Grayson's POV:

Life had never been particularly easy for me. When I was a toddler, my father left us without so much as a goodbye. Mum, Liz, and I had lived on a one person salary, and it wasn't a very large salary. Mum had worked as a waitress at a posh restaurant that payed a fair wage, but wasn't enough for a family of three.

Throughout my years at Hogwarts, I had studied my arse off, trying to get the best marks I could so that I could get a good job to make a generous wage and help my mum with money, but when I had graduated, the only job that had accepted me was a desk job at Gringotts weighing knuts. I had gotten E's all around on my N.E.W.T.'s except for Herbology, in which I had achieved an O.

But life had gotten significantly rougher a few years after I had graduated Hogwarts. The turning point had been when I had seen a known Death Eater eyeing my mum in the Leaky Cauldron at dinner one day, so, right then and there, I had vowed that I would do whatever was needed to protect her and Liz.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? So I got the Dark Mark burned into the skin of my left forearm and regularly attended Death Eater meetings.

But when Lizzie had told me she had been forced to join the Death Eaters by our father and was to murder Albus Dumbledore, my heart broke. I had failed to protect her. Her soul was going to be darkened even more than mine was.

The final straw was when Lizzie told me that our mum had died. I had joined the Death Eaters to protect my family, and I had failed all of them. My baby sister was a murderer, and my mum was dead.

My mum was dead. The mum who had tried her best to raise me on her own. The mum who had made me and Lizzie her entire life. The mum who never let us know just how rough our life was.

Her cinnamon coloured hair was going to decay into nothing but dust. Her warm skin was going to become cold as ice. Her eyes would grey and never see the light of day again. In a few years, she would be nothing but a pile of bones.

She would never again make me my favorite meat pie. She would never again envelope me in one of her hugs. She would never again sit beside me during Samuels Scintillating Saturdays.

My world had shattered with her death, but I couldn't let it show. I still had to play the part of a Death Eater and protect my sister from the same fate. She was not going to die. She would live through the approaching war even if it meant I had to give my own life to ensure it.

Elizabeth Alexandra May Samuels would live to an old age and have kids, probably with that Malfoy boy. She was going to graduate Hogwarts and grow up and get married and live happily ever after. I was going to make sure of it.

Her relationship with Draco Malfoy was not a secret. Many people knew. They were constantly together and basically lived for the other. It was obvious. The way they looked at each other made it so. Anyone could see that they loved each other deeply.

I had known from the start that Malfoy was a bad guy. I mean, he was the son of Lucius Malfoy, for Merlin's sake. I knew that he would drag Lizzie into something dreadful, but in the end, he hadn't. I had been our father to force her hand.

The man who had contributed in the creation of me and Lizzie, Corbin Yaxley, was not a pleasant guy. He had fought alongside with Voldemort in the First Wizarding War. He proved his cruelness when he handed Lizzie over to Voldemort.

I had sat through countless Death Eater meetings where I had to suppress the urge to murder him on the spot.

Before Lizzie had informed me that he was our father, I had attended many meetings with him. I had watched him give reports of the last kidnapped witch or wizard. I had heard his accounts of the muggles he had killed. I had watched his greasy head nod and his cracked lips stretch over his yellowed teeth in a crooked smile as he received his next orders. It made me sick to my stomach.

Over the few months I had seen him, I had noticed several similarities between him and me and Liz. Lizzie had his blue-grey eyes. I had his nose and hair.

He never approached me or made any acknowledgment that he knew I was his son, and I hated him even more for it. He had told Lizzie, but not me. Did he even remember me? The small, giggling son he left behind all those years ago?

What had my mum seen in him? His eyebrows were always furrowed as if he were always angry, his teeth were yellow and crooked. He wasn't handsome, and he was callous as hell.

I resented him for all that he was worth.