"Why are you here, Maddy?" he asked softly, not wanting to wake her if she slept.

He stroked the soft waves of dark hair that spilled across his pillow, feeling, for the moment, like the luckiest bastard in the world. For so long, he had lived with nothing but his own fear and self-loathing, but somehow, without ever speaking a tender word, she made him feel that, to her at least, he was valuable.

She was one of the few who had managed to avoid sentence in Azkaban following the Dark Lord's fall from power seventeen years before, and at thirty-eight, her beauty still bloomed. So many of the others had become ravaged shells of their former selves from the torment of incarceration. As for himself, he had only to look in the mirror to know that he was no woman's ideal lover. It was one of the reasons they made love in the darkness; so that she might imagine he was someone else, if she wished.

Just when he was sure she was sleeping after all, she turned to face him, fair skin glowing in the moonlight. "I don't know."

"I've never understood it," he confessed. "Why you would want to be with someone like me."

The expression on her face was serious. Even as a girl, her smiles had been rare. "You never acted like you wanted to own me or control me. Like you were better than me. You were always - kind."

"I was grateful," he replied. "I still am. Now more than ever. I never expected you'd come back to me after I was - gone for so long."

"I thought you were dead, Peter."

Peter. She was the only one who ever called him that anymore. The others all followed the Dark Lord's lead, mocking him, throwing his schoolboy nickname back in his face, a constant reminder of the friends he had betrayed.

"Why are you here?" she asked him.

He laughed softly in the darkness. "You know why I'm here, Maddy. How often do you think a beautiful woman consents to come to bed with someone like me?"

Her expression did not change. "You know that's not what I meant. I mean, why are you with us? With the Dark Lord? I know you, Peter. You've never cared about the pure-blood cause or the Dark Lord's quest for immortality. You're too smart to think you're going to earn power and glory here. So why?"

His laughter turned bitter in his throat. "Where else could I go? Any of my friends who are left would happily see me dead. The Dementor's Kiss is the best I can hope for from that lot. I'm a coward, Maddy, and well you know it."

"Then I guess it's a good thing I'm not looking for a hero." Even when she joked, she did not crack a smile.

"I guess it is." His own smile was sheepish. He bent to kiss her, but she turned her face away.

"You never meant to betray them, did you?" she said to the wall. "That James Potter and his wife?"

"What are you going to do?" he asked. "Report me to the Dark Lord? He knows what I did, and probably why I did it. He knows well enough that fear is what keeps some of us loyal."

She turned back to him then. "Why would I turn you in," she asked, "when you're the only one of them I can stand to fuck?"

He should have been used to it by now, but somehow vulgarity coming from that beautiful mouth always disconcerted him, and he looked away from her.

"It just sort of happened," he admitted. "I thought - well, looking back, it was a pretty stupid thing to think. All I really wanted was to be safe, and I thought James might have had a chance of - making life safe again."

"You really thought your friend could defeat the Dark Lord?" she asked incredulously.

"I thought he could do anything," he said softly.

"I guess you were wrong." There was a snide coldness to her tone that he hated. Sometimes he wished he could discomfit her as much as she did him.

"Why are you here, then?" he asked, trying and failing to match the chill in her voice. "What's the Dark Lord got that you want badly enough to risk Azkaban and spend time in the company of the Lestranges and the Malfoys and the rest of them? You hate them."

She reached out a slender, pale hand and drew a fingernail down his chest, leaving a long, red welt in its wake.

"Maybe I just like to hurt people. Did you ever think of that, Peter-my-love?"

He shuddered, and it was only partly in response to her touch. He knew she spoke truly. Madeleine Yaxley had never been a nice girl. Peter himself had witnessed her attempt to kill a fellow Hogwarts student in their fifth year.

"That can't be all of it," he said doggedly. "It's hardly a good reason to throw in with this lot."

She shrugged. "I guess it's the pure-blood thing. A world where I get to be one of the elite sounds like a worthwhile cause to me."

"I don't buy it," he said, shaking his head.

"Why not?"

He looked at her. "All the good pure-blood women I know have made themselves good pure-blood marriages, and set about producing the next generation of the 'elite', as you call them."

It seemed that he had managed to make her uncomfortable after all. She turned away from him again. For long moments, she did not speak. He had nearly given up and tried to go to sleep himself when her voice broke the silence between them.

"You remember how I was?" she asked, an odd, hollow tone in her voice. "When we were in school?"

He did. Vividly. She had been a pretty thing even then, and she had known it. Any boy at Hogwarts had been fair game, and there had been a lot of girls who had hated her for it. After their own first encounter, Peter had watched, bewildered, as she worked her way through what seemed like half of the male population of the school.

"You were - flirtatious," he said uncomfortably.

"I was a slut. Mother found out, of course. It - broke her heart, I guess. She said I'd dishonoured our good name and polluted my blood with Muggles and blood-traitors. We fought - and then I left. She had wanted so badly for me to make one of those good pure-blood marriages."

There was a sad note under the harshness of her tone, but Peter was afraid to touch her for fear that she would think she had said too much and close herself off from him again.

"Why didn't you?" he asked instead, as if he were merely curious. "Most girls do. Didn't you want -?"

"Of course I did!" she burst out, sitting up and turning to glare at him. "I wanted it all. But bloody Rabastan Lestrange went and spoiled it for me, didn't he?"

"Did he?"

She ignored the question.

"And by the time Mum found out, I knew -"

"Knew what?"

"Open your eyes, Peter," she said in disgust. "In three years, I was with nearly half the boys at Hogwarts, and I never once used any kind of protective potion. If I could have children, I would have had one by the time we left school. But I can't. What good is a pure-blood woman if she can't bear a pure-blood child?"

"I wouldn't have cared about that," he said quietly.

She snorted at that. "I cared about it. So here I am, doing what I can for the pure-blood cause in the only way I know how. And now -" she sighed. "There are some things you can't come back from. I've done things - I only escaped Azkaban because I did a deal with the Ministry." She smirked. "I'm the one who gave evidence against the Lestranges. I told them everything they wanted to know about that family, and happy to do it. Better them than me."

"Do you want to get married?" Peter asked.

The corner of her mouth twitched at that, and he thought she almost smiled. "That's what you come away from this with? I tell you all that, and you ask if I want to get married? Why?"

Because then we could be together. Because then I could have you all to myself. Because you're the only one in the world who doesn't look on me with loathing and contempt. Because I love you, Maddy. Because I always have. But he could not say any of those things. She had always scorned displays of sentiment.

He shrugged as if it were of no consequence to him. "I just thought I'd let you know the offer was on the table," he said. "If you want it."

She gave him a long, measured look. "I'll think about it," she said at last.

So startled was he that she would even consider his proposal that he did not notice the owl until it pecked sharply on the window glass. He jumped, then rose to let the bird into the room. A scroll of parchment was tied to its leg. He removed this, unrolled it, read it once silently, and then read it aloud to the dark-haired beauty in his bed.

"We have one of them. Report to headquarters."

Madeleine smiled.