"Trust me, you shouldn't want anyone like me on your back."
"Maybe I don't want anyone like you on my back," His eyes darkened as he stepped closer, confining me tighter into barely any space as my back pressed against the wall.
"Maybe I want you. U...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE BOY WAS AN ENIGMA in that moment, with his thick round glasses and his frail form defiantly standing under the weight of all our varying looks—tainted with anger, confusion and disbelief in equal measure. Words were on my lips, but they were torturously foreign to each other, as though I had suddenly learnt a language I had no idea on how to navigate. I wanted to grab his thin arm and force him to look into my eyes and repeat his claim again. I wanted him to prove it to me, I wanted him to produce Voldemort in front of me and say, 'There, I told you he was back.'
But that was foolish, a stupid, stubborn fantasy my incredulous mind was grappling at. It would make sense, but why would it make sense when the death eaters themselves were not aware of their lord's presence? Or had he only chosen to reveal himself to a select few, the ones Harry Potter suggested were ordered to look for me?
"How do you know these things?" Viktor Krum blurted out, and I glanced at him. The skin on his face was pinched red at firmer points, and his jaw was tighter than it had been when he had pinned me against the wall moments ago. His fury was a halo, surrounding him and thickening the air like lead.
"How in fucking hell would you know these things?" He brought his hand over his head, running it over his changing buzz cut. I stilled slightly, he clearly hadn't had the mental capacity or time to shave. But why did I like him like this? Unruly and frustrated, tethering back and forth on the brink of furious madness?
The portraits around us on the walls shifted as wizards and witches inside stirred and some awoke, wide eyes glancing to and fro as observations and quite exclamations of surprise slowly hummed in the air—desperate attempts to break down the reasons for this thick of the night conference that was made up by a very unlikely party. Two Beauxbatons, two Durmstrangs and a Hogwarts student.
Krum whipped out his wand and murmured a spell, and it rendered every hearing ear in the portraits within our earshot temporarily deaf. I watched as the wizards and witches struggled, grabbing their heads and pulling at their ears in panic. They quietened down once they realized they couldn't even hear themselves.
