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The fabric of reality had been torn and rewoven, and the magic of her ritual whisked her away from the dark forest she had been chanting in. The air around her shimmered, and she crashed down upon a surface that curiously cushioned her impact.
Hermione had fallen into a bed. Warm, soft, and not unoccupied.
The other figure in the bed stirred, his body moving with such fluid grace that she didn’t have a chance to react before he enveloped her with his tall body, throwing the covers over them both. They were cloaked in darkness, and time seemed to suspend with her breath.
The whooshing in her ears gave way to dead silence, and her breath, short and labored, echoed through the small space. The ritual, a desperate last resort, had succeeded in its purpose; to send her back to the past to an era in which her greatest enemy was vulnerable, before he made his first Horcrux.
But never in her wildest imagination could she have conceived of this—crash landing into his bed with unforeseen proximity to the dark wizard himself.
Terror descended upon her.
“Tom Riddle?” she asked, her voice trembling and hardly perceptible in the air thick with anticipation.
“No…Ominis Gaunt.”
“Gaunt? Well, at least something went according to plan.” But a part of her was relieved this wasn’t a young Lord Voldemort whose legs were currently entangled with her own. “Ugh, get off me. Trust me, you’d want to. I’m a Mudblood.” She couldn’t keep the sharpened, defensive edge of disdain out of her voice.
“You’re a…” His hand moved to her face, gently cupping her jaw with an intimacy that made no sense given the situation. His fingers brushed against her cheekbone, and flitted ever so slightly past her eyelashes in a delicate dance before landing on her lips, as if shushing a naughty child. “A young lady ought not to use such vulgar language,” he chided. “I hold no prejudices against Muggle-borns. I stand apart from the cursed disposition that degrades the rest of my family.”
The hint of resentment, of rebellion in his compassionate tone confused her further.
He remained suspended above her, his hands caging her in. The moment seemed to stretch endlessly as heat permeated the negligible space between their bodies. His looming body emanated an appreciable warmth as it seeped into her skin, her senses.
She couldn’t help but yield to the impulse to breathe in the heady scent enveloping her. He smelled like someone who had been immersed in writing a novel amidst the pristine stillness of a snowy forest on a cold, wintry day. The scent, a sophisticated play of ink and parchment, mingling with the freshness of cedarwood, was irresistible.
Heat bloomed across her face as it dawned on her—an unanticipated, unwanted attraction was unfurling within her.
This never happened to her, and she was bewildered by her reaction to this complete stranger. Not her—she had always been ruled by logic, but the tendrils of desire were weaving through that very rational mind of hers. His distracting touch was much too intimate for a perfect stranger.
It was so dark, it was impossible to make out his expression and his features, but she narrowed her eyes suspiciously anyway. “What did you say your name was?”
“Ominis.”
Ominous? Her mouth twitched, but she remained silent. How utterly fascinating. Pureblood families and their strange naming conventions…
“Yes,” he sighed wearily. “Who’s Tom—”
“What year is it?” she interrupted, suppressing a giggle at how absolutely unremarkable he made the name sound.
“1899,” he answered, his voice tinged with an inquisitive, playful lilt. As if asking, how could you not know?
She went very quiet. The taste of overwhelming disappointment was indeed bitter. 1899 was many years off the range she had been targeting. She had even traveled during the summer, when Tom Riddle would most likely be at the orphanage. Knowing what he’d become, she had been prepared to end his life, even if he was an adolescent…
How did the ritual go so wrong? By a cruel stroke of fate, she had used her one chance to travel back in time and arrived at the end of the Victorian era.
All those nights digging through graves to find the bones of a dead Gaunt. All those experiments on time travel, precious resources, and ingredients… wasted.
But she refused to accept defeat. Perhaps it could be salvaged. She could always kill his ancestor.
“Do you…” she began. This wizard seemed to be only a few years older than herself. Of course, that didn’t rule out him having children, especially for pureblood families like the Gaunts, but she had never heard of him before. “Have a brother?”
“Yes, I have an elder brother.” His tone cooled perceptibly.
Oh, he did not seem overly fond of this brother.
“What’s his name?” She was only just putting together in her mind the year and Voldemort’s maternal family tree. Marvolo…please let it be—
“Marvolo,” he said.
“Fuck.”
“Pardon me?”
“Yes, pardon me,” she said absently. Was Marvolo Gaunt innocent? He wasn’t responsible for Tom Riddle’s crimes, but he was still an unstable, violent blood supremacist, and she wouldn’t have a smidgen of remorse for terminating his life. Not after what she’d been through in Voldemort’s new world…
“I need to get out of here. Is your brother here? Does he have children yet? Is this…the Gaunt residence?” She nearly called it a shack, but she didn’t get the impression that this luxurious bed fit in that description.
“No. I’ve been living alone in this flat for years.”
She started pushing insistently against his solid chest, her heart racing. Her erroneous ritual landed her years and miles from her intended target, and she was embarrassed at how spectacularly she failed.
But what was more embarrassing was the revelation that there was firm musculature beneath her palms. His shoulders were broad, and his body felt lean and taut from every angle, and he was not moving.
She was in bed with Tom Riddle’s great-uncle. It was quite possibly the strangest moment of her life. It had been quite some time since she’d been this physically close to another person, and never one who had such an intoxicating scent.
“If you would be so kind,” he began in a composed voice before he encircled her wrists in a firm grip and pushed them above her head. Her restrained hands sunk deep into the soft pillow. Her breath suspended in her throat at the undeniable strength of his frame, and at the highly vulnerable posture he had forced her into. “Before you proceed, my dear, I have questions that need answering.”
She fought vainly against his hold for several more moments before his face came perilously close to hers, his mouth mere breaths from her own.
“Why are you here?” he murmured. “What magic brought you into my bed?”
Was he a gentleman from the nineteenth century? Or a brute?
She was, of course, not a witch from the nineteenth century.
“I beg your pardon, sir…I simply cannot share such information,” she said with a honeyed touch of regret and Victorian discretion. “Please accept my humble apologies for this unwarranted intrusion upon your peace. I must promptly take my leave. If it isn’t too much trouble, would you happen to have the exact date and time?”
She gasped lightly when he suddenly lowered his head and pressed his mouth against her throat. A shiver ran down her spine when he gently nuzzled against her, and his breath whispered tantalizingly across her sensitive skin.
He chuckled, the rumbling in his chest low and extremely pleasant. “No. This defies all expectations. I am never so fortunate,” he said, his voice drowsy, yet infused with mirth. “You must be a dream, and I’m not about to let you escape so easily. It’s been so long since I’ve had such a pleasant dream.”
She stayed quiet. She couldn’t believe this man. He wasn’t even fully awake.
She fought the urge to slap him, so the sting would remind him of the reality of their uncomfortable situation. But violence was never a good solution, unless it was to eliminate the future dark lord.
He sighed, and a shock coursed through her when he lowered his hips against hers, and something hard and thick nestled between her lightly parted legs. “My subconscious must have created you, just for me.”
His lips trailed a delicate path up the column of her neck, over her jaws, her cheeks. He was using his lips to map her out, like an artist’s brush on canvas, leaving a trail of sensation in its wake, each stroke more definitive than the last. “You’re a figment of my hidden desires, made real, even if it’s for a moment…”
The sensuality of it all had her spellbound. The boundary between desire and the need to flee became artfully blurred. It had been so long since anyone had been kind and gentle with her, and she missed the human touch. Craved it, just a little.
“Your scent...” He breathed in deeply. “I thought I’d never smell it again after that day in fifth-year potions class.”
He reached under his pillow for his wand, and pointed it at her face.
Oh gods, he was going to kill her.
She shouldn’t have let her guard down, even for a moment. But she had started slipping when he said he didn’t share in the prejudice against Muggle-borns, in that warm timbre of his beautiful voice.
After several seconds, nothing disastrous happened. He didn’t curse her.
But he was moving the tip of his wand gently across her face, caressing her features. A low moan tumbled from her throat when he thrust his hips against her at exactly the right angle, and she was reminded of his insistent erection pushing against her softness.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, ashamed at her lack of control. She was also intentionally ignoring the hammering of her heart, which he could surely feel, and the molten heat gathering in her lower abdomen.
“Looking at you.”
She couldn’t even begin to understand what he meant by that, but it made her raise her own wand with nervous fingers.
Lumos. She cautiously held her wand up to his face.
Time seemed to still as she drank in every contour of his face.
He was far more handsome than whatever her brain had helpfully imagined earlier while she blindly pondered her attraction to him. His full eyelashes were lowered halfway, while a corner of his sensual, sculpted lips was slightly curved upward. His cheekbones and jawline were exquisitely sharp and refined.
But what drew her gaze were his eyes—and the curious absence of discernible pupils. Within the depths of his lightly colored irises were grey, silken clouds hovering over the muted blue of a desolate winter sky.
She wouldn’t mind getting lost in them.
And so she understood; he was blind. She didn’t want to assume, but perhaps it was due to the nature of how the Gaunts maintained their so-called purity for generations.
She didn’t know what it was about him…perhaps it was because of what he said. Or perhaps it was the vulnerability he was displaying to a complete stranger when, truly, he should be outraged…
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Gaunt,” she said, voice barely above a whisper, as she wondered if she was making an immense error in judgment. But she took a leap of faith, and decided to trust this man with no love lost for his family. “This is no dream. I’m from the future, burdened with a terrible mission; I must stop a dark lord of unparalleled power and evilness from rising. In my time, the world has become a place of constant misery and terror. His malevolent influence has spread like wildfire, leaving in its wake a trail of countless bodies, both magical and muggle.”
He stilled, and tilted his head slightly, as if in deep thought. He seemed to have finally realized this wasn’t a dream after all. “A dark lord?”
“Yes. He’s…Marvolo Gaunt’s grandson. He’s your—”
“I see. I understand.” His unseeing eyes seemed to stare right into her own. “How may I be of assistance?”
