When the news of Lucius Malfoy's death reached him, Blaise felt something strange settle in his chest. It was not one clean emotion. It came in waves and collided hard enough to leave him momentarily breathless. Relief struck first. It hit with the force of something unexpected, something he had never allowed himself to imagine.
The world felt lighter in that moment. A pressure eased. He hated that he felt it, hated the way it released something tight in his ribs. Lucius had never wronged Blaise directly, not in any meaningful way. Yet the man had always been there, looming in the background like an old portrait whose eyes followed you no matter where you stood. His influence had stretched far beyond the Malfoy family. His ideals. His judgments. His calculated cruelty. His voice had shaped the wizarding world for decades.
Blaise had watched Draco bend under that voice for most of their lives.
Lucius had carved Draco with strict hands and colder expectations. He had molded him into something brittle. Something sharp. Something Draco had spent years trying to shed. For as long as Blaise had known him, Draco had been living in the shadow of a man who demanded perfection yet gave nothing in return. Now, just like that, the shadow was gone.
And with it came guilt.
It pushed forward quietly, as if reminding him that feeling relief at another man's death was something dark, something he should be ashamed of. He could not grieve. He knew that. Lucius Malfoy had been a master manipulator, a man who had twisted the world around him without ever lifting his voice. A raised brow had been enough to silence rooms. A single sentence spoken in a quiet corridor had been enough to rearrange alliances. His reach had been long and cruel, shaping an entire generation of pureblood children who had grown up under his cold ideology.
Still, death was death. Even monsters left ripples.
Blaise sank into the armchair near the fire and stared at the shifting embers. He tried to picture Draco at the moment he learned the news. He tried to imagine the expression he wore. Angry. Lost. Conflicted. Perhaps nothing at all.
Would Draco mourn him?
Maybe in some quiet, fractured way. Not as a son grieves for a loving father, but as a man confronts the loss of a figure who had dominated every corner of his life. Lucius had not raised Draco with affection. He had raised him with expectation. With pressure. With the kind of control that leaves scars no one sees until years later. Draco had spent his life surviving that. Trying to outrun it. Trying to become something else in spite of it.
Now he was free.
But freedom was complicated. Blaise wondered if Draco even knew how to exist without the weight that had defined him since childhood.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw and exhaled slowly.
Lucius Malfoy had commanded rooms effortlessly. He had been elegant and terrifying, a man who did not need to raise his voice to make others fall silent. He had been all calculation, all cold charisma, all quiet menace. A presence that could unnerve even seasoned adults. Blaise remembered being a teenager and feeling those pale eyes on him, assessing him, measuring him against some impossible standard. It was never personal. Lucius evaluated everyone that way. To him, people were tools, stepping stones, or liabilities.
Draco had been both son and instrument.
It was a miracle he survived at all.
Now the man was gone, leaving a strange stillness in his wake. A dynasty shattered. A name that would carry a different weight from this day on. The world would shift in small ways. The old alliances would tremble. The pureblood elites would whisper behind curtains and tally the new balances of power.
But Blaise thought only of Draco.
He imagined the silence that must fill the Manor now. The echo of footsteps that would never return. The heavy, aching emptiness that came with the end of a war even if the war lasted only inside you.
Every father leaves a mark.
Some leave a bruise that fades. Some leave a ghost that lingers. Some leave a silence so heavy it becomes its own kind of haunting.
Lucius Malfoy had left a shadow. And even in death, that shadow stretched.
Blaise knew the cost of growing up under men like that. He knew the damage they inflicted without ever lifting a finger. He knew the kind of ache Draco would never put into words.
He sat back, watching the fire crackle and flare.
Even the worst fathers leave echoes. And for Draco Malfoy, those echoes would not fade quietly.
~~~~~~
Twenty-eight hours later, Draco stood beside Hermione at the gravesite, their hands clasped tightly, fingers intertwined as if tethering each other to the present. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say—no words that could make this moment more or less than what it was. Before them lay the open grave of Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, the freshly turned earth waiting to swallow the man who had once loomed so large, his influence stretching like a shadow across their lives.
The air was unnaturally still, as if the world itself had paused to mark the passing of a man who had commanded both fear and reverence in equal measure. But Draco felt neither. No sharp pang of grief, no overwhelming sorrow. Instead, a strange, distant detachment settled over him—a quiet, clinical understanding that this was simply the closing of a chapter he had long since stopped reading.
There was no mourning here. Only finality.
The others stood nearby, silent specters in the background of his thoughts. Theo, Pansy, and Blaise formed a small, solemn trio, their expressions carefully schooled but filled with a quiet sense of resolution. They had all, in one way or another, been shaped by Lucius Malfoy's legacy—entangled in the web of his influence, his politics, his vision of a world they had long since outgrown. Today was not just a funeral. It was a farewell to the weight of a past none of them wished to carry forward.
The first shovelfuls of earth fell, hitting the coffin with a dull, final thud. Draco exhaled slowly, feeling something inside him loosen, lighten.
Lucius Malfoy had once been a towering force in his life—a father, yes, but also an architect of his fears, his failures, the battles he had fought to carve out his own identity. And yet, stripped of power, stripped of presence, he was nothing now. Just another man buried beneath the soil. Just another name etched into stone.
Draco listened to the rhythmic fall of dirt, each handful striking the coffin like a punctuation mark to the story of a man who had ruled his world for too long. It was not a sound of grief. It was a lullaby—a final, quiet song of release.
A few steps away, Narcissa stood composed, her profile sharp against the gray sky. To an outsider, she might have appeared grief-stricken, the picture of a devoted wife laying her husband to rest. But Draco saw what no one else could—the subtle shift in her posture, the barely perceptible weight that seemed to lift from her frame.
She was free.
For the first time in decades, she was free of the expectations, the whispered manipulations, the burden of being Lucius Malfoy's wife. The weight of his choices, his alliances, his mistakes—she had carried them all for so long. And now, finally, they were being buried with him.
A single tear slipped down Narcissa's cheek, not in sorrow, but in quiet acknowledgment. A final farewell to the man she had once loved, the man she had long since lost.
From the corner of his eye, Draco caught Blaise's gaze. A small nod passed between them—subtle, but filled with understanding.
For years, Lucius Malfoy had been more than a father or a political figure; he had been a force, one that had shaped and suffocated them all in different ways. But now, they were free to step out from beneath his shadow. To forge lives untethered from his influence.
No one spoke during the service. The sky above remained overcast, the muted gray swallowing the whispers of the wind. The minister's voice rang out—steady, practiced, empty. Words meant to grant peace, spoken over a man who had never known how to give it. They drifted into the heavy air, weightless against the gravity of the moment.
As the final prayers concluded, the gathered mourners began to disperse, retreating in slow, silent movements, their figures fading into the misty morning.
Draco and Hermione remained.
They stood side by side, thoughts separate yet intertwined, the past and the present folding over one another in quiet reflection. Draco's mind was a battlefield of memories—some sharp and cutting, others dull with time. The endless lessons, the suffocating expectations, the unspoken moments of quiet defiance. And now, the emptiness that came in their absence.
A shift of movement—her hand tightening around his. He turned slightly, meeting her gaze. There was no pity in her eyes, no forced condolences, only quiet understanding. A silent promise that she was there, that she would be there, no matter what this new freedom brought.
Draco inhaled deeply, tasting the crisp bite of the morning air, the scent of damp earth rising from the grave before him.
Lucius Malfoy was gone.
And for the first time in his life, Draco could finally decide who he wanted to be.
Pansy sank into the chair beside the boys, her posture relaxed but her expression razor-sharp, as if she were still waiting for something to go wrong. There was relief in the set of her shoulders, but there was also defiance, a simmering sort of challenge in her gaze that dared the world to test her now.
She took in the room, then the faces around her, and something in her steadied. They were the only people who could have understood this moment. They had all survived the same war, the same families, the same shadows.
"Good riddance," she said, not with cruelty, but with certainty.
The boys did not hesitate.
"Amen," they answered, their voices overlapping with the kind of finality that settled deep into the bones. It filled the room like an incantation spoken on instinct, leaving no room for doubt.
Blaise leaned back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head, a smug half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "None of us cried when they died. Or when they were thrown into Azkaban. That says something," he said, casual on the surface but weighted underneath.
Theo let out a low laugh, fingers tapping lightly against the table. "Speak for yourselves," he said with a wicked grin. "I celebrated. Properly. Champagne on the balcony and everything."
Pansy let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. Her fingers drummed softly against the polished wood, steadying her own heartbeat. "I didn't celebrate," she said quietly. "But I didn't mourn either. It felt like someone opened a window in a room I didn't know was suffocating me."
A hush settled over them, not uncomfortable but heavy with understanding.
They had grown up tangled in houses that demanded obedience. They had been shaped by parents who used power the way other people used their hands, shaping and pushing and forcing them into roles that never fit. They had spent years trying to outrun consequences that were never theirs in the first place.
Now those years were over.
Now the ghosts were finally gone.
The conversation shifted without them noticing, sliding from grief to memory, from heaviness to the absurd stories that had kept them sane when nothing else had.
"Remember when we tried sneaking into the Forbidden Forest?" Blaise asked, his smirk widening. "We thought we were untouchable until Hagrid grabbed us like kittens."
Pansy rolled her eyes, though the smile tugging at her lips betrayed her amusement. "You were the one who nearly fell into that boggart pit," she said. "I had to hold your robe to keep you upright. And you screamed like a dying owl."
Theo nearly choked on his drink, laughing. "You screamed louder, Pans. You thought the boggart was a giant snake. I thought you were going to hex the entire forest."
Pansy groaned, burying her face in her hands. "I panicked. And I was twelve."
Theo leaned forward, eyes bright. "You hexed yourself that same week because you forgot your wand was in your own hand."
She glared at him. "And what about you? You cried when McGonagall found you sneaking into the kitchens."
"That was a strategic emotional response," Theo insisted, lifting his chin.
The laughter that followed broke whatever tension had remained. It was loud and warm and unguarded, spilling out of them like something long trapped that had finally found a way to the surface. The fire crackled. The air loosened. The weight of the funeral faded until it felt like a story from another lifetime.
Then Blaise leaned forward, his voice dropping into something steadier. "This changes everything," he said quietly. "No more expectations. No more bloody legacy hanging over us."
Theo nodded. "No more walking around like we owe the world something."
Pansy straightened a little, something bright flickering behind her dark eyes. "For the first time, we get to choose," she said. "Not them. Not tradition. Not the names we were born with. Us."
Theo grinned, leaning back with the kind of confidence that came naturally to him now that the chains were off. "Sounds like a cause for celebration. A proper one. Not the pureblood nonsense. A real party."
Blaise raised a brow, intrigued. "A party that would make our ancestors roll in their graves."
Pansy's smirk widened. "Something decadent. Extravagant. Wicked enough that if any of our parents were alive, they would drop dead at the entrance."
Theo nodded, eyes gleaming. "Live music. Floating drinks. Magic so strong the floors hum."
Blaise added, "Candles dripping gold. Tables that shift shape. A bar that never runs dry."
Pansy imagined it. For a moment, the whole room softened around the edges. She felt something warm spread through her chest, something that felt dangerously close to hope.
This was not the family she had been born into. It was the family she had chosen. The only one she ever wanted.
She lifted an invisible glass, chin tilted with quiet pride. "To new beginnings."
The boys mirrored her, their voices steady and sure.
"To new beginnings."
And in that simple moment, surrounded by laughter and memories and people who had clawed their way out of the same darkness, Pansy realized something precious.
~~~~~~
Blaise stepped through the front door, the scent of home rising to meet him in a way that eased something tight in his chest. Soft light spilled through the windows, stretching long across the floorboards, painting the room in warm shades that should have felt comforting. Instead, the weight of the day clung to him like damp wool, heavy and persistent. The funeral had been everything he expected and somehow worse. Cold. Polished. Filled with people who arrived out of obligation, not affection. No one mourned. No one cried. They stood there with stiff spines and tight mouths, pretending to grieve a man who had ruled their childhoods with fear.
The finality of it sat uneasily in his ribs.
He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to scrub away the lingering pressure of too many polite condolences and far too many false expressions of sympathy. When he finally lifted his gaze, she was already watching him. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, arms folded lightly, her eyes softening the moment she saw him.
She crossed the room without hesitation. Her warmth reached him even before her hands did, and when she wrapped her arms around his waist, he let out a slow breath that felt like a release. She held him with quiet certainty, her cheek resting briefly against his chest before she pulled back enough to see his eyes.
"Blaise," she whispered, her voice gentle in a way that made something inside him loosen. Her fingers smoothed over the front of his shirt, grounding him. "I know today must have been brutal. I made carbonara. I thought you could use something familiar."
He felt his shoulders sag, the tension fading just a little. He reached for her, cupping her cheek in his palm, brushing his thumb across her skin with a tenderness he only ever showed her. "Thank you, tesoro," he said, kissing her forehead with a slow, lingering softness. "You always know exactly what to do."
She offered a faint smile, one that reached her eyes, then guided him toward the kitchen. They sat together at the table, the warm smell of the pasta settling around them like a blanket. They did not speak at first. He loved that about her. She never pushed when he wasn't ready. She simply let the quiet exist between them, filling the gaps with her presence rather than words.
He ate slowly, each bite easing him further into the moment. Still, he could feel her watching him. Not in a probing way. She was just there, steady and attentive, letting him come back to himself bit by bit.
His mind drifted. He saw the gravesite again. The cold marble. The shadows cast by the black umbrellas. Draco standing motionless, hands clasped behind his back, jaw set. A boy raised on fear pretending to be a man shaped by pride. No tremble in his shoulders. No visible grief. Only silence.
A lifetime of fighting for a man's approval, only for the final blow to be the realisation that the fight was over and had never meant anything.
Blaise swallowed, the fork quieting against the plate.
She reached across the table, her hand brushing over his. Not a gesture demanding an explanation. Just an offer. A place to rest.
And he let his fingers lace with hers, feeling the steadiness of her palm and the warmth that spread through him as she squeezed gently, anchoring him to a world far softer than the one he had just left behind.
Blaise had seen death before. He had walked past bodies in the rubble after the war, had watched friends lose people they loved, had even carried some of that grief on his own shoulders. But something about today settled wrong in his stomach. It was not sadness. It was not even anger. It was a strange, metallic bitterness that lingered at the back of his tongue, like the taste of something burnt.
Maybe it was the weight of what Lucius had represented, the iron grip he had kept on Draco for far too long. Maybe it was the memory of a man who had shaped an entire generation with nothing more than his name and his influence. Or maybe it was the simple fact that someone so powerful, so cold, so impossible to ignore, had been reduced to ashes and a grave marker. A name carved into polished stone. A legacy that was never meant for them, yet had dragged them all through hell.
She let him sit with that heaviness. She did not rush him. She did not interrupt. She simply stayed close, her presence a steady warmth in the cool kitchen, her hand resting near his on the table, ready to reach for him when the moment came.
After a few quiet bites, she finally broke the silence, her voice soft but firm enough to hold him steady. "Do you want to talk about it?"
He hesitated. His fork clinked lightly against the plate as he lowered it. He leaned back, rubbing a thumb along the rim of his glass like he was trying to smooth out the edge of a thought that refused to settle.
"It wasn't just the funeral," he said after a moment. His voice was low, the words pulled straight from some raw place inside him. "It was watching Draco. The way he stood there, not moving, not blinking, not letting anything show. It was like he was waiting for something. Like part of him still expected Lucius to step out of the shadows and start dictating his next move." He swallowed, jaw tightening. "Lucius's death wasn't only the loss of a father. It was the end of a fight that shaped Draco's entire life. And now that the fight is gone, he doesn't know what to do with the quiet."
His eyes lifted to hers. There was no mask there. No lazy charm. No polished indifference. Just a flicker of vulnerability that most people would never believe existed in a man like Blaise Zabini.
She squeezed his hand, slipping her fingers through the spaces between his like she belonged there. "You don't have to carry all that alone, Blaise," she said gently.
His shoulders loosened the tiniest bit. He turned his hand so his palm held hers more fully, his thumb gliding over her knuckles in slow, thoughtful strokes. "I know, baby girl," he murmured. His voice had softened, losing that edge he usually kept sharpened. "It's just a lot. So much to think about. So much I can't fix."
But something shifted anyway. The weight hanging off him did not vanish, but it eased, just enough to let him breathe properly for the first time since he had walked through that front door.
Because when she held his hand like this, when she stayed by his side without demanding anything from him, the world stopped feeling so heavy. The silence was no longer something he had to fill. And the grief that was not his, but still lived somewhere close to him, felt a little less like a burden he had to carry alone.
The evening stretched on in the soft hush of their home, the last bits of dinner sat cooling on their plates, untouched now that the conversation had shifted into something heavier and quieter. The sun dipped lower, washing the room in deep amber light that softened the edges of everything it touched.
Ginny watched him with that steady, intuitive gaze of hers, the one that always made Blaise feel like she saw far more of him than he ever spoke aloud. She did not crowd him, did not push. She simply sat with him, letting the calm build between them until she sensed the moment he started to sag beneath the weight of the day.
"Why don't we go sit in the living room?" she said softly. "You look like you need to rest."
He nodded. Her voice had a way of giving shape to things he refused to admit until she said them out loud. They rose together, moving through the house without speaking, the quiet feeling less like emptiness and more like something intentional.
The moment they sank into the sofa, she curled into his side with the ease of someone who had done it a hundred times before. Her head fit neatly beneath his chin, her hand resting lightly on his chest, her breath warm through the fabric of his shirt. He let his arm fall around her, holding her close, feeling the steady weight of her body grounding him.
For a long while, the room held only the soft tick of the clock on the wall and the distant hum of the evening breeze brushing against the windowpanes. Blaise leaned his head back, eyes closed, letting the warmth of her seep through him. The knot in his chest loosened another fraction.
He had been surrounded by noise all day. Formalities. Condolences. The low murmur of old families talking about legacies and duty. But here, in the quiet with her, he could finally breathe.
He tightened his hold on her without thinking, a small, instinctive gesture. She stayed perfectly still, letting him cling in the way he almost never allowed himself to.
"Thank you," he whispered. The words slipped out before he could stop them, thin and frayed around the edges.
She shifted, just enough to look up at him. "For what?"
"For this," he said, his fingers tracing slow patterns along her arm. "For knowing when to say something and when to stay silent. For… being here."
Her lips curved in a soft smile, nothing flashy or playful, just warm and real. She pressed a gentle kiss to his jaw, then rested her cheek against his shoulder again.
"That's what I'm here for," she murmured. "You don't have to stand through everything by yourself, Blaise. I've got you."
The words settled over him like a blanket drawn up on a cold night. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just true.
He felt something inside him unclench, something he had held tight all afternoon. He let go of the part of himself that always stayed braced, always ready for the next blow. He allowed himself to sink into the calm she offered, his eyes closing again as he exhaled a breath that felt like it had been trapped in his lungs for hours.
She stayed tucked against him, warm and steady, her hand resting over his heart like she was keeping it from splintering under the weight of the day.
~~~~~~
He had felt nothing then either. Nothing but a cold recognition of the truth he had learned far too early in life. That some people were better as memories than as living forces. That some parents were wounds rather than comfort. That losing someone who had never truly been yours was not a loss at all.
Her eyes had searched his, wide with a fear she had never allowed herself to show before. A fear she might have reserved for her own death, or the collapse of everything she had fought to maintain. She had looked at him as if she expected something from him at last. A plea. A promise. A reason to believe she had not failed in every way a mother could fail.
But Blaise had simply stood there, calm and composed, hands folded at his sides while she was escorted out of the manor she had once ruled with an iron spine. Their gazes had met for a single breath. Hers frantic and desperate. His unreadable and still.
And then she was gone.
The silence that followed her departure had felt different from the silence after his father. This one did not rush in like a blessing. It settled slowly, creeping into every corner, colder somehow. Not painful, but unfamiliar. Her absence had left a hollow where something should have been, something he had been denied too many times to name.
He had sat in the drawing room that night, staring into the fire until it blurred into nothing but shifting color. The quiet pressed against him like a question. Should he feel something? Should he mourn the woman who had birthed him but never raised him? Should he grieve for the childhood he never had?
But grief requires love. Grief requires loss.
And he had never truly possessed either of his parents in a way that allowed loss to touch him now.
He had felt only inevitability.
The kind that arrives when the truth finally catches up to the people who created you, the kind that settles like dust on a life built on shadows.
He remembered that night clearly. The taste of the brandy he had stolen from the decanter. The steady tick of the antique clock in the corner. The crackle of the fire. The strange weightlessness that came when he realized he was alone, truly alone, and that the world had not ended because of it.
He had survived them.
He had survived everything they tried to shape him into. Every expectation. Every punishment. Every rule. Every cold stare that carved him into someone who learned not to feel, not to trust, not to hope for softness he would never be offered.
Freedom had never felt warm back then. It had felt metallic and sharp, like a door unbolting in the dark.
He learned to live with it.
He learned to stand on his own without the scaffolding of fear propping him up.
He built himself from the ground up, piece by piece, forging an identity not tied to blood or legacy, but to survival and sheer will.
And sitting here now, in the soft light of their home, Ginny tucked gently at his side, he felt the echo of those years in the pit of his stomach. Old ghosts. Old truths.
He had never mourned them.
But he had mourned the version of himself who never had a chance to be anything but a weapon and a name.
He let out a slow breath, eyelids lowering as he leaned slightly into her warmth. This was nothing like the life he had come from. This was chosen. This was earned. This was his.
And for the first time in a long time, the past felt like something that belonged firmly behind him rather than in his shadow.
His mother had sacrificed everything for a cause that had never truly belonged to her, given her loyalty to men who had discarded her the moment she was no longer useful. And in the end, she had lost it all.
But it was not his loss. It was not his burden to bear.
He did not mourn her. Not really.
She had never been the kind of mother whose absence would leave a hole in his heart.
He had often wondered, in the quiet hours of the night, if she thought of him from her cold, damp cell in Azkaban. If regret had finally settled in. If, in the darkness, she had come to realize what she had thrown away.
But then again, maybe she hadn't. Maybe she was still trapped in the same delusions that had led her there.
It didn't matter. Not anymore.
He had never known real love from either of them. Only duty. Only neglect. Only the sharp sting of expectation and the dull ache of never being enough.
But now?
Now, with both of them gone, he was finally free.
Free from their demands. Free from the legacy of a bloodline that had never done anything but chain him to a life he never wanted. Free from their mistakes, their ambitions, their failures.
There was no grief in his heart for them.
Only the quiet, unshakable knowledge that their absence had given him something they never could.
Freedom.
~~~~~~
How had it come to this?
Blaise stood over the lifeless body, staring down at it without a single flicker of emotion crossing his face. His mind felt strangely hollow, as if someone had scraped out everything inside him and left only the quiet hum that followed a storm. The night air pressed close around him, cool and indifferent, carrying the faint scent of damp earth and iron.
Blood gathered at his boots in a slow, widening pool. It caught the moonlight in a grim glimmer, a dark mirror that reflected a version of himself he barely recognized anymore. The severed head rested a short distance away from its body, eyes wide and glassy, mouth frozen mid-breath. Even in death, there was confusion on the man's face. A final question he would never finish forming.
They never expect it.
They always think they have time.
The body lay perfectly still now, its chapter closed without ceremony.
Blaise felt nothing.
He waited for something to stir inside him, some echo of what this used to mean. But there was only silence. A familiar silence, one that had been growing inside him for longer than he cared to admit. Each kill carved out another piece of him until all that was left was a quiet, efficient void that knew how to move without hesitation.
He crouched beside the corpse, methodically wiping the blood from his blade with a worn cloth. The motion was practiced, almost graceful, a ritual that no longer carried weight. He folded the cloth, pocketed it, and rose again with a slow breath that felt too steady given the scene around him.
How did I end up here?
That question lingered like a shadow in the corners of his mind. It pressed at him gently, like a hand on his back urging him to confront something he had spent years avoiding.
He looked down at the body and tried to remember what it felt like to care.
Once, his life had been full of possibilities. He had been clever, too clever for his own good. His professors had told him he could be anything he wanted. A strategist. A researcher. A diplomat. He could have built something solid. Something meaningful. He could have created instead of destroyed. He could have been someone the boy he once was would have admired.
Maybe, in another life, he would have been all of those things.
But not this one.
This path had been carved long before he ever had a say. Born into a world soaked in violence and expectation, he had been molded with cold hands that did not know the meaning of nurture. They trained him to be silent. They trained him to be sharp. They trained him to survive by becoming whatever the Dark demanded of him.
He had never been given the luxury of choosing. His life was shaped by shadows long before he understood what it meant to step into the light.
He sheathed his blade with a soft snap, the final note in a grim symphony. The man at his feet was nothing more than another assignment, another warning delivered on behalf of someone with deeper pockets and colder intentions.
And Blaise would walk away from it.
Just like always.
Just like he had been conditioned to do.
He stepped back from the body, the night swallowing the sound of his breathing. A breeze carried the scent of blood away, leaving the air strangely clean. Blaise closed his eyes for a moment, letting the silence settle around him, letting the emptiness press harder against the edges of his thoughts.
He did not mourn the man. He did not mourn the kill.
But he mourned the parts of himself that had died long before this.
He turned away from the corpse without looking back, boots crunching softly over gravel, as if he had not just ended a life. He moved through the shadows with the quiet certainty of someone who no longer questioned the darkness beneath his feet.
The truth, sharp and cruel, settled at the back of his mind.
He had never stood a chance.
The Zabini name had always felt stained. It carried the weight of every secret deal, every whispered betrayal, every body that had quietly disappeared because someone paid for it to happen.
His father's legacy had hung over him like a blade suspended by a thread, ready to fall at any moment. The man had been feared in every corner of the underworld, a master at bending people to his will, a collector of debts that were almost always paid in blood.
And from the day Blaise came of age, the message had been painfully clear.
He was expected to take over.
Not just the name, but everything that came with it.
An inheritance drenched in violence.
He had never truly been given a choice. Long before he understood what it meant to take a life, he had been shaped into someone who could. He was trained to move without sound, to think without hesitation, to shut off every feeling that might slow his hand. His father had taught him that empathy was a liability, that kindness made men weak, and that weakness was a death sentence. So Blaise learned to go silent. He learned to smother everything that made him human.
He buried the anger.
He buried the sadness.
He buried the loneliness.
Layer by layer, he covered each one until nothing remained but ice and a sharpened edge. He became what his father wanted. A blade in a handsome suit. A man no one could read and even fewer could approach. And he excelled in the role. His father had turned him into a killer, and Blaise had proved frighteningly good at it.
But now, standing in the darkness with the metallic scent of blood lingering in the air, he felt a hollow ache in his chest that had nothing to do with remorse. It was something different. Something he had not felt in years. The emptiness gnawed at him, slow and steady, refusing to be ignored.
The kill itself did not bother him. That part had become muscle memory. Violence was easy. Violence was familiar. In his world, survival was earned through strength and influence, and he possessed both. What unsettled him was the realization that this was all he had. This routine. This cycle. This endless march of death and cover-ups and cold nights spent wondering who he would have to hunt next.
His mind had not been here tonight. His blade had moved out of habit, precise as ever, but his thoughts had drifted somewhere else entirely.
His hands trembled now, although the fight had ended long ago.
The tremor came from something softer, something far more dangerous than fear.
It was her. Ginny.
The home they were trying to build.
The quiet moments that made him feel like he could be someone other than the son of a monster.
The thought had followed him into the kill like a ghost, distracting him in ways he had never allowed before. It had slipped beneath the armor he had worked so hard to weld around himself. It had made him hesitate, not in action, but in spirit.
He wondered if that made him weak.
Or if it meant he finally wanted something more.
For the first time in his life, he could imagine another path. A way out. A future that did not revolve around corpses and careful lies. A version of himself who woke up beside someone who chose him because she wanted him, not because she needed what his power could offer.
He could picture it.
He could almost feel it.
And the longing cut deeper than any blade he had ever held.
But reality stayed right where it always had, cold and unyielding.
He had been raised in darkness.
Shaped by cruelty.
Crafted into a weapon before he ever got the chance to learn how to be a boy.
Men like him did not get happy endings.
Men like him did not get clean hands.
He looked down at the body again, feeling the weight settle in his chest once more. He could want something better. He could dream for a moment. But the truth followed close behind.
He would never truly escape this world.
He could never outrun the blood in his veins.
His father had made sure of that long before Blaise understood the cost.
So he steadied himself.
He returned to the only life he had ever known. He accepted the role he had been forced into.
He would keep killing.
He would keep lying.
He would keep doing the things other men never had the stomach for.
Because that was what he had been made to do.
But when he finally stepped away from the body and let the night swallow him whole, a single thought clung to him like a burr beneath the skin. It lingered in the space between breaths, stubborn and sharp, refusing to be shaken loose.
How much longer?
How much longer could he pretend that this life was all he deserved?
How much longer could he keep moving through the world with a numbness that grew heavier each time he wiped blood from his hands?
How much longer before the last fragments of feeling left in him turned to dust?
He had no answer. There was nothing in him that even tried to reach for one.
The life of an assassin carved a man down to his bones. It stripped him of softness, hollowed him out, and left him with the kind of silence that followed him everywhere. The jobs paid well. The power was intoxicating. The influence kept him safe. But the cost crept in slowly, wearing him down grain by grain until he barely recognized the person staring back at him in the mirror.
And yet, he kept going.
Not because he wanted to.
Not because he believed in any of it.
But because stopping felt impossible after so many years of moving in this one direction.
There was no time to unravel himself.
No time to question the things he had done.
No time to mourn the pieces he had lost along the way.
There was always another name.
Another target. Another life waiting quietly to be snuffed out.
He let his eyes fall shut for a moment, letting the cold air brush against his face. The last remnants of whatever emotion he still possessed flickered once, dim and weak, before sinking into the quiet void inside him.
When he opened his eyes again, they were steady.
With the practiced ease of a man who had lived too long in the dark, he slipped back into the shadows, letting them close around him like a familiar coat.
This was where he belonged.
This was what he was made for.
And until the day it finally consumed him, he would keep moving.