ebonymovies Chapter 304: I Don’t Care
Chapter 304: I Don’t Care
No triumph, no mockery, no contempt, no victor’s superiority. No trace of restraint or tension either.
The expression of someone who’d finished something not worth mentioning and was moving on to the next thing.
He met Bella’s gaze, his tone so calm it bordered on gentle. "You asked me what I care about, Cousin Bella."
Her right eyelid twitched.
Regulus took a step forward, landing on a cracked flagstone. Gravel crunched beneath his sole.
"That lord’s goodwill. I care about that."
Surprise flickered across Bella’s face, eyebrows lifting. She hadn’t expected him to say it.
She’d thought he would stay silent, or toss out something offhand, some quip about how well-informed his cousin was.
But he said he cared.
Light shifted in her eyes, weighing whether he meant it.
Another step. "House Black’s eternal purity. I care about that."
Her lips pressed together.
She watched him, expression unchanged, but the sharp angle of her eyes softened a fraction.
Both sentences were what she’d wanted to hear.
She even felt, for a moment, that her earlier speech had worked. A Black child after all. He knew what mattered.
So the fight had been a tantrum?
The thought lasted less than a heartbeat.
"But the perfume on the letter in your hand," Regulus continued, taking another step, "I don’t care."
The sharp angle returned.
"How carefully you chose your words," another step, "I don’t care."
Her gaze changed, settling into something quietly dangerous. She already knew where he was going.
"Your advice," his stride never breaking, "I don’t care."
A strange expression crept across her face. The smile still hung at the corners of her mouth, but the muscles along her jaw jumped, left side then right, alternating, beyond her control.
"You think I’m disrespectful, think I’m arrogant, think I’m provoking you..."
He paused. His eyes found her face and didn’t leave.
"I don’t care."
He stopped two meters from her, close enough to smell the smoke on her skin.
"Your performance," he said. "I don’t care."
Her chest rose and fell, ribcage expanding with one deep breath before collapsing back.
The smile was still there but had warped into something else, an expression stretched past its threshold by emotions it wasn’t designed to hold. Lips pulled wide, trembling, teeth bared, eyes crinkled as if laughing, but the corners twitching upward of their own accord.
Regulus watched her and, strangely, his own expression relaxed. Something genuine settled between his brows, completely at odds with everything he’d said.
"If you want to keep going, Cousin, we keep going."
He shifted his wand from right hand to left. Then he extended his right hand, palm up, fingers open, held out in front of her.
"If you don’t, we can sit down and talk properly."
The banquet hall went utterly silent.
Even the candles still burning seemed pressed down by some invisible weight, their flames shrinking to the size of a fingernail.
Regulus stood there with his hand outstretched, a mild expression on his face, a field of wreckage at his back, his battered cousin before him.
That hand hung steady in the air, carrying no hidden meaning, as though he were offering her a way down, as though he truly meant we can sit and talk.
It cut deeper than everything he’d said combined.
Because the hand’s message was unmistakable: you’re no longer a problem. What comes next is family business.
Bella stared at it. The same hand that had blasted her across the room, now reaching toward her.
Kinship.
Reconciliation.
Talk properly.
Her gaze traveled from his fingertips to his palm, from his palm to his wrist, from his wrist to his face.
Not a shred of malice. Only sincerity.
That was the most lethal part.
Laughter spilled out of her, squeezed from deep in her throat, hoarse, carrying an uneven tremor, then climbing, breaking into a ragged, rasping howl.
Her head tipped back. Curls tumbled from her shoulders, baring the red scratches on the side of her neck where flying debris had caught her.
The laughter ricocheted through the hollow banquet hall and shattered against the walls.
Then she straightened, killed the laugh, though her mouth stayed pulled wide.
"Regulus."
She said his name. Not loud, but every syllable bitten hard.
"Regulus."
"Regulus..."
She tilted her head and watched him, wand spinning once between her fingers, eyes burning too bright.
His hand was still out. His expression hadn’t changed.
Bella stepped forward, grinding her sole over a broken silver candelabra. The screech of metal on stone cut through the silence.
Her hand rose. Fingers touched the back of his hand, and her fingertips traced a slow line across it, knuckle to fingertip, as though stroking something fragile.
Then her fingers curled, closed around his, and pushed his hand down and away.
"Talk properly?" Her voice came threaded with breath, as though savoring each word. "You hit me, hurt me, launched me off my feet, and now you hold out your hand. Talk properly?"
She released his fingers, stepped back half a pace, and twirled her wand once. A wisp of white smoke, impossibly thin, curled from its tip.
"What makes you think this is all I have?"
She said nothing more.
Orion knew Regulus better than anyone in the room. The moment he’d heard "Cousin Bella" leave his son’s mouth, he’d known what was coming next.
His gaze flicked toward Narcissa and Lucius. His lips moved without sound.
Narcissa blinked. Lucius read it before she did.
He glanced at the distance between the two figures in the center, then at the wisp of smoke on Bella’s wand tip. His own wand slid back into the snake-head cane. One arm circled Narcissa’s waist and he steered her toward Orion.
Narcissa understood a beat later. Regulus wasn’t only winning. He was still provoking Bella, choosing the methods that would cut deepest.
They knew what Bella was capable of. Narcissa had heard the stories. Lucius had seen the aftermath firsthand, the scenes she left behind.
What came next wouldn’t be small. Moving closer to Orion was the right call. With him nearby, at least they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.
At this level of combat, standing too close could get you hurt.
Lucius brought Narcissa to Orion’s side and planted the snake-head cane on the floor, grip tight.
His eyes stayed locked on the center of the hall, narrowed, thoughts racing.
The Black heir. Twelve years old. Doing this to Bella, and still talking like that.
What this boy would become was impossible to say, but one thing was certain: this generation of Blacks was different.
Sirius had come over too, pressing himself against the wall on Orion’s left, trembling with barely contained excitement.
He knew Regulus was powerful.
He’d watched Regulus spar with Orion in the training room. Even half a year later, there were things from those sessions he still couldn’t parse.
He’d been standing right there when Regulus performed Spatial Transfiguration, watching the air in front of him twist into an impossible shape. He’d thought that was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever witness.
And the time Regulus had hit him... well, that needed no elaboration. Solid contact, seared into memory.
But this was different from the training room.
Every one of Bella’s curses had been thrown to kill. Rubble spraying, fire roaring, the banquet hall blasted beyond recognition.
And Regulus had traded with her for round after round, never once losing his composure, never once changing expression, then put her on the ground with a single curse.
A genuine dark witch, and Regulus had dominated her.
Sirius could accept that Regulus was stronger than him. He’d accepted it ages ago. That wasn’t an issue.
But strong enough to knock Bella flying was still a bit much.
Only a bit.
He could do it too.
Eventually.
Rodolphus glanced at Rabastan, still cowering behind a pillar, then at the two figures facing off in the center.
He raised a finger and flicked it. A House-elf materialized at Rabastan’s fee.
Before Rabastan could open his mouth, a sharp crack sounded. Both of them vanished.
Rodolphus remained by the doorframe, face blank.
He swept a glance over the spot where Rabastan had been, drew his gaze back, and looked toward the center of the hall.
He didn’t leave. He wanted to see the rest.
Bella moved. Her wand drove downward, stabbing into the floor, and magic poured from the tip into the stone.
The cracked tiles beneath her feet began to warp. Edges curled upward like paper held over a flame, folding inward from every direction.
Rubble and flagstone fused together, stretched, joined, and in a single second became a stone serpent over seven meters long, its surface textured with muscle striations and scale patterns, its body writhing across the ground, coiling to strike.
Bella pointed her wand at Regulus. The serpent lunged.
At the same time her free hand traced an arc through the air. The left wall of the banquet hall, the one that hadn’t fully collapsed, began to soften.
The surface of each stone brick turned viscous, heated to taffy. Blocks peeled away one by one, not falling but hovering, suspended in her magic, compressing toward Regulus.
Two fronts. The serpent on the ground, a closing mass of stone in the air above.
Regulus pointed his wand at the floor ahead of the serpent and tapped once.
When the snake crossed that spot, the surface beneath its belly changed.
The flagstone turned frictionless in an instant, polished to something beyond smooth.
The serpent’s lower half skidded. Its trajectory veered three feet to the right, head still aimed at him but the body torqued at an unnatural angle, most of its force bled away.
One sidestep. The serpent scraped past his left arm, slammed into a half-shattered pillar behind him, and broke into a dozen pieces.
The airborne stone mass was still closing in.
He didn’t look up. A flick of his wand toward the ceiling, and the internal structure of the largest chunk shifted. Stress distribution inside the stone realigned, the load that had been spread evenly now concentrated at a single point.
The block split in midair on its own.
The two halves tumbled into the path of the pieces behind them. Stone struck stone, trajectories scattering in every direction.
Some crashed to the floor. Some ricocheted into corners. Not a single fragment landed on Regulus.