For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Two: Checkmate

People began to disapparate.

The flickering lights and mirrored ceiling captured the rush in the most disorienting way—women in swaths of fanciful dresses disappearing in a blink of an eye, men in tailored suits of Acromantula silk silently slipping into the shadows.

There was the shatter of glass, the shrieks of concerned mothers, and the stench of cigar smoke from the now abandoned poker table. Gwen's gaze swirled around the room, but unabashedly lingered on the mutilated neck of the teenage son of Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Sung-ho.

Crimson blood dripped down the leather skin of the drum, staining the instrument and pooling on the floor. Jeong-Hoon stood over his wife as she sobbed atop her son's lifeless body. There were no tears falling from his eyes, but he looked as though he had been transported to the war fields of Korea—his gaze was empty and his body rigid, as if he had seen a not so friendly poltergeist and it had penetrated some vulnerable part of his soul.

Losing the only heir of a pureblood dynasty surely would not go unnoticed by the tabloids. She briefly assessed the room for the figures of Archie and Kenji, but they were nowhere to be seen.

Good.

Gwen stood and passively allowed the chaos to unfold around her. Her Darkness paralyzed her with the need to see the despair seep out, fresh from the wound—it was as if she was watching a performance enacted on a grand stage, at the mercy of watching helplessly in the crowd as the tragedy in the second act struck.

Across the room, Mauricio Sia, the Ministry hopeful with Muggle sympathies was trying desperately to convince his date to disapparate away from the unraveling horror story with him, but she was not having it.

Her mint and magenta stained dress billowed behind her as she determinedly stalked away toward a group of crying women holding tiny dogs. They instantly embraced her, full of tears, arms shaking with dread and oblivious hounds salivating for jinxed dumplings. Finally, Sia gave up and blinked away.

The taiko group had dispersed, shocked and sullen and sobbing, with one girl's face, the one that had been playing the drum closest to the catastrophe, splattered with Sung-ho's blood.

Throughout the room, House-elves ran around in their aprons and tried to serve the remaining disturbed guests the last remnants of cocktail onions and bulgogi beef, but the only taker was an extremely large man who nervously ate in the corner of the room as his wife gossiped with her friends and stayed far away from the dead body—no doubt only staying at the party to get the latest scoop so they could spread it to their circles later.

Contrastingly, a group of men, the ones who had been playing poker with Mr. Lee, gathered around the antechamber in a huddle, like a ball of serpents, as they wrestled with a form that was squirming and screaming in their grasp.

Their voices pierced the ball room.

"We've got him!"

"The murderer!"

"Mudblood scum! Call the Aurors!"

As they dragged him into the room, Gwen's eyes studied the unfamiliar face of the man who had been captured for Sung-ho's murder.

His skin was dirty, and his hair was disheveled, and blood leaked from a gnash on his forehead. His clothes indicated blue-collar status in the magical world, meaning he was either a poor half-blood, a squib, or a muggle-born. From the insults hurled at him, she assumed he was the latter. Her sharp eye didn't fail to notice the strange sheen his eyes held as he manically thrashed and wriggled.

"I did the world a favor! The apostasy is rising! Purebloods should fear the day their wealth and influence are gone from the world!"

"Save it for the Aurors," one of the men hissed as he spat his chewed Moly stem juice in the man's face. Another man kicked him savagely. Soon, others joined in until the man was on the floor.