Chapter 166: Questioning
The debriefing had largely concluded, leaving behind a suffocatingly warm reunion for the Weasley family.
"I have taught you better than this, Ginny!"
Arthur Weasley exhaled a long, ragged breath. He bent at the waist, his usually gentle hands gripping his daughter's trembling shoulders with desperate, earnest concern.
"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you cannot see where it keeps its brain!"
"Oh, Arthur, stop pestering her!" Molly Weasley shoved her husband aside and pulled Ginny firmly into her broad, suffocating embrace.
She pressed frantic kisses to her daughter's forehead, her shoulders heaving with loud sobs. "Mum isn't blaming you, dear. We were just so worried about you... Thank Merlin you are back with us, safe and sound..."
It was a nauseatingly perfect family portrait, painted in tears, crushing hugs, and the sickening relief of surviving a disaster.
Harry stood quietly at the foot of the adjacent bed. He hovered at the edge of the candlelight, his green eyes shimmering with undisguised envy and a bitter, hollow ache.
Having grown up locked inside that dusty cupboard at the Dursleys, he had never known this kind of unconditional parental love. The kind of love where you were held tight and wept over, even after making a catastrophic, life-threatening mistake.
He watched the Weasley family, a sour longing blooming thick in his chest.
He wished, with a sudden and violent intensity, that there were people in this world who would cry for his safety. People who would lose their tempers out of sheer terror for him, and then drag him into a hug so tight it left him breathless.
Sitting stiffly on her own hospital bed, Tamara felt her stomach churning with a violent nausea that far exceeded the misery of swallowing undercooked Polyjuice Potion.
'Pathetic,' she thought, her inner voice dripping with aristocratic disdain.
These so-called emotions were utterly useless. They served only to make people dull, weak, and riddled with fatal, exploitable flaws. The truly powerful were born to stand alone, unburdened by the weeping dead weight of family.
Fortunately, someone else reached their absolute limit with the noisy environment before the Dark Lord had to resort to a Silencing Charm.
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen!"
Madam Pomfrey finally snapped. She bustled forward like an irate mother hen protecting her chicks, waving her arms wildly to corral the crowd toward the doors.
"Visiting hours are strictly over! The patients require absolute peace and rest! Everyone out, except for the injured who must remain in bed!"
The Weasleys thanked Dumbledore with exhausting profusion, cast one last lingering, tearful look at Ginny, and were finally ushered out the heavy oak doors by the matron.
The Hospital Wing fell into a blessed, ringing silence.
But Tamara had no intention of remaining in this room, steeped in the lingering stench of warmth and tears, for a single second longer.
Especially not with Ginny Weasley staring at her from the adjacent bed. The ginger girl was looking at her as if trying to bore a hole straight through her skull; the wide, unblinking gaze gave Tamara the creeps.
"I am going for a walk."
Tamara threw back the crisp white covers and forced her aching body out of bed, completely ignoring Madam Pomfrey's sharp gasp of outrage.
"Miss Riddle! Your body still needs—"
"I have already consumed three bottles of Pepperup Potion and two of Blood-Replenishing Potion, Madam Pomfrey," Tamara cut in. She threw her slightly disheveled black robes over her shoulders, her tone cold, precise, and brooking absolutely no argument. "The smell in here makes me sick. I require fresh air."
Seeing the dark-haired girl's icy, determined posture, Madam Pomfrey finally threw her hands up in defeat. "Fine! But only in the corridor! Do not go far!"
Tamara pushed open the heavy double doors of the Hospital Wing. The cold, damp draft of the stone corridor hit her face, and she let out a small, quiet sigh of relief.
But before she could even draw a full breath of the stale castle air, a messy head of black hair detached itself from the shadows of the corner, stepping directly into her path.
"Tamara."
Harry Potter stood dead center in the hallway. Behind his round glasses, his green eyes appeared exceptionally bright and sharp in the dim torchlight.
Clearly, the boy had ignored Madam Pomfrey's orders to return to Gryffindor Tower; he had been lurking out here, waiting specifically for her.
"That diary... did you know something about it all along?"
Harry stared at Tamara, his voice tight with an urgency he did not even seem to register himself. "That day in the girls' bathroom, the thing you were looking for... it was the diary Ginny threw away, wasn't it?"
Faced with this blunt, Gryffindor-style interrogation, Tamara felt no panic. Instead, a mocking, elegant sneer curled the corners of her lips.
"Is this how you repay the person who saved your life?" she asked, her voice a soft, dangerous purr. "By interrogating me in the dark with your ridiculous, half-baked deductions?"
She reached into the pocket of her robes and smoothly withdrew a small, black book. It looked perfectly ordinary, its leather cover scuffed and worn. To maintain her flawless disguise, Tamara had even taken the time to write a few mundane, idiotic notes on the first few pages.
Without a shred of hesitation, Tamara shoved the black book hard against Harry's chest.
"This is merely my private diary, Potter."
Tamara tilted her chin up, looking down her nose at him with a gaze of pure, icy arrogance.
"But if you truly believe this is the evil Dark Magic artifact that opened the Chamber of Secrets and nearly killed your little friend's sister, then by all means, take it. Take it right now and run to claim credit with your beloved Headmaster Dumbledore."
She stepped half an inch closer, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "Tell him the Heir of Slytherin is standing right in front of you. Have him lock me away in Azkaban."
Harry instinctively brought his hands up to catch the book before it fell.
It was light. The worn leather carried a faint trace of Tamara's body heat. It was, by all physical metrics, just an ordinary, battered diary.
He did not even bother to open the cover. He did not give the pages a second glance before immediately thrusting it back toward her.
"I never suspected you were the culprit!"
Harry's voice cracked, rising sharply in the empty corridor. It was thick with frustration and a wild, inexplicable agitation. "I know it wasn't you! I know you are the one who saved everyone!"
He stared at Tamara's pale, beautiful face—a face that always seemed designed to keep the entire world at a freezing distance. His gaze dropped briefly to the high collar of her robes, hiding the horrific scar she had earned down in the Chamber. A messy, volatile cocktail of anger and deep heartache finally boiled over the edges of his control.
"But you clearly knew everything, yet you always keep the danger hidden from us!"
Harry stepped closer, his chest heaving. "Why can't you just tell us when you are in trouble? Why do you have to face those deadly things alone, every single time?!"
He refused to blink, his green eyes locking onto her dark ones. "Aren't we friends? Do you really distrust me that much?"
The sheer force of this confession, dripping with foolish, bleeding-heart sincerity, actually made Tamara freeze.
'Friends? Trust?'
Such absurd, pathetic concepts did not even exist in the Dark Lord's vocabulary. They were weaknesses meant for lesser creatures.
also, these two specific words were currently spilling from the mouth of Harry Potter. Her fated nemesis. The prophesied savior destined by the universe to be her mortal enemy.
The sheer, staggering irony of the situation almost made Tamara throw her head back and laugh out loud.
But seeing Potter's face flushed red with genuine, agonizing worry, Tamara found herself momentarily paralyzed. For a split second, she could not summon a single word vicious enough to strike him down.
It was not because her cold heart had suddenly gone soft.
It was because she suddenly realized that, over the course of the past two years, she had already exhausted every single cruel insult, every mocking sneer, and every sarcastic remark in her arsenal on this spectacular idiot.
Yet, no matter how deeply she wounded his pride with her words, no matter how violently she drove him away with her aristocratic arrogance, Potter always came crawling back. He always returned with that same foolish, hot-blooded, earnest expression, acting as if her cruelty had never happened.
Even when she actively did nothing, his favorability rating in the system had once surged straight to eighty, and it constantly threatened to climb even higher.
It gave the Dark Lord an unmatched, infuriating sense of utter powerlessness.
Before she could force her mouth to form another mocking retort, a cold, drawling voice sliced through the tension from the side.
"This is none of your business, Potter."
Draco Malfoy, who had evidently been waiting in the deep shadows outside the Hospital Wing, stepped into the torchlight.
He moved without hesitation, stepping smoothly in front of Tamara and completely blocking Harry's view of her.
Draco tilted his pale, pointed chin, his grey eyes flashing with absolute contempt for the Gryffindor.
"Put away that self-righteous savior act. How we Slytherins choose to handle our affairs is not for a Gryffindor to dictate." He sneered, adjusting his cuffs with practiced elegance. "The House of Malfoy will handle Tamara's well-being. We certainly do not need your hypocritical concern."
This aggressively protective speech caused Harry's expression to darken into a thundercloud instantly. He clenched his fists at his sides, his jaw locking as he prepared to shout back.
But from behind Draco's shoulder, Tamara let out a very faint, airy chuckle.
She looked at Draco's back, feeling an immense wave of satisfaction at her loyal follower's perfectly timed intervention. Compared to Potter's nauseating, unpredictable sincerity, she infinitely preferred Draco's brand of absolute defense—a loyalty built firmly on mutual interest, pure admiration, and shared Slytherin allegiance. It was clean. It made sense.
"Well said, Draco," Tamara murmured softly.
She looked past Draco's shoulder, fixing Harry with a glance so cold and detached it was as if she were looking at a complete stranger, and gave a brief nod of approval. "Let us go. Let us not waste another second of our time here."
The two Slytherins turned and walked away together, their black robes billowing in unison, leaving Harry standing entirely alone in the freezing corridor.
Watching their retreating figures disappear into the gloom, the crushing sensation of being completely excluded made Harry's chest feel dangerously tight.
He looked down, staring blankly at his empty hands. His fingertips felt as though they still held the rough texture and the lingering warmth of her diary from just moments ago.
Harry let out a harsh breath, irritably running a hand through his already disastrously messy hair, and violently kicked a stray piece of loose stone into the corner.
"So frustrating..."
Meanwhile.
Once they rounded the corner of the grand staircase and were completely out of Potter's line of sight, the rigid tension in Tamara's spine finally relaxed. A cold, triumphant smile of relief touched the corners of her lips.
After all her biting sarcasm, her cruel distancing, and allowing Malfoy to insult him to his face, she must have finally left a terrible, irreparable impression on the savior's fragile heart.
Filled with a smug sense of certainty and a delicious hint of vengeful pleasure, Tamara addressed the damn Virtue System in her mind.
'Now, that idiot savior's favorability toward me should have finally dropped, right?'
The perky electronic voice in her head, usually so annoyingly talkative, fell into a rare, deathly silence.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Just as Tamara began to frown, genuinely wondering if the broken machine had crashed again from the residual backlash of Dark Magic...
The system finally spoke.
It used a cheerful, sickeningly sweet, swaying tone that sounded like pure, unadulterated horror to Tamara's ears.
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