FIVE
Bloodshot eyes bored into him as a chillingly calm voice repeated, "She still…hasn't…replied."
James swallowed hard but maintained eye contact. "No."
White nostrils flared, the only betrayal of the building temper under that ghastly skin, and James elaborated with a sigh, "The Order's attack at the Rosiers' spooked her—"
"Weak," one of the Lestrage's barked.
"Smart," James instantly snapped back, feeling his own anger bubble up in his chest. Down the table, he was met with open sneers and rolling eyes.
Lucius interjected smoothly, "Perhaps a different approach…"
A humorless laugh bursted from his mouth. "Fancy my date after all, do you?" James demanded. "Never mind all the shit you said before you'd even met her—"
The other Lestrange boomed, "Well, you coulda told us she was stacked—"
"Nah," teased his brother, "Potter wants all that pussy for himself—"
More voices jumped into the mounting cacophony.
"Cock didn't keep her around, Potter?"
"Maybe she just needs a, ah, different touch—"
"Well Malfoy sure thinks so—"
"Fiancé not doing it for you, Luce?"
"More like he's probably not doing it for her—"
"ENOUGH!"
Silence fell, quick and heavy, with only the faint echo of the Dark Lord's shout ringing off the room's stone walls. Voldemort seethed at the head of the table. "Imbeciles," he hissed. "Pathetic. You're all so blinded by lust you can't even think."
That eerie face, one that would be unfairly handsome if it weren't for the bizarre and secretive magical transformation warping it, turned back on James, and though his heart beat furiously, panic stirring in his veins, he willed his mind clear.
"You say she is smart to be spooked," Voldemort accused. "Explain."
He sucked in a deep breath. "She knows enough about our…politics…to know who I'm affiliated with. Not to mention, in the short time I've known her, three of the four occasions we've spent time together have been cut short by some attack or other, with one of them resulting in her being gravely injured. We're confident we know who she really works for, so she obviously knows how to assess risk, and based on that track record? I'd say she's assessing the risk of being around me as pretty damn high and cutting herself loose."
Voldemort's glare was cold. "So you failed."
The knock on the front door echoed through the empty house, and James pushed himself up from his desk and trudged down the staircase with a sigh. He didn't know who to expect at that time of night, but when he swung open the door and saw the figure on the stoop, he thought she might have been the last person he would have guessed.
"What are you doing here?"
She lowered her hood with a coy smile. "Visiting. Is that how you greet all your guests?"
He chewed his lip, not rising to her bait. "Dru—"
She rolled her eyes and pushed past him, making straight for the sitting room off the entrance hall, and James resignedly followed her, leaning against the doorway with his hands in his pockets as she stood warming her hands in front of the crackling fire.
"It's been awhile," she said casually, tossing him a flirtatious look over her shoulder.
"I suppose," James answered. He'd lost track of time a little lately, with all the whirlwind of meeting and starting to court Lily.
Drucilla rolled her eyes. "Not all of us have been busy dating for the Dark Lord, James."
His skin prickled. "What?"
She turned her gaze on him, looking particularly dangerous as the harsh shadows danced over her face. Though on first glance she appeared dainty and delicate, with her soft features, glossy black hair, and pouty mouth, James had never been fooled: beautiful she might be, but Drucilla Flint had inherited those parts of her family tree—tongue quick enough to cut, heart hard enough to be stone, mind thirsty enough to border on unhinged—that could make her deadly.
A smirk curled up her lips. "Lysandra and Bellatrix have always been best friends."
His eyes closed fleetingly. Of course. Lysandra, Drucilla's older sister, had been inseparable from Bellatrix for as long as he had known them. Interestingly, Bellatrix was the only female Death Eater, though James had never investigated why that was. He supposed it was a mixture of not very many women wanting to subject themselves to the mysogonistic environment that Death Eater gatherings typically became and Voldemort's disinclination to include women in his inner circle aside from his strange obsession with Bellatrix (which James didn't want to dwell on). And given that he, Sirius, and Peter regularly recounted everything that went on in meetings to Remus, he really shouldn't be surprised that the topics of discussion in the Lestranges' dining room would be shared by others with their own close friends and family. After all, the pureblood society supporting Voldemort was far more like a world unto itself, where Tom Riddle sat in the throne and the rest of them were varying degrees of minions and civilians whose lives all seemed to revolve around him, even if they weren't the ones called to hold court behind closed doors.
"Well," he said carefully, "I'd appreciate it if you kept that bit to yourself, all the same."
Drucilla arched a mocking brow. "Worried about giving reports on your ability to romance?"
James rolled his eyes. "I'm being serious, Dru. We have every reason to believe she knows important information, and it's not exactly going to work bringing her around if everyone's whispering and slipping about it being fake."
Not that it looked like he would be bringing her around again anytime soon, but if Drucilla didn't know that already, she didn't need to.
She abruptly turned away from the fire and strode toward him. "If the information's so important, remind me why you can't just torture it out of her?"
James's insides curdled at both the idea and Drucilla's casual inclination for violence, but he just fixed her with an admonishing look. "C'mon, Dru. Be smarter than that."
"You tortured Dearborn," she retorted. "Quite successfully, I hear."
His heart twisted, but he hurriedly blocked the memory from his mind, not wanting to relive the grisly details of that particular interview.
"Yeah, well, his mind wasn't prepared. Torture only works if you know you're more powerful than them. She's iron-clad with Occlumency, and assuming she works for who we think she does, which is the reason we want to get to her in the first place, she'll be dosed up on Veritaserum antidote as well. Maybe the Dark Lord could crack her, but it probably wouldn't end well for either of them, and her mind is more useful to him in tact than distorted."
Drucilla stepped up to him and ran her hands shamelessly up his chest. "That sounds a little blasphemous, Jamesie."
He shrugged. "Or just a plain assessment of reality. You don't think he'd have handled it on his own from the beginning if he thought he could?"
She pursed her lips, smoothing the wrinkles near his shoulder.
James sighed. "He's a strategist, Dru. And he's going up against a powerful group to get important information that only they can give." He grabbed her wrists, stopping the absent motion of her hands. "It's delicate. There's nothing weak in playing a smart long game, and the Dark Lord knows that."
Her front teeth dug into her bottom lip as her dark eyes glimmered up at him through her lashes. "You're so hot when you get all Head Boy"—he scoffed lightly, breaking their eye contact, and she used his distraction to break free of his grasp of her wrists, returning her hands to his waist—"lecturing us prefects—"
"I didn't lecture—"
"Of course not," she teased, but her face was suddenly in such close proximity to his that the rest of his protest died in his throat.
Having nowhere else to put them, he rested his hands on her arms. "Why'd you come over here?"
"I was randy," she said simply, ducking her face down toward his neck, "and bored of taking care of myself"—he couldn't help the low groan that mental image caused—"and I thought I'd see if your little project allowed for us to still do…this."
And she pressed her lips to the base of his neck, flicking her tongue against his skin. His body responded immediately, but a weird tension played out in his brain. He had no claim to Lily, no response from her in weeks, no indication she even wanted to see him again after that disastrous dinner party, and yet he still felt an inkling of guilt about the idea of hooking up with Drucilla.
"Dru…"
Her hand left his waist to cup the bulge developing in his joggers. "How's wanking going?"
Some mixture of a groan and chuckle left his mouth, and he heard her laugh softly into his neck before she pulled back and brought her face in front of his. "Because I know I'd rather have your cock than my fingers."
He swore under his breath. "Fuck, you—can't say shit like that—"
Her hands stroked his growing length. "Why? Got someone else coming over here to take care of this?"
His gut twisted with a pang, because as much as he'd like that answer to be yes, the truth was that he wasn't even sure if Lily Evans would ever speak to him again, let alone do anything else. He might like her (a whole hell of a lot, if he was being honest), but it didn't make any sense to feel guilty for seeking some company elsewhere if she was shutting him out. And besides, his thing with Drucilla had always been just that: casual company.
It had started in Hogwarts. He wasn't exactly proud of it, but as he'd hung around her by virtue of Adelaide, a sexual tension had developed between them, all the more tempting for being forbidden, and one night, when he'd been in yet another off phase with Adelaide and he and Drucilla had been doing rounds together (unplanned, but his scheduled partner had found a sub, which he'd always figured had been Drucilla's scheme all along), they'd given in and hooked up in a broom closet.
That night had only been the beginning of their now years-long secret habit of hooking up with each other. Adelaide didn't know, which James had mixed feelings about, but to be fair, he and Drucilla had always stopped when he and Adelaide had gone into an on phase. She'd been missing from his life for awhile while he'd been gone, of course, but once he'd returned and ingratiated himself into pureblood life, he and Drucilla had picked their habit right up again. His mates, being his roommates, had found out, but Adelaide still didn't know.
And neither did Lily. He'd left out that little detail at the dinner party, not quite sure that was something to disclose on the third date of a fake relationship, and also not wanting to risk that little secret getting out and throwing Adelaide into a scene.
That little inkling of guilt nagged at him. Was he doing the wrong thing? Did it even matter, if Lily wasn't speaking to him for reasons he couldn't even blame her for?
His brain hurt. His eyes were tired. And, now that he was thinking more with a different appendage, he supposed it had been awhile since he'd been with Drucilla.
"Fuck it," he growled, and he crashed his mouth to hers, shoving his hands into her hair and his hips into her grip.
Drucilla laughed into their kiss, breaking away to mumble, "Mmm, thought so," before she kissed him back and prompted him to walk her backwards until her legs hit the back of one of the sofas. It was only when she tossed her heavy traveling cloak aside that he realized she'd Apparated to his house with nothing underneath except black lingerie.
"Fuck, Dru."
She yanked his joggers and boxers down to his thighs with the precision of repeated practice while his eyes raked over her figure.
"Get this off," she ordered, lifting the hem of his shirt, and he complied, tossing it on top of her cloak.
Her fingers skimmed over his abs and across his pecs admiringly. "So fit," she complimented, and then she bent over the back of the sofa with a dramatic hair flip so she could, James knew, watch the flex of his muscles over her shoulder while he fucked her.
This was why he liked Drucilla, liked what they had. She wasn't nice, and she wasn't patient, but she was direct. She wanted his body; she didn't want him. And in that, they understood each other perfectly.
When Sirius Apparated into the hall awhile later and saw them fucking, he knocked over the coat rack with a deliberate clatter, causing both of them—James, now sitting on the sofa, and Drucilla, in his lap with her back to his chest and her hands bracing against his legs—to start and shout a string of expletives at him in a very different tone than they'd just been shouting before.
"Great to see you too, Dru-cil-la!" Sirius drawled loudly in a sing-song voice as he set off up the staircase.
James dropped his head back against the top of the sofa with a groan as Drucilla stilled in his lap with a strangled growl of frustration and grumbled, "I fucking lost it."
He laced his fingers behind his head and watched her maneuver off of him. "Wanna go upstairs?"
She wrinkled her nose, hands on her hips. "Down the hall from Mr. Obnoxious himself? No thanks, I'm not in the mood anymore. He's like a bucket of fucking ice water."
James suppressed a laugh; Sirius would never barge in on him when he was genuinely in private, but Sirius also considered anything he happened to see or hear fair game for disruption and endless taunting. And if there was one thing Drucilla didn't like, it was someone (namely, Sirius) having the power of blackmail over her, which Sirius had had (and threatened to exercise) ever since the first time he'd walked in on them in the kitchen.
With a sigh that was more exasperated than upset, she fished her knickers from the floor, shimmied them back over her hips, and sauntered over to where her cloak had landed.
"Guess you'll just have to wank after all," she snarked, tossing him his shirt.
"Sorry about him," James offered.
Drucilla only shrugged, swirling her cloak around her shoulders, tying up the front, and then pulling on the hood. "It's whatever." She smirked. "At least I have a fresh memory of abs and dick to help me out."
He chuckled as he pulled his shirt on over his head. "Glad I could be of service, Dru."
She just gave him a wry smile—"'Night, James"—and disappeared with a crack.
Silence blanketed the room, only broken by the occasional spit of the fire, and he raked his hands through his hair. That had been entirely unexpected, and though he agreed with Drucilla that Sirius had broken the mood and removed the comfort of being loud in an empty house, he was still aroused enough to want to do something about it.
But when he found himself in a first-floor powder room with the door locked and silenced, it wasn't black hair and a lithe body that filled his mind, but dark red curls falling around curves hugged by a tight black dress. If he opened his mind, let it wander, he could still feel the dip of her waist under his hand, picture the long legs he'd finally glimpsed, recall the sight of her shoulder blades in her open back.
He laughed out loud to himself as he felt how quickly he responded to even just thinking about her; it was stupid, what she did to him. Like even though he knew, logically, that he needed to keep his head and do this strategically, his body was rebelling and turning into a fifteen-year-old boy with all the trappings of a dumb, incontrollable, schoolboy crush. Hell, he hadn't even kissed her yet, and he was still this worked up about her.
His mind formed a blurred fantasy of her on top of him, back in the sitting room where he'd just been with Drucilla, only he imagined Lily straddling him, kissing him, coming for him with that dazzling smile she had. The motions were the same he'd always done—cupping with one hand, stroking with the other—but these recent fantasies he'd had of Lily (because touching himself to visions of her had become part of his regular routine embarrassingly quickly) somehow made them feel better, more exciting, than they had in a very long time.
Having finally given in to the fantasy after trying to distract himself from dwelling on her the past few days, he didn't want to stop thinking about her, didn't want to leave the little bubble he'd created in his head where she wrote him back and then came over and climbed in his lap. He edged himself as long as he could, hanging onto every last second of that little dream world, until climax forced itself on him and, in his distracted state, he forgot to lift up his shirt and came all over it.
Defensive indignation instantly surged in his chest; James might do a lot of things, but fail wasn't one of them, and while he might have been moping a little over the loss of Lily, he still firmly stood by the fact that if this mission wasn't going his way, it was most certainly not his fault. "I haven't failed. She likes me—I was making progress—"
"And yet she hasn't replied," Voldemort reminded him icily.
For such a brilliant man, Tom sure was thick when it came to interpersonal relations.
"I don't know who would," James sassed back, far more confidently than he felt, "after being repeatedly left in the middle of dates for unexplained reasons and then being nearly sliced to death after she accepted an invitation to a fucking stuffy dinner party."
Voldemort's eyes flashed, but James pressed on, not giving him the chance to speak. "It's not about me; her and I got on great on our own. It's about all this other chaos"—here he threw a dark look toward Malfoy—"that keeps interfering with my progress."
Several seconds of silence followed, during which Voldemort stared at him with an unreadable expression and James strategically opened his mind enough to let memories of Lily float to the surface. A bashful look through her lashes as they held hands for the first time. Her head thrown back in laughter across from a small bistro table from him. Being so close to her face he could count her freckles before the sting of his Dark Mark jolted him from their impending kiss. The sight of her in that dress, taunting him outside the Rosiers' estate. And then, the last memories: the pain and fear on her face as he magicked the cursed glass from her skin; the press of her lips to his cheek, the arousal he felt from such a simple act, before she departed. Had she known, then, that she would shut him out?
Voldemort spoke first. "What would you suggest?"
James chewed his lip, thinking back to words he'd uttered days ago to someone else. "My Lord, I…I understand the desire for expediency, but I think that the…sheer gravity of this endeavor requires we play a good long game. This isn't something we can take by force, it's too risky. This requires trust and time. There's nothing weak in playing smart like that. Hell, it's the ultimate power move, really."
He'd never been able to get inside Voldemort's head—good ole' Tom was too good an Occlumens for that—but there was no missing the spark in Voldemort's eye at that word James had made sure to use to drive his point home. Power.
"And how do you expect to achieve this?"
James had no idea. "Well, I think if I could just see her again, I could…"
He didn't know how to finish that sentence. Convince her not to ditch him? Woo her?
Thankfully, Voldemort got the gist, and waved his hand in absent dismissal. "There is to be an intimate gathering at the home of a collector in Paris. You will attend and look for any of the objects we've previously discussed, and perhaps you will have the good fortune of finding our Miss Evans along the way."
"Yes, my lord," James choked, heart in his throat at the thought of being, for all intents and purposes, in Lily's backyard. And though he had no idea where she lived, only the slightest inkling of where to even start looking for her, excitement nonetheless thrummed through his body at the prospect, even if it was a small one, of seeing her again.
Fallen leaves swirled around her boots as she leaned back against the bench in the middle of the Jardin des Tuileries, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, and thought about James.
It had been three weeks and a day since the Rosiers' ill-fated dinner party, which meant three weeks since she'd seen James, and nearly just as long since she'd replied to his first letter. It had been the most words he'd written yet, an apology followed by well wishes for her recovery and closed with an open-ended invitation to get together again soon. She'd replied a brief, Thanks, James. I'm all healed up, but to be honest, I'm not sure I can do this right now. Thanks again for everything. Lily.
He'd written her back, of course. An off-the-cuff, Shit. Can we talk? followed a couple days later by a more thoughtful, Lily, I wouldn't do this if I didn't think there was something between us, but I do, and I think you felt it too. I understand why what happened at the Rosiers' would scare you away, but I wish it wouldn't. Please talk to me? xx, James
That one had hurt to ignore, both because he was right—she had felt that spark between them—and because his owl had persistently tried to nip a reply out of her for two days before taking off back to London. But her stubbornness had overridden any lingering doubt that owl had tried to stir, and Lily had set to moving on with her life.
No more Dumbledore, no more spying, no more bloody fucking ridiculous British blood war.
No more James.
She'd thought she'd been coping decently well, considering.
Only, her ex-boyfriend was in her bed, the product of running into him at the Place Cachée the night before and thinking that splitting a bottle of wine with him before taking him back to her place was a serendipitously ideal alternative to lying awake with her own thoughts.
Which were clearly not coping as well as she'd convinced herself, as she'd gotten too lost in her drunk fantasy of the body over her belonging to someone other than her ex and moaned a rather loud and enthusiastic James when she should have moaned something—anything—else.
What in Merlin's name was wrong with her? She knew he was evil. She'd extracted herself from a dangerous (literally, life-threatening) situation. She'd done the right thing.
Hadn't she?
But if she had, then why—why—couldn't she get James Potter out of her head? Why did she miss him?
She knew, in the silence of that blustery, empty Saturday morning, that that was the truth she'd been trying to deny. She missed him. Hell, she barely knew him, could count the days she'd spent time with him on one hand, and yet after three weeks without him she still bloody missed him. His smile. His eyes, twinkling behind his glasses. His hair, mussed in that sexy way he had. His humor; his wit; his steadying, comforting presence. The way his touch had shot electricity through her veins and fucking Hippogriffs flapping around in her stomach.
Stupid. It was stupid. A stupid, school-girl crush that she needed to—no, would—get over.
"Hey."
She started and looked up abruptly; lost in her thoughts as she'd been, she hadn't heard anyone approach. Stupid.
"Hey," she replied weakly, accepting the take-away coffee cup he offered as he sat heavily beside her. She took a cautious sip. "How'd you know I was here?"
He chuckled. "Because you haven't changed a bit, Lil. I mean, you have, but you also haven't, y'know?"
Her eyes traveled over him and his familiar lean limbs, dirty blonde hair, and scruffy jaw as she mused, "Suppose I could say the same for you."
He grinned, white teeth sparkling even without the glint of the sun, and turned those crinkling blue eyes on her as he knocked her shoulder gently with his. "So who's James?"
Shit. Lily averted her eyes and forced down a scalding sip of her cappuccino—he remembered—as her mind raced for how to handle the situation. "He's…a bloke I was seeing recently," she eventually answered.
"Ah."
"Mmm."
"Was, hmm?"
"Was."
"Should I apologize?"
"No."
"In that case, you're welcome."
She looked sharply sideways, eyes narrowing. "For what?"
He only arched a sardonic brow before he said cheekily, "Giving you what it sounded like you clearly needed, even if you were imagining I was someone else the whole time."
Lily rolled her eyes with a sigh. "Should I apologize?"
"No need," he said simply. "Happy to step in if this James—English, I assume?—wasn't doing the job."
She figured it would be futile to tell him that she hadn't even given James the chance.
"You're suspiciously amenable this morning, you know that?"
He chuckled, a charming sound she'd once simpered over. "Lily"—he leaned closer to her side and set a hand on her thigh—"Neither of us can help that we ran into each other again right after you stopped…well. Look, we didn't work before because I moved away after school, right? But I'm back in Paris now, so maybe we can…try this again."
Her heart leapt into her throat, mind spinning with more than just too much wine. She'd loved him, once. Obsessively, selfishly, youthfully. And she'd been so crushed when he'd left that it had taken over a year for her to figure out who Lily Evans was in the real world without him. Only, now that she had, she wasn't sure that what she'd known him to be was what she wanted anymore.
"I—I don't—"
He closed his eyes, shook his head, and swiftly cut her off. "I'm sorry, that was—far too strong. I just—it's been nice, seeing you again."
Lily swallowed hard and admitted softly, "It has."
Those blue eyes softened as he offered her a warm smile. "I tell you what, I'm going to a salon tomorrow night at Tremblay's—"
"The collector?"
He nodded. "Would you like to go with me? No pressure, just…"
"Oui." The dart of his eyebrows betrayed his surprise, a mirror of her own rising up at the swift answer her subconscious had provided. She hastily added, "That sounds…nice."
It was the truth; her ex he might be, but the idea of a pleasant evening socializing, and maybe even having another good round in her bed afterwards, was downright refreshing compared to being left atop a monument or having the room explode on her before hors d'oeuvres even started.
He grinned at her. "I'll pick you up at seven."
She forced a smile back, though she found she didn't have to try that hard. "Guess I need to go find myself a dress."
