It finally made sense, Pandora thought.
It made sense why her mother had left her behind. Why her mother, even on the rare occasions she set foot in Malfoy Manor, had never once sought her out. Why there had never been so much as a letter, a birthday gift, a single hint of communication in all the years since. Why, whenever visitation was permitted, it was always Lucius who received the invitation, and never her.
She had spent her whole childhood believing herself simply unwanted. That had been painful enough. A private grief she had long since learned to carry. She had told herself, over the years, that some mothers simply did not love their daughters. That perhaps she had done something, been something, or failed at something. It was easier to believe herself merely unloved than to have no explanation at all.
But she had never once doubted that she was her daughter. She has never doubt that for years.
Because she was Pandora Malfoy, daughter of Abraxas and Clarisse Malfoy.
Now even that was gone.
She had been unwanted not because she wasn't enough but because she really wasn't hers.
Clarisse Malfoy was a woman forced by family to take another woman's child to be her own blood. To raise her, feed her, and present her to the world as her own while never once asking what she really wanted in her life. There was no failure to correct in Pandora's part. She was a debt someone else had been made to pay and suffered for it.
The floor did not move beneath her, and the room around her did not change, and yet something in Pandora felt as though the entire architecture of who she had believed herself to be for years had just been irrevocably dismantled.
Her breath would not come properly. Her heartbeat had climbed into her ears, loud enough to drown out whatever else was happening around her. The edges of her vision had gone strange — too bright in places, swimming faintly at the corners — and somewhere distant, as if from behind glass, she was aware that someone was saying her name.
Pandora? Pandora!!
She could not seem to answer it. Her hands had gone cold, and her fingers would not quite obey her, and there was a pressure building in her chest that felt very much like something about to break.
Then — warmth. Soft, warm hands, cupping her face, tilting it upward, insistent and still calling her name.
"Pandora!" Esmeralda's face swam into view, close now, her voice sharper than Pandora had yet heard it.
Her hands came to rest against her face, tilting it up, steady and sure.
"Look at me. Just me — nothing else." Esmeralda's voice had dropped into something low. "You are breathing wrong. I need you to breathe with me. In." A pause, deliberate, exaggerated. "Now out. Slowly. Again."
Pandora tried. The first attempt came out as little more than a shudder.
"Again," Esmeralda said, unbothered, as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world. "You are not dying. You have had a shock, that is all — your body does not yet know the difference between the two. In." She counted it out under her breath, patient, unhurried, her thumbs pressed lightly against Pandora's jaw as if to anchor her there by touch alone. "Good. Again."
Slowly, the room began to reassemble itself around her — the ceiling stopped tilting, the ringing in her ears receded by degrees, and Esmeralda's face stayed exactly where it was the entire time as though she had done this a hundred times before and found nothing in it is worthy of alarm.
There was silence, but a different kind now,
"I don't—" Pandora's voice came out unsteady, hoarse, as though she had been shouting rather than barely breathing. "I don't know what happened to me. I couldn't—" She stopped, pressing the back of her hand briefly to her mouth. "How did you know to do that?"
Esmeralda did not immediately answer. When she did, her tone was matter of fact, without any weight to it. "I am a healer. I have seen people go somewhere far away in their own mind before, when something is too much to hold all at once. It passes, given the right handling. It always does."
Further silence.
"Do you need time?" Esmeralda asked, calm as ever.
"No." Pandora's breath still came unevenly. "I still want to know more."
"More?" Abraxas asked.
"Yes. More." Pandora finally looked at her father — the one person in this room she still knew, with any certainty, to be her parent. "You've told us what happened. You haven't told us what came after. Mother blood-adopted me. And yet Esmeralda—" she glanced toward her sister "—grew up in France, with her. Not with us. Not with you." Her voice was steadier now than it had been a moment ago, anger beginning to burn through the shock. "So, what was the arrangement?"
Abraxas was quiet for a moment, as though deciding where such an explanation could even reasonably begin.
"For the first few years, your mother remained here," he said finally. "At the Manor. She saw to you as was expected of her — but coldly, and at a distance. Most of what a mother would ordinarily do herself; she left to the house-elves." He paused. "My parents and I did not press her to be otherwise. She had been made to marry a man who did not love her, and who had then been unfaithful to her. There seemed little to be gained, and a great deal to be risked, in demanding warmth from a woman who might simply break if we ask her to treat you like her own."
He folded his hands.
"Everything changed when my parents died. Your grandparents." A faint, humorless breath, not quite a laugh. "I did not understand it myself, but I believe they had held something over her. Some manner of leash, though I was never told what, and by then there was no one left to ask. Whatever it had been, it died with them. And your mother, for the first time in our marriage, was free to make demands of her own."
"She did not ask for a divorce," he continued. "That would have been a scandal neither of us could survive, and whatever else she wanted, she was not willing to hand the family that particular ruin despite what it did to her. What she asked for instead was separation in all but name. She would remain Lady Malfoy but she would never again perform a single duty that title required of her." His voice was even, but something behind it had gone very still. "She held every secret this family had by then — my affair among them — and she was a noblewoman, which meant her mind could not be reached by any manner of persuasion I might otherwise have arranged. I could not make her stay, and I could not make her forget wanting to leave. So, I agreed to her terms."
Abraxas took a breath and glanced at his children. They remained still, listening, none of them interrupting.
"She took Esmeralda with her, to France. On that, I had no voice at all — not in her schooling, nor her upbringing, nor whom she might one day marry. It is why no betrothal contract was ever drawn for her, as one was for you and for Lucius." He looked, briefly, toward Esmeralda, before continuing. "Lucius, she left with me. He was heir. Even then, she did not contest that much as long as Lucius can visit France occasionally."
"We corresponded by letter, when we corresponded at all. She managed the family's estates in France for as long as she lived — which is why, once she was gone, I was able to retire there myself. I was not even permitted to attend her funeral, nor to visit her grave, as per our agreement." He paused again, and this time did not immediately go on. "That was the arrangement. That is why I had no contact with Esmeralda. And that," he said, quieter now, "is why there was no one left, in any of it, to advocate for you."
Silence settled over the room, thick enough that no one seemed willing to be the one to break it. There was, perhaps, nothing left to say — not yet, not with so much needed to be absorbed.
It was Pandora who broke the silence.
"What was her name?" she asked.
Abraxas looked at her. "Pardon?"
"My mother's name." Pandora's voice did not waver this time. "The woman who gave birth to me. You have told us everything else tonight. I want her name."
Abraxas took a breath. "Giovanna Montanarri."
He said nothing more for a moment. No mention of where she rested, because there was none to give. He did not know. It had never been his to know.
"Noted." Pandora said, coldly this time, and left the room.
Lucius followed her out, the sound of his cane striking the floor sharp and deliberate with every step, the only thing in the room still willing to make noise.
Esmeralda remained, still looking at her father. Abraxas kept his gaze fixed on the floor, refusing to meet hers.
"It explains so much," Esmeralda said, shaking her head. It explained, really, why things had ended up this way between the three of them — three siblings who shared blood and a surname and almost nothing else.
She was quiet for a moment, working something out in her own mind before she spoke it aloud.
"I understand her now, Maman. Why she did what she did. Why she fought so hard to keep me away from all of this." Her voice was even, but there was an edge beneath it that had not been there before. "I am not going to pretend I am not angry with you. I am. But I made a promise, and I intend to keep it, so I will continue to treat you." She paused. "Why did you never write to me? I mean, after maman's death."
Abraxas did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice had none of its usual composure.
"I did not know how," he said. "I had never once addressed a letter to you in my life. I did not know your hand, your habits, where you might even be found on a given week. By the time I thought to try, properly try, I was told you had already left France again, somewhere on the Continent, and no one seemed to know precisely were. It was not for lack of wanting to." He looked up at her, briefly. "Though I understand if that means very little to you now."
Esmeralda said nothing to that.
She crossed instead to his bedside, drawing two small vials from somewhere within her robes and setting them down without ceremony on the table beside him.
"Don't forget to drink these," she said, and then she, too, was gone.