Life of a Killer

Chapter Three - Devotion

She looked beautiful, like an angel. All dressed in white, her dark hair hanging loosely round her face. I will always remember how she looked that day, in her wedding dress, telling me how much she loved me. If only it had been me she was marrying.

"I don't want to do this Tony," she had told me quietly as I held her close to me.

"You have to...it's for the best, Bella," I'd heard myself say, all the time silently willing her not to. It was for the best that Bella married Rodolphus.

Their parents, and the noble wizarding society, expected it. Rod and Bella were 'made for each other', apparently. Their parents had been pushing them together since they were small children. But they didn't love each other, not in that way. They both cared deeply for the other, but as friends, as brother and sister.

Bella loved me; and Rod, well, Rod loved himself and his freedom. He had an eye for the girls but he lost interest pretty much as soon as he got them. It was all about the chase for him. And I loved Bella. I had done since the first time I saw her. I had been ten years old. My mum had dragged me on a shopping trip to Diagon Alley. She'd left me outside Quality Quidditch Supplies, gazing in the window at the brooms, while she went in the Apothecaries.

"Out of the way, filthy little Mudblood!" That last word caught my attention. I hadn't heard it before, didn't know what it meant, but I could tell from its context it wasn't something I would be asking my mum to explain.

Who said it I never knew because as I turned to look, my attention was distracted by something else. Bella. Although I didn't know who she was at the time. She was walking down the street, her head held high as if she owned the place. Her hair fell in loose curls, bouncing slightly as she walked. Her beautiful dark robes moved elegantly with her. She would have been nine years old. I simply stood staring at her until my mum's hand on my shoulder brought me out of my daze. I'd asked her who the girl was and Mum had told me she didn't know. I didn't believe her and wondered why she wouldn't tell me.

Soon the girl from Diagon Alley had been put to the back of my mind. I'd forgotten about her, or so I'd thought. Until I saw her again that is, about a year and a half later. I recognised her instantly. We were on Platform 9 ¾. It was her first day at Hogwarts; I was returning to my second year.

It took me over six years to do anything about how I felt. Partly because I thought she would laugh at me and partly because Bella was seen as 'Rod's girl' - off limits. All those years I settled for being her friend until I said something.

Bella and I were sitting in the almost deserted Slytherin common room one evening. We had been talking about after we left school. I only had a few months left at Hogwarts; Bella had a little over a year. It was during this conversation that Bella realised that in under two years she would be married to Rodolphus. She had looked so sad as she told me what she was thinking and I couldn't stand to see her like that.

"Don't marry him," I told her. She had looked at me inquisitively.

"Why not?"

"Because I love you," I'd blurted out without thinking. Bella had stared at me in disbelief before she responded in a way I would have never expected. She leaned over and kissed me.

Rod had been ecstatic at this revelation, thinking it'd get him out of the 'arrangement', but we soon came to realise that Bella's family would never accept me. I wasn't from a noble family, I certainly wasn't rich and most of all I wasn't Rodolphus. In their eyes I was probably only slightly better than the Mudbloods and blood traitors.

So here we were, two years later, on their wedding day. The situation was now even more complicated than ever. We'd worked out a plan and we were putting ourselves through it 'for the cause'.

Bella and Rod had both told their parents they weren't going to marry each other, only to be threatened with being cut off from their families. Which meant no money, no regular allowance. The money from their families kept the three of us from having jobs, meaning we could dedicate ourselves to the Dark Lord and His cause. I hated taking money from them both. But they insisted, and I would only ever take enough to buy the necessities. Between them, they made sure I lived as well as they did. Bella would get me things as gifts and Rodolphus would constantly be giving me 'old' robes that I knew he'd never worn. It was never my turn to pay in a pub or restaurant and I stayed at Lestrange Manor more than I was at home.

So the money was a vital issue in our plan. We couldn't carry on without it. Things would be just the same after the wedding, except there would be a house for us all to live in as well. Bella and I would have each other. Rod would be free to do as he pleased. The wedding was purely a financial scam on our part. But it didn't make it any easier for us to go through.

Back in Bella's room at the Black Estate, the door opened and Rod entered wearing a new set of dress robes. He walked over to where I was still holding Bella against me. He placed an arm round both of our shoulders, smiling sympathetically at us. Suddenly Bella whacked him on the arm.

"Rod! Get out! You aren't supposed to see me. It's bad luck," she frowned at him.

"Bella...I think we're beyond bad luck," he had laughed back at her "We need a bloody miracle for this to all go smoothly."

The actual wedding ran pretty well, considering. Bella and Rod's mums took it in turns crying, though Mrs Black alternated her crying with glaring at me with a certain smugness about her. In her eyes it had been my fault Bella nearly hadn't married Rod, which in all fairness was technically true. If only she knew what was really happening.

It was hard to watch the girl I love marry my best friend, but I forced myself to focus on what we were going to achieve by this. Not for one second did I feel guilty about what we were doing. Lies and deceit were all second nature to the three of us by now. We had convinced nearly everyone that the wedding was all for real. Very few people knew the truth.

Lord Voldemort knew everything about his Death Eaters. Sometimes it was like he knew you better than you knew yourself. He could predict how you would react to certain things, what you were going to say. So it was inevitable that He would work out our scam. Which he did. He was the only one we fully told what we were doing and that it was all for his cause, for him. We were fairly sure Stan knew what was happening as well, although we never told him and he never asked. We also assumed that if Stan knew, Lucius did as well. If anyone else was aware then they never said, although some of our fellow Death Eaters probably figured it out over the years after the wedding.

The wedding reception wasn't quite so uneventful, but when you put two families together, arguments and disagreements are bound to happen. Especially two families as unique as the Blacks and the Lestranges. But generally it was just the usual pettiness you come to expect at weddings.

Well into the party, I headed outside for some fresh air, glad to escape the duties of Best Man for a while. Bella must have seen me, as she joined me a few minutes later. We sat on a wall, not daring to even sit close together in case we were seen. As we chatted I felt an odd sensation on my arm which I tried to ignore, hoping I was imagining it. I tried to put it to the back of my mind until Bella asked me what I was doing. I had been scratching and moving my arm without realising. Giving into the feeling, I slowly pulled back the sleeve of my robes, to reveal the blackening Dark Mark which was just starting to burn intensely. Bella had immediately looked down at her own arm but nothing.

I glanced back inside. Numerous Death Eaters were in there; surely I wasn't the only one being called, but nobody was reacting or acting any differently except for Stan and Lucius arguing, which itself wasn't unusual. As I was looking for signs of other Dark Marks burning, Rod came out of the other door, looking questioningly over at me. I glanced down at my arm and nodded reluctantly.

"Not both of you. Not today," Bella had protested. But we had no choice. When the Dark Mark burned, you went. No matter where you were, what you were doing. We both smiled wearily at her, kissed her on the cheek and Disapparated, leaving her to make our excuses.

It was just a simple retrieval mission we had been called for. Something any of the Death Eaters could have done. There had been some reason behind our Lord calling us particularly, but if Lord Voldemort didn't choose to disclose why he had ordered you to do something, then you never knew; you certainly never asked. The mission took us until around noon the next day, so Bella spent her wedding night with neither the one she loved nor the one she married. Maybe that was the reason behind why it had been us sent on that mission. To prove, not only to us but to all of the Death Eaters, that in essence each of us belonged to him.

~~~~~~~~

It was a few weeks before our next 'real' mission. It was a simple plan but one that we would enjoy. Our target: Frank Longbottom. Lord Voldemort wanted him out of the way; he was causing too much trouble for us. Longbottom was an Auror and a very powerful one. I remembered him from school. He was a few years older and had been Head Boy. Longbottom had interfered and ruined too many of our plans over the past few months, and it was now down to us to sort him out. Of course the Killing Curse would have done the job easily, but we had never even contemplated doing just that. We wanted to do something spectacular, and who knew what information we could get out of him.

We had a location on Longbottom, information given to Lord Voldemort by Peter Pettigrew, the spy. Who would have thought that pathetic little Pettigrew, who used to follow Potter around Hogwarts like a lost sheep, would come over to our side. I'm still amazed to this day that Pettigrew was never found out by Dumbledore or his friends. I would never have thought him intelligent enough to pull it off.

I never liked Pettigrew. A few of the others had some sort of toleration for him because he was useful to us, but him being a spy was one of the main reasons I hated him. However useful he was to our cause, to me he would always be a traitor, even though it was our enemies that he was deceiving. If he could sell out his best friends like that, I had no respect for him and absolutely no reason to believe I could trust him.

The plan didn't quite come off as expected. Longbottom hadn't been alone when we ambushed him. Whether it had been a set up or if Pettigrew had gotten the details wrong we never found out. Six of them there had been when we got there. The duelling went on for some time before three of them, including Longbottom, had Disapparated away. One lay in a heap on the ground; the final two still fought on. They took some beating but eventually we had them surrounded. Five of us in a circle, the two of them in the centre, lying on the ground. Their bodies were wasted and broken. We had had our fun with them, found out some potentially useful information with the aid of the Cruciatus curse, and now it was time for them to die. They were both weak, ready to give in living anyway; my fellow Death Eaters had seen to that.

I stepped forward in to the circle, towering over them as I pulled off my mask. It was something I always did before killing someone. I liked to be able to look them in the eye without being obscured by that hood. I liked knowing that my victim knew who I was at the moment they died, and most of all I liked seeing the look on their face when they realised what it meant - that I wasn't bothered about them seeing my face because they very soon wouldn't be able to tell anyone.

The Prewetts. Gideon and Fabian. The amount of trouble those two had caused us over the past few years. The Dark Lord would be glad for us to get rid of them. I pointed my wand at the eldest of the brothers, Gideon, and with a flash of green light his body lay still, no longer trying to get away, no longer trying to fight. I turned to the other brother, re-aiming my wand. I'll never forget the look on his face as he watched his brother die, the realisation dawning as he turned around to face the same fate. A hand had rested on my shoulder just as I was about to cast the Killing Curse. I didn't need to look around to see who it was. Rodolphus stood next to me, still masked. Over the years there had been some rivalry between Rod and the younger Prewett. More than once had Rod nearly been captured as a consequence of something Fabian Prewett had done. I stepped aside slightly, knowing Rod would want to finish this one himself.

"I told you I'd have the last word," Rodolphus laughed as he hit Prewett with the Killing Curse, the body lying still next to that of his brother's. With a final glance at the two bodies, I picked my mask up from the ground, and as Rodolphus conjured the Dark Mark over the scene, I Disapparated back to Head Quarters.

As much as I hated the Death Eater masks, the beauty of them was that unless we got caught in action, nothing could be pinned on a single one of us. The masks meant we were personally anonymous but the Death Eaters as a whole were credited for our murders. That's why I always left it until the last few moments before killing someone to remove the mask. I waited until I was certain my victim couldn't escape. Once the mask came off the victim must die.

That's what I thought I'd done this time, and it wasn't until we arrived back at Head Quarters that I found out otherwise. The body of one of the Aurors had been on the ground behind us as we tortured and eventually killed the Prewetts. I, as everyone else, had assumed him to be dead following the fighting. The other Aurors and Order members had Disapparated, leaving only this one Auror and the Prewetts. It wasn't until the debrief that we realised no one could remember killing him. We could only assume, and hope, that he had been Stunned and had seen nothing. This didn't turn out to be true. Whether he had been Stunned and had come out of the spell without us noticing or whether he had simply been under a body bind curse, we'll never know. What we do know is that by the time the murder of the Prewetts was reported in the Daily Prophet the next day, I had a price on my head. I wasn't named in the paper but it did say that the Ministry knew who was responsible and that they would be hunted down. Rookwood confirmed this on inside Ministry information. I was a wanted man from that day on.

~~~~~~~~

Bella had sent me an urgent message to meet her. My mind was whirring, as I Apparated to where she was, thinking what it could be about. She was crying when I got there.

"It's Rod, isn't it," I managed to say. Bella shook her head and told me that as far as she knew Rod was fine. He was on a mission in France but she had spoken to him yesterday through the Floo network.

"It's Reggie," she sobbed. This had puzzled me. Regulus hadn't been sent on a mission for some time before this, not since he had messed up so badly on a simple Muggle killing; how could something have happened to him?

"The Dark Lord, He's ordered me to kill him."

This had shocked me. Not Reggie being killed, not even Reggie being killed on Lord Voldemort's orders. It was inevitable really. It wasn't the first time Reggie had messed up, and it had been plain to see that he didn't want to be part of things anymore. I think he had still believed in the cause, but he couldn't handle things - the killings, the torturing.

"Why me?" Bella had asked me. I hadn't known the answer to this. The only thing I could think of was that Lord Voldemort was using it as a test for Bella, to see how loyal she was to him. It had also served as a warning to all of us: that we had to be prepared to kill anyone for Him, including our own families if necessary. To this day I still don't know what I would have done if I had been in that situation. Could I have really killed one of my family, one of my parents perhaps?

I had held Bella in my arms in an attempt to comfort her as she told me that she had to go and do it right away, no time to come to terms with it, no time to even work out what she was going to do when she got there. There seemed to be no doubt in Bella's mind that she was actually going to do it, but this hadn't made it any easier for her. I even offered to go with her, but Bella had refused. She wasn't supposed to have told anyone, not even Rod, what she was about to do.

Eventually, Bella had risen from where she had been sitting and picked up her wand.

"Wait here for me Tony. I need you here when I get back," she had said as she Disapparated with a loud crack.

So I had sat and waited, feeling guilty that the last time I had seen Reggie, I had had a go at him about exactly the things that were the cause of his imminent death. I'd told him he was being an idiot, which he was, but a naïve, pathetic idiot who hadn't really understood what he was getting into. He hadn't understood that becoming a Death Eater wasn't something you could back out of. You were a Death Eater for life. And he would be. Only his life would end because he stopped being a Death Eater rather than the other way around.

Bella was in a complete state when she returned. She was sobbing as she stumbled over to me, clutching hold of my robes and collapsing into me. I held onto her, and that's how we stayed for a long time, without speaking. I didn't want to push her into telling me what had happened. Eventually Bella looked up at me. Her eyes were red and bloodshot, her face damp with tears.

"Is he...gone?" I asked her. She didn't speak but just nodded. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but at no point have I ever heard Bella say that Regulus was dead or that she killed him. She would always say that he had 'gone'. I might be thinking too much of it, but I sometimes wondered if Bella didkill him that day or if they worked something out and Regulus just disappeared off somewhere. I never asked Bella, I didn't want to know the truth. If I didn't know, I wasn't involved, wasn't responsible for not saying anything to anyone. Besides, I wasn't supposed to know it was Bella that had been sent to dispose of him.

The Death Eaters grew stronger and stronger over year or so, and the Dark Lord was soon at the peak of His reign. Every wizard and witch in the country feared him, feared us, feared his name. It was only a matter of time before Lord Voldemort took over completely.