Elyssa Greer came from a Pureblood family, a Pureblood descent of Serbians. She was the outcast of her family; the only Gryffindor after centuries of the Greer and Banović family being sorted into Slytherin. Ellie felt like an outcast before she was...
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As the days passed, the image of Nikolai squeezing Ellie's wrist to the point it was purple and bruised seemed to have slipped every witnesses pair of eyes. Including Nikolai's. Had he expected the redhead to simply go as though it had never happened? He certainly did. The girl was still constantly yanked away from her Gryffindor friends Lavender and Parvarti, and she still hadn't received word of Silas. He still refused to look at her . . .
She should have listened to him from the start but she didn't want to believe such a thing. Silas may have refused to look her in the eye, but he did constantly glance at her wrist whenever he was nearby. There was the slight fear that he may have been mad at her for it, for brushing him off, but Silas was smart. He should've known she wanted to believe the person she would be expected to spend her life with was good and kind.
Other than the misery of being torn away from her friends and being made to hang around people who would laugh at her suffering, there was also the misery of her poor diet thanks to her betrothed. It began to hurt that Nikolai felt the need to pick out what she ate, and it hurt going to sleep at night starving. It was making Ellie feel ugly . . . and gross . . . and she was beginning to see it. She knew that he was making her see an image of herself completely different to the way everyone else viewed her, but she wanted to see what they saw again.
Ellie never much cared for the way her body looked.
Until now.
Some nights she wished she knew where the kitchen was, but even then she wouldn't go after it. She would have at the start.
After swallowing her last grape, she stared down at her reflection on her plate. There were black shadows beneath Ellie's blue eyes that made her look tired and her usual frown made her look miserable beyond repair. Her face just looked . . . different. There was a stranger staring back at her, screaming at her to fight back. But she was afraid. What if she couldn't defend herself behind closed doors? What if Nikolai got his friends to cause harm to her? What if there was no way to leave him, ever, and he hurt her every day and night?
But she had to try. Only for now she wanted evidence on her body, and the bruising on her wrist had been a start. She used her polaroid to snap images of it. A polaroid her parents were unaware that she owned, all thanks to their servant Isobel who suggested a polaroid camera to take still images of Ellie's paintings. Three days ago she took a picture of her wrist, and today it sits hiding in one of her socks in her trunk.
"You all right, love?" a voice came from beside her. Nikolai's breath pressed into her cheek and ear and she wanted to cringe and wipe it on her shoulder. Instead she sat there, and her eyes flicked up ahead away from her plate.
"Of course," the redhead muttered, turning and forcing a small smile at him. She hated it. She hated him.
"You'll be with Malfoy after this in the library to work on your Potions theory."
