𝐒𝐀𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐄 || Severus Snape x OC ||

24. MEDIEVAL TALES

*.·:·.☽ ✧ ☾.·:·.*

Slender, pale hands over the intricate patterns of the Death Eater mask. Soft flesh against the hardened metal, her fingers following the patterns carved upon the silver. So beautiful from up close, here in the quiet and calmness of the dormitory, yet this mask, as all others made for each Death Eater, was used for nothing but malice and terror.

She set the mask inside the drawer of her nightstand wrapped in cloth, and glanced outside the window at the darkness of the night. Her skin still recalling the shivers from the warmth of his breath upon her neck. Her eyes closed, and the potion master's figure came out of the deepest shadows of her mind.

The dark infamous alley, the soft rain dripping down, his figure caging her, her lips burning so close yet so far from his. Her body responding to his closeness on its own, seeking his touch. Seeking all that she instinctively knew he could do to her. She could feel the storms of his dark pools that deep behind the obsidian veil, beneath the rock-solid exterior, was fuming magma longing to be released.

But he was holding back. He wasn't the kind of man to seize the opportunity that was so vulnerably standing before him.

No, Severus' eyes spoke of a different kind of desire. One that was deeper, and one that she knew he would never force on her.

It was only in that moment when he had pulled away from her, rising to his full height and barricading himself behind his own stone walls, that she felt the cold breeze of the Alley upon her skin.

"Why did you let him speak to you like that, professor?" she had mumbled through her raven locks that had escaped her cape's hood. His gaze thundered at those words. A wound he wished none to touch, none to near, nor ever to tread in the dark corners of his past. She didn't need to ask him to know if Sirius was a part of a painful past. This much she could already read in the harshness of his rigid form and the restrained cruelty of his cold appearance.

Yes, he was a master of dark arts, a master of potions, and a sorcerer of restrained feelings, too. But emotions, like all things alive, bleed. They are born within and long to be freed of the flesh that they torment in their caged form. They bleed out in a kiss, a touch, and from the depths of a glance. His black pools swirled with storms behind their dark veils but bleed they did. And like a priestess at a sacrifice, Alice collected the bleeding emotions with the chalice of her soul and fed them to the wolf of her heart who howled in hunger.

A hunger she couldn't decipher as her bare form lay now between the sheets, alone and in the silence of the night. A hunger deep within. To protect. To give in...to submit in a manner she never had before.

The same unyielding power from within her that made her fingers twitch and blacken at Sirius' house, purred when Severus's hand had come upon hers to keep her at bay. Like a whisperer of beasts enchanted, his touch alone and the sound of his velvety voice were enough to ease her heart and tame the side she feared the most about herself.

She tossed. She turned. Ruffled bedsheets, but the hunger remained. There. Growing. Howling his name. A calling deep within that yearned for more. She pressed her thighs together, an instinctive move to ease what her body longed for but her mind dared not confess.

In the coming day, the solitude of the dormitory would come to an end. Students, old and new would flood it again. And perhaps it would be for the better. Perhaps the sense of them being near would silence the yearning in her and would scold her thoughts to behave. To heed what he had taught her over the summer, for she doubted it no more, there were far worse things coming ahead than what had happened already.

But for now, in the middle of that night, and in the solitude of the Ravenclaw dormitory, Alice breathed out his name tightening her grip on her pillow, as if his name alone could summon him into the room and break the curse. The curse of a fate she had never asked for. The curse of loving a man she could not have. And the curse of her own blood...