He had never stood so still in his life—not like this, not frozen beneath the gorgon-stare of history and the gluttonous gaze of hundreds, not bound in silence so thick it clung to his lungs like ash, ceremonial and suffocating, the air itself steeped in judgment. He had stood in courtrooms before. In front of judges. In front of enemies. He had stood under the searing weight of truth serum and public condemnation and his mother's trembling hands. But never like this. Never in a way that made stillness feel like surrender.
This was not posture. This was punishment.
His spine locked in a stance too perfect to be natural, too practiced to be comfortable, carved from the brittle discipline that came from years of surviving scrutiny. He was upright only because the alternative was collapse. Every muscle in his body was drawn taut like the string of a cursed bow—held, held, held, until something snapped. He could feel the ache blooming behind his knees, the slow burn of his calves cramping from stillness, and still he did not move. Movement was defiance. Movement was human. He was not allowed to be either of those things today.
The robes clung to him like a shroud, all stiff silk and suffocating tradition, ancestral Malfoy garments dredged up from some vault that should have stayed sealed, gleaming faintly with threads of real silver that caught the enchantment lights like spiderwebs strung across a crypt. They were ancient and cold and wrong on his skin. Sewn with magic older than modern law, ironed flat with generations of pride, pressed so cruelly tight that even the rhythm of his breath felt like blasphemy. The seams bit at his shoulders when he shifted the slightest fraction, the sleeves resisted the flex of his wrists as if to remind him: You are not meant to move. You are meant to be seen.
He didn't need to guess whose idea that had been.
Of course the committee had designed it this way—precisely, purposefully, with the slow-syruped malice of Ministry officials who had learned how to make cruelty look like ritual. This wasn't about justice. It wasn't about reparation or legacy or magical harmony. It was performance. Propaganda. He was the Ministry's most prized prop today: the perfect penitent, the final Malfoy heir, dressed not for dignity but display, coiffed and collared like a prize stallion meant for inspection, his rage stitched neatly beneath ceremonial seams. He had been packaged like a relic, preserved in silk, dusted off for one final ritual humiliation disguised as redemption.
A Malfoy—but not one with power.
A Malfoy in penance. A Malfoy on his knees, without ever needing to kneel.
And he hated them for it. Oh, how he hated them. The bureaucrats. The architects of this spectacle. The carefully smiling politicians who sat in their elevated rows, pretending this was honor, pretending this was healing, their eyes bright with the self-satisfaction of people who had just made history by humiliating a man they once feared. They didn't want him to fight. They didn't want him to break. They wanted him still. Compliant. Palatable.
And gods help him, he gave it to them.
Draco stood behind the enchantment veil—gossamer-thin, humming with ancient laws and ceremonial bindings, its surface rippling like a pond disturbed by magic rather than wind—and kept every emotion on a leash so tight it cut into him. He stared straight ahead, jaw locked until his molars throbbed with pressure, his teeth clenched like they were holding back every curse he had ever swallowed. His hands were curled into fists at his sides, the bones beneath the skin so pale and bloodless they looked like marble sculptures carved to look obedient.
The courtroom glared around him like a cathedral designed by vultures. High arches, ancient stone, gold-plated trim that had been retouched just for this occasion. The enchanted stained-glass windows bled filtered sunlight across the floor in fractured patterns of martyr's gold, jade regret, and sacrificial blue. The light fell across his face in painful, holy streaks, like divinity spat through the mouth of something monstrous.
He didn't blink.
He didn't breathe.
He let it happen.
Because what else could he do?
He was the last Malfoy heir. The final son of a ruined name. And he had already been stripped of everything else.
Now, they were here to sell what was left.
They'd called it reparations—a word dressed in its finest robes, perfumed with Ministry rhetoric and sanitized for public consumption, all parchment polish and ink-slick signatures stamped in ceremonial red. A generous word. A diplomatic word. The kind of word that sat neatly on the tongues of politicians who had never lost a war, only rewritten it. But to him, it rang like a curse disguised as virtue. It was not justice. It was not restitution. It was punishment lacquered in tradition, a noose passed off as necklace, strung with ancestral pearls to make the strangulation look elegant.
They had named it The Bride Price Ritual, as if unearthing some ancient, moth-bitten custom from the vaults of magical history could somehow be spun as honorable, sacred even. As if centuries of blood politics and wartime atrocities could be exorcised by ceremony. As if marriage—a contract older than reason and just as cruel—could serve as a balm for betrayal. But Draco knew history. Real history. Not the whitewashed kind that appeared in Ministry-approved textbooks. He knew that rituals like this had never been about healing.
They had been about power. About control. About silencing bloodlines through strategic bonds and disguising surrender as legacy. They were tools of consolidation, of cleansing, of quiet conquest. And now? Now it was being repackaged as reparation. History didn't change. Only its wardrobe.
This wasn't reconciliation. It wasn't peace. It was theatre.
A performance in four acts: blood, shame, spectacle, and silence.
Everyone knew what this was, even if they didn't say it aloud. Even if they wore their carefully blank expressions and scribbled dutiful notes for their society columns and op-eds. Even if they told themselves they were witnessing justice. They weren't. They were witnessing a public offering. A human auction disguised as holy rite. The Ministry had simply changed the scenery—added some gilded runes, painted the walls with heritage, and called it progress.
The war had ended, yes—but not for him. Not for his family. The Malfoy name still hung in the air like the scent of something scorched, something burned too deeply into the walls to be scrubbed clean. It clung to robes. To conversations. To the pauses after his name was spoken. It ghosted through every room like the echo of a scream that had never been acknowledged.
His father had secured their technical survival with bribes and spineless compliance—had bartered what little soul the House of Malfoy had left for a seat at the furthest edge of the Wizengamot, and Draco... Draco had inherited the debt. Not in galleons. Not in titles. But in quiet capitulations.
He had paid it, year after year, in ways no one recorded but everyone witnessed.
He paid it in the brittle curve of his spine in press conferences where he stood alone.
In the stiffness of his lips during apologies he never believed in.
In the interviews where he said too little or too much, and both were wrong.
He paid it in silences so sharp they shredded his pride, in the microscopic humiliations of being tolerated, not trusted.
In every handshake that was a test.
In every headline that measured his worth in fractions of inherited guilt.
And now, this.
This was the final cost.
He was the last unmarried Malfoy heir of his generation—once a badge of rank, now a brand of failure. What had once made him elite now made him suspect. Tainted. A piece of rare magical meat carved from a rotting dynasty, too potent to discard but too dangerous to own without ritual. He had become a legacy liability, a final pawn offered up by a dwindling house that still carried enough bloodline magic to matter—even if no one wanted to admit it.
Because his blood, for all its stains, still carried weight.
Old weight.
The kind that could anchor spells carved into castle foundations, the kind that could bind dragons or bless cursed lands. His family may have been publicly declawed, but their ancestral roots still sank deep into the bedrock of magical law—old, buried rights tucked into corners of legislation no one dared repeal. In the places that mattered—in the ink of old treaties, in the bones of old wards—Malfoy blood still held value.
And so the Ministry had smiled.
They had issued a press release—complete with carefully chosen language and an unflattering portrait—and sold the story as a triumph of reconciliation. A union of past and future, they'd said. A revival of sacred custom. What they meant was: Look how well we can leash a monster.
What they meant was: Watch him kneel.
The rules of the ritual were clear, ancient, and immutable.
Any witch of eligible bloodline could step forward—not with gold, not with dowries, not even with affection—but with ancestral legitimacy. Her lineage had to be old. Documented. Potent. She had to be recognized by the magic itself. No exceptions. No negotiations. No appeals.
One match. Final. Binding.
A contract written in blood, sealed by arcane forces older than the Ministry itself.
And once it was made—once the parchment sealed—it could never be undone.
No matter who claimed him.
No matter what he wanted.
Because that was the point, wasn't it?
It wasn't about his choice.
It never had been.
Draco scanned the courtroom through the translucent shimmer of the enchantment veil, its surface laced with old runes—subtle, spider-fine etchings of containment and concealment meant to obscure him from view until the ritual officially commenced. A curtain of half-seen magic, draped in politeness and law. But it didn't matter. He could see through it just fine. See them all. Their faces. Their hunger.
The gallery overflowed like a fever dream of power and gossip—Ministry officials seated in smug little clusters, society parasites cloaked in peacock plumage and powdered vanity, and row upon row of journalists with sharpened quills already twitching above glossy notepads enchanted to capture the juiciest phrases. They looked at him like they were waiting for him to fall apart. Like they wanted it. Their gazes sparkled with the particular sadism reserved for public downfall—the same glint seen at scandal trials, secret duels, and executions whispered about in velvet-draped parlors. Some leaned forward, unable to hide their anticipation. Some whispered behind gloved hands. But all of them watched.
And still, the flashes came—too many, too fast—flashbulbs bursting in rapid, merciless succession, white-hot magic flaring across the chamber like miniature explosions. Each one struck him like a lash across his consciousness, turning the back of his skull into a pulsing knot of pain, making the air taste like static and salt. They weren't photographing a man. They were documenting a downfall. An exorcism.
In the front rows—those most coveted seats that smelled of old gold and older secrets—sat the pureblood matriarchs. The old families. The surviving royalty of a decaying empire. They were arranged like a tribunal dressed in couture, pretending not to be executioners even as their silence throbbed with judgment. He saw them at once—recognized them with the weary instinct of someone who had grown up studying power and knowing precisely how it smelled.
There was a Greengrass—Astoria, most likely—sitting with her spine straight as a wand, hands folded in her lap like a priestess mid-devotion, her expression blank but her eyes too clear to be disinterested. Next to her, a Bulstrode, thicker in build and heavier in presence, flanked by a pair of younger cousins styled like attendants, her focus already fixed on the ceremonial altar with a gaze so calculating it felt like prophecy. And further down, though he couldn't be entirely certain, what looked like a Rosier—posture rigid, lips curled in the faintest shadow of a smirk, her shoulders set with the restless arrogance of someone who thought she might just break the rules and still be applauded for it.
He knew them all.
Not as strangers, but as echoes of a life he no longer lived.
He'd danced with some of them. Or their sisters. Or their daughters. He'd bowed at their debutante balls, endured their perfume-choked drawing rooms, exchanged pleasantries and promises beneath chandeliers that glittered like frost-covered daggers. They had once giggled behind fans embroidered with family crests and whispered cruel truths about half-bloods and heartbreak as though those were one and the same.
These women were no mystery to him. They were part of the machinery. Predictable. Political. Dangerous, yes—but in a language he understood. He had been raised to walk among them, to charm and endure them, to know exactly how close to stand without bleeding.
And though he was no longer deluded—no longer naïve enough to believe in things like love or loyalty, not after Azkaban trials and Ministry settlements and years of interviews calibrated to please—he had assumed, at the very least, that the Ministry would contain this final humiliation within the expected ranks. That they would keep the farce tidy. Manageable. Confined to familiar names and carefully sanctioned powerplays.
He had assumed wrong.
Because something was shifting.
He felt it.
A prickle at the base of his neck. A cold feathering up his spine, slow and spectral, like winter crawling up through stone. It wasn't fear—fear was sharp. This was colder. Older. This was dread dressed in ceremony.
The magic was waking.
He could feel it now—deep beneath the polished marble floor, in the bones of the chamber, in the pulse of the ancient enchantments that coiled beneath the architecture like a second circulatory system. The weight of tradition was no longer metaphorical. It was magic. It was real. It was moving.
The air changed—thickened, tasted metallic at the back of his throat. The wards began to whisper against his skin, faint and formless, like something brushing past the fabric of his robes. The enchantment veil before him wavered, pulsing softly as the magic built itself toward ceremony.
Something old was beginning.
Something absolute.
And Draco Malfoy—last heir of a tarnished name, wrapped in silk and shame—was about to be offered up like history's final confession.
He could feel it now—deep beneath the polished marble, the floor itself seemed to exhale, a slow and spectral breath drawn not from lungs but from the roots of ancient, buried spellwork waking after centuries of dormancy, an almost imperceptible shift that vibrated up through the soles of his shoes and wrapped, with eerie precision, around his ankles like invisible shackles forged from silver vines, the enchantments crawling with ritualistic grace beneath the obsidian tiling in patterns too old to name, magic blooming beneath his feet like some infernal garden rooted in blood and law, blooming with purpose, pulsing with the rhythmic certainty of heartbeat rather than spell, threading itself through the foundations of the chamber until even the air felt aware, sentient, expectant, holding its breath not in anticipation of ceremony but of sacrifice; the veil shimmered more violently now, its edges flickering like a mirage caught in a rising tide of ceremonial tension, as though the enchantments woven through it were straining under the weight of the moment, warping the light with a kind of reverence so sharp it felt cruel.
And then it came—the voice, slicing through the rising hum with a clarity too polished to be accidental, that measured cadence of bureaucracy masquerading as ritual, the tone smooth and legalistic but slick with something else beneath it, something almost gleeful in its precision, the satisfaction of someone who knows they are about to announce not an event but an execution with just enough parchment-wrapped civility to make it palatable.
"By decree of the Wizarding Reparations Committee," the speaker intoned, each syllable reverberating through the dome like a verdict, "and under the sanction of the Magical Bloodline Restoration Act, we gather to fulfill the rite of the Bride Price Offering. Today, the House of Malfoy will make restitution."
And there it was—that word, that poisoned chalice of a term, that lovely, lofty bit of legal sanctimony they all seemed to adore, as if dressing the blade in brocade somehow made the cut less deep, less personal, less permanent. Restitution. As if a wedding, officiated by memory and magic and meaningless smiles, could scrub the stench of war from his name. As if shackling him to a stranger would somehow atone for blood spilled, for allegiances betrayed, for a history too cracked to be mended. As if parading him in front of the old families like a lamb wrapped in silk could ever pass for justice. His teeth clenched before he could stop them, the sound of the word lodging itself behind his molars like gravel, brittle and sour.
But he didn't move, didn't so much as blink when the veil dropped in a slow, deliberate cascade of golden shimmer that fell like the closing of curtains at the end of a tragedy, illuminating him at last in full view of the gallery. The gasp that followed was immediate, collective, and disappointingly predictable—not the kind of sound born of sympathy, not even of horror, but the sharp, delighted breath of spectators getting exactly the show they came for, a ripple of aroused fascination blooming across the room like perfume, heavy and vulgar. They weren't looking at a man. They weren't seeing him. They were witnessing the moment, the occasion, the ceremony where disgrace was crystallized into something beautiful and cruel. They were watching history made palatable.
He was the theatre. The lesson. The spectacle sewn into six feet of stifled rage and grey formalwear, draped in a name that had once commanded fear but now invited pity. He was a morality play wrapped in bloodline silk and subtle sneers, a fall from grace masquerading as progress. His jaw tightened, his posture didn't waver, but his vision narrowed when the officiant cleared their throat and read the first name aloud—ritual demanding formality, voice echoing like a drumbeat against the heavy silence.
"Lady Astoria Greengrass, of the Northern Lineage, direct descendant of High Enchanters Brisena and Corvinus."
He saw her move with the fluid grace of someone born to choreography, every line of her face composed, every flick of her robe deliberate, the soft bow of her head like a page torn from a textbook on aristocratic elegance; she stood before the altar with perfect poise, lips parted just enough to breathe, hands demurely folded before her, and she said it with such quiet serenity that it almost didn't register as rejection at all—"I decline."
A silence fell, splintered instantly by whispers, a collective intake of breath that sharpened into a gasp before anyone could temper it. Somewhere to his left, a woman hissed something beneath her breath, another parchment rustled too loudly, but Draco didn't so much as blink—didn't let the hollow bloom inside his chest show on his face, didn't let the ache behind his ribs bend his spine. He had expected her to say yes. Expected the safe choice. Expected decorum.
But then another name was called—and another refusal followed, just as poised, just as bloodless, just as calculated to appear respectful while landing with the impact of a slap. And then another. And another. Each rejection more final than the last, not angry, not emotional, not even particularly dramatic—just dismissive in that aristocratic, razor-edged way he knew far too well, the kind of rejection that didn't scream you're not wanted, but worse, you're not necessary.
He stood there as silence followed silence, each name rising into the air like a possible salvation only to be dashed against the cold stone of politics disguised as ritual, each polite declination a dagger slid delicately beneath his skin, each pause afterward more damning than the last. His pulse began to rise—not from panic, not from pride, but from something colder, something meaner, something carved from the old, deep fury of a man being told he was not worth even the power of a contract. They didn't want his name. They didn't want his legacy. They didn't want the remnants of a dynasty so thoroughly defanged that even desperation couldn't make it desirable.
The Ministry had put him forward, had offered him like a relic to be enshrined or discarded at will, and the pureblood daughters of the old world—those sharp, shining creatures he had once danced beside, once imagined standing next to him beneath an ancestral crest—were turning their backs. Not out of vengeance. Not even out of morality. But indifference. And there was something in that—something small and sharp and slow-burning—that hurt more than hatred ever could.
Because this wasn't a reckoning.
It was abandonment masquerading as formality.
And Draco Malfoy, for all his inherited grandeur and magical pedigree, had just become the unclaimed prize at the altar of redemption.
He could feel it building, rising in the bones of the room like pressure beneath skin, a quiet thickening of the air that pressed against his chest and crawled along the nape of his neck with the static tension of a gathering storm; it was in the shifting bodies of the crowd, in the nervous rustle of silks and the tight, darting glances cast toward the dais, in the way conversations had stalled mid-whisper and how even the most self-assured witches in the gallery were beginning to glance toward one another with unease coiling in their throats, because the ritual had faltered, had stumbled, had begun to teeter dangerously on the edge of collapse, its old magic stretching thin, strained under the weight of too many refusals and not enough names, its ancient expectation now spinning in frantic circles, scouring the room for a viable claim, aching for a match before the enchantments snapped like worn thread; the silence wasn't empty—it was full, bloated, swollen with magic that needed resolution and blood that demanded binding, and somewhere behind the formal poise of the officiant's desk and the rigid rows of pureblood matrons, the pressure turned inward, caught between expectation and failure, too fragile to sustain itself much longer.
And then it happened—not a shout, not a proclamation, but a voice, soft and low and laced with the kind of calm that doesn't beg for attention because it doesn't need to, unhurried and clear as glass, a single line delivered with no embellishment and yet wrapped in something unmistakably dangerous, something ancient and irrevocable—"I claim him."—and it wasn't just the words that broke the room open like a spell detonation, it was the person who spoke them, the impossibility of who stood behind them, because she moved before anyone could stop her, gliding forward with the unshakable gravity of a star falling in slow motion, untouched by the murmurs or the stares or the sacred weight of the ceremony she had just ruptured, walking as if her name had always been etched into the bones of the ritual, as if this moment had always belonged to her, as if fate was merely catching up.
She entered not like a witch stepping into ritual, but like something mythic risen from marble and memory, her every movement swathed in the kind of sculpted elegance that made time hesitate, clothed not in traditional robes but in a designer gown that clung to her like a prophecy fulfilled, its fabric liquid and lustrous, cascading over her frame in folds that whispered of divinity and defiance, woven with barely visible sigils embroidered in thread fine as spider-silk and stitched into the bodice like hidden constellations; the dress shimmered not with magic, but with power—the understated, devastating kind worn only by women who have long since learned they don't need to shout to be heard, and her heels—tall, razor-thin, impossibly delicate—struck the stone with a cadence that sounded less like footsteps and more like declarations, each click echoing off the chamber walls as if the floor itself had to bear witness to her arrival.
She looked like a goddess exiled from Olympus and draped in mortal couture, carved from conviction and contradiction, every angle of her presence polished to impossible poise, and the room, which had been loud with silence only moments before, seemed to choke on its own breath, drawn tight in a single, suspended exhale—as if everyone present had just remembered what awe felt like, and what it meant to watch something beautiful that could ruin you.
Granger stepped into the circle with the kind of grace that did not announce itself but commanded attention all the same, not with force, not with the haughty elegance of pureblood posturing, but with the serene inevitability of something that simply belonged—she didn't bow, didn't pause, didn't even glance at the officiant for approval because she didn't need it, she just walked straight through the veil of spellwork like it was a breeze parting around her, like the ancient runes carved into the marble floor were merely waiting for the weight of her footsteps to complete their circuit; her hair, long and wind-swept and seemingly threaded with slivers of moonlight, moved behind her in loose, glimmering strands that caught the wardlight and flickered silver in the charged air, reacting to the enchantments not with resistance but with recognition, as if the magic knew her, as if the room remembered her, as if history itself had made space for her arrival.
Gasps didn't just scatter—they shattered, sharp and discordant like the sound of glass breaking in a cathedral, a collective fracture of disbelief and rising awe as every eye in the room turned to her, struggling to reconcile what they were seeing with what they had expected, confusion rippling through the gallery like a spell gone wrong, because this wasn't supposed to happen, this wasn't one of the eligible daughters of old families, this wasn't a name whispered behind fans at pureblood weddings—this was Hermione Granger, and the ritual should have rejected her, should have collapsed the moment she stepped past the wardline, but instead—
The wards answered her.
Not passively. Not begrudgingly. But with something dangerously close to reverence, flaring not in warning but in welcome, ancient runes carved into the ceremonial circle pulsing with green fire so blinding it painted the floor in light, parchment on the officiant's desk igniting with iridescent glow as her name etched itself across it in ink that shimmered violet and gold, the magic responding not just with permission but with delight, the circle itself spinning as if it had been asleep until now, groaning with the kind of relief that sounded too sentient to be accidental, as though she hadn't interrupted the spell but completed it, as though the rite hadn't been failing—it had been waiting.
Because she wasn't ordinary.
Because bloodlines are only one kind of power.
And hers ran deeper.
Draco felt the rage spike so fast it stole the breath from his lungs, a sudden, blinding heat that rose in his throat like bile and burned behind his eyes like betrayal, sharp and visceral and searing with the particular fury that only came when something slipped completely beyond his control—because he hadn't expected her, not here, not now, not in this room thick with history and humiliation, and certainly not standing before him like she belonged there, her voice curling around the moment like silk soaked in gasoline, gentle and impossible and already rewriting everything. His mouth opened on instinct—lips parting to object, to spit her name like it was a hex, to cut her down with words sharp enough to draw blood—but the ritual did what he could not, silencing him with magic older than vengeance, the spell locking his throat with unyielding finality, his protest dying in his mouth like a scream that had never been born. The law forbade interference. The rite did not tolerate resistance. His voice was no longer his own, and gods, wasn't that just the final insult—that even his outrage had to be quiet.
He stood there, immobile, shackled by ancient enchantment and his own spiraling disbelief, every muscle in his body humming with the kind of tension that bordered on violence, his jaw locked so tightly it felt like something might crack, yet all he could do—truly, all the universe would permit him to do—was look at her, just look at her, and the act of seeing her, really seeing her, somehow undid more of him than her words ever could.
Because she smiled.
Not in triumph. Not in cruelty. Not like she had won something.
She smiled like she'd found something.
It wasn't the smile of a witch basking in victory or staking a claim in front of an audience trained to applaud audacity. No—that would have been easier. That would have made sense. Instead, she smiled at him like he was something familiar, something expected, something meant. The kind of smile one gives to an old secret rediscovered in a drawer you'd forgotten you once loved. Soft. Steady. Unforgiving in its intimacy.
She looked at him like she had always known he would be there.
Like she'd been searching, but without urgency.
Like the world had finally brought her to the exact doorstep she had been fated to cross.
And Merlin help him, he felt it—that strange, bone-deep certainty behind her eyes, that quiet gravity in her posture, that unbearable calm that made it clear she wasn't here to play the game. She was the game. And gods, she didn't even look smug about it. That would've been easier to hate. That would've given him something to push against.
But she didn't gloat.
She didn't weaponize it.
She just stood there, beautiful and unknowable, in her designer dress and dangerous stillness, looking at him like he wasn't a man on display or a legacy broken open for public inspection—but something curious, coiled, sharp with fire and instinct. A dragon. Caged and bare and bound in silk.
And when she finally spoke, her voice was so soft it barely stirred the air—just a thread of sound, but it curled around him like smoke, like memory, like something dreamt.
"I've always been curious about dragons."
She said it like a child confesses a secret to a god.
She said it like it was nothing, like it was everything, like the courtroom around her hadn't just ruptured under the weight of ancient laws recognizing her blood, like she hadn't just carved her name into a legacy that wasn't meant to be hers, like the universe hadn't just cracked open to accommodate her.
She said it like a joke. Like a spell. Like the kind of truth no one else would understand until it was too late.
And he—Draco Malfoy, stripped of choice, dignity, and voice—had no idea whether he wanted to tear the world apart around her or fall to his knees and beg her to finish the sentence.
Because for one shattering, vertigo-laced second, he didn't know if what burned in his chest was hatred or longing, didn't know if she had ruined him or remade him just by existing in the same room.
And the worst part was, she hadn't even tried.
***
Granger reached for the ceremonial quill with a slowness that didn't suggest hesitation but something far more unnerving—deliberation, intention, a kind of graceful inevitability that made it impossible to look away, her fingers extending with the weightless precision of a spell performed in a dream, not quite touching, but hovering just above the feathered shaft as though the object might vanish if disturbed too harshly, as though she were reaching not for parchment and ink, but for something sacred and ancient and trembling at the edge of reality—like the stem of an unspoken prophecy, or the fragile breath of a spell older than language, barely clinging to the veil between memory and future. She handled it not like an instrument of law or a tool of bureaucracy, but like a relic—something alive, something storied—holding it with a kind of reverence so subtle it bypassed all performance, the kind of instinctive tenderness one might show a mirror that remembers who you were before you bled. There was no grand gesture, no flinch, no artifice in her posture, only that impossible stillness she wore like silk, as if her entire body had been designed to move only when the world required it, and when she finally lifted the quill, it felt not like an action but like a spell being completed—like the conclusion of a ritual the rest of them had forgotten they were part of.
It was then, in that breathless, suspended moment, that the room seemed to comprehend what they were truly witnessing—not just the sealing of a contract, but the quiet, devastating reweaving of fate itself. Because Granger wasn't simply signing a name. She wasn't just binding herself to the ruins of a dynasty. She was inscribing something deeper, something mythic, as if the ink were being drawn from some vein the earth had kept hidden for this very purpose, as if each stroke carved into the parchment was less about ownership and more about claiming a corner of time and saying: this is mine now. Her movements were fluid, effortless, devoid of the usual ceremony one might expect from such a monumental act, yet carried the eerie serenity of a forest moments before a storm—the kind of quiet that hums with life just below the bark, that smells of roots and dusk and unseen things watching with ancient eyes.
And when the quill finally touched the parchment, the ink that spilled from it shimmered in a way that defied every known rule of alchemy—not gold, not violet, not even iridescent, but something between all three, something that didn't reflect light so much as breathe it, curling into the air like vapor from an old potion, smelling impossibly of things that shouldn't coexist: crushed petals warmed by moonlight, rain-soaked metal kissed by lightning, elderflower drifting through forgotten gardens, the kind of scent that clung to dreams and silk slips and memories you weren't entirely sure were yours. It smelled like magic that hadn't asked for permission. It smelled like the kind of beauty that rewrote boundaries. It smelled like surrender disguised as choice, and choice disguised as destiny.
And Draco—still frozen, still bound, still unraveling—could only watch her, helpless and furious and impossibly drawn, as she signed away whatever was left of his autonomy with the poise of someone gifting a blessing. He could do nothing but stand there, heart strangled by a feeling too tangled to name, and watch Hermione Granger begin the exquisite, irreversible undoing of his life—an undoing she made look like an act of grace, like a benediction handed down by a goddess who didn't even know she was divine.
Then it was his turn—not announced, not welcomed, not even acknowledged with ceremony or compassion, just expected, inevitable, like a blade passed to the condemned with no pretense of mercy. No pause softened the moment. No breath of silence broke the weight of what was demanded. The ritual moved forward with the grinding, pitiless rhythm of ancient magic doing what it had always done: taking without asking, binding without grace. And Draco stepped into that silence the way a man steps onto a scaffold, every footfall drawn like a thread from an unraveling seam, the air tightening around him with every movement until it felt like he was walking deeper into a noose, the crowd nothing but shadows behind glass, the enchanted circle at the center of the world where he would sign away the last sliver of his name.
He didn't hesitate—he couldn't. There was no hesitation built into this kind of surrender. No room for rebellion beneath laws old enough to predate kings, no path to redemption that didn't begin and end at the tip of a quill soaked in the blood of dynasties. He moved without grace but with precision, the slow, resigned cadence of someone who had stopped looking for exits a long time ago, who had learned that the only way through certain kinds of ruin was to walk directly into the fire and pretend it didn't hurt. His fingers curled around the handle of the ceremonial quill—still warm from her touch, still humming with the afterglow of her impossible magic—and it nearly startled him, that heat, that trace of her woven into the wood and silver like a secret still clinging to the shape of her hand.
It was heavier than it should have been.
Not in weight, but in meaning.
It felt like a relic. A weapon. A confession. It felt like a sword he'd been told to fall on.
He raised it with the solemnity of someone who understood what it meant to write the ending to a story he hadn't agreed to start, and when the tip of the quill finally met the parchment—when his name began to burn itself into the page in thick, iron-dark strokes—it wasn't ceremony anymore.
It was consequence.
And that was when he felt it—the recoil—not from the page, not from the parchment or the ink or the watching eyes, but from within himself. It struck him like a pulse of cold water to the spine, a jolt that rattled his bones and clawed at the inside of his lungs, and for a single, devastating instant, he felt something inside him pull back, retreat, coil inward like an animal sensing danger. His magic. It knew. It knew, before his mind could catch up, before he could twist it into logic or stubbornness or disdain, that something had been severed and remade in the space of a single breath—that something ancient and absolute had clicked into place, and there would be no unbinding it, no spell to reverse what had just happened. The line was drawn. The blood had agreed.
He was no longer wholly his own.
And there was no one else to blame.
So he turned to her—because if he didn't, he would've broken something, anything, just to feel in control again—and he let the venom pour through the cracks in his composure, let the words come low and furious and almost trembling with restraint.
"You think this is funny?" he said, the question so sharp it nearly whistled through the air, his voice curling around the circle like smoke from a burning house, bitter and black-edged and laced with disbelief, not because he thought she did find it amusing, but because he needed her to say something, anything, to anchor him in the chaos she had summoned around him.
And she didn't flinch.
Of course she didn't. She never did.
"Not funny," she said, and her voice—gods, her voice—was so calm it felt like a slap, soft and even and maddening in its ease, as though this were an ordinary conversation, as though she hadn't just dismantled him in front of half the magical world with nothing more than a name and a smile, as though this weren't her wedding and his unmaking.
"Interesting."
That word.
Of course she would say interesting, as if he were some curiosity plucked from a shelf, as if this moment—his life—was just another piece of magic she wanted to study, another oddity to press between the pages of her neat little mind. His sneer broke through before he could stop it, and his voice turned colder, sharper, jagged with something dangerously close to panic masquerading as control.
"What exactly do you think this is, Granger?" he hissed, the name tasting bitter on his tongue, his hands clenched so tightly at his sides his nails left half-moon imprints against his palms. "What kind of fucking game are you playing? Do you even understand what you've done?"
He wanted her to crack. He wanted her mask to falter, wanted to find the seam in that maddening serenity and tear it open until something real spilled out. He wanted a flaw. A weakness. A reason.
But she just tilted her head, slow and thoughtful, that moonlit hair cascading over one bare shoulder like it had been painted there, and for a moment she simply looked at him—really looked, not with cruelty, not with pity, but with the kind of unbearable softness that felt like it had no place in a room built on politics and punishment, the kind of gaze that didn't see a monster or a name or a weapon, but something wounded, something beautiful, something caught.
"You looked so lonely," she said, and her voice was like warm air at dawn, like something gentle brushing over bruises you didn't know you had, and the words hit harder than any insult could have, because they weren't cruel. They weren't calculated. They were true.
And before he could decide whether to curse her or kiss her or collapse entirely, the magic surged up from the circle—golden and brutal and final—and sealed them both.
It rose without warning, blooming from the parchment in a burst of radiant heat so sudden and searing it felt less like magic and more like being branded from the inside out, a furnace flung open beneath his ribs, the roar of it silent but all-consuming as it rushed upward in waves, wrapping around his arms like invisible cuffs, sliding up his spine with the weight of molten metal, licking beneath his collarbones and threading itself through the narrow channels of his veins like golden fire laced with iron frost; it didn't simply bind—it infiltrated, curling beneath his skin and rooting itself in the hollows of his body, spreading like oil and flame and memory, merciless and invasive and slow, so slow, each breath drawn under its influence as the ancient enchantment slipped past bone and blood and breath and claimed every buried piece of ancestral magic that had ever pulsed through him, every sliver of legacy carved into his marrow by centuries of lineage, coiling deeper until it reached the places no spell should ever touch.
It moved through him like a secret rediscovered, like a truth long buried clawing its way back into power, winding down the fragile corridors of bloodline memory with the precision of a key finally turning in a lock that had waited lifetimes to be opened, as though every generation of Malfoy magic had been holding its breath for this moment—this match, this name, this claim—and now, finally, was exhaling.
And then—just as his chest began to tremble with the weight of it, just as the spell seemed poised to consume him whole—it sealed.
A single, blinding spark of light ignited between them, gold edged in something ancient and wild, and in that flash the parchment burned with a magic so absolute it didn't need to be announced. The contract locked with a soundless click felt rather than heard, an internal thunderclap that echoed not in the chamber but in his blood. Complete. Irrefutable. Final.
And then there was nothing.
No sound. No breath. No hum from the enchanted walls. No whisper of ward-magic in the air.
Just silence—true silence—the kind that falls only after something irreversible has happened, the kind that presses into the lungs and settles behind the eyes, heavy with the weight of permanence.
It was done.
Hermione Granger, by the oldest blood-binding laws etched into magical civilization, was now his wife—not by choice, not by consent, but by ritual, by decree, by spellwork that predated empires.
And worse still—far, far worse—he was hers.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.
Bound, body and blood and legacy, to the woman who had stood in the center of a ruined tradition and made it look like prophecy.
Forever.
Whether he wanted it.
Or not.
***
The carriage moved with a grace so unnatural it felt almost mocking, drifting above the earth with the arrogant ease only centuries of elite enchantment could grant—its wheels hovering inches from the ground as if the laws of motion themselves had bent in deference to the Ministry's craftsmanship, gliding through the countryside like a thought too dangerous to speak aloud, like a lullaby humming just beneath the skin of a nightmare. The path it followed was smooth, untouched by weather or wind or even time, a route wrapped in wards old enough to remember blood spilled for the illusion of peace. Inside, everything was crafted for comfort—temperature held at the perfect threshold between warmth and cool, cushions that adjusted to posture as if trying to soothe without being noticed, glass windows charmed to dim the harshness of the world and let in only moonlight, soft and silver and easy to mistake for gentleness. Even the walls whispered quiet. The space breathed tranquility.
It was a lie.
The kind of lie only the powerful could afford to make beautiful.
A floating sanctuary, a cocoon wrapped in charmwork and protection spells and magic so old it had forgotten what it was protecting from. A sealed box of velvet and silk and deceit. A mobile mausoleum lined with luxury and locked from the inside with everything unsaid. And to anyone outside, it would have looked perfect—peaceful, effortless, a vision of elegant detachment gliding across a sleeping world. But the peace was surface-level only. Shallow. Manufactured. Inside the walls, something darker swirled—something hot and jagged and vibrating just below civility.
Because inside the carriage, there was nothing still about it. Not really.
Not with her seated across from him, so calm it felt cruel, her posture relaxed and her expression unreadable, humming softly under her breath to a potted sprig of some magical plant he didn't recognize, fingers gently stroking its delicate leaves like she hadn't just rewritten the trajectory of both their lives with the flick of a wrist and the press of a quill, as though the ink hadn't still been drying on the contract that made her his wife, as though this wasn't her victory and his undoing unfolding in real time. She looked untouched by the gravity of what had happened, utterly at ease in a world she had just torn from its hinges. She was humming, for fuck's sake. Humming. And it made him want to scream.
He sat stiff-backed on the opposite bench, posture ramrod straight, fists clenched so tightly against his knees that his knuckles ached with the strain, his jaw clenched to the point of pain. Every inch of him buzzed with something sharp and unspent, a volatile current of emotion twisting between his ribs, too tangled to name, too big to bury—rage, yes, but not just rage; confusion thick as fog, heat curling low in his gut like a flame fed by the impossible, the unbearable, the unearned serenity of the woman across from him. She didn't look smug. She didn't even look particularly pleased. She looked like this meant nothing to her—and somehow, that was worse than gloating.
The silence between them was not silence at all—it was a living thing, thick and coiled and pressing in from all sides, humming with everything they weren't saying, vibrating like a string pulled too tight, ready to snap with the wrong word or the right one said too gently. No spell could mute it. No charm could ease it. The tension was baked into the air now, steeped into the velvet, soaked into the space between breaths. It curled in the shadows like something feral and waiting. Every second passed like a countdown.
Because he didn't understand her.
Because she had done this with a smile so soft it felt like an invasion.
Because she had claimed him not like a prize but like a truth—and now they were alone, surrounded by a silence too rich with implication to be ignored, floating through the night in a gilded cage that carried the both of them toward a life neither of them had asked for, and only one of them had chosen.
The carriage moved on, silent and seamless.
But inside, everything was seconds away from shattering.
Granger sat across from him with the unshaken tranquility of someone who had not, mere minutes ago, rewritten the course of two ancient bloodlines with the effortless sweep of a quill, as if she hadn't bound herself to one of the most scrutinized, reviled, and legally radioactive wizards in all of postwar magical society—no, she looked nothing like a woman sitting inside a ritual's aftermath. She sat cross-legged, bare-ankled and unbothered on a cushion of Ministry-funded velvet as though she'd wandered, half-lost in thought, into the corner of a greenhouse or a sun-warmed library rather than into a marriage forged by centuries-old blood magic and the jagged remnants of political shame. The translucent folds of her gown shimmered each time she breathed, delicate layers of gossamer etched with faintly pulsing runes that lit and dimmed like starlight caught underwater, pooling around her like fog that had chosen to settle at her feet, soft and formless and strangely regal. There was no performance in it. No calculation. Her beauty, maddeningly understated, didn't ask for attention—it claimed it by nature of its stillness. Every detail of her presence seemed designed not for spectacle but for quiet erosion, like water slowly carving its will into stone.
She hummed—not to him, not for the room, not in response to anything that had just transpired, but to herself, an aimless melody without structure or rhythm, some half-remembered tune she carried in her bones that sounded like it belonged more to the earth than to human memory. The sound wasn't quite song, wasn't quite spell, but something in between, a thread of comfort looping around her like a wardless charm meant for moss and moonlight and nothing else. It filled the cabin not with noise, but with something gentler and far more invasive: peace. And it made his skin crawl.
In her lap rested a small, twisting sprig of something half-plant, half-luminescence, a bioluminescent bloom Draco didn't recognize—green and curling and pulsing faintly like it had a heartbeat of its own, exhaling golden pollen in slow, affectionate bursts as if it recognized her touch. Her fingers stroked it absently, reverently, the way one might touch a feral thing that trusted them anyway, her voice dipping now and then into low, murmured words that dissolved the moment they were spoken. They weren't incantations. They weren't commands. They were… lullabies, almost—syllables heavy with something ancient and soft, more magic than language, shaped by affection rather than intent. She whispered to it like she knew it would understand.
She hadn't looked at him once.
Not in acknowledgment. Not in triumph. Not even in curiosity. She didn't need to. She was not ignoring him, not in the way people do when they're afraid or arrogant or dismissive. She was simply being Granger—which meant she existed adjacent to chaos, not to challenge it but to quietly outlast it, to sit beside it without ever being consumed. She had always had that unnerving ability, even in school—floating just to the side of panic, of pressure, of power, letting it swirl around her without ever disturbing the calm that wrapped her like a second skin. And now, here, in this carriage, with the ink still drying on the blood-binding contract that tethered her life to his, she did not gloat or tremble or even speak. She simply was.
And Draco—Draco was unraveling by the second.
He sat across from her like a statue carved from rage and confusion, every inch of him coiled and cracking beneath the weight of restraint he no longer trusted, muscles locked so tightly that even breathing felt like betrayal. His back was so straight it hurt. His hands were fists pressed hard to his thighs, tendons straining beneath pale skin, and his jaw—gods, his jaw—was clamped shut with such brutal intensity he was half-certain something would break. He couldn't relax. He couldn't exhale. He couldn't move. Because if he did—if he shifted, even a fraction—he might lose what little he had left. Dignity. Control. Detachment.
The silence between them wasn't passive. It wasn't empty. It was so thick with meaning, with tension, with things neither of them dared name, that it had become its own living force, pressing against his ribs like a slow crush of gravity, pulling at every unspoken thing between them. The wards may have enchanted the air to perfect equilibrium, but every breath he drew felt too tight, too shallow, like he was trying to inhale through silk and secrets. His heart, which once ticked like clockwork through every public ordeal, now thudded off-tempo—louder, heavier, traitorous—reminding him with every beat that this had happened, that it was real, that her name was now tied to his by blood and contract and law.
There was no going back.
No loophole.
No denial clean enough to erase the image of her sitting across from him, quiet and unbothered, humming to a plant while the world he had spent his entire life trying to control collapsed around him in silence.
He watched her and felt the walls of himself tremble—not from hatred, not exactly, not even from anger anymore—but from the terrible, creeping realization that she was not his end in the way he had expected.
She was worse.
She was his beginning.
She glanced up at him with that maddening, unshakeable serenity of hers—that unbothered, otherworldly calm that had never once cracked under pressure, not even in school corridors thick with cruelty, not in battle, not in ritual—and reached down with her long, delicate fingers to pluck a single mint leaf from the waiting, blinking plant nestled in her lap. She held it out to him between two fingers with a kind of effortless grace that made it look like an offering—small, harmless, absurd in its tenderness. There was no hesitation in the gesture, no self-consciousness. Just the quiet, weightless audacity of a woman who'd decided that a leaf and a moment of shared breath could mean something.
It was maddening—infuriating in that quiet, undisturbed way only the truly innocent or the terrifyingly untouchable could manage, that kind of casual, deliberate stillness worn like silk armor, soft to look at but impossible to pierce. She held the leaf between her fingers not with tension or expectation, but with effortless grace, as if offering it to him wasn't a gesture but a momentary truth, something simple and sincere and, gods, almost tender—and that was the worst part, the tenderness of it, how it didn't flinch or demand, how it just waited in the air between them like something he didn't know how to hold. And he couldn't take it. Of course he couldn't. He wouldn't.
He stared at it like it was a trap disguised as kindness, something deceptively small that could detonate everything inside him if he touched it—the edge of a curse, the outline of a confession, or something even more dangerous: a kindness he didn't know how to receive. He watched it the way one watches an open flame in a room filled with powder. His fingers stayed clenched, motionless, aching. His jaw, already sore from the effort of holding everything in, throbbed like it had teeth of its own. And when the silence thickened—when it stretched on just long enough to become unbearable, just long enough to feel like a challenge—he forced words out through gritted teeth, sharp and low and cruel in the way that only wounded things know how to be.
"This isn't how this works."
The words fell like broken glass between them—carefully chosen not to invite dialogue, not to explain, not to bridge the impossible space between them, but to draw blood. He didn't care if she bled. He needed her to. Not because he thought he could make her flinch, but because hurting her would mean she was touchable. It would mean she was real. Because if she was going to sit there barefoot and serene, humming lullabies to magical weeds as though she hadn't just dismantled the structure of his entire life with a signature and a smile, then someone in this carriage had to remember what this really was: not a moonlit evening ride, not a philosophical exchange, but a binding sealed in blood and bureaucracy and centuries of expectation. A sentence masquerading as ceremony. A future made of cage bars dressed in silk.
But she—of course she did—she just tilted her head, her expression the same maddening blend of gentle curiosity and distant detachment, like she was observing something rare and slightly broken in a museum display. She didn't look insulted. She didn't look surprised. She didn't react. Her eyes flickered with something like interest, but not in the way people look at each other—not like one human to another. More like she was watching weather shift. Or a spell misfire. Something interesting, but not dangerous. Not yet.
Her voice, when it came, was maddeningly soft—so calm, so perfectly even that it made his hands curl tighter into fists, the sound of it settling over the space between them like flower petals falling over a battlefield. "I think it is," she said, not as a rebuttal, not as an argument, but as a simple truth delivered with the ease of someone who had already made peace with her side of the story, someone who knew something he didn't and saw no reason to explain it.
She let the silence stretch after that—let it bloom and curl and become something alive—until it stopped being silence and turned into something else entirely, something deliberate and infuriating in how utterly unbothered it was. And then, as if the conclusion had been obvious from the beginning, she added with that same unbearable softness, that lilac-laced neutrality that made it impossible to tell if she was comforting him or condemning him, "But don't worry. I won't expect anything from you."
And that—that—was the word that cracked him open.
Anything.
It struck him not like a weapon but like a poison, sweet at first, subtle, sliding down his throat and curling in his chest before he even knew it had sunk its claws into him. It sounded like mercy, but it tasted like dismissal, like erasure, like being told he was a footnote in his own story. He didn't know what she meant by it. He didn't know if she was offering him freedom or absolution or something colder, something worse, something that didn't even see him as worth having expectations of in the first place. And the not-knowing—that was what killed him.
He hated that he didn't understand her. Hated that his mind was still chewing on the word long after she'd gone quiet again, still turning it over like a cursed object, still searching it for the thing she hadn't said. He hated that the idea of her expecting something from him—claiming more than his name, more than his legacy—felt less terrifying than the idea that she wouldn't. That she'd already decided he had nothing to offer.
He glared at her, venom flooding every inch of his expression, venom without language, without direction, just raw, pulsing tension he didn't know where to put—and she didn't even look back. She didn't need to. Her gaze had already drifted out the window, bathed in moonlight, her fingers stroking the petals of her strange little plant again with the same gentle, unthinking tenderness, as if he hadn't spoken at all, as if his anger hadn't even rippled the surface of her composure.
And that—that—was what undid him.
Not her words. Not her spell. Not even her silence.
But that quiet, infuriating grace. That distance.
Because in that moment, he didn't know if he wanted to reach across the carriage and throttle her just to prove she was real—or drop to his knees and press his forehead to her robes and beg her, beg her, to tell him what the hell she wanted from him before the silence swallowed him whole.
He didn't know whether he wanted to throw the carriage door open so hard it shattered the silence, leap into the wind-stung darkness, and disappear into the night like a curse never spoken—somehow outrun the contract inked into his blood, the weight of her gaze, the unbearable fact of her existence—or whether he wanted to crawl across the velvet cushions on hands that trembled more than he'd ever admit, press his palm to the delicate inside of her wrist and demand answers, demand meaning , demand something to make sense of the impossible softness with which she'd shattered him. He wanted to ask her why—why she had chosen him when she could've walked away like everyone else, why she had smiled at him like he was something rare instead of something ruined, why she kept looking at the world with those impossibly wide, endlessly open eyes like it was still worth saving, still worth trusting, still beautiful , even as it did everything it could to whittle her down to something harder, colder, easier to understand.
He didn't know if he hated her for it—or if he envied her so much it made his teeth ache.
All he knew—all he could feel , in that place inside himself that no spell could touch, the one war hadn't burned and legacy hadn't hollowed out, the place still stitched together with old magic and older ache—was that Hermione Granger unsettled him more deeply, more violently, than any battlefield ever had. She unmade him without wand or word, without hex or blade or vengeance. She dismantled his armor with quiet. She cracked him open with nothing but stillness.
And the worst part—the part that wrapped around his spine like a curse, the part he couldn't stop tasting every time he breathed—was that she hadn't even tried.
***
He lay awake in the cavernous, high-ceilinged chamber she'd designated as his— assigned him, really, though the gesture hadn't felt like control or politeness, hadn't felt like anything easily nameable, just another quiet, infuriating move in the game she didn't seem to realize they were playing—on a bed that was far too soft, far too large, the kind of bed meant for peace and permanence, not punishment, not war. The silver-threaded linens beneath him were impossibly smooth, smelling faintly of something floral and unnervingly clean—like lavender and lilac and the ghosts of spring—like the manor itself had scented his arrival, taken one long look at the wreckage behind his eyes and decided, in its ancient, sentient way, to sedate him with beauty. The room was oppressively quiet, the kind of quiet that didn't soothe but listened , filled only with the low, rhythmic hum of the warding runes carved deep into the walls, and the long, sleepy creaks of old magic shifting its weight as the manor breathed through the night like it remembered a hundred lifetimes of secrets and betrayal and blood-soaked elegance. But sleep refused to come. It wouldn't come.
It had never had trouble finding him before—not in tents, not in dungeons, not in the twisted hours after battle when his skin still smelled like ash and blood—because war had trained him to collapse the moment he had the chance, to sleep like a corpse between alarms. But here, in this absurdly soft bed dressed in luxury and surrounded by magic that practically purred with calm, every muscle in his body was drawn so tight he could barely turn his head without feeling like something inside him might snap. The stillness didn't rest. It pressed.
She had put him one room away from hers.
Not at the opposite end of a long corridor. Not across an entire wing of ancestral marble. Just there, close enough to reach in a moment if something called, close enough that he could hear the faint splash of water through the shared bathroom, which—of course—had been charmed never to lock, as if even the house had given up on the illusion of separation. One breath between them. One wall. One choice.
And gods, he was still thinking about her.
He hadn't stopped thinking about her—not since the moment she stepped into the circle and said I claim him with the kind of ease reserved for inevitabilities and moonrise, like she wasn't binding herself to the most cursed name in wizarding history, like the decision hadn't cost her anything. He kept seeing her—on that dais, in that veil of magical light, her voice calm and final and gently devastating. He kept seeing the shimmer of her silks catching the spelllight like ripples on a still pond, kept hearing the sound of her voice weaving through his memory like a song he didn't mean to memorize. She had smiled at him—smiled—like he wasn't ruined or monstrous or pitiful, like he was something inevitable, something hers, and it had lodged itself in him like a splinter of light too deep to cut out.
He turned over. Then back again. Again. Again.
Closed his eyes only to open them a second later, because every time he blinked, she was there—not in body, not in breath, but in the weight of her gaze, in the unrelenting echo of her stillness, in the way she had looked at him like she already knew the places inside him no one else had dared to see, like she had seen through the armor and the cruelty and the name and still—still—had chosen not to look away.
He had been claimed. Like a prize. Like a relic. Like a thing. Paraded before the pureblood elite, evaluated like livestock, signed over like parchment in a contract that bled.
But the part that made his skin itch and his heart beat like a lie wasn't the shame.
It was that he didn't hate it.
Not entirely.
He hated her. Of course he did. Hated her unbearable calm, her softness that wasn't weakness but something more dangerous—something unflinching—hated her maddening serenity, the way she refused to treat him like the beast everyone else had spent years sculpting him into. Hated how she never once raised her voice. Never once weaponized his shame. Never once flinched when she should've run.
He hated that she hadn't tried to break him.
She hadn't humiliated him. She hadn't gloated. She hadn't even leaned into the power she now held in her palm like a lit match.
She had just… kept him.
Quietly. As if he were something strange and rare and maybe even worth preserving.
As if claiming him wasn't conquest.
As if it was care.
And he wasn't ready for that. Not even close. Maybe not ever. Because there was nothing he could say to fight that kind of magic—not wandwork, not insult, not silence.
But she was there, in the next room. And the wards between them were thin. And the scent of her—rosewood, parchment, and something electric—still clung to his skin like smoke from a fire he hadn't known he'd walked into.
And when sleep finally came—slow, reluctant, full of restless limbs and unspoken questions—it didn't come clean.
It came with her name still lodged in his mouth like a secret he hadn't meant to swallow.
And it followed him down.