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chapter forty-three,
couldn't recognize him at all
"No," Alice said as she took a large bite of a mince pie she had brought from home. The two girls were (as a usual Sunday night went) sitting on Alice's bed, chatting.
Beatrice rolled over to face her friend, with an amused expression on her face. "What do you mean, no?"
"I mean, no, I don't get it. Why would your parents want you to marry your cousin?"
Perhaps Alice had said this a bit too loudly, for Mary Macdonald glanced up from her sketchbook, and shot the pair a horrified look.
Beatrice couldn't help but laugh slightly. Since Massimo had declared his plans to never marry Beatrice (thank Merlin), she had decided to try not to worry about it too much.
"I dunno, the usual reasons. Keeping the bloodline pure, creating alliances between different sections of the family, ensuring an heir is produced..."
Alice mimed throwing up.
"Yeah, my thoughts exactly," Beatrice said.
"So you're just trusting Massimo to find a fiancé before the summer, then? So that you don't have to get engaged to him?"
"Pretty much. This is hardly the type of thing Father could announce to me in a letter, so as long as Massimo can convince the Zabini girl to marry him before then we should be okay."
Alice looked thoughtful, "I see... Y'know, if anything ever goes wrong you can come stay with me. Mum and Dad wouldn't mind."
Beatrice half-shrugged. "Thanks Alice, but I think I'll be okay. For now, at least."
So maybe Beatrice Salvatore had considered running away before, even if for just a moment, but she knew she never would. What kind of horrible, ungrateful daughter would she have to be to leave Theodora all alone?
☾
The next day after school, Beatrice was sitting with Regulus in the library doing some homework. Technically, she was supposed to be helping him with some charms concepts he didn't quite understand, but it had been quite a while since she had worked on size-changing charms herself (third-year was mostly focused on human-affective charms) so most of their study session so far had just been Beatrice looking through her old notes, trying to find that one particularly helpful page she had copied from Alice last year.
