The air tasted of wet stone and old iron, cold enough to bite through wool robes. Silver chains whispered against the flagstones at the slightest movement, and moss crept down the walls in grey-black fingers.

Past midnight, he did not take the main stairs. He took the servant's passage behind the tapestry — the one that bypassed the ward gates — his wand drawn, his breath shallow.

The singing was already there when he reached the bottom of the last stairwell.

No words at first. Just a low, silver thread of sound winding through the corridor, curling around the torch sconces like smoke. It did not echo so much as nest — in the stone, in the dark, in the marrow of his bones.

Draco passed three sealed doors and stopped at the fourth.

His wandlight crawled along the bars — runic iron, cold and black — and landed on the cell's far wall, where the chains converged.

The song stopped when the light touched her.

She did not flinch at the brightness. Her eyes were open and already on him, and they held something the dark had no right to hold — patience. As if she had known, for months, exactly when he would come.