Emerson Wilmore was an exemplary Ravenclaw student, known for her unwavering dedication to academics and an unyielding moral compass. However, things took a twisted and deviated turn in her life after her boyfriend, Cedric Diggory, was murdered by L...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Ariel - Young Taylor Richardson
The conversation haunted Emerson long after she left the Astronomy Tower that night. She walked back to Ravenclaw Tower with her chest feeling carved open and her mind replaying every word Mattheo with merciless clarity. His voice, broken and edged with anger he couldn't quite contain, lingered in her ears.
'My father knows your name, Emie.'
It was a sentence that should have turned her blood to ice. Instead, it hollowed her out, leaving her trembling not with fear for herself, but with the thought of how long Mattheo was carrying that fact alone.
At first, she felt a rush of defiance. So what? If she was already marked for death, what difference did it make? She would rather spend time with Mattheo again and take whatever time they could carve out, than waste days pretending they didn't want each other.
When she finally collapsed into her bed in her dormitory, she didn't sleep. Her body was heavy with exhaustion, yet her mind refused to still. She heard again the crack in his voice, the slip in his control when he gripped her wrist and practically whispered that he couldn't stay away from her.
Over the next few days, those words became both her comfort and her torment.
Emerson caught herself watching him across classrooms, at meals and in the corridor. He was still careful not to look at her directly, his face schooled into practiced indifference, but she could see the tension in his jaw, the way his hand sometimes tightened around his quill until the feather frayed and the restless bounce of his leg under the table. He wasn't as untouchable as he wanted the world to believe. Emerson knew better now. She knew what he was holding back.
But knowing didn't make it easier.
Every instinct in her screamed to close the distance. To walk straight over to him and demand he stop pretending and demand that he let her in. She wanted to reach for his hand, to tell him that she wasn't afraid, that she would rather walk into the fire with him than stand at a distance and pretend none of this mattered. She wanted him to see that she wasn't fragile, that she could carry some of his weight if he just let her.
And yet...
Every time she thought about forcing herself into his space when he'd so clearly drawn those lines, her chest tightened with something sharper than longing. Guilt. He was clawing and bleeding to protect her and keep her out of the line of fire, even if it meant lying to his father. If she pressed now, if she demanded more from him, wasn't she just making it worse? Adding one more burden when his shoulders were already breaking beneath the weight?
As much as she wanted to storm through that wall he built around himself, Emerson realised with a pang that if she kept pushing, she would only be asking him to give her more than he could afford to lose. This wasn't just about what she wanted.
