Caden chanced a glance over at his mother, who had suddenly gripped his hand a little too tight. He was not sure whether or not he should pull his hand away since she was holding it so tightly, it was crushing his fingers as well as the bones in his palm. Caden thought about it for a moment before wiggling his hand out of her grasp and held her hand properly so they both would not get hurt. He gave her a small smile as she tore away her gaze from the doorway where Roland was supposedly going to answer.

"Mama, you believe Daddy's good, right?" He asked her after a moment or so.

Hermione smiled at him and ruffled his dark hair. "Of course I know your father's a good man."

"Then why are you so nervous?"

She had no reply, but luckily she did not have to answer him as Remus and Tonks joined them in the stands. As Tonks began to engage Caden in a conversation, most likely to keep his mind off the trial, Remus gave her a small grin that told her they were there for her, no matter what the Ministry was able to get out of Roland. She bit her lip nervously as she pondered Caden's question.

Roland had had a rough childhood; she knew that mostly based upon his scars. And with Voldemort as a father, who knows what he could have gotten himself into? Now that she thought about it, he never really told her what he did for Voldemort. She did not know whether or not he had been any of the masked cloak figures they had met before. She was not sure how many people he had actually hurt, how many families he had ripped apart.

Remus watched the many questions and possible answers appear on her face. He knew she was struggling, perhaps doubting that man. Remus personally was not fond of him, but this man was Caden's father. He had mixed feelings about whether or not Roland should stay in Azkaban. If he was found guilty, Caden's last memory of him would be being dragged away by dementors before he got the chance to know him. If Roland was found innocent, Remus would not trust him alone with anyone. After all, he had Voldemort's blood running through his veins. Perhaps there was a psycho gene and he could try to rise as the next Dark Lord.

"Hermione," Remus said suddenly. "Whatever the outcome of this trial, you know you've always got a place to stay with us."

She looked at him confused for a moment, wondering what would make him say that all of a sudden. But before she got a chance to reply, the room suddenly went cold. Hermione could feel Caden shivering next to her and he buried his head under her arm. Across the room, the door flew open and in glided two dementors, each had a tight grip around each of Roland's arms.

Caden heard the sounds of someone's footsteps entering the room. He slowly peered out from behind his mother and saw that his father had entered the room. He instantly smiled at him, but it faded when he took notice of the other two things that were dragging him. What were they? They seemed so horrible.

As some man came up from behind the dementors, who put and strapped Roland to the chair, Roland caught sight of Hermione in the stands. There were a lot of people in front of him, most of which were looking at him as though he were some sort of poisonous snake. He smiled at Hermione and then saw Caden come out from behind her. He missed them both and as he sat there with the man holding out a goblet to him, all he could think about was running up to them, giving Hermione a kiss she could never forget, and hugging Caden, perhaps even give him a piggyback. He had always wanted one when he was a kid.

The man pulled Roland's head backwards and forced him to drink whatever substance was in the goblet. Roland unwillingly forced it down and shot that man a deadly glare. He quickly realized where he was and got rid of it, but the man still noticed though he did not say anything. Perhaps he gets that a lot.

In front of Roland, a man with neatly combed, dark gray hair and a mustache cleared his throat. Roland rolled his eyes and looked down at the bounds wrapped around his wrists as the trial began. The man spoke and Roland forced himself to look up.

"Name?" The man asked.

"Roland Marvolo Riddle," He answered instantly and shut his mouth when he realized he had told him that without even thinking about it. He cursed under his breath. That man had given him veritaserum.

"Date of Birth?"

"Umm… June 6th 1975." Roland told him. "I'm 32, in case you're wondering." He did not really feel like having them waste his time on things such as this.

The man grunted and proceeded to the next question. "You're the Dark Lord's son, is that correct?"

"Yes," Roland answered obediently.

"We have no record for your birth. Care to explain?"

Roland glared at him. "I was born in the middle of a field behind some stupid rock. Since there was about half the population out looking for my family, do you think my uncle and mother were that stupid as to wander into St. Mungo's with me?" He paused for a moment. "But if they did, the good news is that you all would not be here wasting your time."

"Mr. Riddle, another outburst like that and I'll gladly send you back to the dementors. I heard you're quite friendly with them." The man snapped at him like a child.

"I never worked with dementors. My father did not trust me with them." He muttered.

The man leaned forward slightly with interest, telling Roland to go on. He rolled his eyes before continuing. "Just because I'm his son, doesn't mean he treats me above all the others. He never did like me. Practically abandoned my mother after he found out I was what he called a 'mutt'."

"A mutt, you say? How so?" asked some woman, who said behind the man up a few stands and to the left.

"He called me a mutt because I'm a Gryffindor and Slytherin mix. To Voldemort," he was rather surprised when most of them shuddered, "Gryffindors and Slytherins are just the same as purebloods and muggle-borns are to you as well. Every one in my mother's family was a Gryffindor from start to finish. And he was the same in Slytherin. It's kind of like a mudblood."

"Why don't you tell us about your mother's family?" Another wizard asked him. Roland was not sure where to begin that. What exactly did they want to know about her?

He decided to tell them the basics. "My grandfather had died before my mother was born and my grandmother died maybe a couple of years after that. My uncle was the older of the two by six years and he was always protective of my mother, you know how some brothers are like that. They lived in an orphanage and both got letters to Hogwarts, and then they both became Gryffindors. I guess my mother felt left out when my uncle started to date and she went out to find her soul mate, like he found his.

"She wasn't so successful and soon fell into Voldemort's crowd, while my uncle got married and had his first kid, a boy named Daniel. Voldemort used my mother as a spy to check up on the Ministry since my uncle had once worked here. He found out what she was up to around the time his son became sick. Soon he could barely sleep. He needed to find a cure for Daniel, make a living, and keep my mother out of trouble. Daniel's medicine was a lot of money, so the sicker Daniel got, the hard my uncle worked and was unable to spend time with him. He died when he was four while my uncle was away in Romania. His wife was so upset with him that she drowned herself before he came home.

"By now my mother was a complete psycho and she teased him about what happened to his family. He put up with it and continued to try to help her out. He was horrified and angry with her and Voldemort when he learned about me. But after I was born, he suddenly gave up on my mother and focused on me. He taught me how to be like a Gryffindor and protected me from my parents' beatings. Voldemort eventually found out that he had plans to take me away and raise me himself. He ordered his death eaters to kill my uncle and… they succeeded." He whispered that last part as he remembered a horrible green flash that had lit up his bedroom one evening.

The man in the front grunted. "Nice story, Riddle," Roland's eye flashed with anger and he tugged a little on the bounds that tied him to the chair. "Now, I want you to tell me where your loyalties lie."

"To my family," He answered and glanced over at Caden and Hermione. The man followed his gaze and nodded rather simply.

"Alright, now this boy, Caden, he's your son, correct?"

Roland raised an eyebrow but answered anyways. "Yes, of course he is."

"And he is also Miss Granger's son?"

"Yeah…" Roland answered, wondering where this was going.

The man nodded again. "Now according to Miss Granger's account of your, uh, time together, you never once hurt her in anyway."

"She did more damage to me than I did to her. I never took advantage of her, or slapped her, or control her, or anything else you can thing of." Roland told him.

"Ok, now here's the big question: how did you escape?" The man asked him.

Roland took his time on that one. Partly because the whole thing had been such a blur, he barely remembered anything himself. "I can't remember, honestly."

"Surely there must be something?" Another wizard pushed.

Roland looked away from the stand of people. Only flashes of that night came to mind, his house-elf running into his room saying they were coming, tripping over the blanket on the staircase as he rushed down to see Hermione, her confused expression when he wanted her to go, and then the big pair of red eyes that looked over at Hermione disgusted. He had never felt so angry in his life at that moment.

"Sorry," Roland said, getting back to the question. "I don't know how I escaped. Perhaps I played dead until they left the house."

"What did He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named have you do for him?" Another witch asked him after it seemed they were not going to get any more information out of him on that subject.

"Well, my first real assignment was to torture that group of students he had capture from Hogwarts." Roland told them and felt as though he made it sound worse when he used a casual tone. "But I couldn't. I freed them instead. Ask her." He pointed to Ginny, whose name he still did not know. No one looked at her and he fell silent as he heard the scratching of quills.

The man in the front spoke up again. "Any other assignments you did for him?"

Roland shrugged. "I was mostly locked away and tortured for that. My father came around would occasionally come to me whenever they were in need of another death eater. I don't remember what I did. My father began to place pretty powerful Imperius curses on me. They became hard to escape from the ones he did to me when I was a kid. I used most of my energy to fight against them and I managed to, and that was when I was ordered to kill Potter's two friends. I only saw Hermione, and I couldn't kill her. I took her back with me and hid her from my father."

"Why have we never received any information on you?" Some one asked.

"What? Do you think my father would go blabbing it out to the world he's got a Gryffindor for a son?" Roland answered instantly. "Most of his followers didn't know about me either."

He saw the man in front raise his eyebrows before suddenly looking down at a piece of parchment in front of him. "We have no record of you ever attending Hogwarts, Mr. Riddle. How can you be–?"

"I'm most like my uncle," Roland interrupted. "My father and mother even said so, and he was a Gryffindor. I wasn't allowed to attend Hogwarts because my father didn't like some Dumbledore person. I was home-schooled."

"Alright, if You-Know-Who had never really claimed you as a son, how did you become a death eater?" The man asked him. "You were discovered by the Dark Mark on your arm, you must've done something to prove you were worthy."

"Voldemort was running out of devoted followers," Roland found himself saying. "I was about 20 when he came up to me and told me I had been raised as the perfect death eater, I was going to become one. I told him no and he didn't take it so well. He hit me with the most powerful Imperius curse he could muster at the time and ordered me to go to spy on Draco Malfoy during his sixth year and to make sure someone did the job."

"So you were there when Dumbledore died?"

Roland nodded. "I was to do it if Draco chickened out. Snape did it instead. My father couldn't have been happier, and suddenly had me throwing a Cruciatus curse at Potter, but Snape blocked it. That made him angry and he order me to leave quickly."

After another rushing sound of scratching quills, the man in front looked Roland straight in the eyes and said to him in somewhat of a cold voice, "That'll be all, Riddle."

The room was filled with complete silence as the man looked down once again at his parchment, rereading what he had wrote. Minutes passed like hours, Roland nervously glanced over at Hermione and Caden. Caden wore the same expression, but looking over at the man instead. Hermione caught his eyes and gave him a small smile while rubbing Caden's back, comforting him. Roland looked down at his tied hands again. What he had told everyone in the room wasn't so bad, was it?

The man finally looked up from his parchment and examined Roland in the chair for another moment. Finally he said, "All in favor of conviction of Roland Marvolo Riddle?"

Roland looked away and shut his eyes. He did not what to know what they thought of him. He felt as though he was five years old again, right after his uncle's death and with no protection from his parents. He could practically feel her hand slapping his cheek and his father's curses. And the same thought would run through his mind every time they did that to him:

This is it.

"Would you stop ringing that bloody bell? I'm coming!" Roland hollered as loud as he could as he stormed down the stairs. He crossed the room and almost tripped over Binky, who quickly apologized and ran over to the closet and began to bang his head against the door as a punishment. Roland was torn from tearing him away from the door and answering the front door. He ordered Binky to stop as his hand grabbed the doorknob. Binky ignored him and continued on, making Roland's eyes roll as he pulled the door open.

His once-calm face had gone from stressed to absolute anger as he looked at the three cloak figures standing before him. The middle one, who was also the one in front, had white blonde hair visible under the hood. "Malfoy," Roland said in a cold tone as he crossed his arms at him. "What brings you here?"

Malfoy pulled off his hood and smirked at him, "Same as every time, Roland. Now would you please let us in? It's raining hippogriffs out here."

Roland went aside and allowed the three to enter his warm home. He saw Malfoy smirk and laugh at Binky, who was still banging his head against the closet. Roland went up to him, pulled him away from the door, and had him make some coffee for the uninvited guests.

"Coffee?" came a deep voice from the cloak man standing to Malfoy's right. "Great, I could use a cup. French vanilla, right?"

Tilting his head to get a better look at the man, Roland could not help but wonder out loud, "Zabini?"

Blaise ripped off his hood and smirked at him. "That's right, Riddle." He shook his head to get the water off that had leaked through the hood. Roland glared at him as he used his hand to wipe off the drops that had left on his face.

"Nice place you got," Blaise said, examining the interior of the house. Binky appeared the next moment with four cups of coffee with another cup of cream on a tray.

"Would the master's guests like to sit down?" Binky asked in a small squeaky voice and motioned to the other room. Roland cursed over and over again in his mind. Having them sit down would make them stay longer than he wanted them to, which was not long at all. He followed silently the others as they went into the sitting room.

Roland was still glaring at them as he fell into a leather armchair. By now the other unknown man had taken off his hood in order to drink his coffee. He should have known it was Theodore Nott, since he was usually with his best friend, Blaise.

"Where are your usual henchmen, Malfoy?"

"Why? You don't like us?" Blaise asked. "And I thought we were friends, Riddle."

Before Roland had a chance to come up with a comeback, Malfoy answered the original question, "Crabbe was caught and Goyle has been injured," He said as though it was nothing, no surprise to Roland. "But never mind that, Riddle. The Dark Lord wants to know what happened to that mudblood."

"Be more specific, young Malfoy," Roland taunted. "There are many mudbloods out there these days."

"You know the one I'm talking about!" Malfoy snapped. "Hermione Granger! She's one of Potter's friends. The ones you were sent to kill. What happened to her? She disappeared without a trace."

So that was her name, Hermione, Roland thought. It sounded nice to him. Roland avoided the sudden urge to glance over at the door that led to the cellar as well as the prison cells he had built where Granger now resided. He looked Malfoy and the others straight in the eye. "I have absolutely no idea where she went."

"How can you be sitting here then when she's out there?" Malfoy exclaimed.

"I have better things to do than waste my time looking for her."

Malfoy glared at him and crossed his arms as soon as he put down his coffee. "What better things to do? You've got nothing else better to do." He pointed out.

"I'm working on another assignment for my father," Roland quickly lied.

Blaise and Theodore exchanged glances, before Theodore leaned forward in his armchair and said to Roland, "You haven't seen your father in four days."

"Do I need to?" Roland snarled at him.

Malfoy almost jumped to his feet. "Exactly my point, Nott! How come you did not report the problem to the Dark Lord?"

"Would you?" Roland retorted and got up from his chair. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to."

"No, you're not excused from this conversation!" Malfoy said also getting up from his chair. "We have strict orders to demand the whereabouts of Granger."

"Well… you've demanded now leave," Roland said and pointed to the door. "I have no idea where she is."

Malfoy glared at him, but said nothing. He put his hood back on and made his way towards the door with Nott following him. Blaise lingered behind for a moment to speak with Roland. "You'll be sending me another pack of this stuff, right?" He motioned to the cup in his hand.

Roland rolled his eyes and gave him a grin. "Of course, Zabini, like always."

Blaise began to head for the door. He suddenly stopped and looked down at his cup then back at Roland, "Eventually… you'll get this cup back. It was nice to seeing you again, Roland." He informed him and left with the cup and followed Nott and Malfoy.

Binky appeared with a tray of chicken next to Roland the moment everyone had left. Roland growled and clutched his fist when he saw that not a bite had been eaten, this was the twelfth meal he had slaved over and it was still there, untouched. Binky was also looking down at the tray probably hurt that the good food was wasted once again. "Binky's sorry, Master Roland. Binky couldn't get her to eat it."

"Give it to me," Roland told him. "I'll make sure she eats."

The house elf handed over the tray to Roland, who quickly marched over to the basement door and down the stairs. He went down the stone hall way and arrived at Cell #4. He was not sure why he had put her in this cell even though the other three before it were empty. Perhaps he wanted to build up the suspense if she discovered that there were three others in front of her. Or maybe he thought that if other death eaters thought that the first three were empty, they would think the others would be as well.

Roland opened the door with such force he thought he would have ripped it off its hinges. He saw her lying on the bed with a finger pointing to a stone block. She quickly jumped out of that position and faced him fully with a glare. Roland slammed down the tray at the table and pulled up a chair so he was sitting in it backwards. As she looked at him with her big brown eyes, and Roland could not help but compare them to the color of chestnuts. He liked chestnuts.

"What's this?" She asked him as she sat in the chair opposite of him.

He got rid of the thought of her eyes out of his mind and returned her glare. "Food," he snarled and pushed the tray towards her.