"But it felt bloody good!" Rodolphus laughed heartily, tugged at the cut at the corner of his mouth, then grimaced and stopped laughing. He simply leaned against the wall, tipped his head back, and closed his eyes, his smile gradually fading. After a moment of silence, Rodolphus said in a voice almost like a dreamlike murmur, "I know that look. I've seen it many times, for more than a whole year... Just now, those filthy fools were looking at me with that same look. They all look down on me."
"I have never looked down on you, Rodolphus." Lucius gave a cold snort. "That's why I have to get you a new arm..."
"Do you know what they call me?" He frowned, as if he had fallen into a nightmare, and said in a pained, suppressed, heavy voice, "The one-armed man, the cripple, the man whose wife is carrying someone else's child..."
"You are not a cripple!" Lucius could not say much about Bella, so he could only comfort him from another angle. "They've all forgotten the great deeds you once accomplished... What right do they have to say that?"
"What if even your wife looks down on you?" Rodolphus painfully turned his head aside. "She forced me to swear one oath after another—to obey the Master, protect the Master, be loyal to the Master... to hurt others, to hurt the feeble-minded. I killed many people, all so I could be with her... Of course, I was quite happy to burn those Mudbloods to death..."
"You know our time was different from now... Cissy and I were fortunate to love each other..." Knowing the inside story, Lucius could not help saying something fair for Bellatrix. "Cissy told me... their marriages were all forced by their parents too... For the marriage