The New Order
I never thought I’d grow to love the smell of jasmine, but the scent now fills Riddle Manor, a scent I chose myself. It overpowers the damp, rotting stone that used to be a staple of this place. The oppressive gloom that once clung to every shadow has been banished, replaced by a warm, enchanted glow that feels both comforting and completely out of place. It is my light, though, and the house now reflects me. My banners—the Slytherin crest interwoven with a blood-red flower—hang from the dungeon walls where Voldemort’s dark relics used to reside. It is a new world, a new order, and it’s all mine.
I recline at the head of the long dining table, my fingers toying with the stem of my elven-crafted wine goblet. It is not just a cup but a symbol of my new, effortlessly acquired life. My posture is deliberately casual, a posture of someone who has not fought for a single thing they possess. I look across the table at my parents, Santiago and Serene, who are radiating a silent, chilling satisfaction. We are a family of ghosts in a house built by another, but we are the ones who haunt it now. The power is ours, and it all belongs to me. It started with a simple, stupid act of aggression—Mattheo’s slap—and ended with my father’s fury. The riches, the power, the complete dominance—all of it now belongs to me.
I hear footsteps echoing down the corridor, heavy and full of a resentful hesitancy. My lips curl into a triumphant smirk as the doors open to reveal the Riddle brothers. They are a parody of their former selves, ghosts in their own home. Tom’s face is a hard, chiseled mask of impotent rage, while Mattheo’s gaze is fixed on the floor, his posture broken and submissive. They were meant for greatness, for power, but they are now nothing more than pariahs in my home.
“Tom, Mattheo,” I hear my father’s sickeningly sweet voice boom, dripping with condescension. “So good of you to join us.”
Tom’s jaw clenches, his eyes flashing with a dangerous cocktail of hatred and humiliation. He remembers a time when this house and its power were his birthright. Now, it is a gilded cage, and he and his brother are my prisoners.
“Get on your knees,” I command, my voice a soft velvet curtain hiding a thousand steel needles. The brothers freeze, their fists clenching at their sides, but they do not move. “Now.”
Mattheo flinches, his eyes darting towards me. The memory of our shared past, a brief, violent romance, is a ghost in the room. He sees me now, not the girl who had once whispered promises of devotion, but a queen forged from his own cruelty. My words cut through the silence, and I can almost feel the sting of the slap he had given me, but the consequences are a world away.
“You dare?” Tom snarls, his magical aura flaring in a burst of reckless defiance.
I simply raise a delicate hand, and with a lazy flick of my wrist, Tom is thrown against the far wall, a chokehold of pure power constricting his throat. I revel in his gasps for air, his face turning a mottled purple.
“You will learn your place, Tom,” Santiago says, his tone still nauseatingly sweet. “Just as your brother has.”
Mattheo drops to his knees, his humiliation a bitter taste on his tongue. He had seen his father, the most powerful wizard of his time, crumble under Santiago’s ruthless assault, stripped of his power and reduced to a sniveling coward before his execution. Mattheo knows there is no defiance left in him. He is a broken thing, a monument to my vengeance.
As Tom struggles, pinned by my effortless magic, I smile, a cold, predatory gleam in my eyes. The power is intoxicating, the control absolute. It is everything I had ever wanted, everything I had been denied.
I look at Mattheo on the floor, and in that moment, I see the boy I had once loved and the man who had struck me. A flicker of something crosses my face, a fleeting memory of a different life. But it is quickly gone, replaced by the perfect, unblemished mask of satisfaction.
As I release Tom, letting him fall to the floor in a heap of gasps and coughs, my eyes land on the goblet in my hand. I raise it in a silent toast, not to my family, not to my conquered enemies, but to myself. Was it all worth it? The question lingers in the air, a whisper of a doubt I will never truly voice. I have everything. My life is perfect. The past is a memory I am not afraid of, a ghost I have finally laid to rest.
Or so I tell myself.
