The former Auror looked at her, his gaze sharp.

A moment later, he had subsided again, giving a slight, wheezing laugh.  "I hope that that isn't a threat," he said, almost lightly. 

With another Auror, he might have been concerned that it was.  But Zora Roh -- unless she had changed drastically in the days since he'd known her, she was always the sort to break before she would bend.  She'd come into the Auror training program late, years after recruits were usually admitted.  She was committed to the values of the Auror Corps, more than she ever was to the rush or the accolades.

But one could never really know for sure.  Not when she was involved.  If he was going to proceed, he'd have to proceed with caution.

He was watching Zora still, green eyes focusing on her features.  His mouth felt dry, too dry, but then, it always was here.  That was Azkaban's curse.  The cold and dampness worked their way inside you, until everything in you turned dry and bitter.

"That's quite the leap in logic to make," he said at last, his voice more quiet than it had been.  "Why in Salazar's name would you mention that name, Auror?"

Well, that had quieted the room. Zora watched Leo closely and didn't hide it. She looked for any hint of recognition, any flinch or flush that might give something away. But he was inscrutable. That had always been a gift of his, hadn't it? Never give anything away. Zora'd kill to have demand of a poker face like that.

She leaned forward and laced her fingers on the table.

"You know why."

Why hide it? Leo knew Zora had been in close contact with Genevieve who couldn't seem to keep a secret in her mouth to save herself. And she remembered the grip Leo'd had on her back in the day. It wasn't a 'leap in logic' that Genevieve would have told her husband what she'd done.

Roh clearly wanted him to say it first.  She'd baited him by dropping the name at all.  But that in itself showed that she didn't understand the level of the dangerous game that they were playing. 

If the Auror thought that he knew, that meant that Genny had told Level Two more than simply about the books and the letters.  After she'd realized the stakes, Roh had said earlier.  There was a knot forming in the pit of his stomach, a sort of rising nausea that he didn't even know that he could still feel.  His wife had gone to see her, and then she'd told everything that she had known or guessed to Level Two.

Dante.  He couldn't help but think of Dante. 

"I'm afraid I don't," he said very softly, green eyes still locked on Roh's face.  "I don't know what my wife has said to you, Auror, but I think you may want to employ a little more discretion in trusting her words.  She imagines things and then convinces herself that they are true."

Discretion.

Zora sat back and tapped the quill on the pad. She took a breath and looked slowly around the small dark room. The walls were made of the same stone as the floors. There was a small metal grate in the floor. The lantern above them was made to last and hung on a heavy chain. She looked past him at the massive door that kept them both in. Kept ears and eyes out. It was ringingly silent when neither of them were saying anything. Just the tap-tap-tap of keeping time with the nib.

She breathed again and turned her gaze back to Leo Gamp. He wasn't playing dumb. He was playing dead.

"I see," said the Auror to the former.

'Push him harder, Roh. Find out what he knows,' came an old voice. Or was it, 'Don't poison the well. Go easy. You'll need him later.'

Then, in chorus. 'You know what she's capable of.'

"You didn't answer my question before," she said sternly. Mercifully?

"Did you know Gilgamesh Shahidi?"

Roh stopped and sat back. She looked around the room, carefully, quietly.  There wasn't anything to see here, naught but the cold stone walls of Azkaban.  Nothing to hear but the tapping of the Auror's own quill.

He smiled nonetheless.

A moment later, Roh had returned her attention to him.  He could remember when she was first starting out, when she'd been uniformed in trainee's black rather than the Auror's crimson.  She had never been timid, not Zora Roh, but every Auror strove to find the balance between aggression and understanding, pushing and giving way.

She changed the subject from Kingstreet altogether.

"You didn't answer my question before.  Did you know Gilgamesh Shahidi?"

He looked away, his eyes playing across the empty room.  What answer was the right one to give?  To deny knowing him, thus leaving her out in Azkaban's cold?  Or to claim that he knew him well, thus linking himself to her? 

It likely didn't matter in the end.  Whatever game they were playing, the pieces had already been set in motion, and there were no rules.

"Yes," he replied flatly.  "Everyone knows him --"  He paused, and glanced at her.  "Or knew him.  He's easy to twist into things.  He likes flattery and gives favors."

He stopped again, his eyes still locked on Roh, and licked his lips.

"And he was terrified of her."

Zora was already thinking about how the hell she was going to write this report. Leo Gamp had managed to provide almost no concrete information, and a series of gut feelings and inferences would sit in the file mostly useless. But maybe she should have expected it. The threads tying Kingstreet, Shahidi, and Leo Gamp were loosely spun. Even as she doubted it, she furrowed her brow. No. There was something here. She just wasn't going to get it from Gamp.

But even as she mulled over her doubts, Leo Gamp was suddenly forthcoming. What had she done to earn that?

She arched an eyebrow. This was new. So far, there wasn't anyone who'd been willing to offer anything but reverence regarding the deceased. They'd called him a kind man, agreeable, diligent, honorable.

But according to her former colleague, Shahidi's friendliness exposed a security risk. She made a note.

"Who isn't?" Zora asked rhetorically. She swiped the hash on a t and flipped the notebook shut.

Zora stood and adjusted her robes. For a moment, she nearly forgot what he'd done. Even in these bleak circumstances, talking to him felt normal enough to take her back.

"That's all I've got. Your cooperation is appreciated."

With that, she moved to leave.

After all that, that was apparently all that the Auror wanted.  One reply, and she'd flipped her notebook shut, tucked her quill away with finality.  Off and back out of his life, leaving him to the stone walls of Azkaban again.  That was the Level Two way.  Take what they needed, and give nothing back.

But he wasn't ready to be abandoned to his fate just yet.

He jolted forwards.  His hand shot out, as if to grab her wrist, but the chain kept him from reaching that far.  He strained against it for a moment, arm outstretched, and then finally let his hand fall, fingers resting against the table.

"Wait," he said pressingly, urgently.

His eyes found hers, and he swallowed.  Dante.

"You have to be careful."  His voice was low and gravely, but there was a plaintive note underneath the roughness.  Almost pleading.  "If you start asking questions around here, any at all, then she'll know."

The Auror stepped back quickly but without panic when Leo moved for her. The darting gesture was starkly different than Gamp's bearing this far, and the voice that followed was likewise unsettled. She felt an unwelcome pang of sympathy, which she quickly tucked away. Zora worked her reconciliations off-hours.

"Then she'll know."

A chill went down Zora's spine. She didn't need - didn't want - Gamp's warning about Kingstreet. Since Genevieve blurted out the name, Zora had been keeping herself from the edge. She was just as afraid of Kingstreet as anyone else but to continue doing her job she had to forget pretend the fear was only caution.

But Gamp, he had to know that. He wasn't warning her for Zora's benefit. And, she realized, he wasn't warning her for his.  And not Genevieve. Who else did he have to fear for -

She let the realization show on her face. Genevieve and Leo Gamp, they had a son. A son at Hogwarts, a stronghold Kingstreet had penetrated before.

"I'll be careful," she said. "I promise."

The great stone walls of Azkaban loomed all around them, more marked than usual as he subsided back in the chair.  If Roh had come to speak with him, he couldn't help but wonder who else she'd already had words with, what serpents had already been stirred up underfoot.  Level Two would be so focused on finding the killer that they'd miss the real danger lurking sight unseen.

He knew that there was nothing to be done once the great wheels of the Ministry had been set in motion.  All he could do was wait and watch and trust that his former colleague understood discretion, or that someone on Level Two would misstep so badly that the bespectacled witch with cold blue eyes would turn her attention on the Aurors instead.  He had to hope that his dear wife would shut her bloody mouth for once, or that word of the discussion that he was having with a witch in crimson wouldn't spread so far as to reach the wrong ears.

His eyes stayed locked on Roh's face for a long moment, her words hanging heavy in the air between them.  She promised.  When she was involved, what good was an Auror's word?

Slowly, hesitatingly, he gave his former colleague a solitary nod.

At least for the moment, it was the only option that he had.