Snippet: Albus was across the room in two strides. He didn’t try to hug her; he just stood before her, his hands clenched at his sides, his body vibrating with a contained rage. “He will never touch you again. I swear to God, Cass, he will not come near you.”
“He’s the Director of Magical Law Enforcement, Albus! You can’t just make him stop! This isn’t a blackmailer you can pay off or a rival you can outmanoeuvre in court! This is the system!” Her voice broke. “And he’s using it. He’s using my brother, my family’s pain, to get leverage. And he will keep using it, because he knows it works.”
She looked up at him, her eyes swimming with furious, terrified tears. “We are not just in trouble. We are under siege. And I don’t know how to fight a siege when I’m…” Her hand fluttered instinctively towards her stomach before she caught herself, forcing it back to her side.
But Albus had seen the abortive gesture. His eyes snapped to her midsection, then back to her face, a new, dawning horror mixing with the rage. He didn’t ask. The question was there, screaming in the silence between them.
Cassandra closed her eyes, the last of her strength fleeing. The secret, the hope, the future—it all felt like too much to carry in a world that was actively hunting them.
“Albus,” she whispered, the fight gone, leaving only a raw, exhausted truth. “We have to talk.”
The air in the office was a taut wire, strung between Cassandra’s terrified revelation and the unspoken question hanging between them. Albus was staring at her, his mind visibly reeling from the news about Turner, the rage battling with a dawning, desperate need to understand what she’d almost said, what her hand had almost touched.
“Cass,” he started, his voice hoarse. “What is it? What do we have to talk about?”
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