This chapter has some R-18 in the first half.
Chapter 50:
– Harry Sitri –
The shower had been exactly what I needed.
I toweled my hair just enough to stop it dripping, and tossed the towel over the back of a chair on my way into the bedroom. I didn't bother getting dressed. Mostly because I felt a familiar magical signature on the other side of the hotel room door.
My mouth curved into a grin. I didn't rush. I just walked to the door and pulled it open.
I didn't expect a member of my peerage to show up so quickly. But, then again, they were able to teleport freely across the world whereas I had to stick to mundane or wizarding travel since I had Marlene and Jasmine with me.
My Queen Lilja stood in the hallway.
She was wearing a fitted cream blouse tucked into a high-waisted charcoal skirt that stopped just above her knees. Those green eyes of hers were already locked onto my face with an expression halfway between relief and the specific brand of exasperated fondness she reserved exclusively for me.
Then her gaze dropped.
It traveled down my neck, over my chest, lingered on my abs for a beat longer than she probably intended, and then landed squarely on my cock hanging full and heavy between my thighs, still flushed from the hot water.
The pink that bloomed across her cheeks was instantaneous and gorgeous. "Really?" she said.
"Really what?"
"You answer the door like that. Just... completely naked. No hesitation whatsoever."
"I knew it was you."
"And that's supposed to make it better?" She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth was twitching. She didn't wait for an invitation. She stepped past me into the suite with the kind of purposeful stride that Valkyries probably used when marching into enemy fortifications, her shoulder brushing my bare chest as she passed. The contact sent a jolt through both of us and she pretended it didn't.
I closed the door and watched her survey the room with a critical sweep before she walked straight to the massive king bed, sat down on the edge, crossed one leg over the other, folded her arms beneath her chest in a way that pushed her breasts up against the silk of her blouse, and fixed me with a look that was equal parts relief, affection, and the desire to wring my neck.
"Harry Sitri," she said, and the way she used my full name told me I was about to get a lecture. "I have been your Queen for less than two months. In that time you have fought a stray devil Voldemort in an underground chamber, killed a second basilisk, survived a Fallen Angel invasion of your school, dueled a Cadre-class warmonger alongside your mother in the sky above Scotland, fought an army of goblins in the Underworld, and now you have crashed a commercial airplane into a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and burned an airplane sized Thunderbird to death from the inside." She paused. "From the inside, Harry!"
Huh? She already knew about that last part? I didn't even give Serafall the full report when I sent a message that I was okay and in a hotel the Gremory Clan owned. Lilja must have stopped by the island first before coming straight here. I wonder if she ran into Newt and got the story from him?
I grinned and walked toward her, completely unbothered by the fact that I was still dripping wet and very much naked, and she tracked every step I took with those green eyes even as she maintained her stern expression. Her fingers were gripping the bedspread a little too tight, though, I noticed.
"This time wasn't my fault," I said, stopping in front of her close enough that my knees were almost touching hers. "A corrupted magical bird attacked a random commercial flight. There was no way to predict that. No scheming Dark Lord pulling strings, no assassination plot. Just a crazy bird and bad luck."
Lilja held my gaze for a long moment, searching for something in my face. The irritation slowly drained out of her expression. Her hand came up and pressed flat against my stomach, warm palm against wet skin, fingers spreading over the ridges of muscle.
"I know it wasn't your fault," she said quietly. "I know that. And I know you saved over three hundred people on that plane, including Jasmine and her mother and our new family member Asia, and I am so incredibly proud of you for that." She swallowed. "But I almost went into a full panic when Serafall messaged me and told me your plane went down before she told our peerage you were okay. I'm pretty sure I was also able to feel you get hurt through our bond. I'm your Queen after all…"
She felt me hurt halfway across the planet? I reached down and cupped her face in both hands, tilting it up toward mine. Her skin was soft and warm against my palms and her eyes were shining with something she was too proud to let fall. "I'm okay," I said. "I'm right here."
"You are infuriatingly difficult to keep alive, Harry Sitri."
"Good thing I have the strongest Valkyrie watching my back."
That earned me a small, helpless smile that broke through the last of her composure. "That's technically still my big sister, but the thought is appreciated."
Then she stood up, let out a sharp exhale, and kissed me. Her mouth opened against mine and her tongue slid past my lips with a desperate, searching urgency. Her hands dropped to my shoulders and she pulled herself flush against my body. The silk of her blouse was cool against my bare chest. Her skirt pressed against my thighs. I could feel her heart hammering through the thin layers of fabric separating us.
I kissed her back just as fiercely, one hand tangling in her damp red hair while the other wrapped around her waist and hauled her tighter against me. She made a soft, breathy sound into my mouth, "Mmh," something between a moan and a sigh that vibrated through my lips and went straight to my cock.
Her fingers raked down from my shoulders across my chest, tracing the lines of muscle. She mapped the ridges of my abs, the hard cut of my obliques, the trail of dark hair below my navel, and when her fingertips brushed the base of my cock she didn't pull away this time. Her hand wrapped around me, firm and sure, and I was already hardening fast in her grip.
"Mmm, you were hard before I even touched you," she murmured against my mouth.
"You walked into my room wearing that skirt. What did you expect."
She smiled into the kiss and squeezed me, and I groaned low in my throat and bit her bottom lip in retaliation, tugging it gently before releasing. Her answering gasp was everything.
We were still tangled together, her hand slowly stroking me while I kissed along her jaw toward the sensitive spot behind her ear that always made her shiver, when the bathroom door swung open behind us with a burst of fragrant steam.
"God, the bathroom in this place is absolutely divine," Marlene's voice rang out, bright and enthusiastic and completely casual. "Heated floors, a rain shower big enough for six people, three different types of body wash, and a mirror that doesn't fog? Rias Gremory's family clearly understands that the bathroom is the true measure of civilizaaa..." She trailed off.
I turned my head.
Marlene McKinnon stood in the bathroom doorway wearing absolutely nothing, one towel draped over her shoulder and another being used to scrub lazily at her wet blonde hair. Water droplets clung to her and ran down between her breasts, which were full and round and swaying gently with the motion of her arm. She was forty-something and looked barely thirty, and she stood there in the doorway with the kind of complete, unapologetic nakedness that only someone who had spent decades being the most gorgeous woman in any room could pull off.
Her blue eyes moved from me to Lilja, then down to Lilja's hand still wrapped around my cock, then back up to Lilja's face.
The silence lasted exactly one and a half seconds.
"Oh," Marlene said, and her surprise melted into a slow, knowing smile. "Hi there, Lily. I wasn't expecting to see you here. Or should I have been…?"
Lilja broke the kiss and blinked. Her hand didn't move from my cock. Her head swiveled from Marlene to me and then back to Marlene, green eyes flicking rapidly between us as the pieces snapped together with the kind of speed that only a reincarnated genius witch turned Valkyrie turned devil Queen could manage.
"You," she said, pointing at me with her free hand. "And her." She pointed at Marlene. "Already?"
She didn't use very many words and yet I understood her question completely.
She let out a long, slow breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the exasperation had settled into something more complicated. Something that was equal parts resignation, amusement, and if I wasn't mistaken, a thread of genuine curiosity. "I knew this was going to happen eventually, I suppose."
Marlene tossed the towel she'd been using on her hair onto the bathroom counter and began walking toward us with the kind of slow, hip-rolling swagger that turned a simple stroll across a hotel room into an event. She didn't try to cover herself. She didn't blush. She moved like a woman who had spent her entire adult life understanding the exact effect her body had on people and had long since stopped pretending she didn't enjoy it.
"And aren't you glad it finally did?" she said, her voice dropping lower.
Lilja's eyes betrayed her. She tried to keep them on Marlene's face. She really did. But they dipped, just for a moment, tracing down to the swell of Marlene's breasts, the tight peaks of her nipples still stiff from the shower, the water trailing down her stomach.
Lilja's throat worked as she swallowed, and her hand tightened involuntarily around my cock in a way that made me suck air through my teeth.
"Don't give me that look, love," Marlene said softly, stopping at the edge of the bed close enough that Lilja could have reached out and touched her. "You and I both know this isn't new. Maybe the bodies are different, maybe the names have changed, but the way you're looking at me right now?" She tilted her head, wet hair falling across one eye. "That's the same way Lily Evans used to look at me across the Gryffindor common room after everyone else had gone to bed."
Something shifted in Lilja's expression. Her hand finally released my cock and came up to press against her own chest, fingers curling over her heart. "Marley," she whispered, and the nickname came out in Lily Evans' voice, not Lilja's, pulled from a life she'd already lived and lost.
They stared at each other across two feet of space.
Then Lilja moved. She stood up from the bed, took one step forward, grabbed Marlene's face in both hands, and kissed her!
It wasn't a gentle kiss either.
Marlene made a sharp, surprised sound against Lilja's lips before melting into it completely, her hands flying up to grip Lilja's waist, pulling their bodies together. Bare skin pressed against silk clothes, hair tangled together, and the sound they made when their tongues met was a shared, shuddering moan that filled the entire room.
"Mmmh... Mmhh..."
I stood there, naked and hard and absolutely transfixed, watching my Queen kiss the mother of one of my closest friends like the world was about to end and this was the only thing that mattered.
Marlene broke the kiss first, breathing hard, her lips swollen and glistening. She kept her forehead pressed against Lilja's and her hands on her waist, fingers tracing slow circles on the silk of her blouse.
"I waited twenty years to do that again," Marlene grinned. "So," she said, keeping one arm around Lilja's waist while turning her body just enough to give me a clear view of everything. "Here we are. Two women who loved each other in a past life, standing in a luxury hotel suite in Shanghai with a half-devil prince who happens to be the son one of us died to protect and who the other one just 'rode' into port on an ice boat."
"When you put it like that it sounds complicated," I said.
"Darling, your entire life is complicated. This is just the fun kind." She looked back at Lilja. "What do you say, Lils? Think we can share?"
Lilja wiped the tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. She looked at Marlene, then at me, and I watched the wheels turn behind those impossibly green eyes.
"Fuck yes," she said to me.
That was all I needed to hear! I closed the distance between us in two steps.
Lilja grabbed the front of... well, there was nothing to grab, so she just put her hand flat on my chest and pushed me backward until the backs of my legs hit the bed and I sat down hard.
Marlene laughed as she moved herself closer to the two of us.
Lilja stood over me. She reached up and began unbuttoning her blouse slowly, one button at a time, her eyes never leaving mine. Marlene moved behind her and helped, pressing her bare body against Lilja's back and reaching around to work the lower buttons while pressing her lips to the side of Lilja's neck.
"Aahh..." Lilja's breath stuttered when Marlene's teeth grazed her sensitive neck.
The blouse fell open, revealing a simple black bra that was doing heroic work containing Lilja's full breasts. They'd only gotten bigger and perkier since she became a devil. Marlene unclasped it from behind with practiced fingers, and it joined the blouse on the floor. Lilja's breasts spilled free, round and perfect, her pink nipples already stiff and peaked.
Marlene's hands slid around from behind, cupping both breasts, thumbs circling the nipples, and Lilja let out a throaty moan that made my cock twitch hard against my thigh.
"Nnh... Marley..."
"I've missed these," Marlene murmured against her ear, loud enough for me to hear. "Bigger now than they were at school, but they feel perfect all the same."
Lilja's skirt was next. Marlene's fingers found the zipper at the side and drew it down, and the charcoal fabric pooled at Lilja's feet, leaving her in nothing but a pair of sheer black panties that were already visibly dark with wetness between her thighs.
Maou...
I looked up at them from the bed. "You're both so fucking beautiful," I said, and I meant it with every demonic cell in my body.
Marlene smiled against Lilja's neck. "Hear that, Lils? Our boy has good taste."
"Our boy," Lilja repeated, and the possessiveness in the word was thick enough to taste. She hooked her thumbs into her panties and pulled them down, stepping free. She stood completely naked now, her body on full display. The trimmed patch of dark red hair between her legs was glistening with her own arousal. She climbed onto the bed, straddled my lap, and settled her weight against me, her wet pussy pressing directly against the underside of my cock.
"Fffuck," I breathed, my hands instinctively gripping her hips.
"Language," she whispered, and then kissed me with a smile on her lips.
Marlene climbed onto the bed behind Lilja, kneeling up against her back, sandwiching her between us. Her hands roamed freely, one sliding up to tease Lilja's left nipple while the other reached down between our bodies and wrapped around my cock, angling it so the head rubbed directly against Lilja's slick, swollen clit.
"Aahh... hhaahh..." Lilja gasped into my mouth, her hips rolling forward involuntarily.
"There she is," Marlene purred, stroking me slowly while grinding the tip against Lilja's pussy in lazy, teasing circles. "I remember that sound. You made that exact sound the first time I touched you in the Astronomy Tower, fifth year. Middle of February, snow falling through the open windows, and you grabbed my hand and put it right... here."
She pressed me firmly against Lilja's pussy entrance, not pushing in, just holding the pressure, and Lilja broke the kiss with a shuddering whimper that echoed off the hotel room's high ceilings.
"Mmmnhh... don't tease, Marley, I can't..."
"You can. You always could. You just never wanted to wait." Marlene looked over Lilja's shoulder directly into my eyes, her expression equal parts wicked and worshipful. "She's dripping, Harry. Can you feel that? She's absolutely soaking your cock and you haven't even put it in yet."
I could feel it. The slick sensation of Lilja's juices was coating me, making every slide of Marlene's hand against us obscenely wet and audible. The room was filled with the scent of sex and steam and the perfume that clung to Lilja's hair.
"Tell me what you want," I said against Lilja's lips.
She pulled back just enough to meet my eyes. Her own were blazing with lust and excitement. "I want you inside me," she said. "And I want her hands on me while you are. Don't make me wait another second."
Marlene tilted my cock to the right angle and let go.
Lilja sank down.
"Oohhh... fuck..." The sound Lilja made as she took me inside her was low and raw. She was impossibly tight and blazing hot and slick enough that I slid all the way up in one smooth motion that had both of us shaking by the time her ass met my thighs. Her pussy swallowed me completely.
I could feel her fleshy walls gripping my sensitive cock from all angles. My tip was pressed up right against her cervix.
– Lilja Nornas –
She could feel every single inch of him.
Harry's cock stretched her open in a way that made her thighs tremble and her breath catch.
This is only the second time we've done this. Only the second time I've had him inside me, and it already feels like my body was made to fit around his.
Technically, their first time had been back at the mansion in Kuoh. That night had been slow, tender, and reverent. It was beautiful.
This was something else entirely.
This was Harry sitting on the edge of a massive bed, his blue eyes burning up at her with naked, shameless want. This was Marlene McKinnon's bare body pressed against her back, warm and soft and achingly familiar, with her fingers circling Lilja's clit in slow, maddening loops while her lips painted a trail of wet kisses across the curve of Lilja's back.
And this was Lilja's first threesome. In either lifetime.
Lily Evans would have fainted at the thought. But I'm not Lily Evans anymore, am I? I'm Lilja Nornas, Queen of Harry Sitri, and right now I have my best friend's naked body against my spine and the most beautiful man I've ever known splitting me open on his cock and I don't want either of them to stop.
She braced her palms flat against Harry's chest, feeling the hard planes of muscle flex beneath her fingers, and she lifted her hips.
The drag of his cock against her inner walls as she rose was exquisite. It became a slow, slick pull that made every nerve ending between her legs sing in desperate protest at the loss. She could feel her own wetness coating his shaft, feel the way her pussy clung to him like it refused to let go, and the obscene, wet sound it produced when she reached the peak of her lift and his thick head caught against her tight entrance.
"Nnhh... haaahh..." Then she dropped her hips back down, and the moan that ripped out of her was involuntary, throaty and raw. Her ass slapped against his thighs with a wet, obscene sound and his cock drove back into her to the hilt. The impact sent a shockwave through her entire body that blanked her vision for a half-second and tore a ragged cry from her throat that she didn't even try to contain. "Ohhh fuck, Harry..."
"There you go," Marlene murmured against the shell of her ear from behind, her voice a low, honeyed purr that vibrated through Lilja's body and settled somewhere deep in her belly. "There's my girl. Just like that, Lils. Ride him." Marlene's fingers on her clit never faltered. Her other hand slid up Lilja's stomach and cupped her left breast, kneading the soft flesh and rolling the stiff, aching nipple between her thumb and forefinger with the kind of confidence that came from years of intimate knowledge. It was muscle memory reaching across decades and death, and Lilja's body responded to it like a tuned instrument.
"Aahh... Marley, that's... nnh, that's so good..."
"I know exactly what you like, love," Marlene said, and her teeth closed gently on Lilja's earlobe, biting down just hard enough to sting before her tongue soothed over the spot. "I've always known. Your body has changed, you're taller now, more muscular, and your tits are absolutely spectacular by the way, but you still shiver in the exact same places."
Lilja wanted to argue.
She wanted to say something composed and dignified, something befitting a Valkyrie of Asgard and a Queen of the Sitri Clan. Instead, Marlene pinched her nipple at the same moment Harry's hands tightened on her hips and pulled her down harder onto his body, and what came out of her mouth was a stuttering, desperate cry that had absolutely no dignity in it whatsoever. "Aaahhn! Oh gods... oh fuck!"
She found her rhythm after that, and it was relentless. Her thighs flexed as she bounced on Harry's lap, her ass rising and falling in a steady, driving tempo that filled the room with the wet, rhythmic slap of skin meeting skin. Each downstroke drove him impossibly deep, his thick cock stretching her tight walls and pressing against that spot inside her that made her vision blur and her fingers curl against his chest hard enough to leave half-moon indentations in his skin. Each upstroke dragged the ridged underside of his shaft along her most sensitive flesh, and the friction combined with Marlene's relentless fingers on her swollen clit was building a pressure low in her belly that was already threatening to overwhelm her.
Her perky tits flopped up and down as she bounced, and she could see the way Harry was staring at them in wonder. Just like any bloke would if she was riding them. But the only man she'd ever be riding for the rest of her existence was her handsome King.
"You're clenching so tight around me, Lilja," Harry said from below her, and his voice was rough and strained in a way that sent a thrill of savage feminine pride rushing through her chest. She was doing that to him. "You feel fucking incredible!"
"Mmmnh... you feel incredible," she breathed back, rolling her hips forward on his next stroke and grinding down against him so that his cock pressed firmly against her front wall while Marlene's slick fingers worked her clit from behind. The dual sensation made her stomach clench and her thighs shake. "You're so deep... Harry, you're so deep inside me, I can feel you in my stomach, I can feel... nnh... aaahh..." The bed groaned beneath them. The headboard bumped against the wall in a steady rhythm that would absolutely be audible from the next room over and she did not care even slightly. "Nnh! Ah! Aahh! Harry... Harry, right there, don't stop..."
His cock is hitting that spot, that deep spot inside me that turns my brain to static and makes my thighs shake. Every. Single. Thrust!
Marlene's mouth found the back of her neck.
"Aahh! Marley! Oh fuck, both of you at once is... nnhh... it's too much, I can't..." Lilja gasped.
"You can," Marlene whispered fiercely, her fingers rubbing faster, pressing harder, matching the pace of Lilja's hips as they slammed down again and again. "You absolutely can, Lily. I've got you and he's got you and you are going to cum so hard you forget which life you're living!"
Harry's hips bucked up to meet her downstroke and the collision ripped a scream from her lungs. He did it again. And again. His powerful hips drove upward every time she came down, doubling the force of every impact, and the pleasure ratcheted so high so fast that her vision started to blur at the edges.
"AAHH! YES! Fuck, yes, harder!" She could feel it building, a pressure in her lower belly that was expanding outward like a supernova preparing to detonate, tightening every muscle in her body until she was trembling from her toes to her lust clouded head. "I... I'm... Marley, I'm going to... Harry, I'm...!"
Lilja tried to form a coherent sentence that would convey the sheer magnitude of what was building between her hips, but her mouth forgot how language worked. Her tongue was sticking out. Her eyes fluttered shut. Her fingernails dug bruises into Harry's chest. Her hips slammed down one final time, taking him as deep as he could possibly go, and the orgasm hit her fast and POWERFUL.
"AAAHHHH!" Her entire body locked up and then shattered. Every muscle from her calves to her shoulders spasmed violently as she came, it was a full-body convulsion that arched her spine and wrenched a scream from her throat so loud and so raw that it cracked against the ceiling and would probably start noise complaints of every guest on the hotel floor.
Her pussy clamped down on Harry's cock with crushing, rhythmic pulses, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again in waves that rolled through her like tidal surges, each one more intense than the last. Her thighs clenched so hard around his hips that any normal man would have had bruised bones. Her toes curled until they cramped. Her hands clawed down his chest, leaving red lines in their wake!
She couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except ride the endless, devastating peak that kept peaking, kept climbing when it should have been cresting, kept slamming through her in pulse after pulse after pulse.
I'm dying. I'm dying again and this time it feels good.
Her hips jerked wildly, uncontrollably, the rhythm completely gone, replaced by raw, animal spasms that she had zero power to stop. And on one particularly violent buck, her slick, convulsing pussy lost its grip!
His cock slipped accidentally free right as he came.
"Nnghh, fuck!" Harry groaned through gritted teeth, his hands tightening on her hips, and she felt the first hot, thick rope of his cum hit her stomach before she could even process what happened.
The next shot spurted higher, painting a long white stripe up between her breasts, and the one after that caught the underside of her chin, hot and wet and dripping down her throat. He was cumming hard, his cock twitching and pulsing between her thighs, each spurt sending another thick, pearly streak across her trembling, sweat-slicked body. It landed on her stomach, her breasts, her face, it landed everywhere, coating her like he'd been saving it up for days, even though she knew he hadn't.
Lilja couldn't move. She sat there on his lap, shaking and gasping and utterly wrecked, watching through half-lidded eyes as his cum dripped down between her breasts and pooled in her navel, mixing with her sweat and the lingering dampness from the shower. Her pussy was still clenching around nothing, aftershocks rippling through her in diminishing waves that kept pulling soft, broken whimpers from her lips. "Nnh... nnh... hhah..."
Marlene peered over Lilja's shoulder, surveying the mess with the unhurried appreciation of an art critic evaluating a masterpiece. "Well," she said with a shameless giggle. "That was spectacular. You've absolutely covered her, Harry. I mean really, properly covered her. There's cum in her hair. Did you know there's cum in her hair? Lily, darling, there is cum in your hair."
Lilja blinked slowly, reached up with a trembling hand, and touched the wet streak just above her left ear. She stared at her glistening fingertips for a long moment, breathing hard, her brain still rebooting from the hardest orgasm of either of her lives. "...worth it," she said finally, her voice absolutely destroyed.
Marlene's giggle turned into a full, throaty laugh that shook her entire body and pressed her bare breasts against Lilja's back. She wrapped both arms around Lilja from behind, chin resting on her shoulder, and hugged her tight with a tenderness that existed in a completely different register than the filthy, gorgeous carnality of the last fifteen minutes. "You're an absolute mess," Marlene murmured against her cheek, still smiling so wide that Lilja could feel it. "I love it."
Harry was breathing hard beneath her, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his cock still half-hard and glistening against his thigh. But his hands had gentled on her hips, thumbs tracing slow, soothing circles on her skin, and when Lilja met his eyes, the tenderness in them hit harder than the orgasm had.
But then Marlene ruined the moment when she demanded: "IT'S MY TURN NOW!"
– Harry –
A couple of hours later, after a second shower that took longer than it should have because there were two gorgeous women in there with me, I found myself walking through the magical district of Shanghai with my Queen's hand firmly laced through mine.
Marlene was resting after going for two different sex sessions in one day. She'd decided to stay behind in the hotel with Asia and Jasmine who were having a movie marathon together. As for whether the two girls had once again heard us going at it—I was betting on probably…
The district was nothing like Diagon Alley.
Where London's magical shopping street was narrow, crooked, and looked like it had been built in the fifteenth century and then stubbornly refused to acknowledge any architectural development since, Shanghai's magical quarter was sprawling, vertical, and alive with color and noise. Multi-story pagodas lined both sides of a wide cobblestone boulevard. Stalls spilled out of storefronts in every direction, vendors hawking everything from bottled magical ink to cages of tiny jade-scaled lizards that chirped like songbirds.
Lilja was glowing.
"Harry, look at this one," she said, pulling me toward a narrow shop front whose wooden sign was covered in flowing Mandarin characters painted in what appeared to be liquid moonlight. "It's an apothecary, but they don't organize by ingredient type like Slug and Jiggers does. They organize by ailment. See? That entire wall is dedicated to potions for spiritual fatigue, and that shelf over there is for elemental imbalance." She pointed through the window at rows of delicate glass vials filled with shimmering liquids in colors I'd never seen in any potions textbook. "The methodology is completely different from the European approach. Hermione would lose her mind here. She'd buy the entire shop and then write a twelve-thousand-word comparative analysis before breakfast!"
I laughed because she was absolutely right. "We'll bring her next time. Though I'm pretty sure she'd also try to reorganize the entire inventory according to her own system and get into a screaming argument with the shopkeeper within the first twenty minutes."
"Within the first ten," Lilja corrected, and the fondness in her voice when she talked about Hermione always made my chest warm. She rose on her toes and kissed me softly, briefly, right there in the middle of the bustling marketplace.
A few passing Chinese witches stared. A stall owner selling enchanted fans whistled approvingly. An ancient wizard with a beard down to his knees glanced at us, said something in Cantonese that he probably thought we would not understand.
"Young love is a beautiful poison.'"
"Wise man," I said and his eyes widened in surprise.
Lilja then giggled next to me. "He also said you should buy me the jade amulet because a man who doesn't spoil his woman doesn't deserve her!"
I'm pretty sure he did not say that last part. I looked at the stall owner and he just played along and nodded sagely and held up two fingers, then pointed at the amulet and then at a display of matching earrings.
The greedy guy realized he was about to make some money and was now trying to upsell us!
Lilja was already trying the earrings on with an expression of exaggerated innocence that fooled absolutely nobody.
I bought both because I loved her and money was nothing to us. I handed Lilja the money.
The currency situation turned out to be a pleasant surprise. When Lilja, in turn, handed the stall owner a few pieces of newly minted Sitri galleons to pay, the stall owner's eyes went wide with genuine surprise. He picked one up, turned it over, bit it out of habit, and then stared at it like he'd just discovered buried treasure.
"Zhēn jīn," he said reverently. Real gold.
"Of course it's real gold," Lilja said in perfect Chinese. "These are Sitri Bank galleons. The new standard of England's magical currency. Solid gold through every layer, no density charms, no fake alloy cores. The previous goblin forged British galleons were approximately twelve percent actual gold content with the rest being charmed base metals. These are one hundred percent pure!"
The man called his wife from the back of the stall.
She called their daughter.
Their daughter called two other stall owners from across the walkway.
Within five minutes, a small crowd of Chinese magical merchants had gathered around Lilja, who was holding court like a financial ambassador while casually explaining the Sitri family's takeover of the former Gringotts banking system and the ongoing currency replacement program. Apparently, Chinese magical currency wasn't much better than what the Goblins were using in England…
There were opportunities for a market expansion.
I stood to the side watching my Queen accidentally become the most popular person in magical Shanghai by handing out real gold coins.
Grandmother Selene is going to love hearing about this. Free international publicity for Sitri Bank, delivered by a gorgeous foreign redhead.
…We spent another hour wandering through the district after that, Lilja dragging me into three more shops while the crowd of merchants slowly dispersed behind us, several of them now clutching Sitri galleons like sacred relics and chattering excitedly to each other about the new British currency.
By the time we finally circled back toward the main boulevard, Lilja had acquired a jade amulet, matching earrings, a silk-wrapped bundle of rare potion ingredients she insisted Hermione would cry over, and a small enchanted music box that played a different traditional Chinese melody every time you opened it. She'd also somehow negotiated a wholesale import agreement for Sitri Bank on behalf of my grandmother Selene.
My Queen is a terrifyingly competent woman.
"We should find the International Portkey Office before it closes," Lilja said, threading her arm through mine as we walked. The late afternoon sun was painting the pagoda rooftops in shades of amber and copper, and the lanterns strung between buildings were just beginning to flicker to life with soft magical luminescence. "If we can arrange transport for everyone back to London by tomorrow morning, we can still make it to Hogwarts before the reopening."
Getting to the International Portkey Office took us through the densest part of the district. Paper lanterns floated overhead without strings, drifting lazily in patterns that seemed almost deliberate, and the foot traffic thickened until Lilja and I were shoulder to shoulder with what felt like half the magical population of eastern China.
The office itself sat at the end of the corridor, wedged between a towering teahouse with a jade dragon coiled around its chimney and a shop whose entire storefront appeared to be a single living tree with doors carved into its trunk.
A brass plaque by the entrance read "International Magical Transit Authority, Shanghai Branch" in Mandarin, English, and what I was fairly sure was Mermish.
Inside was chaos.
The waiting room was packed wall to wall with wizards and witches clutching numbered tickets and looking like they'd been there since the Ming Dynasty. A harried clerk behind the front counter was simultaneously stamping documents, arguing with a tiny old woman who kept slamming her cane on the counter, and levitating a stack of folders that wobbled dangerously every time she raised her voice. Three separate queues snaked through the room, intersecting at random points in a way that seemed deliberately designed to cause maximum confusion.
"How many people are in here?" I muttered, scanning the room with my enhanced devil senses and counting well over two hundred individual magical signatures crammed into a space meant for maybe sixty.
Lilja was already reading the overhead signs. "It says the next available international portkey to London is... booked for eleven days from now." She blinked and read it again. "Eleven days, Harry."
"Eleven days?"
"Eleven days." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Magical China has the same problem as regular China. Far too many people, far too little infrastructure, and the bureaucracy moves at the speed of a concussed flobberworm."
I looked at the endless queues, the overwhelmed staff, the wizards arguing over numbered tickets like they were golden snitches. "Right. We're not waiting eleven days."
"No," Lilja agreed, already pulling galleons from the enchanted coin purse she'd been using at the market. "We are absolutely not."
She walked past all three queues with the kind of purposeful Valkyrie stride that made people instinctively step out of her path even before they consciously registered she was moving.
I followed in her wake, ignoring the dirty looks from people who had clearly been waiting hours. She reached the front counter, smiled warmly at the harried clerk who was mid-argument with the cane-wielding grandmother, and placed a small stack of gleaming Sitri galleons on the polished wood surface.
The clerk's eyes locked onto the gold like a hawk spotting a field mouse.
"Good evening," Lilja said in flawless Mandarin. "My name is Lilja Nornas. My fiance and I require a private international portkey for a party of five departing for London tomorrow morning!"
Fiance!? I thought with a dopey grin on my face. How many was that now? And when did she decide that? Not that I would protest…
The clerk glanced at the gold, then at Lilja, then at me standing behind her looking like a wet dream in human form if I did say so myself, and then back at the gold.
"Tomorrow morning is... that is very short notice, Miss Nornas. The scheduling alone would require approval from three separate departments, and international transit documentation for five passengers usually takes..."
Lilja placed a second stack of galleons beside the first. These ones caught the overhead lantern light and threw little golden reflections across the ceiling.
The clerk did nothing but continue to stare at the gold.
"Additionally," Lilja continued, her smile never wavering, "we will not be requiring the standard international wizard passport verification process. Discretion regarding the identities of our traveling party would be greatly appreciated and generously compensated."
A third stack joined the others. The clerk gazed in reverence at more gold than she probably made in years.
"This is all—very unusual. I will—I'll need to speak with my supervisor," she said nervously, already reaching for a brass communication tube mounted on the wall behind her.
"That's really not necessary is it?" Lilja said pleasantly.
"I'm sorry, but this kind of blatant bribery is—"
And a fourth stack of coins joined the pile!
"...You know what, I'm sure my supervisor doesn't need to be bothered with this…" the woman immediately changed her mind.
Even if she did get fired, I doubt she'd care since this was years of her salary all at once, I figured. My Queen just bribed her way through an entire government office in under ten minutes. Grandmother Selene would be proud. I bet even Serafall would be taking notes.
…We left the office with confirmed portkey tickets for five.
We were halfway through a narrow market street, heading back to the hotel, when Lilja's hand tightened on mine.
"Harry." The warning in her voice was quiet but immediate.
I'd already felt it. A familiar magical signature approaching from the front, moving against the flow of foot traffic, heading directly toward us with the kind of deliberate trajectory that wasn't accidental.
A man stepped out from behind a stall selling dried serpent scales and planted himself directly in our path.
He was tall and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and long black hair that hung in lank curtains around a face that might have been handsome once but now looked like it had been chewed up by years of suffering and spat out without an apology. His clothes were mismatched and travel-worn, a heavy dark coat over what looked like stolen muggle cargo pants and boots that had seen better decades.
Sirius Black.
I stopped walking. Lilja stopped beside me.
"Sitri." Sirius practically spat the name like it tasted foul in his mouth, his lip curling with undisguised contempt. "The hell are you doing in Shanghai?"
I looked at him steadily and didn't rise to it. "I could ask you the same question, Black."
His jaw tightened. The hatred rolling off him hadn't dimmed even slightly since our last encounter in the Forbidden Forest, when he'd called me a fraud and a bastard spawn and told me to stay away from Jasmine.
The fact that I'd helped prove his innocence, that I'd delivered Pettigrew to Dumbledore, that I'd literally carried the evidence of his wrongful imprisonment to the people who could free him? None of that mattered to Sirius Black.
I wasn't James Potter's son. That was the only thing that mattered to him. Everything else was background noise.
"I go where I please," Sirius said flatly. "I don't answer to you, boy. I don't owe you a damn thing."
"Never said you did," I said, not rising to his provocations. He wasn't worth it and Jasmine would be sad if I maimed him, or worse.
His eyes narrowed and he opened his mouth to say something else predictable, and then his gaze shifted six inches to the left and landed on the woman standing beside me. The change was instantaneous.
Every ounce of hostility drained out of his body and was replaced by shock. He stared at Lilja.
"No," Sirius whispered. "No, that's... that's not possible. You're dead. You died. I saw the house. I saw what was left of Godric's Hollow. Hagrid pulled the baby out of the rubble and you were... you were gone. You've been dead for twenty years." He took a half-step forward, and I shifted my weight slightly, putting myself between them. Sirius didn't even notice. His eyes never left Lilja's face. "Lily?" The name came out strangled. "Is that... how... how is this possible? How are you alive? How are you standing here?"
Lilja looked at Sirius Black with an expression that could have frozen the surface of the sun. "That," she said, her voice flat and precise and carrying absolutely zero warmth, "is none of your business, Sirius."
He flinched like she'd slapped him. "None of my... Lily, I was one of your best friends! James and I were brothers! I spent eighteen years in Azkaban because of what happened to you and him! I thought you were dead! I mourned you every single day in that hellhole, and you're standing here alive and holding hands with..." His wild eyes snapped to me and the old bitterness flooded back in, twisting his face ugly. "With him. With the bastard child that proves you cheated on James. With the living, breathing proof that you betrayed the man I loved like a brother."
Lilja's expression didn't change. If anything, it got colder. Her hand was still in mine, and I could feel the faintest tremor running through her fingers, the only outward sign of the emotion she was keeping locked behind that icy Valkyrie mask.
"James cheated on me first," she said, and each word dropped like a stone into still water. "He slept with my best friend behind my back and fathered a child with her while we were still engaged. I found out, I was devastated, and I made a choice that I have never once regretted. Not in my first life, and not in this one." She paused and let that land. "And I already forgave Marlene for her part in it a long time ago. I more than made up with her. The fact that you can't move past it says everything about you and nothing about me…"
Sirius's hands were shaking at his sides. Conflicting emotions warred across his face so fast I could barely track them. Grief, rage, betrayal, confusion, a desperate need for something he couldn't name. He looked like a man watching the last pillar of his worldview crack down the middle. "You forgave Marlene," he repeated, like the words didn't compute. "Marlene McKinnon. The woman who slept with your fiancé."
"She's here with us, actually," I offered helpfully. "Back at the hotel. Her and Jasmine. We're all traveling together."
Sirius looked at me like I'd just told him the sky was green and fish lived in trees. "I don't..." He ran a hand through his greasy hair, fingers catching in tangles. "I don't understand any of this. None of this makes any sense. How are you alive, Lily? What did you do? What kind of magic could possibly..."
"I said it's none of your business, and I meant it." Lilja's voice cut through his spiraling with surgical precision. "You lost the right to demand answers from me the moment you looked my son in the eye and called him a fraud for something that was never his fault. And instead of being grateful that he proved your innocence and delivered the man who actually betrayed James straight to Dumbledore, you spat in his face!"
The words hit Sirius harder than any spell could have. He physically took a step back, his boot scuffing against the cobblestones. For one long moment, something vulnerable and broken flickered behind his grey eyes. Then the walls slammed back up. "Fine," he said hoarsely. He straightened his spine and shoved his shaking hands into his coat pockets. "Fine. Keep your secrets. I didn't come here looking for either of you anyway."
"Then why did you stop us?" I asked, keeping my voice level. It was a huge test of my patience though…
Sirius's jaw worked. He glanced left and right, scanning the thinning evening crowd. When he spoke again, his voice dropped low enough that only devil hearing would have caught it clearly. "Pettigrew," he said. "I tracked the rat here. To Shanghai. I've been following his trail for weeks, ever since he slipped Ministry custody during the Dementor attack at Hogwarts. He went through Eastern Europe first, Belarus, then Mongolia, then down into China. He's been moving fast and using muggle transportation to avoid magical detection, but I've had his scent since Scotland and he can't shake me." His nostrils flared slightly, a remnant of his years spent in dog form. "He's close. Somewhere in this city. I can feel it in my bones. I don't know what he's doing here—probably something nefarious for his master—but it doesn't matter because I'm going to kill him this time!"
Pettigrew. Here. In Shanghai…?
The last time we'd had him in custody, that bumbling fucking imposter Barty Crouch Junior disguised as Lockhart had deliberately kicked open the cage and let the rat escape during the Dementor assault. The Ministry's own incompetence had set him free.
I looked at Lilja.
She was already looking at me, and the expression on her face was something I had never seen on her before. This was personal in a way that went deeper than duty or even love. This was the face of a woman who had died because of Peter Pettigrew's betrayal. Who had stood in a nursery and shielded her infant son with her own body because a rat-faced coward had sold their location to a monster.
A slow, vindictive grin spread across Lilja's lips. It was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, and it reminded me with sudden, vivid clarity that before she was my Queen, before she was a Valkyrie, before she was a devil, she was Lily Evans. And Lily Evans had a mean streak that would have made a Marauder proud according to everything I knew about her past life...
"Change of plans," she said. "I think we should go rat hunting before we leave Shanghai."
The grin that split my own face was probably just as feral. "That sounds like a fantastic idea." I looked at Sirius. "Where exactly did you lose his trail?"
Sirius blinked, clearly thrown off by the sudden shift in dynamics. His mouth worked for a moment before he managed to speak. "The warehouse district," he said slowly. "South side of the river. He went underground about two hours ago. Literally underground. There's an old smuggler's tunnel network beneath the docks that the local magical authority supposedly sealed off decades ago, but the wards are Swiss cheese and Pettigrew is small enough in rat form to squeeze through gaps"
"Two hours ago," I repeated. "So he's still down there."
"If he hasn't found another exit, yeah. I was about to go back and sweep the tunnels again when I caught your scent coming down the market street." He paused and had the decency to look mildly uncomfortable. "I wasn't... I didn't come looking for a fight. I just wanted to know why you were here." Sirius's eyes flickered between us. Something was shifting in his expression. Not forgiveness, not anything close to acceptance. But the single-minded obsessive fury that had sustained him through eighteen years of Azkaban was reasserting itself over his personal grievances, and the enemy of his enemy was standing right in front of him offering to help. "I don't need your help," he said, but there was no real conviction behind it.
"You've been chasing him for months and he's still alive," I pointed out flatly. "You clearly do."
His jaw clenched so hard I heard his teeth grind. "I work alone."
"And how's that been going for you?" Lilja asked with one red eyebrow arched up. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you've chased a rat halfway across the planet and ended up in a Shanghai market looking like you haven't slept or eaten a proper meal in weeks."
"Fine," he said through his teeth, as if the word physically hurt him to speak. "Fine. But this doesn't make us friends. This doesn't make us anything. I want Pettigrew. That's the only reason I'm not walking away right now."
"Wouldn't dream of it," I said.
He still wasn't done. "And I'm not doing this for you, Sitri. I'm doing this for James. For the friend that rat bastard betrayed and the family he destroyed."
He really liked to hear himself talk, didn't he?
I could have pointed out that the family Pettigrew destroyed included the woman standing right next to me, the woman Sirius had just called a cheating bitch not five minutes ago. I could have pointed out that the baby Pettigrew tried to get killed was me, regardless of whose blood ran through my veins. I could have pointed out a lot of things. Instead I just nodded. "Then let's go find him."
"Lead the way, Black," Lilja said, and her voice had shifted into the commanding tone of a Queen and a Valkyrie.
XXX