Delphi raised an eyebrow.
She was amused, a little, because that was how it was. She had stayed long enough to establish a pattern. It was never a good thing before now, Rowle learning her, and her in turn learning Potter. Learning everything there was to know.
She was good at it, and she knew something about Vic.
What she was about to say wasn’t a lie. She had to remember that, artful as she was and as casual as she pretended to be–they were both world-weary. She had always had a hint of the truth mixed in, and it didn’t help that she had had ….
“Time. It was like I blinked and I was spinning a time-turner,” she said, “but no, it was real life. That never happened to me before Vic.”
Time stood still for her forever, and she always kept in mind that things weren’t permanent around her. Just herself and the goal. Until Vic. She drummed her fingertips against her arm, knowing she had to tell the truth to make him see. Just the truth about this one part of her past.
“I had nightmares about my father’s enemy as a kid,” she said, simply. “I always was told if they discovered who I was, I’d suffer. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt me. Maybe they would. Rowle sent me out one day on the anniversary of the…great battle of Hogwarts. I heard enough. The rumors of a child, and what they would like to do, I heard enough.”
She gestured towards the children’s bedroom. Their children, yes, but hers in that she had doomed them. She could believe …
Then again, he had sympathized with her and still left her to rot in Azkaban. Was that not worse?
“They’re two now. Soon they will be eleven. Every magical child at age eleven gets a letter. No matter where they are.”
In a city known for its crime, they’d somehow built a bubble of safety. They were unchallengeable together, and despite the literal shit hole that was Hub City, Vic didn’t doubt their safety.
He’d been reckless to forget about the entire secret world Delphi had emerged from. She’d been running when they met, then they’d started running together. There was a darkness in Delphi’s history, they didn’t deny this to each other.
Her world believed her to be some unfathomable danger.
“You’re saying the boys are in danger?”
He wouldn’t write it off. His heart clenched. There was a time in his past when he’d failed a child, and she lost her life because of it. In many ways she’d almost been his own. He’d killed to protect her, but in the end it was for nothing. An enormous loss.
He would not lose their sons.