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Narcissa watched him from her window, where she sat at her dresser, brushing her hair. He was talking with Severus, and she couldn’t make out the words, but she knew from the expression on his face that the conversation certainly wasn’t small talk.

Lucius’s eyebrows rose up to join his hairline, his mouth vanishing in on itself as he stared at Severus in disbelief. He shook his head, which Severus counteracted with a nod of his own, his expression guilty, as if he’d rather be anywhere else but there, delivering his news.

Lucius glanced up at the window, his gaze meeting his wife’s, and Narcissa let out a sharp breath, even though she already knew this would happen. He was grieved, as she knew he would be, despite everything that had happened between him and their son.

She sighed, putting down her brush at the eighty-eighth stroke, abandoning the rest of her routine hundred to race out of the room and down the stairs, flinging open the doors as she stepped barefoot into the snow, wearing just her nightgown.

Lucius looked worse close-up: older; the tiny lines around his mouth that she loved to kiss when they were alone had deepened into hardened furrows.

His hand immediately reached for hers, despite their guest, and she shuddered from the lack of heat in his touch.

“Cissy…” He used her pet-name, and she almost broke right there, splintering across the walkway like one of the icicles that fell from the roof.

She risked a glance at Severus, who was proving to be a better actor than she would have given him credit for, his hands clasped behind his back, his heavy eyebrows knitted together into the sorrow of those who had lost a lover.

“Cissy…” Lucius tried again, and she looked back at him, her eyes wide - not such a hard thing to pull off, seeing the state he was in.

“Draco…he…Severus says he’s dead.”

Narcissa blinked, trying to process his words. She’d heard them a thousand times before, during her rehearsal with Severus when he had visited the previous afternoon, but it just couldn’t compare to hearing them from Lucius’s lips.

She glanced back at Severus, looking for confirmation that it was still to go ahead, and he nodded grimly.

There was no other choice but this, and she sighed, tilting her head back, staring up into the sky, letting the wind burn her eyes until the tears came.

It was now her time to act.