Chapter Text
The smell hit first, and in it was everything Harry needed to know—sex, power, and that particular kind of shit that smells like roses if you pay enough for it. In Kabul, places like this stank more honestly. Harry stopped at the threshold, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light, and his shoulder immediately reminded him of its existence—twitched where the shrapnel had sat not long ago. Six months ago he’d been lying in a Birmingham hospital, stuffed full of metal and morphine. Then he’d drunk alone for a long time, flinching at every door slam. And then Draco Malfoy—a scrawny, stuck-up IT prick whom Harry had carried out from under fire in Kandahar—called and said: “There’s a job. Easy. You’ll like it, Potty.”
Malfoy had always been a twat. “Just security,” he’d said then. “You’ll be looking after someone. A very valuable someone.” Valuable—that much Malfoy hadn’t lied about. He’d lied about the rest: about it being easy.
Dolohov’s office smelled of alcohol and nothing else, as if no one had ever lived there, eaten, smoked, or even breathed without extreme necessity. The pens on the desk lay parallel to each other, and for some reason this made Harry want to check whether his fly was undone—though three cacti on the windowsill, labelled on masking tape “Motherland,” “Bitch,” and “Clusterfuck,” somewhat spoiled the picture. The owner matched the room—Dolohov stood by the desk and silently studied Harry, letting the silence do its work.
“Potter.” The accent was barely noticeable, but Harry, who had served with Russian mercenaries, caught it. “Malfoy praised you. Says you’re one of those who don’t break. We’ll see.”
“A test?”
“Sit.”
Dolohov nodded at a chair. Harry sat; Dolohov didn’t, and Harry almost smirked because the trick was familiar to the point of yawning. In the silence that followed, something beeped on the desk. Without taking his eyes off Harry, Dolohov picked up a Tamagotchi, pressed a button, and set it back down next to the parallel pens. Harry decided not to ask.
“Who do you wank to, soldier? Girls or boys?”
Harry blinked. Of all the possible interview questions, this was the last on the list of expected ones.
“Sorry?”
“Don’t play dumb. Answer.”
“Girls. And what’s this got to do with anything?”
Without answering, Dolohov pressed a button. The door opened, and for a second Harry forgot why he was here, because the brunette who walked in had the kind of body that shut down your brain before it had a chance to switch on, and she moved in a way that made Harry have to remind himself where to look and why he was here.
“Lavender, show him the goods,” Dolohov ordered.
In Kabul’s brothels, the Taliban tested informants in much the same way, but Harry wasn’t sure the stakes had been higher there. A second later the brunette was already sitting on his armrest, and Harry hadn’t even properly figured out what to do with someone else’s tits in his face before she was already whispering some nonsense about his biceps in his ear. From this whisper, together with the vanilla and warmth radiating off her in waves, he got hard so fast that his brain didn’t even have time to object, and Harry sat there with a burning face, thinking only about how long it had been since he’d fucked and how shit his timing was to remember it now. The girl felt it and giggled, and Harry noticed out of the corner of his eye a tattoo on her ankle—either a butterfly or something illegible, obviously inked while drunk—and from this crooked butterfly he suddenly felt sorry for her, quickly and inconveniently, and then the vanilla drowned out everything else and there was nothing to think about—until he remembered that Dolohov was in the room, clearly seeing everything—the hard-on, the burning face, and how Harry was staring at someone’s ankle instead of acting like a professional. Dolohov told the girl to leave, and Harry still didn’t understand what this had been—a test of professional suitability or of orientation—Dolohov’s impassive mug gave no hints.
“Enough. Colin, you’re up.”
Lavender fluttered away, and in walked a boy so pretty that for a second Harry decided he’d got the wrong door. The boy hadn’t, and even tried to sit on his lap, but Harry instinctively pulled back. Not from disgust, just… nothing. Zero reaction. Like a beautiful vase in a museum—elegant, but you don’t want to fuck it. The boy didn’t give up, ran a hand over his thigh, looked into his eyes, and the cock that a minute ago could have hammered nails died on the spot.
“Enough.” Dolohov waved the boy away.
“And that was for what?”
Dolohov sat down opposite, fingers interlaced, and spoke as if continuing a sentence he’d started before Harry had even walked in:
“Now listen carefully, Potter. And remember—I won’t repeat myself. Serpent. Snape. Remember that name. Though you won’t be able to forget it—once Snape gets into your head, he stays there, no matter how hard you try to dig him out. Mr Riddle has invested so much in this man that it’s easier to call him an asset—through his bed have passed people on whom laws, budgets, and military contracts depend, and everything they said to Serpent between orgasm and cigarette is stored right here—” he tapped a finger against his temple. “Your job is to make sure it stays there. To make sure Serpent is alive, healthy, and in place. Everything else is none of your concern.”
“Understood.”
“No, you don’t understand. Your cock works fine—we’ve established that, and Lavender established it, and the whole club has probably established it by now too—but with Colin you didn’t get hard, and that’s good, because Snape is a man, and if you get hard for him too when you see him with a cock in his mouth—and you will see it—we’ll have problems, and I solve those problems in only one way.”
Taking a bag of gummy bears from the desk drawer, Dolohov poured several into his palm, tossed them into his mouth, and continued with his mouth full:
“Serpent services whoever Mr Riddle sends. You’ll have to stand there and listen while a Member of Parliament grunts on top of him, and then walks out and shakes your hand with a sweaty palm. The previous guard decided that Serpent wasn’t just a job. It’s easy to confuse your dick with your finger, especially when it comes to Serpent—before him two others made the same mistake, and both ended badly. The last clever bastard was found in pieces in three rubbish bins in Hackney—head separate, and the binman who pulled it out didn’t call the police but the council, because he thought someone had forgotten to take down their Halloween decorations. Questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Welcome to hell, soldier. Now come on, I’ll show you where you’ll be living.”
The staff lived on the fourth and fifth floors, and Harry had expected something like barracks, so when Dolohov pushed open the door, he didn’t immediately understand where he’d ended up. Bedroom. Living room. Jacuzzi. By his standards, not a room but a flat, and one of those he’d never have a shot at.
“Fucking hell,” was all he said.
Dolohov smirked:
“Mr Riddle takes care of his people.”
Harry had barely had time to look around when there was a knock at the door, and on the threshold appeared a short woman with the smile of a nursery teacher—the kind who locks naughty children in dark cupboards.
“Mr Potter!” Her voice was like candy floss. “Dolores Umbridge, housekeeper. How lovely to see a new employee! Especially such a… heroic one.”
She walked into the room without waiting for an invitation. The pink suit gave her a resemblance to an Easter egg, but Harry tensed instinctively. In Afghanistan, women like this usually hid a suicide belt under their burqa. Here, apparently, they hid something worse.
“I hope the room suits you? Some of our… previous employees didn’t appreciate such generosity. Unfortunately, ingratitude is so unattractive, don’t you think?”
“The room is lovely, ma’am.”
“Wonderful! Then there’s hope for a long and fruitful cooperation.” She opened a pink tablet with kittens on it. “Now about the rules, my dear. They’re so simple that even a person with your… education will understand them.”
Harry didn’t have much education—school, army, hospital—but no one had ever called him thick, and this pink bitch had just done exactly that, smiling all the while.
“First. Our beautiful home is equipped with a security system. Cameras monitor order in all public areas. For your own safety, of course. Private rooms and bathrooms are your personal space—only motion sensors there. We’re not monsters, after all!”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“Lovely! Second. Our sweet girls live in the east wing, and our charming boys in the west. Romantic relationships between staff are so distracting from work! So we… disapprove of them. Career is more important than fleeting infatuations, don’t you find?”
Harry nodded. What he understood was different—fucking the staff equals termination. In the best case.
“And finally, the most important thing!” Umbridge’s voice became even sweeter, and Harry tensed. “The fifth floor, east tower—the private apartments of our dear Serpent. This territory is off limits. No one is permitted there without a personal invitation from Mr Riddle or Serpent himself. Absolutely no one, Mr Potter. One curious young man decided to break this rule in November. And the Thames is so cold at that time of year.”
“I don’t like swimming in a cold Thames, ma’am.”
“Wonderful!” She beamed as if Harry had passed an exam. “Then we’ll get along. Dinner is at eight; Monsieur Leclerc is making Peking duck and absolutely does not tolerate lateness. See you then!”
After she left, the perfume still hung so thick that Harry’s eyes watered.
“Does she greet everyone like that?” he asked Dolohov, who was waiting impassively by the door.
“Only those she considers a threat.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest she doesn’t notice. You’re unlucky.” Dolohov walked out into the corridor, and Harry had no choice but to follow.
In the main hall Dolohov left him at the bar with the words “look around” and disappeared somewhere down a service corridor. Harry sat on a high stool, automatically checked whether the exit was visible from here, and only then allowed himself to look around. It was beautiful and genuinely expensive—Harry in his worn forty-pound trainers felt like a cockroach on a wedding cake, though for some reason this cake made you want to wash your hands. Outfits like at an embassy charity auction, jazz, whisky, everyone smiling—if you didn’t know where you’d ended up, it could pass for an ordinary club for those with too much money and too little conscience. Harry knew: at the bar a bald pig in gold watches was groping a girl who was laughing so brightly, so merrily, that you could believe it if not for her face—with a face like that you endure at the dentist’s when they drill without anaesthetic. And at a table opposite an elderly couple was leafing through a menu, and it took Harry a moment to realise that these old farts weren’t choosing wine but a boy.
His left shoulder ached so badly he wanted to howl. It always ached in the evenings, but today especially. The painkillers were back in his room, and where the room was Harry no longer remembered, because Dolohov had led him through corridors, and it had all blurred into one strip of expensive carpets and identical doors.
“You look like a man who urgently needs a double whisky,” the dark-haired barman addressed him. A minute ago he’d been deftly juggling bottles.
“I’m on duty.”
“So are we all! Doesn’t stop me having three cocktails an evening. Quality control, professional necessity. Theodore Nott, by the way. And you’re Serpent’s new guard?”
“Harry Potter.”
“Poor bastard,” Nott said with such sincere sympathy that Harry couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Want a ‘Last Wish’? Tequila, absinthe, and a virgin’s tear.”
“A virgin’s tear?”
“Well, lemon juice. But ‘virgin’s tear’ sounds cooler, you have to admit!”
He laughed at his own joke with such genuine joy that Harry couldn’t help but envy him. This one certainly never had to hide from sniper fire, and at night he probably dreamed of nothing worse than a hangover.
Envying was stupid, but Harry couldn’t help himself. Nott chattered, and Harry listened with half an ear and nodded in the right places, because in reality he was studying the hall, trying to memorise the locations of the exits; the windows had bars—supposedly decorative, only the bars were finger-thick, and Harry had seen ones like that before, but not in clubs—at checkpoints. His therapist in Birmingham, whom he’d ditched after the third session, called this hypervigilance and advised him to breathe. Harry breathed. It didn’t help.
“…and edible glitter. Can you imagine? ‘Unicorn Orgasm’ I called it. It’ll be a hit, you’ll see.”
“Definitely,” Harry said, having no idea what he was talking about.
Something screeched by the stage, and Harry spun round before he had time to think. His body reacted on its own, as it had in Afghanistan to every sudden noise: muscles tensed, and his brain was already running through cover options. And only then did his mind catch up that it was just a microphone, and it was almost funny. In the spotlight stood a dark-skinned guy who made you want to hide your girlfriend, your mum, and just in case yourself.
“Zabini,” Nott said, following his gaze. “Sings like Sinatra, dances like Jackson, fucks like a porn star. Universal soldier of our establishment. Hey, don’t stare too long or he’ll think you’re offering.”
Harry wasn’t staring. He was trying to remember his room number and couldn’t. Third? Fourth? Instead of remembering, he’d been listening to Dolohov’s instructions and studying the camera in the corner of the corridor, calculating dead zones. The pretty boy at the microphone must have heard them talking about him, because he turned and smiled at Harry, giving him an appraising look.
“New boy? How cute,” he winked and returned to the microphone, instantly losing interest.
And then the air in the hall changed, and Harry didn’t immediately understand what had happened. The conversations around him just sort of went quiet all at once, and there was something very familiar about it. Soldiers went quiet like that when a general walked into the tent or when shelling started outside. Which was worse, Harry still didn’t know. Nott shut up and stopped clattering bottles, and even Zabini tore himself away from the microphone, though a second ago it had seemed that nothing existed for him except his own reflection in the chrome stand.
The first thought, when together with everyone else Harry turned to the door and saw who was entering, was wrong. In his head surfaced Malfoy with his dead voice of a sapper saying “everything’s under control” a second before the explosion: “there’s a job, easy, you’ll like it.” Malfoy had known then. Of course he’d known, the bastard, and still said “easy,” and Harry had bought it, because when you’ve pulled someone out from under fire, you take them at their word afterwards, even if that person is Malfoy.
Tom Riddle was tall. That was the first thing Harry noticed, because he himself wasn’t short, and Riddle towered over most of the room. And then Harry saw the bright red eyes, and everything else instantly lost meaning. In two tours in Afghanistan he’d seen plenty of commanders you wanted to keep your distance from. Dead eyes, faces twisted with hatred—he’d seen enough of those. Captain Rookwood made recruits piss themselves at the first parade, but even he looked like a housecat next to Riddle. Rookwood hadn’t chosen to look that way—he’d just got used to dead eyes and lived with them, the way you live with a limp or a scar. Riddle had chosen his eyes himself, and wore them with pleasure.
“Lenses,” Nott whispered, barely moving his lips. “Custom-made. Loves special effects.”
Riddle walked through the hall, and the guests parted before him without thinking. As soon as he stopped at the bar, Nott silently, without dumb jokes or tossing the shaker, placed a glass of something dark red in front of him. Harry wanted to think it was wine.
“Potter.”
His voice was soft, with a rasp—the kind of voice that reads children bedtime stories, and then those children grow up and spend the rest of their lives afraid of the dark.
“Malfoy told me about you. War hero. Touching.”
“Former soldier, sir. Nothing heroic.”
That was a lie. Or the truth. Harry still hadn’t figured out whether there was a difference between heroism and simply not having died in time.
“Don’t be modest.”
Riddle came up close, and Harry caught a whiff of something sweet, floral. Suddenly he remembered Diggory’s funeral, the lilies on the coffin, and how Harry had thrown up in the toilet for ages afterwards from their smell, and the lads thought it was from grief.
“Scars. Almost like lightning. Beautiful,” Riddle said. “You’ll be guarding my Serpent. He’s the most valuable thing I have.”
The way he said “my” made Harry think of collectors who keep rare butterflies under glass.
“If anything happens to him…” Riddle didn’t finish. Just looked, and Harry understood. Death. Slow and creative.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wonderful. Serpent is in the Blue Room now. With Lord Fudge. Two hours already.” Riddle glanced at his watch. “Time to wrap up. The lord has a weak heart, and my Serpent is sometimes given to… enthusiasm. Go, Potter. See what you’ll be guarding.”
Dolohov showed the way: second floor, corridor to the right, third door.
“Knock and enter. Don’t wait for an invitation—they might be… occupied.”
Stopping before the right door, Harry knocked three times and entered. Everything became clear before he even saw the bed—the room stank as if someone had been cooking a soup of sweat, come, and expensive cologne for two hours. In Kabul’s brothels it smelled about the same, only cheaper. He recognised Lord Fudge from the House of Commons at once, though on the rumpled sheets he bore little resemblance to the man who every Thursday looked down from the cover of The Times and talked about family values. Now he was red and wet, breathing so heavily that for a second Harry wondered whether to call an ambulance, and he looked exactly like a man who had just been fucked into oblivion.
Beside him sat a man, and Harry, who had expected to see a porn-star model whore at ten thousand an hour, didn’t immediately understand what he was looking at. The man sitting on the bed could have been twenty-five or forty-five—Harry usually read age in a second, but here he found nothing to latch onto. The robe had slipped off one shoulder, and beneath it were not model abs but the long dry muscles of a swimmer and pale skin so well-kept it looked as if no one had ever touched it—though judging by Lord Fudge, who was still trying to catch his breath, it had just been touched, and not gently. Harry thought about this and immediately regretted it. He studied the face longer than he should have. It couldn’t be called handsome—hooked nose, cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on, thin lips—but Harry looked and couldn’t stop, and what bothered him wasn’t the face but the fact that he couldn’t figure out why the fuck he was staring. The man flicked a black strand of hair from his face, and on his forearm Harry glimpsed a tattoo of a snake crawling out of a skull. The lads in the platoon had similar ones, only simpler and with eagles, and this one was inked so well that for a second Harry thought it moved.
“Time’s up, my lord.”
Harry flinched at that even, low voice. He’d expected something professionally-sexy, switched on to order, and instead got the voice of a man accustomed to being listened to—the way lecturers at expensive universities talk, or judges when they read a verdict.
“A little longer, my serpent,” Fudge croaked, clutching his wrist with thick fingers. “You know I’m generous.”
The man—Snape, Serpent—turned his head, and Harry forgot to breathe, so black were his eyes, bottomless, looking as if they knew everything about you that you were afraid to know yourself. His gaze slid over Harry, then he turned back to the fat man—the whole thing took less than a second, and in that second Harry understood that he had just been weighed, assessed, and dismissed from thought like an empty wrapper. It stung more than it should have.
“Rules are rules, my lord.” Snape freed his wrist and rose to help Fudge dress: buttoned the shirt over the bulging belly, straightened the collar, took up the tie. All the while the fat man kept pawing him—now grabbing his hip, now running a palm over his hair—and Snape didn’t notice those hands the way you don’t notice flies, and that unsettled Harry more than anything else.
“Until next time, my dear.” Fudge tried to kiss him on the lips, but Snape turned his head elegantly, offering his cheek so casually that Harry realised: the lord only thought he was paying for obedience, when in fact Snape had long since decided where he could be kissed, and the man hadn’t even noticed.
“Until next time, my lord.”
When the door closed behind Fudge, Snape poured himself a whisky and drank it slowly, staring at the wall, not once looking towards the doorway where Harry stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do with himself. The last time he’d felt this idiotic was when he’d drunkenly picked up a girl in some shitty pub, but then he couldn’t get it up at all—he’d made a proper fool of himself—and the girl was clearly offended. And now, too, he probably needed to say something or at least stop staring at the pale hand holding the glass, at the long fingers wrapped around the glass, but Harry couldn’t look away, though he knew he should.
When he’d finished the alcohol, Snape dropped the robe, and Harry saw his back. White stripes ran across it, even and identical: someone, once, had taken their time. In one of the field camps Harry had seen marks like these on those who had been interrogated before him—back then those stripes had made him want to vomit, and now too, only Snape apparently didn’t give a damn: he calmly pulled on a shirt, buttoned up without looking in the mirror, fastened cufflinks, gathered his hair, then changed his mind and let it down again, ran a finger along his lower lip wiping away something invisible—and Harry just stood there in his worn trainers by the door like a forgotten umbrella. As he left, Snape passed so close that he brushed Harry’s shoulder, and Harry caught sandalwood, soap, and beneath it all animal fucking, only on his skin it smelled in a way that shut his brain down for a second.
The door closed, and Harry stood frozen in the middle of the room with a pulse of about a hundred and forty and the feeling that he’d failed a mission, though there had been no mission. His mouth was dry as after two hours on post without a canteen, his palms were sweating, and he wiped them absently on his jeans. Usually this feeling hit before combat or after, but here there had been no combat, no enemy, yet there was the sense that you’d fucked up, and what to do with it Harry had no idea. In Kandahar there had been a sniper who for three weeks had been picking off lads from their checkpoint, and Harry had lain for hours on the roof under the scorching sun, trying to catch the glint of optics in the rocks and swallowing baking air—lay there feeling the crosshairs on him, and it went cold between his shoulder blades, and time stretched so slowly you wanted to howl. That was how it felt now. Snape had left, but the crosshairs remained.
-----
Downstairs Dolohov was waiting at the bar, sipping something clear from a shot glass.
“So?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?” Dolohov smirked. “The last one who said that quit an hour later. Didn’t sign up, he said, to guard the devil.”
Shrugging, Harry went to the bar, and Nott with a solemn face silently handed him water—no jokes, no shaker. Harry drank it in one go, but the dryness in his throat didn’t pass.
“Next client in two hours,” Dolohov glanced at his watch. “Lord Crouch. High Court judge. Likes it rough. Stay alert—the judge sometimes gets carried away.”
Out of habit Harry checked his weapon and took the armchair by the stairs, from which the whole hall and both exits were visible, and even arranged something like calm on his face, but the smell wouldn’t leave his head.
“Hey, new boy.”
A bloke was walking towards him who, judging by his face, had been dropped face-first onto asphalt as a child and never picked up.
“Marcus Flint, your partner.” The bloke held out his hand. The handshake was firm but without any dick-measuring. “We’ll swap every other day.”
“Harry Potter.”
“Heard about you. Afghanistan?”
“Two tours.”
“Iraq, three.” Flint nodded and sat on the arm of the neighbouring chair. “Quieter here, but fuck me, sometimes you want to go back to the sand. At least there you know who the wanker is.”
“And here?”
“Here everyone’s a wanker. They just pay you enough to forget it.” Flint bit off a hangnail and studied his finger thoughtfully. He pulled out cigarettes and offered the pack; Harry shook his head. “Right. Serpent doesn’t like it when guards stink of tobacco. Quite the nose on him.”
He smoked the cigarette in three drags and crushed the butt in the ashtray.
“Right, I’m off. Shift till four a.m. Good luck, new boy.” He clapped Harry on the shoulder and headed for the exit, his polished eight-hundred-pound boots gleaming. The money, apparently, really was good.
Left alone—as alone as you can be in a room full of people—Harry closed his eyes, but Snape hadn’t gone anywhere: he stood in the darkness behind his eyelids, with his fingers on the glass and his scars beneath the silk. Dolohov had warned: once Snape gets into your head, you won’t dig him out. He hadn’t lied. Angry at himself, Harry opened his eyes and buried himself in his phone—scrolled through news without reading, just to occupy his head with something normal.
Two hours later Snape appeared again, and Harry didn’t recognise him at first, because the man in the severe black suit with his hair pulled into a knot had nothing in common with the one who an hour ago had been sitting on rumpled sheets in an open robe. Nose in the air, Snape walked through the hall, looking over everyone’s heads—and not a single bastard stood in his way, though the hall was packed like the Tube at rush hour. Harry rose and, catching up with him at the stairs, followed, keeping a distance of five steps. At the door of the Red Room—why were they all named after colours?—Harry took position. Snape entered without knocking and closed the door behind him.
Through the wall Harry heard voices—Crouch was saying something, Snape was answering something, then glasses clinked, and then began what Harry didn’t want to hear but heard anyway. He took out his phone and stared at the screen, trying not to count the moans, and instead counted money: twenty thousand for two hours, according to Dolohov; up to a hundred for the night—that was Nott, whispering at the bar. Snape earned more in one night than Harry had in six months in Afghanistan. In a week—more than in all six years of service. Money had been short all his life, and at first Harry had still hoped the army would fix that, but the small savings accumulated over several years had gone after discharge on booze, rent for a bedsit in Birmingham, and the shrink Harry had told to fuck off after the third session. Maybe he’d been doing the wrong thing with his life.
Behind the door it got louder, and he started to count. One. Two. Three.
Seven thousand two hundred seconds until the end of the session.
Four. Five. Six.