlana, who would be, if he knew her as well as he did, dying to get out of the room, scared and yet flattered by the fight over her.

"Severus, please mind your words!" Lucius chose a counterattack this time, wanting for the confrontation to be as short as possible, for Svetlana's sake. "This is your wife's honour you're carelessly sullying!"

"As if she hadn't done so already" replied Severus quietly, only his smouldering eyes showing how enraged he really was. Lucius now did look at Svetlana, silently apologising for not being able to protect her any further.

"May I remind you" said Svetlana softly and dangerously "that not only you have no right to call me your wife, or worry about my honour, or lack of, but also that you are probably the last wizard on earth who can give a morality lecture to anyone!" The Russian witch was pale with rage, but her voice was firm and her demeanour correct as she looked down on her husband.

"This discussion is not about you" said Severus, turning to her his fiery eyes.

"You two are fighting over my ownership" she contradicted angrily //Stop feigning, you love it!// "I think that is reason enough for me to get involved"

"So, are you saying that Lucius here has any kind of claim over your ownership, as you call it?" The bitterness in Snape's voice corroded all hope of future normal relationships between the trio "If  I didn't know you better, I would have thought you took the idea out of a cheap Muggle drama: wife goes with husband's best friend, behind his back, for twelve years….."

"I am *not* your wife!" shouted Svetlana suddenly, silencing both Severus' accusations and Lucius' explanations. "I am not your wife" she repeated quietly, blinking away tears whose cause she didn't know. "I have never been your wife, not even when we lived together. I don't know why we've kept this stupid façade of a marriage, but I'm sick of it. Tomorrow I will ask for the annulation papers to be sent in, and in less than a week, I'll be Svetlana Karakoff again, free to leave this damned school and its damned inhabitants"

Silence followed that explosive declaration. Svetlana had nothing more to say, and she tried to steady her breathing and go back into the world of coherent thought. Lucius looked at her with admiration and respect in his silver eyes, although he didn't stop checking for a violent reaction from Snape. He needn't have bothered, though, because Severus was standing completely still, paler than pale, his black eyes shut and his right hand gripping a chair so tightly that the wood began to crumble under his fingers.

"Very well" said Severus at last, in a voice so soft it didn't seem his own "Very well" And he left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

//What have I done?!// asked Svetlana frantically as she watched the closed door.

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"Mr Henry Mulldrive?" asked the young woman sitting behind the counter of a renowned airline. "Do you have all your papers in order? Do remember that immigration officials at Yaoundé might ask you for your vaccination certificates….. you have them? Very well then. Boarding will start in an hour, at gate B-5, please be there by 7 PM at the latest. Thank you and good trip!"

The young woman smiled brightly and turned to her next customer; there was nothing in the man she had just talked to that would distinguish him from the other people waiting to board the evening's flight to Yaoundé, Cameroon. Maybe his golden eyes, underlined by heavy black bags, or the heavily white-streaked hair, but the air-hostess was now facing the drama of a family with 50 pounds of overweight in their luggage, and she soon forgot all about anything else.

Remus Lupin put his fake passport back into his coat pocket and started making his way to the waiting rooms. He had heard of African wizards who had developed spells to work against the dangerous werewolves which thrived in the mountains of Cameroon, and he was at a point where he had no other option but exile or death. It was either risking the trip to Cameroon, or the vial of cyanide he had stolen from Severus in their Hogwarts days and which he still kept in his suitcase.

A group of American tourists pushed their way past him and he sighed in annoyance: he longed to use his wand and just Apparate in Africa, but he suspected that all of his magic was under Ministry surveillance and he had chosen the Muggle way as the lesser of two evils. He took a seat in the waiting room, after making his way past the passport controls, and put his head in his hands.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Sirius' mangled body in front of him, he felt the metallic taste of blood in his tongue, he smelt the torn flesh and felt the cold breeze of that night when he had killed his best friend. He still didn't understand what had gone wrong, why the Wolfsbane Potion hadn't worked, why his beastly instincts had to surface in that exact moment….. //Why?// he asked to all the gods who could hear him //Why?//

"Passengers for the BA753 flight to Yaoundé, please make your way to gate B-5 for boarding. I repeat, passengers for the BA753 flight to Yaoundé, please make your way to gate B-5 for boarding. Thank you"

"Mr Mulldrive? Seat H7, on the right side along this corridor, please"

"This is Captain Howards, your pilot for today. We have just left the Heathrow Airport and will be arriving at Yaoundé in approximately six hours. There, the weather is overcast but warm, with an average temperature of 20 degrees Celsius….."

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"Harry, dear, are you awake?" asked Madam Pomefrey's motherly voice from somewhere besides the night-table. Harry blinked owlishly until he registered his surroundings and then gave a weak smile to the nurse. Satisfied with this, Poppy Pomfrey helped him sit up and placed the dinner tray on his knees, soon leaving the young Gryffindor on his own; after all, he had spent in the infirmary a good deal of his seven years at Hogwarts, and knew it as well as he knew his common room.

But in truth, Harry had been awake for a long time before the nurse checked on him. He just remained immobile, his eyes closed and his breathing steady, mulling over dark thoughts under the pretence of induced sleep. While he tucked into the food, he concentrated again on the character he blamed the most for this whole ordeal (besides himself, of course, but that was out of all question): Sirius Black.

How could he have let himself be killed so stupidly, knowing how Harry needed him? How could he have gone into the werewolf's lair without protection, with or without the Wolfsbane Potion? How could he have lived so carelessly, not caring what could come next, dying, like he had lived, in complete unawareness? Harry could not get over how *unfair* it all was, and he placed the blame on the one person who could not shrug it off.

"Harry?" asked a hesitant voice.

"What?!" he snapped before even looking up.

"I just wanted to say hello" said Hermione timidly. Harry hated himself for his own unfairness at snapping at the only person who still cared for him in the whole damn school, but this only got him in a worse mood.

"You've said it, you can go now" he indicated, forcing himself not to look at those brown eyes full of hurt.

"Harry!" she complained, her voice definitely wounded "Please, talk to me; you don't know how worried I've been since that night….. I hadn't been able to see you, I didn't know if you were really alive, or if Dumbledore was trying to hide something….." Her voice broke, and Harry pitied her for a moment "….. please, tell me if you're OK, if you need anything! I'll listen if you want to talk, but if you want to be alone, I'll go with your words and tell Ron and the others; they're also so worried…..!"

"Don't even mention Ron" spat Harry; although his words lacked conviction, Hermione still believed them to be true.

"But Harry! He's your best friend, however you both try to spoil that. You've helped each other more times than I can count, you've saved each other's lives tens of times over the years….."

"What does he think of me now, Hermione? Does he think I'm a heartless bastard that only cares about himself? Does he think I'd let you down at the first opportunity? Does he think I'd save my life sacrificing others? Does he think that the insults and beatings don't hurt me? Does he think he's the only one with feelings in this damned school?!" Harry's voice had risen in the last sentence, and Madam Pomfrey shot him a warning look.

"He's only a child, Harry" said Hermione mournfully, knowing that his accusations were partly true.

"Then let him face the consequences like a man. Now, I want to be alone"

Hermione left without a word, the knot on her throat and chest too tight to even say "Good-night". She stumbled across dark corridors, trying to hold back tears in vain. At one point she thought she heard shouting in Snape's office, but she was too gone to care.

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"Oh, Merlin, what have I done, what have I done, Lucius?!" repeated Svetlana desperately, looking at the closed door as if it were her particular Boggart. Only two minutes before Severus had left the room and Lucius still didn't understand the causes of soon-to-be Miss Karakoff's hysteria-attack.

"Svetlana….." Not for the first time in the evening, he was interrupted.

"Damn it, damn it!!!" she exclaimed, her curses followed by a string of Russian expletives that made Lucius blush. "How could I've been so stupid?!"

"But, Svetlana, I thought you didn't love him….." //Or at least that was what you always told  me//

"Damn, Lucius, can't you see it's not about that?!" Svetlana walked with certain feet up to Lucius and put her right hand on his left shoulder, a signal clear enough for him, who had more than one secret tattoo. "It's not about Severus. When I divorce, I will have no further excuse to remain at Hogwarts, and if I don't….."

Lucius looked at her with wide grey eyes. He was surprised beyond measure, although he had suspected it all along.

"So it was you after all" he said softly. The mark that burned on her shoulder, the fleur de lis that condemned her to secrecy, burned in Lucius' left shoulder as well, for as long as he had been an independent wizard, and for even longer than the Dark Mark itself "Congratulations for a job, so far, very well done" Then, he remembered her current source of preoccupation and frowned "And now, what are you going to do?"

"I don't know" she cried in frustration "If you two hadn't been so stubborn and so *manly*, I wouldn't have lost my temper; if I hadn't lost my temper, I wouldn't have shouted to Severus; if I hadn't shouted to Severus, I wouldn't have to divorce him now; and….." Svetlana took a deep breath and her speaking resumed its normal speed "and now I don't know what to do"

"You can't divorce him." concluded Lucius "Unless you can finish your mission in a week, in time for the divorce papers to be ready"

"No way" Svetlana answered firmly "It's all set, but I need until January, at the very least"

Another pregnant pause followed, and Lucius once again broke the silence with his silken voice.

"Then, you have to stay married" Svetlana opened her mouth to rebuke him mockingly, when the implications of what he had just said hit her; and with them, Lucius' now suggestive voice, very close to her burning ears "You're still a beautiful woman, Svetlana. And Severus knows that, whether he wants to accept it or not. And I'll be damned if this beautiful and intelligent woman can't worm her way into Severus' shrivelled heart once again"

"But I can't do that:" she sputtered, moving away from Lucius, feeling all hot and bothered "he's my husband!"

"It's either that, or getting the divorce and leaving Hogwarts before the mission is completed. You know what happens after that"

Oh, Svetlana knew, and she shivered at the mere thought. She wanted so much to remain alive; she wanted to eat, drink, laugh and dress up; she wanted to see her children grow, to swim in the Mediterranean and ski in Tibet; she wanted to see a sunrise and then go back to sleep; she wanted to take flowers to her father's grave on his first anniversary; she wanted to complete her thirteenth and last mission and then go into retirement, and live the life she always wanted. She didn't want to die for a few reckless words she had shouted without thinking of the consequences.

"Oh, damn" she muttered, moving instinctively into Lucius' embrace.

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Draco escorted his father to the main entrance half an hour after Lucius had left Svetlana Snape in her husband's office, a sea of tears and regrets. But now both Malfoys seemed like the picture of frivolity and elegance as they walked through the empty Entrance Hall.

"I wanted to tell you something, dragon" said Lucius after letting the conversation about the winter holidays wither and die "This summer you'll leave Hogwarts and go onto further your education at the Oxford University, as we've already discussed. However, before you go, there's one small matter to take care of: as the only heir to the Malfoy state, you have the duty of continuing our line, that has flowed without tainting from before the foundation of this school. This is a daunting matter to one so young as you, but to make things easier, your mother and I have chosen your future bride. The engagement contract will be signed during these holidays, and the marriage will be carried out as soon as the girl graduates"

Draco froze mid-step. He had listened to his father's speech with a growing sense of dread, but it was only now that he realised fully how little control he had over his life, and cold anger and desperation filled his chest. He thought of Svetlana and her quiet laughter and the peculiar way of looking him after she had delivered a compliment, and then thought of having to go through his life with a empty-headed porcelain doll by his side; the thought that Svetlana once was one of such porcelain dolls never crossed his mind.

"Who is she?" he asked dully, preparing himself for the worst. //Please, at least not Parkinson, or Bullstrode, please, not them!//

"Gabrielle Delacour, the half-Veela studying at Beauxbottoms" Draco answered nothing as they left the Entrance Hall and faced the waiting carriage.

Lucius thought that, all in all, Draco had taken it rather well. Remembering his own youth, he couldn't count the amount of objets d'art he had broken in a fit of rage at the announcement of his own engagement with Narcissa D'Ivoire. But there weren't any delicate porcelains to break out there, while they stood in front of the carriage and Draco did nothing but bite his lower lip and breath slowly. In. Hold. Out. Hold. Lucius never felt more proud of his son, and thought that it was as good as opportunity of telling him as they got.

"You're a good son, Draco. I'm proud of you" After this impromptu declaration, which Draco appreciated even with his rage boiling over, Lucius got in the carriage and was soon nothing more than a black stop in the distance.

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A/N: Poor Draco! And poor Pansy too! And poor Svetlana! What do you think she's going to do now?