"My friends. Tonight I speak to you through your Dark Marks in a time of grave emergency. Stop whatever you are doing; leave wherever you are. Gather your nearest family members and flee immediately to your designated safe houses. Tell no one, and I mean no one, where you are. No owls are to be sent. Do not leave until you hear from me. We have been betrayed, and we are currently under serious threat."

Lord Voldemort stood in the sitting room of his safe house on Mermaid Street in Rye with his yew wand pressed firmly to his left inner arm. He seethed through clenched teeth and glared at Bellatrix where she paced anxiously around the room, clutching at her own painful arm, still masked with her hood up. He huffed a breath and then shut his eyes before continuing to communicate with his entire corps of Death Eaters through their shared connection, using his unique gift of broadcasting speech through Legilimency.

"Rodolphus Lestrange, " he pronounced slickly in his mind, "I speak now to you and you alone. I know what you are and I know what you have done. I know that you are a weak and jealous little apostate who has bitten the hand that has fed you well because you grew sick with envy. Well. You are my enemy now, Lestrange, and I will find you, and I will kill you, and when I do, it will be the most gruesome and painful death you can imagine. There is no escape. You are doomed. "

Voldemort opened his eyes to see that Bellatrix had stopped her rather frenetic pacing and was staring at him through her shining metal mask, just standing there in her black combat attire and her heavy winter cloak, still looking ready for the battle that now would not come. Voldemort hissed a little, jabbing his wand more tightly than ever against his arm, and he thought intently,

"Never in all the history of the world has a more egregious mistake been made than that which Rodolphus Lestrange has made, my friends. By going rogue, by becoming a turncoat, he has only strengthened my resolve to annihilate every last one of my foes through brutal and barbarous means. We will emerge victorious, and when all is said and done, we will be spitting on the corpses of those who conspired against us. Stay hidden now whilst I begin to make sense of the chaos, and when I summon you for service, be ready to enact utterly savage revenge for this duplicity. Morsmordre."

He pulled his wand from his arm and, with one fluid motion, tucked it into the combat holster at his right hip, beneath his outer robe, then moved to tug down his left sleeve. He cleared his throat quite roughly and straightened his back like a rod, then glanced about the sitting room of his safe house. This place in Rye had been secured a few years earlier; each of his Death Eaters and Voldemort himself had a place of their own that was one hundred percent secret so that they could retreat in cases of emergency, just like this.

Voldemort had chosen Rye in East Sussex because the town had very little wizarding presence, even though it was a profoundly old Muggle seaside settlement. During Rye's pirating history, the witches and wizards of this town had been driven out by focused raids and had never returned; they'd wound up settling elsewhere in Britain. As far as Voldemort knew, at present, there were no magical families living in the popular tourist town. So it had amenities and was pleasant enough, but his safe house would likely not be found here.

This place, hundreds of years old on Rye's glorious Mermaid Street, had four bedrooms and a few common spaces. The sitting room where Voldemort and Bellatrix stood now had been painted a bright coral befitting its seaside location before Voldemort had acquired the place, and he'd never changed it. There were heavy, very old beams crossing the whitewashed ceiling, and the floors were creaky dark wood. The furniture was oddly pale and sunny for a home 'owned' by the Dark Lord, but, again, he'd never bothered refurbishing this place. All of the cream upholstery in here, the wispy white curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows, the vibrant and summery rug upon the ground… it was all ill-suited for the master of Darkness who sought to administer wizarding Britain with an angle of viciousness.

But that didn't matter right now. Paint and curtains and furniture was of precisely no consequence at the present time. All that mattered was that Rodolphus Lestrange had become a quisling, either for Dumbledore or for the Ministry, almost certainly because he'd been angry and humiliated over being made a cuckold. All because Voldemort had publicly fucked Bellatrix and then begun an affair with her - even though the dynamics of power and hierarchy had been made abundantly clear - Rodolphus had flouted his lifelong vows to his wife and to the Dark Lord. Well, Voldemort thought now, the stupid bow had forfeited his own life, and, worse than that, he'd ignited a fire in Voldemort's veins to begin a sort of reign of terror, to unleash his counterinsurgency in response to the Judas kiss.

"Bellatrix," Voldemort snarled through the room, and his voice was so incensed and aggressive that he watched Bellatrix shrink back and collapse a little into herself where she stood. Her masked face bowed and her heavy hood fell around her, and he watched her strange, bent wand tremble in her small fist. She was terrified, he could tell, even though she was masked and cloaked. It was obvious. He pursed his lips and sniffed lightly, deciding rather definitively that of all the people right now who ought to be completely terrified of him on a personal level, Bellatrix Black was not one of them. Perhaps, Voldemort considered somewhat distantly, she was the only one who ought not be particularly frightened.

He crossed the sitting room towards her in three strides, his dragonhide boots making the timework floorboards protest. Once he'd reached her, he could hear her quaking breath coming in desperate pants, filtered through the mouthpiece of her mask. She slowly raised her face to him, and he could see the terror in her wide, dark eyes, shadowed as she found him. Finally, she dared to reverently whisper through her fear,

"My Lord. I vow to help you make him suffer."

"I know you will. You are my most valiant servant," Voldemort murmured. He reached then to peel back her hood, and when Bellatrix flinched in nervous apprehension, he let out a long breath and tipped his head, whispering to assure her, "You are my most loyal soldier, Bella. You are my most trusted confidante. You are my companion and my mistress. You have scarcely betrayed me. You won't abandon me now, will you?"

"No, Master," she hummed. "Never in a thousand years."

"Good." He gently peeled her mask from her face, revealing her porcelain face with her flushed cheeks and her still-frantic eyes. He rather haphazardly tossed the mask onto the cushion of the nearby cream-coloured upholstered armchair, and he reached to unclasp Bellatrix's waterproofed winter cloak she always wore for battle. He shoved it off her shoulders and let it pool on the ground at her feet, around her flat lace-up dragonhide boots, and then he just gazed down at her for a long moment. He studied her face, every angle and plane and line of it, the hues and shades of milky white contrasted with rose pinks and browns. He reached out with his left hand and dragged his fingertips along her jawline, feeling her shiver when he did, watching her tip her chin up just a little as her lips parted. She wore not a single scrap of makeup; she was beautifully barefaced and was quite the spitfire in her tomboyish ensemble of boots, breeches, and jumper with fingerless gloves. He huffed a bit and eyed her raven curls, which had been yanked back into twin French braids to ensure her hair would not interfere with her fighting.

She'd been utterly prepared for warfare tonight, Voldemort thought. Then her awful husband had gone and spoilt everything - everything. Rage and indignation boiled up afresh behind Voldemort's ribs and threatened to ooze out the pores of his skin in a violent outburst of some kind. But he contained himself, if only because he was standing before Bellatrix with her face cradled in his hand. The feeling of touching her just now was a balm against his feral wrath, just a little. Voldemort sighed heavily and spent a long moment just stroking Bellatrix's jaw, watching her react, watching her lean against his fingers a tiny bit. Her wide chestnut eyes fluttered shut for a moment, and she wrapped her thin arms around herself in an embrace, evidently still quite anxious. Finally, she spoke, quietly and furtively.

"Will you be leaving tonight, Master, to go and hunt him down? Rodolphus?"

"No," Voldemort answered at once. He moved his knuckles down, grazing them along Bellatrix's long neck and then caressing her decolletage. "That's what Dumbledore and my Ministry enemies will expect. Your husband will have given up every bit of information for tonight - our meeting place and time, our intended targets, the participants in the mission. Tonight is entirely unmitigable. The next few days, in fact, are lost. My foes will be on tenterhooks, waiting and hoping for me to come blazing out immediately, enraged, and I need time to gather intelligence and strategise before purging this world of your husband."

Bellatrix flinched under Voldemort's touch, and he frowned deeply until she murmured,

"I very much wish you would stop calling him that, My Lord."

Voldemort's mouth fell open, and he said nothing. Rodolphus, she meant. She didn't want him to call the boy her husband. His hand stilled on her jaw, and suddenly her eyes seemed darker and more serious. She reached up to cover his fingers with hers, and she shook her head before whispering so quietly he could hardly hear her,

"I don't ever wish to see him again, Master, or to hear his voice. I eagerly await his death, the disgusting traitor that he is. I declare that he has violated every vow he has ever taken, to me and most especially to you, and so I release him as my spouse and again devote myself entirely to you. I refuse to be called his wife any longer. I'm sorry."

She moved quickly then, plucking at her black leather fingerless gloves and yanking at them until they'd been loosed from her hands. Voldemort watched her drop them onto the brightly-coloured rug and then wrench almost desperately at her left fingers. Off came her engagement ring and the matching wedding band Rodolphus Lestrange had given Bellatrix on the day she'd worn a gown and kissed him and become his bride, and suddenly Voldemort was watching, agape, as Bellatrix held her rings in her palm and aimed her wand at them and incanted in a breathless, shaking voice,

"Evanesco. "

Voldemort just nodded then. He licked his lips and reached to take Bellatrix's face in his hands. She gazed up at him as she slowly tucked her own wand into the holster at her right hip and then raised her hands until she was pressing her palms to his pectoral muscles, her fingers convulsing a little on him there as her eyes watered and her bottom lip shook.

"I would die a hundred deaths in combat, My Lord," she insisted softly, "to amend for his transgressions against you."

Voldemort scoffed and rolled his eyes, bending down until he could touch his lips to hers. He kissed her, softly at first and then much more firmly when he felt hunger for her flare up and make his veins go fiery hot. He meant to pull back from her and insist to her that he didn't want her to die even one death because of her stupid, jealous cuckold of a mate. He meant to tell her that he needed her to keep fighting for him, that she was far and away his most vicious conscript and his most esteemed ally. He meant to tell her all of that, but somehow, he suspected she knew it, or at least that she could tell most of it by the way he started backing her up as he kissed her.

Her stumbling backward steps faltered and failed when she ran into one of the simple wooden chairs at the sturdy old table in the kitchen that was attached to the sitting room. Bellatrix yelped as she tripped, but Voldemort grabbed at her waist to keep her upright, and he used his boot to kick at the offending chair. He shoved it away roughly, sending it scuffing across the ancient wooden planks on the floor until he'd cleared some space, and then he hauled Bellatrix up onto the table. Her breath quickened then as she snared her lithe little arms up around Voldemort's shoulders and looked at him with eyes that suddenly seemed just a little bit provoked. He'd awakened her, it seemed, from the doldrums she'd been in since Manchester, by hiking her onto this table with the promise - threat? - of physicality. He smirked at the thought of that and decided not to give in too quickly. They both needed to let tension out tonight; it had been a ridiculously anguished evening. But Voldemort wanted to play with her.

He dragged his fingertips around the bottom hem of her black jumper and then slid one hand up underneath the edge, and when she yelped a little, his crooked smile grew. He felt arousal becoming obvious between his legs, but he ignored it right now. He focused on the velveteen feel of her flat belly as he coursed his fingertips upward, teasing her flesh until he cupped a breast through her cotton bra and began to cosset a pert nipple with his rough fingertips. Bellatrix's head lolled backwards where she sat, her twin French braids drooping down between her shoulders as her grip cinched on Voldemort's chest and her voice pinched out, "Master…"

"You know," he considered, "It is a damnable shame. I was very much looking forward to watching you commit some good murders tonight. My violent little beauty. Watching you kill people is absolutely delightful, Bella. The very best form of entertainment for me, you understand."

"Is it, My Lord?"

"Quite," he clipped. He moved his hand to pamper her other breast, weighing its small heft in his palm and grunting at the way it so easily compressed when he squeezed just a little. His cock started to twitch, to pulse in his breeches, and he felt his cheeks going warm. He gulped hard, his head swimming with illusions of Bellatrix standing over the body of Bess Pritchard in Manchester, having already slain the witch's Mudblood husband. Voldemort could see it now - Bellatrix's face bathed in a momentary flash of jade-green murderous light, her grin full of bloodthirsty glee as her proud dark eyes turned to her master in the wake of the slaughter she'd conducted for him…

"Bella." He tore his hand from her, yanking it out from under her jumper and ripping himself from the table. He staggered away, back a few steps, and nearly stumbled himself like she had done earlier. He averted his eyes from her; if he looked at her right now, he would be lost. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to focus on something else. He shook his head, thinking about the colossal fucking mess Rodolphus Lestrange had created by being more than ten minutes late to the meeting point in Manchester, by ignoring his brother's and Abraxas' attempts to organise their mission, by going missing from his home for several days. Voldemort thought about the fact that all of his Death Eaters were (hopefully) in their own safe houses right now, that (hopefully) they were all essentially underground awaiting further orders from him. His movement had been hijacked, frozen, interrupted and deferred, all because of one jealous and petty and insolent little…

Because of Bellatrix, in a way, wasn't it?

No, Voldemort nearly shouted at himself inside his mind. If that boy had truly been loyal, you could have fucked Bella at every single meeting and he would have taken it on the cheek like a devoted slave. He showed his true colours; what happened with Bella was merely an excuse for him to reveal his true self. His betrayal was an inevitability.

"M-My Lord?"

Voldemort snapped his face up to see that Bellatrix was still sitting on the kitchen table, her short legs dangling, looking just a bit awkward. She seemed hesitant, unsure of herself, and Voldemort knew why. She was perfectly familiar with his peculiarities by now. She would have been able to tell that Voldemort had been perilously close to losing himself, to surrendering control of his body, as he so often did with her, when he'd wrested himself away from her body and staggered off into deep contemplation. Now, as so often happened in their interactions, she would find herself confused about what would come of her, whether she would be discarded by her master, whether he would tire of her or grow frustrated with her.

He sighed a little and approached her again, stepping up to the table and sliding his hands from the knees of her combat breeches up her thighs. He stared into her eyes and said with all the seriousness in the world,

"There is nothing I can do, really, for a little while now, Bella. I shall need to gather intelligence before I make a move to find and eliminate Rodolphus. I will also want your help in strategising organised strikes against other enemies; this treason is but kindling to encourage the lighting of the raging fire of this war. But all of that will take time. There will be a period of hiding, and that will mean that you and I will be here, alone, for some time."

Bellatrix's mouth did not so much as twitch, but her brown eyes flared rather wildly, and she gave an obedient nod and then bowed her head as she said in a tremulous voice,

"Well. Erm. My Lord. I shall do everything in my power whilst we are here to -"

"I am very much looking forward to the time alone," Voldemort interrupted her, somewhat harshly, and she raised her face to him, a bit awed, her cheeks pinking. He nodded and said, "I have been incredibly busy for many, many years. I have had scarcely any rest whatsoever. In my youth, I was the finest pupil at Hogwarts, and I spent that time beginning to amass followers and a reputation. After leaving school, I continued to work , at Borgin and Burkes, in a specialised capacity."

Bellatrix nodded, still seeming quite amazed, as her hands drifted a bit mindlessly to Voldemort's biceps. His lips quirked up a little; it was her instinct to hold him there for support or comfort. He flinched a little under her touch because he liked it so well, and he continued,

"I went to the Continent and I spent years honing my skill, becoming more powerful than anymore could imagine. I learnt every form of Dark magic imaginable. In the course of doing so, I slept in rough and I was a guest in castles. I feasted on haute cuisine and I starved. But always, I was busy. I came back to England and began recruiting in earnest, and I have not stopped thinking, moving, doing. Bella, I am tired, and I have you, and I am in this safe house in Rye, and there is a little bit of…"

"Time," she whispered, nodding, and he was quiet for just a moment before he agreed,

"Time."

"Just a little, My Lord," she conceded, "before you must begin the research to undertake your quest for revenge and resume your climb to the power you deserve."

Voldemort felt his cheeks go hot, and he scoffed before he said, "If you speak like that, Bellatrix, I shall do as I've done before to you and Vanish all of your clothes. And then I shall do as I have done before and fuck you on this table."

She giggled a little and reached up to pet gently at his cheeks, and he shivered as he felt the way her fingertips were toying with the whiskers that were poking through and would need a shave first thing in the morning. She gave him a rather brassy look and murmured,

"If you Vanish my clothes, My Lord, I shall be rightly condemned. I haven't a spare scrap of attire in this safe house; you weren't expecting me here."

He let out a low rumble and leaned against on of her palms before raising his eyebrows and informing her, "Rye is a very busy Muggle town, Bella, and I am a very good thief. But I like these combat clothes on you, so I won't Vanish them?"

"No, My Lord?" Bellatrix smiled, and he shook his head as he reached to snatch her wrist, flicking his eyes toward the staircase.

"No," he said. "I'm going to strip them off of you, one piece at a time, and then I'm going to fuck you on the bed until you can't breathe. Let's go."

He hadn't been lying. Voldemort had led Bellatrix up the narrow stairs with too-quick steps she'd struggled to follow, and then he'd dragged her into the largest bedroom, which was whitewashed with heavy, ancient beams across its ceiling. The floor in here was wood, just like downstairs, though a different grain that seemed to have come a century or so later. There was a full-length mirror that was mismatched from the black wrought-iron bed with its homespun quilt and the tasseled electric lamp on the bedside table that Voldemort ignored in favour of the candles he'd brought himself.

He'd been wordless as he'd peeled off Bellatrix's jumper, unhooked her bra and tossed it aside, and watched her kick off her flat boots and stagger out of her breeches and knickers. He'd been silent as she'd divested him of his own combat attire. She'd kept her hair in her tight French braids; they couldn't be bothered to undo the style just now. They'd dressed for battle, he'd thought again, but that battle had never come.

He'd kissed her with a crush against her mouth, his hands searching her backside and her hips and her breasts and her arms and her neck. He'd backed up toward the bed and pulled her with him, his cock aching and leaking a little. Still, he'd said nothing. Their hot breath had mingled in swirls between their mouths as they'd struggled to fill their lungs, gasps managed in the gaps between frantic kisses. Voldemort had sat on the edge of the bed and Bellatrix had straddled him, riding him for a good five minutes until he'd been close - so very close - and then he'd felt her coming hard around his shaft with erratic contractions and a soaking of warm fluids. She'd thrown her head back and moaned like a whore as she'd held his arms for purchase, but still neither of them had really said anything.

He'd tossed her onto the bed like a sack of potatoes, and she'd spent the next ten minutes gasping and groaning pitifully into a down pillow, her fingers wrapped around the iron bed frame like bars of a jail cell. He'd pounded into her body mercilessly, kneeling behind her and grasping her hips in his hands. When he'd felt her come again, and when he'd seen the climax for himself around his manhood, it had been entirely too much, and Voldemort had shut his eyes and let his own pleasure wash over him like a powerful tsunami. Through the feel of scorching veins and pumping seed and deep, powerful satisfaction, he'd heard it… at last, he'd said something, for the first time since they'd been downstairs.

"Oh, Bella… my Bellatrix… my Bella."

It wasn't until later, until much later, that he'd realised exactly what the implications were of saying something like that - my Bella - in a moment of supremely intimate bliss. And it wasn't until much later that Voldemort realised how little he cared about those implications.

He went out in the middle of the night to rob Muggle clothing shops for her. The styles of their clothes were not really to Bellatrix's style, Voldemort knew, and spells to Transfigure clothes were temporary and wore off after a few hours (it was actually where Muggles had gotten their myth of Cinderella's 'fairy godmother' creating her carriage and ballgown for her). So he did the best he could and broke into several boutiques and second-hand clothing stores, rifling through racks of skirts and dresses and drawers until he'd managed to amass for her a relatively sizeable offering of undergarments and black attire that he thought would be functional. What she didn't like could be temporarily altered or ignored. He'd done his best. He also stold some witches' toiletries, hairbrushes, and other necessities he didn't have on hand at the safe house for her. After shoving it all into a bag with an Undetectable Extension Charm, he finished off his spate of robberies by breaking into a supermarket and gathering up all manner of canned goods and meat and cheese and produce he could preserve with spells for them. His safe house kitchen was low on food, so he filled his bag with enough of everything they could need to last for a while. Wine, spices, butter… Voldemort wandered around the empty supermarket raiding the place and bemoaning Gamp's Laws and the fact that he couldn't just Conjure all of this.

Once he was back inside the safe house, hurriedly putting away his loot, he considered that Bellatrix had bathed after he'd plundered her and then had crashed hard asleep in the old iron bed, obviously exhausted from everything that had happened tonight, from Manchester until now. So she was sleeping, he knew, and she was naked beneath the sheets. He would go up to the bedroom to find her there, quiet and comfortable, waiting for her master. He finished loading up the cupboards and the larder with foods and set the perishables to preserve with Chilling Charms, and then he climbed the stairs as silently as a church mouse.

He stood in the threshold of the bedroom and just stared at her for a moment, at the way she lay in the bed, barely visible in the dim silver moonlight filtering in through the small window. Her raven hair was in loose, damp curls now; she'd washed it after they'd made love.

Made love.

Was that what had become of him, then? This had all begun as such a silly thing, an almost grotesque and rancid sort of erotic adventure, where Voldemort soiled his breeches with come because he thought she was pretty and did things that electrified him. But it had all morphed and changed and shifted a great deal since November, hadn't it? This was no longer about voyeruistically spilling himself. It was no longer a game, or at least it no longer felt like a game. Even their gambit with the public fucking at the meeting at Malfoy Manor seemed so shallow and insignificant now. What mattered now, it seemed to Voldemort, was waking in the morning to see her already gazing at him with her wide brown eyes full of adoration, to hear her purr Master as she kissed the scar on his chest and teased him that he needed a shave. What mattered now were long walks where they discussed his time on the Continent and her pleasure in combat, and laughter under hot water in shared showers, and flirtation during meals, and discussion of good books about historical figures, and strategic planning where her brilliant tactical mind gave him real insight, and…

A sudden strike of abject panic ripped like a bolt of lightning from the base of Voldemort's spine all the way up to his brain then as he registered that whatever he felt toward Bellatrix, it was not simple, vulgar lust. It was something much deeper and more powerful, something that threatened to overwhelm the Dark Lord himself. And, yet, he found himself free of fear and, somehow, utterly unafraid of it all. Instead he stood in the threshold watching her sleep and thinking it would be very fine indeed to be in the bed beside her, to finally get a modicum of repose before his mind had to start whirring again with strategy and artifice. It was wartime. There was hardly any time for rest. He would take what little he could get, and he would relish it if it were beside his Bella.

His Bella. His stomach clenched tightly at the way his mind instinctively possessed her like that. He aimed his wand at himself and cast silent spells to Scour himself clean after his sojourn into Rye to rob the Muggles blind of needed supplies and clothes. Then he took a few padding steps into the room and worked to very quietly strip his clothes off, Banishing them into the old wardrobe piece by piece until he was wearing nothing but his loose cotton underwear. He peeled back the homespun quilts and climbed wordlessly into the bed, trying not to wake Bellatrix, but as the mattress shifted from his movement, she stirred and let out a little noise.

"Only me," he murmured, petting at her hair as he arranged himself down beside her. She let out a happy little sound at that, and he thought he heard her whisper Hullo, My Lord . He smirked and kept stroking her damp curls as he shut his eyes and informed her quietly, "I got you lots of clothes. They wear strange things now. The Muggles. Their fashions change quickly; the women wear odd things these days. I did the best I could for you."

"Thank you, M'Lord," Bellatrix mumbled, and she drew herself up nearer against him. Voldemort's heart picked up a little, and he told her,

"I acquired plenty of food, as well. The kitchen is well-stocked now."

"Mmm… don't tempt me; I'm hungry," Bellatrix let out a low laugh against his shoulder, and Voldemort let his head fall to the side so he could kiss her cheekbone and then murmur,

"No House-Elf here."

"Oh. Erm… I'm a terrible cook, I'm afraid, My Lord," Bellatrix worried in a gravelly voice, and he chuckled.

"I cooked for myself in many circumstances on the Continent, and also whilst living on my own after Hogwarts. Don't worry. I'll cook. I'll also teach you some cooking spells, if you'd like."

She didn't answer him then, and Voldemort scowled deeply. Had he offended her? He was a bit cross at that; just because she came from the House of Black and there was no damned House-Elf at this emergency safe house did not mean she needed to be so pretentious and -

"I don't ever want to leave you. I want to stay with you forever," Bellatrix blurted suddenly, and Voldemort's eyes sprang open in response. He stared at the large, ancient beams on the ceiling, and now it was him with nothing to say. His breath hitched in his lungs, and after a long moment, he felt and watched Bellatrix push herself up onto an elbow and shove her curls from her face before carefully prompting him, "M-My Lord…?"

"I heard you, Bella."

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, but he just gulped hard and whispered,

"Currently, I do not foresee a situation in which you and I would need to part company, Bella, and I should like to keep it that way. So."

"Oh." Bellatrix turned her face a little to stare at the window, and then she sniffled a bit and finally rasped, so softly that Voldemort could barely make out the words she'd said before, "I adore you, Master. More than you'll ever know."

"I…" He glanced over to her, to where she was sitting up naked in bed, only slightly visible in the moonlight, her curls hanging around her, and suddenly he was struck dumb. He thought of her in combat, in planning meetings, on walks, at dinners, during sex, in the morning… and then, at last, he informed her, "I think, perhaps, it is more mutual than either of us anticipated, Bella."

She snapped her face towards him, her lips parting and her eyes looking round as saucers. Voldemort gave her a helpless sort of shrug and just said,

"Lie down. It is very late, and it has been a hell of a night."