A Broken Inheritance

Chapter 44: Chasing Ghosts

Chapter 44: Chasing Ghosts

The return to Hogwarts was quieter than usual.

There were no grand pranks, no fireworks set off in the Great Hall, no outbursts of laughter echoing through the corridors in the way they always had in past years. The new year had begun under a heavy, suffocating silence—one that stretched over the castle like a storm cloud, pressing against the walls, settling in the bones of every student who had come back.

At the start-of-term feast, people tried.

They clinked goblets and passed plates of roast chicken, filled the hall with talk of holiday breaks and upcoming Quidditch matches, as if the world outside these stone walls hadn't begun to unravel. As if students hadn't disappeared alongside the Ministry workers and shopkeepers and nameless figures who had simply vanished.

But beneath the surface, everyone felt it.

The unspoken truth that had settled in over the past few months, the gnawing awareness that Hogwarts was no longer untouchable.

Because it wasn't just the world beyond the castle that was burning.

It was here, inside it.

It was in the empty beds that no one talked about, the families who had pulled their children out of school in fear. It was in the way people hesitated before answering the question Where were you over the holidays? In the lingering stares at certain students—the ones who hadn't returned at all.

And it was in the way people moved around the Slytherins.

Hushed whispers, quick glances, conversations dying when they passed by. No one said anything outright. No one dared. But it was felt.

And at the centre of it all was her.

Anastasia Gaunt moved through the castle as if she were nothing more than a shadow, slipping from one class to the next without a word, never lingering in the corridors, never stopping to engage.

It wasn't just that she avoided people. It was that she was absent even when she was there.

She did not go to James' room at night.

She couldn't.

She couldn't face him. Couldn't face anyone.

Instead, she kept to the people who wouldn't ask questions. She stayed with Regulus and Lucius, sat beside them in class, ate with them in the Great Hall, drifted through her days under the guise of familiarity.

But even then, even with them, she was a ghost of herself.

Regulus watched her closely, eyes flickering toward her when he thought she wasn't looking. He was careful with his words, softer in the way he spoke to her, quieter in the way he tried to reach her. He had always been observant, but now there was something else—something like concern.

Lucius, on the other hand, avoided the topic entirely.

Because he knew.

And what was there to say?

Nothing.

There was nothing to say.

Anastasia barely noticed the whispers at first.

The murmured insults that trailed behind her when she passed through the halls, the way people turned away when she approached, the small, ugly words spoken just under breath.

She heard murdered.

She heard monster.

She heard Death Eater whore.