The Riddle Manor was drowned in darkness. Only the fireplace burned, its flames crackling an unnatural shade of emerald that threw warped shadows along the ornate walls. In the center of the drawing room, seated with the posture of a monarch carved from marble, was Tom Riddle.
Handsome in the most unsettling way, he possessed the kind of beauty that made people stare before realizing they wished they hadn't. Curls of dark hair framed a sharp, aristocratic face; his tall, lean frame radiated an aura that felt predatory. People didn't just notice Tom Riddle—they sensed him the way prey senses the brush of a predator's breath.
He was what scholars might one day try to label a sociopath—but those words would always fall short. Tom's mind was too lucid, too self-aware. Where ordinary sociopaths mimicked emotions, Tom calculated them with surgical precision.
Dumbledore liked to say that being conceived under a love potion stripped Tom of the ability to feel love. Tom never believed that. But he did understand something far more dangerous:when a child is told he is incapable of feeling, he grows into the monster everyone expects him to become.
At the Wool's Orphanage, Tom never longed for parents—only for stability, and for others to stop looking at him as if he were a curse wrapped in a boy's skin. The other children whispered "devil's child," "freak," "wrong." Their contempt didn't hurt him; he felt no attachment to any of them. What mattered was survival: a bed, food, clothes, warmth. Everything else was noise.
Yet curiosity—Tom's truest companion—was a fire that never dimmed.And in someone whose moral compass was shattered long before it had a chance to form, curiosity could only ever take one shape: danger.
He discovered early that he could slip into people's minds, pry open their secrets, peel back their thoughts. Legilimency. He had mastered it before he even learned the word.
Most children, discovering such power, would have flaunted it.Tom stayed quiet. He sharpened it. He used it to study people's emotions the way an anatomist studies veins—mapping weakness, pressure points, and the exact places to cut.
By the time he walked through the doors of Hogwarts, he was already a master puppeteer wearing a student's robes. He could mimic empathy better than most people could feel it. Even seasoned politicians would have admired his finesse.
And then came the day he found him—his father.
Tom had been meticulous. He'd sifted through the orphanage records, traced the name, followed the trail to a grand manor brimming with wealth. Watching from the shadows, hidden with a skill far beyond his years, he saw the man whose blood ran in his veins… standing happily with a wife and children who weren't him.
That was when it happened.
For the first time in his life, Tom felt something he couldn't categorize or dissect. A cold, coiled rage, blooming slowly in his chest like a poisonous flower. Not loud. Not wild. Quiet. Controlled. Terrifying.
He didn't lash out. He didn't storm in.Tom Riddle didn't lose control.
He turned away from the window with perfect calm, walked down the street, and smiled politely as he charmed an elderly woman into buying him an ice cream.
But as he licked the melting sweetness off the cone, he made himself a promise—one that settled into him like the click of a lock closing:
He would return to this manor.And the next time he came, he would not be hidden.
***********
There was a loud, deliberate knock—one that echoed through the hollow silence of the drawing room. Tom lifted his eyes, and that was all it took; the door swung open as if bowing to his will.
Tom Riddle — Voldemort, though he never needed to say it — rose from his seat, stepping out of the shadow and into the emerald glow. The fire painted him in shifting shades of green, highlighting the sharp lines of his face like the portrait of a predator emerging from the dark.
"Merry met, Walburga."
He took her hand and brushed a kiss across her knuckles—precisely formal, intentionally intimate. A balance designed to make her knees weaken and her thoughts blur.
"My lord," Walburga breathed, a faint blush blooming across her cheeks.
She fancied him. She always had. And Tom knew exactly how to use that—how the weight of his gaze, the warmth of his voice, the slightest curve of his lips could bend her into shapes he desired. She was predictable, and predictability was something he fed on.
He walked to the head of the table—his seat now. A throne, in all but name.
"Sit, Walburga."
Only when he said it did she obey.
He leaned back, every movement controlled, every gesture engineered.
"Tell me," he began, voice devoid of emotion, "why the Head of House Black has suddenly aligned himself with the neutral faction."
Walburga swallowed. "That… I do not know, my lord. He has become very firm in his opinions. He had, shut himself off from the outside world for decades, and when he emerged, he took back the reins of the family almost immediately as if ..... I don't know my lord it's… unsettling."
Her fascination with Orion flickered again—annoying, predictable, tiresome. Even more irritating was the sting of something sharp when she mentioned Orion Black. Orion, who never spared Walburga a glance. Orion, who carried himself with a born confidence Tom despised instinctively.
Tom didn't admit it—not even to himself—but something in Orion's self-assuredness scraped against an old, buried nerve.
He hated people who never had to fight for control.
He despised people who were born sure of their place.
"And… well, my lord, he has also…" Walburga faltered.
Tom had already slipped past her eyes and into her thoughts. He saw the memory unfold with surgical clarity—Orion's declaration, his cold, logical reasoning, his refusal to bend to Voldemort. The Blacks who did not fear him. The nobles who thought.
Interesting.
And infuriating.
"What is it?" Tom asked softly, even though he already knew.
"H–He forbade any contact with you, my lord. Said the Blacks would not stand with someone who was…" She hesitated.
That hesitation was enough.
Tom stood.
He moved behind her with the silent grace of a serpent, leaning down until his breath brushed her ear.
"It's fine, Walburga…" His voice slid over her like velvet.
Her breath hitched.
"I never realized your loyalty to me surpassed the loyalty you had to your own family."
The words were honeyed poison, trickling into her mind, dissolving resistance and reason alike.
By the time she left, she wore the same dazed, satisfied confusion she always did after speaking with him. Tom knew she wouldn't remember the manipulation—she never did. That was the beauty of his craft.
But when the door clicked shut behind her, the smooth mask cracked—not much, just a fraction. Barely visible even to himself.
Orion Black.
A man who questioned his legitimacy.
A man who didn't bow.
Tom's jaw tightened.
Rich. Noble. Secure in a lineage he never earned.
Everything Tom had never been allowed to be.
He wouldn't name the feeling clawing at him—something sharp, something old. He never acknowledged insecurity, even when it gnawed at his ribs.
But he felt it.
A challenge.
A threat to his control.
A man he needed to break—or understand.
Tom turned toward the door, eyes cold and glittering.
"We will meet soon, Black," he murmured, a promise threaded with threat.
"I want to see whether the so-called nobles are all fools… or whether you are the exception."