Confessions of an Ex-Death-Eater

1.

If this were a romantic story, it would end like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with the infamous words 'Reader, I married him...'

I do not wish to raise expectations from the start: that is not my story, nor is this a romance. Although it is, in part, a story about love. This is the story of my young life, an explanation of why I became who I was. It is an apology.

The story starts on the 31st October 1981, not that I remember it because I was a mere seventeen-months-old. However, on that specific date my twenty-nine-year-old father's hopes and dreams fell apart for the first time in his life. It was the day that my mother miscarried their second child. It was also the day that the man who my father pinned his hopes upon to bring about a new world order was defeated.

No one understood how either had happened.

While my mother grieved the loss of her baby and the healers were baffled as to the reason; half the wizarding world celebrated, believing Lord Voldemort to be gone entirely from existence because of a miraculous survival by a fifteen-month-old baby from the killing curse. Perhaps the duality of the events on that same day is what made the blow harder for my father to take and drove him deeper down his bitter course. I am not making excuses for his actions, even I am still trying to understand them for his logic is still not clear.

My father knew Lord Voldemort had not been completely destroyed for he bore the Dark Mark and although it had faded considerably, it had not disappeared from his arm. Of the Death-eaters, only Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange and Barty Crouch Jnr searched loyally for their Dark Lord until they were caught. The others, well, some were arrested and went to Azkaban, some claimed to be under the Imperius Curse, some claimed to have acted out of fear or because they were threatened, some paid their way to freedom, and some hid in plain sight, grumbling at their misfortune. I cannot say why my father did not join the search for the Dark Lord for he followed Voldemort as zealously as they did, but I do know he was a shrewd politician and I imagine he was playing the long game. And he was intent on breeding a new generation of pure-blooded wizards (once his wife was recovered) that would one day rule the wizarding world.

Unfortunately for him, he was only capable of producing one child. Still, I was his hope, his future, his dream. I was a pure-blooded Malfoy.

And bloodline was important...

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