The necklace rotated slowly in the air above Dumbledore's desk, suspended in a halo of soft golden light.
He turned it with deliberate care, examining every inch of chain and pendant, his expression unreadable. Kevin and the others sat in a loose semicircle behind him, waiting. The fire crackled. Nobody spoke.
Then the door swung open without a knock.
Snape didn't spare the students a glance. He crossed directly to Dumbledore, robes still faintly dusted with something that hadn't been there an hour ago.
"Confirmed." His voice carried the same flat precision it always did. "The boy was under the Imperius Curse. He has no memory of who cast it."
Dumbledore finally set the necklace down. "Hmm." He studied it a moment longer, then looked up. "It seems the Dark Lord has already found his way into the school."
"This curse is his work."
Snape's eyes moved briefly to the necklace, then away. He didn't need to say anything. He'd spent years inside Voldemort's inner circle. Curses like this — intricate, layered, vicious — were as natural to Voldemort as breathing.
"Keep it quiet?" Snape asked, already knowing the answer.
Dumbledore shook his head. "I don't think that will be necessary."
Snape left without ceremony, his robes whispering against the stone floor.
Once the door clicked shut, Dumbledore turned to face Kevin and Harry properly.
"Whoever was behind this," he said, "did not anticipate either of you shaking off the Imperius Curse. It threw their entire plan into disarray." A pause. "Be vigilant from here on. Both of you."
He had heard Kevin's full account already, and the follow-up checks had left no room for doubt. Someone had targeted them specifically. What puzzled Dumbledore — though he kept the thought to himself — was the method. A bewitched necklace was theatrical, obvious. A quieter curse, or a more careful ambush, would have served far better. Either the attacker had been reckless, or they had simply not anticipated what Kevin and Harry were capable of.
He settled on recklessness. Sloppy work.
Harry nodded, absorbing the warning. Kevin barely heard it. He was staring at the necklace with an expression that had gone very still.
He recognised it.
Sixth film. Draco smuggling it into Hogwarts to assassinate Dumbledore. A girl had touched it too early, before he'd had the chance to pass it along, and the curse had detonated ahead of schedule.
Was it Draco?
Kevin turned it over in his mind. He dismissed it almost immediately. If Draco knew who Kevin was — and by now, he did — he would never attempt something this clumsy, this transparent. Whatever desperation Draco was operating under, it hadn't made him stupid.
Yet.
The bathroom taps ran in a steady stream, ignored.
Draco hunched over the sink, gripping the porcelain with both hands, his face the colour of old wax. Each breath came like it cost him something. His wand slipped from his fingers and clattered against the tile floor. He stared down at it for a long moment.
How had it come to this?
Voldemort had his family in a vice. Draco had tried everything — waiting, hoping, staying out of it. When that hadn't worked, he'd gone to the one person he thought might actually help him, the one person strange and powerful enough to stand outside the normal rules. He'd swallowed his pride and asked Kevin for help.
He'd been met with silence. A closed door.
So he had done the only thing left to him. He had accepted the Dark Mark. He had stepped down into the pit, thinking — hoping — there was a floor somewhere beneath him.
There wasn't.
Voldemort didn't trust him. He had Goyle and Crabbe watching Draco's every move, reporting back, a pair of trained dogs given a very simple command: if Draco strays, bite him. His parents were still imprisoned. The only thing that had changed since accepting the Mark was that now he was complicit.
Summer had been hell. Beatings. Humiliation. Instructions delivered in Voldemort's cold, precise voice, as though Draco were a piece of furniture being assigned a function.
And then school started, and for the first time in months he had been able to breathe. Hogwarts — where Dumbledore's presence hung over everything like a ward — felt like sanctuary. He had almost been able to pretend, for a few days, that none of it was real.
Then the task had come.
Kill Dumbledore.
The words had sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. He had tried to reason around it, tried to find an angle that didn't end in catastrophe for his family or for himself. He had watched Kevin and Harry walk into Hogsmeade and recognised an opportunity — Goyle and Crabbe pressing against him with their low, ugly threats, and him caving, pulling his wand on some older boy he barely knew, forcing the Imperius Curse into him with shaking hands.
And it had failed.
He straightened up from the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn't particularly like what he saw.
He didn't want Voldemort to win. He never had, really — not when winning meant a world shaped entirely in Voldemort's image. But he couldn't defy him openly. And he couldn't ask Kevin for help a second time. Not after being brushed off the first.
So whose side are you on?
Maybe the honest answer was that he just wanted his parents to stay alive. Maybe that was all he'd ever really been fighting for.
He picked up his wand from the floor and went to dinner.
"Kevin."
Hermione set her quill down and looked across the workbench at him. He'd been staring at the same spot on the wall for the past three minutes.
"What's on your mind?"
"Draco."
She didn't need to ask him to elaborate. One word, and her mind had already traced the thread — Draco, the fake breakup, the necklace, the attack this afternoon. She was quiet for a moment, thinking it through.
"You think he was behind it?"
"Maybe." Kevin leaned back in his chair. "But that's not really the point."
He turned the day's events over slowly. The Ministry inspector showing up unannounced. The attack out of nowhere. The plot continuing to drift sideways from everything he remembered.
Voldemort was accelerating. Pressing harder, faster, with less concern for subtlety than Kevin had expected at this stage. And sitting here telling himself the story would course-correct on its own — that he could afford to wait and react — felt increasingly like a bet he shouldn't be making.
Was pushing Draco back to Voldemort the right call?
He'd made that choice with clean hands, reasoning that Draco's arc would resolve itself the way it always had in the story. But this wasn't a story being told at a safe distance. It was a war. And wars had a way of killing people who assumed the narrative would protect them.
Draco might be getting destroyed by Voldemort right now, one punishment at a time, while Kevin sat in this comfortable workshop waiting for the right moment.
He wasn't willing to do that anymore.
"You're worried about him." Hermione reached over and took his hand.
Kevin nodded.
He started working through it. A direct approach was suicide — Voldemort would know immediately, and whatever fragile leverage kept the Malfoys alive would evaporate. He needed information first. Goyle and Crabbe, not Draco himself. Draco almost certainly had a failsafe riding him — Voldemort didn't leave his pieces unsupervised.
Rita.
She was already in his pocket. He could put her on Goyle and Crabbe quietly — have them followed, have their conversations documented. Build a picture of Draco's situation from the outside in, without touching anything that might trip a wire.
And in parallel, he needed to push the alchemy work harder. Buy time. Keep Voldemort's attention scattered.
The plan solidified in the back of his mind, quiet and purposeful.
Hermione hadn't said anything else. She'd simply watched him think, and now she was watching the look on his face shift — that particular set to his jaw, the calm coming back into his eyes.
"You've got something."
She slid off the bench and settled into his lap with a grin, leaning back against his chest.
"Something resembling a plan," Kevin admitted. He rested his chin on top of her head. "Better than nothing."
She laughed quietly against his shoulder, and for a little while they stayed like that, listening to the castle settle around them.
---
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