He let her have it. He wants her to wear it, touch it. He wants her to sense it. There is that tactile language she speaks, he finds it so searing and enticing, and it drives him insane. What she gives is something he can’t reproduce, and it’s maddening. He wants to replicate the way she makes him vibrate, the way his entire being boils under her fingertips and shoots his blood so high, so low. Up and down his body. Ringing in his ears and throbbing in his cock.He hasn’t asked, but he knows. He knows he is unable to reciprocate. He is missing that fundamental part that allows giving without considering taking. It’s not there anymore. He ripped it out of himself and he can’t even feel regret because that fragment of his soul is also missing. Or maybe it was never there to begin with. He is just angry. Anger has always been his companion.That is something he can understand and relate to, and reproduce in large quantities. But she doesn't want it. He has already tried, but she refuses to take it. She has just walked all over his anger and closed the space between them, replacing it with this burning desire.He can’t walk all over what she is giving. He has just accepted it and now he feels like he owes her something. And that he can’t allow.So he let her have it. And she has been wearing it. He has caught her touching it mindlessly some nights. Can she sense it? Can she hear his tell-tale heart inside?She is sitting next to him naked by the fireplace. She removed it from her neck earlier when he fucked her senseless against the wooden floors. And now she is holding it wrapped around her wrist and studying it closely. She doesn’t know. He hasn’t told her she holds a piece of his soul trapped inside that locket. She is frowning now. She is bringing it against her ear. Her eyes close with a flutter of her eyelids and she is shivering.Hermione is looking at him now with wide eyes. She leans to kiss his cheek and runs her swollen and abused lips over the lobe of his ear, whispering.