For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Pressure

This chapter is sexually explicit. Read with your own discretion. This story is rated for mature audiences.

Her conjuring of this moment in her mind paled in comparison to the experience of him seizing her lips and caging her against the bookcase, his arms loosely trapping her—testing her desire to break apart and pull away or stay forever in his embrace.

It was a wild hunger unlocked by years spent apart, a thrill of surprise spurred by the flickering of lights and fluttering of ancient pages resting in the Medieval book carousel to their right, the pressing voice of magic and magnetism and the marble of his shoulders, the small pressure of some anticipated hidden knife seeking skin.

She never was sure when his blade would show its teeth and stab her in the back, suddenly sharp and soldered to the vulnerable flesh of her heart.

But the paranoid part of her told her it would happen. That it was inevitable.

It was his very nature to destroy beautiful things, to swallow any semblance of happiness, to drown feelings of peace and contentment with his unnatural ambition. To unyoke himself from any sort of connection, however natural and perfect it may be, and crush it to powder, blown away and lost to the wind.

She feared he would crush her, yet again. And he probably would.

But this time, she prepared herself for it.

She reasoned through all the ways his gravity could tear her apart in its vacuum. She theorized the different methods he could use to deconstruct their history and rewrite it without her, her name lost to time, once his greatest fear, now hers.

She poured over it late at night, in her bed, staring at the ceiling, alone and feeling lost, not remembered nor cherished, orphaned and friendless.

In truth, parts of her missed him over the course of seven years, his brutally stimulating mind, the aura of his magic—the match to hers—the rush she would feel from his caress.

She had never felt so understood before.

Her intellectual vitality had never been stroked in the same way as his sentiments stimulated her brain, ravaged her mind, body and soul. His understanding of magic, it was both instinctual and intellectual, and she admired that quality within him for she embodied the same.

To study and immerse herself in the literature and the art, to live and breathe and die by sorcery, to seek the answers and test the limits and find the delicate petals within the maze; she had never known someone to be as obsessed with it as she was.

All the parts. The ugly and the kind. The useful and the vain. The master of dichotomies.

Until him.

He was a reflection of other parts as well, the chunks of her that she didn't like to think about or stare at it in the mirror, the parts of her that were rotten and vile, the terrible things she had done in an effort to understand, to gain power—to keep herself from getting hurt—even those parts, he graced her with. His cruelty matched her own. Surpassed hers, in many ways.

She didn't need to worry about who was the worst person when she was with him. She had her answer.

And he didn't care. He would continue with his machinations, determined and forever plotting.

And this time around, she blocked out all thought about what this was, what it might mean, what further mess she might have created for herself—all for the twin flame that stood in front of her and seized her with all he had.

Because the kiss, it didn't feel like destruction, although it surely was.

Instead of corrosion, it felt like something within her had been unleashed, an untapped spring flooding forward, and she kissed him until reason seeped out through her pores and she was nothing more than the intersection of machine and pure living pulse.