Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

JULY 13, 2003

Ron stood in the doorway, a sandwich halfway to his mouth. "What is this?"

"Drafting." Hermione didn't look up from the table. Her quill scratched steadily across the parchment, her left hand weighing down a stack of references that reached her elbow.

"Drafting what? You've got - there's parchment on the ceiling, Hermione."

"That one blew off the table. Ignore it. It's sub-clause 14 anyway. Not critical."

Ron stepped into the kitchen, maneuvering around a chair that had been pushed aside to make room for a second tower of parchment. He set his sandwich down on the only visible patch of table - a space roughly the size of a Galleon - and picked up the nearest piece from the pile that had slid onto the floor. He squinted at it. His mouth moved slightly as he tried to parse the language.

"This is - Hermione, is this a marriage contract?"

"Clause draft." She dipped her quill, never breaking rhythm. "For the Malfoy marriage. I'm on section nine. Bodily autonomy provisions. It's quite elegant, actually, if you look at the cross-references - "

"You're drafting your marriage clause." Ron's voice had gone very flat. "To Malfoy."

"Yes."

"Instead of - " Ron shoved aside a layer of parchment, digging until he found the one he wanted - Wizengamot Appeal written across the top in Hermione's firm hand, heavily underlined, with detailed notes and precedent citations crammed into every margin. He held it up between them. " - instead of the appeal? The appeal against the whole bloody law? The one we've been working on for three weeks?"

"Correct."

Three weeks of late nights and legal owls and Hermione firing off citations, three weeks of Ron smuggling Ministry memos out of the Auror office in his sock, three weeks of Harry making tea nobody drank because they were too busy shouting about wizarding constitutional precedent, which, yes, was a phrase that actually existed and no, it did not help that it sounded like a punchline. They had tried everything. Ron had married Susan Bones in April - a quick thing at the Burrow and that had exempted him on the grounds of existing legal partnership.

Harry and Ginny had already done the Ministry one better: they'd had James, who was eleven months old and exempted his parents from the reproductive mandate by the biological fact of his existence, even though Harry and Ginny were now living in separate flats and co-parenting which the Ministry didn't care about, because James existed.

But Hermione, who was the cleverest witch of her age and the most ineligible bachelorette in magical Britain - Hermione had no husband and no child and no exemption and no loophole, and they had spent three weeks trying to find one. They'd looked at blood status exemptions (none), war service exemptions (none, and wasn't that a slap), medical exemptions (Hermione was in perfect health), ancestral property exemptions (Muggle-borns need not apply, obviously), and one extremely convoluted legal theory involving the International Confederation of Wizards' 1692 Reproductive Autonomy Clause that had turned out to have been repealed in 1743 after a scandal involving the Portuguese Minister for Magic and a Veela colony, which - long story, not relevant, Hermione had nearly put her fist through the library table. 

And now she was sitting here, and Ron was looking at her.

He turned and bellowed up the stairs. "Harry!"

Hermione finally looked up, quill poised. "Must you?"

"Yes I bloody must!"

Footsteps on the stairs. Harry appeared at the bottom, slightly breathless, wand still tucked in his sleeve - he'd been upstairs practicing, by the look of the scorch marks on his jumper. He glanced at Ron's face, then at Hermione's table, then back at Ron. "What's happened?"

"She's drafting her marriage contract instead of the appeal."

Harry looked at Hermione. He looked at the table, parchment heaped like snowdrifts, quills scattered, ink pots clustered near her right hand. He looked back at Hermione. "You're drafting your marriage clause?"

"Yes!" both Ron and Hermione said simultaneously.

Harry crossed the kitchen, picking his way through the drift of parchment on the floor, and pulled out the chair across from Hermione. He sat.

"Walk me through why."

Hermione set her quill down. Sat back. Steepled her fingers. "The appeal is a waste of time. The Wizengamot passed the Marriage Law with a two-thirds majority, and the legal framework is airtight. I've read it three times. I've read the precedent three times. The only successful appeal would require proving the law causes irreparable harm to a protected class, and the Ministry has already classified this as a 'temporary emergency measure under the Population Recovery Act,' which means it's exempt from standard judicial review for eighteen months. Eighteen months, Harry. You understand what that means?"

"It means - "

"It means that by the time any appeal winds its way through the courts, the eighteen-month window will have expired, and I'll have been re-partnered anyway. The law self-renews - failed partnerships dissolve and reassign. If Draco and I don't conceive, and we won't, the marriage ends, and I'm free. No re-appeal necessary. I just wait it out."

Ron had been opening and closing his mouth during this like a fish. He'd moved to the counter without seeming to notice, his back pressed against it, arms crossed. Now he found his voice.

"You're just going to live in Malfoy Manor for eighteen months and - and hope - "

"I'm not hoping anything. I'm planning." Hermione tapped the parchment in front of her. "This clause draft ensures the terms of my residence are legally binding before I set foot in that house. I am not going in unprotected, and I am not gambling on the Wizengamot suddenly growing a conscience. I am taking control of the only thing I can control."

Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Hermione - "

"I know what you're going to say."

"You don't, actually - "

"You're going to say Malfoy is dangerous, and I'm walking into a snake pit, and what if he - " She paused. Lifted her chin. "What if he kills me?"

Ron pointed at her from the counter. "Yes! That! What he said!"

Hermione picked up a piece of parchment and held it up with both hands, the paper cracking stiffly between her fingers.

"Clause Seven, Subsection A: 'The hosting spouse shall be bound by magical ward-monitoring, the logs of which shall be transmitted weekly to an independent third-party adjudicator, herein designated as the Office of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror Division.'" She lowered the parchment. "Kingsley personally approved the adjudicator assignment. Every ward in that house will register any act of physical violence against me, and it will be automatically reported. If Draco so much as pushes me, an Auror team will be at the Manor within the hour."

Ron's mouth opened and closed. "But - "

"Subsection B: 'Any failure of the ward-monitoring system, including but not limited to tampering, disablement, or deliberate interference, shall constitute an immediate breach of the marriage contract and trigger the dissolution clause without prejudice to the partnered witch, who shall be released from all further obligation under the law.'" She set the parchment down. "He can't even turn the wards off without the marriage ending and me walking free. And Narcissa can't do it for him either, which is the entire point of Subsection B. I know exactly whose fingerprints were on the Wizengamot floor votes."

Harry leaned forward, forearms on his knees. "What if he finds a way around the wards? Dark magic, something his father taught him - "

"Clause Seven, Subsection C." Hermione was already holding up another piece of parchment, rifling through the stack with her free hand to find it. "'The partnered witch shall carry a dual-trigger emergency portkey, activated by either spoken incantation or sudden loss of magical signature equilibrium, the latter triggered by any spell cast upon her person without prior consent.'" She looked at Harry very steadily. "If anyone casts any spell on me in that house without my permission - Stunning, Imperius, Obliviate, anything - the portkey activates. I'm out."

Ron made a frustrated sound, grabbed a kitchen chair, and dropped into it backwards, arms folded over the back, chin resting on his wrists. "What if he just - locks you in a room? You can't portkey out if you're - "

"Clause Nine, Subsection D." Hermione's voice was almost singsong now as she held up yet another parchment, plucked from a stack that was somehow sorted in an order only she understood. "'The partnered witch shall retain unrestricted right of ingress and egress from the residence at all times. Any attempt to restrict, confine, or impede her movement shall constitute a criminal offence under existing magical domestic law, in addition to triggering the contract dissolution clause.' He so much as closes a door and tells me to stay, the marriage is over and he's in Azkaban.

"That's - " Ron sputtered. "But what if you just go missing? What if they say you left but you didn't actually leave and there's no body and - "

"Clause Eleven." Hermione held up a full roll of parchment that unspooled toward the floor, one end curling around an ink pot. "I report to the Ministry daily for work anyway - but just incase I have to sign in with a blood quill - my own choice - so there's no forgery. If I miss one appointment, the dissolution clause triggers automatically, an investigation is opened, and Malfoy is held in Ministry custody until I'm found. Alive." (The Ministry's own repopulation logic works against them here. A missing witch isn't a repopulated witch. Even they can follow that arithmetic.) She rolled the parchment back up with a crisp snap.

Harry tried a different angle, sitting back in his chair. "What about Veritaserum? What if he doses you and - "

"Clause Nine, Subsection F." Hermione didn't even need to look at the parchment this time. She tapped her temple. "'The administration of any potion, draught, tincture, or magical substance to the partnered witch without her explicit, prior, written consent shall constitute - '"

" - a criminal offence and trigger the dissolution clause, yeah, I get the pattern," said Harry, waving his hand.

"Then stop testing me."

"What about his family?" Ron cut in, leaning forward over the back of his chair so aggressively it creaked. "You're not just marrying Draco, you're walking into the Malfoy house. Lucius might be in Azkaban but Narcissa's there, and the house-elves, and Merlin knows what else - what if she does something?"

Hermione held up a finger, reached into the pile - rummaging, now, the stacks shifting like tectonic plates - and produced another parchment with a small triumphant noise. "Clause Twelve. 'The hosting spouse's family members, household staff, and any other residents or guests of the primary residence are bound by the same terms and penalties as the hosting spouse. The hosting spouse assumes full legal liability for any actions taken by household members against the partnered witch.'" She smiled. It was not a warm smile. "If Narcissa poisons my tea, Draco goes to Azkaban. He knows that. He'll police his own household."

Ron gaped. "You've made him his own prison warden."

"I've made him invested in my safety. That's not the same thing." (It is, a little, but he doesn't need to know that.)

Ron stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over - it clattered against the table leg, dislodging a minor avalanche of parchment - and began to pace the kitchen. It was a small kitchen. He made it to the stove, turned, made it to the icebox, turned, and made it back to the stove before he spoke. Harry tracked him like watching a rally at Wimbledon.

"Okay. Okay, fine. You've got clauses for him killing you, clauses for him locking you up, clauses for him dosing you, clauses for his mum." He turned and pointed at her. "What about - what about the whole point of the law, Hermione? The repopulation bit? The conceive-a-child-in-eighteen-months bit? What if he - "

He couldn't say it. His ears went very red.

"What if he rapes me?"

Ron flinched like he'd been hexed. Harry looked away, jaw tight.

Hermione had thought about it back in March, when the draft of the Act was still making the rounds through the Ministry - whispered about in lifts, debated in the atrium, cried over in the ladies' on level four and she'd imagined the worst, because that's what she does. That's what she's for. And then July came, and the memo came, and she saw Draco Malfoy's name beside hers on Ministry parchment, and the emotion she felt - hammering behind her ribs like a bird that had just discovered the cage door was open - was relief.

Malfoy loathes her. He loathes her with his whole chest, and that is the single most reliable contraceptive available to a witch in magical Britain at the present moment. She has never been so certain of a man's intentions, and there is something actually rather freeing about that, because at least you know the prick won't touch you. Eighteen months is not very long in the grand scheme of things, is it? Eighteen months of living in whatever wing of the Manor he banishes her to, eating whatever food the house-elves serve, reading whatever books she packs - Merlin forbid she run out of reading material, that would be the actual crisis - existing in the same house as a man who would rather swallow his own wand than lay a hand on her, and then the clock runs out, the marriage dissolves, and she walks out of that mausoleum with her body and her autonomy intact.

Though she had considered, briefly - very briefly, the other names on the Ministry roster. Men who might decide that Ministry mandate was license and disgust was not a strong enough deterrent. No. Give her the devil she knows. Because the fear that a man might decide his duty to the Ministry outweighs his disgust, that a man might try - Malfoy will never try. Malfoy would find the very concept repugnant on a cellular level. His prejudice is obscene, but it is predictable, and predictable is a roof over her head in a storm, and predictable is a lock on the bedroom door, and predictable is walking out of that house in eighteen months with nothing worse than a stunning lack of intellectual stimulation and a thorough familiarity with every ceiling crack in the east wing.

And then she'll worry about the next name on the list - because the next one might not hate her enough to keep her safe.

"Malfoy won't touch me."

"How are you certain?" Ron demanded. "How can you possibly be certain - the man is a Death Eater, Hermione - "

"Former. Legally cleared. I was there for the trial, Ron, you were also there - "

" - he's a bigoted, prejudiced, purist - "

"All true."

" - who probably still thinks Muggle-borns are below him - "

"Almost certainly."

" - and you think he won't - that he won't just - " Ron's jaw worked. "What if he forces-"

"He won't."

"You don't know that - "

"I do, actually." Hermione's voice changed. "Draco Malfoy would rather eat his own wand than touch a Muggle-born. His disgust at the idea of it is, ironically, the one thing working in my favor. He finds the notion of being partnered with me repulsive. Good. Repulsion is an excellent contraceptive."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Ron had stopped pacing. He was standing by the icebox, one hand on the handle, not looking at anyone - looking, instead, at the collection of crooked magnets and old takeout menus Harry had accumulated, as if they might contain some answer the conversation hadn't provided.

"And you think he'll agree to this?" said Harry softly. He'd leaned his elbows on the table at some point, his hands clasped. "All of this? You think Draco Malfoy is going to sign a contract that puts him in Azkaban if his own mother slips you a potion?"

"Draco Malfoy is going to sign it because not signing it means the Ministry assigns him to someone else under the default terms - no clause protections for him, no negotiation, no input." She ticking these off on her fingers. "He's in the same position I am, Harry. He was ordered to marry. The default contract gives both parties almost no protections - it's three pages, Harry, three pages, I've read it, and two of those are just the Ministry seal repeated in increasingly ornate borders. He doesn't want me there any more than I want to be there, and his only other option is to take whatever wife the Ministry throws at him with whatever terms they dictate." She paused. "He's a Malfoy. He'll take the deal he can negotiate over the one he can't.

Forty generations of pureblood survival instinct, and not one of those generations got there by saying 'no, I'd prefer the version where I have no control.' Blood traitor or no, she knows this.

She dipped her quill and resumed writing, her hand moving in quick, sure strokes.

"Now if you'll excuse me, I still need to draft the magical creature access provision, because I am not living somewhere I can't have Crookshanks."

JULY 16, 2003

Three days.

Three days since Hermione had sent her clause draft to Malfoy Manor via Ministry-approved owl because she was not about to let Hedwig's less illustrious cousin become a regular visitor to that particular roost-and three days of silence in return.

She had not expected a thank-you card or a fruit basket. She had not, realistically, expected anything resembling courtesy from a man who had once called her a Mudblood so many times it had practically become a greeting. But she had expected something. An acknowledgment of receipt. A terse "received." A howler. A hex. A deeply personal insult delivered via elegant green ink on cream parchment, because if there was one thing the Malfoy family could be relied upon for, it was stationery (and bigotry, but bigotry doesn't arrive by owl-or rather, it does, but not the feathered kind).

Nothing.

She checked her copy of the marriage contract every morning. The Ministry kept a master registry-a bound volume in the Office of Magical Marriages and Civil Partnerships, which sounded like a place where cheerful witches arranged flowers and was, in fact, a windowless room on Level Two staffed by a single elderly wizard named Pembrook who had been doing the job since 1974 and appeared to have died at his desk sometime around 1983 without anyone noticing (Hermione had checked; he was still breathing, barely, and his tea was still warm, which raised more questions than it answered). Any changes to a contract-signatures, amendments, additions-appeared simultaneously on all registered copies. Hers remained blank where his signature should be. Starkly, almost aggressively blank.

Which meant one of three things: he hadn't read it (likely-he was a Malfoy, and Malfoys didn't read things, they had people for that, or at least they used to, before those people turned out to be Death Eaters and/or in Azkaban); he had read it and was drafting his own counter-proposal, or he was planning to appeal the marriage assignment altogether (impossible, but then, impossible things had a habit of happening around Malfoys, usually in ways that made everything worse for everyone). The fourth option-that he had read it and was simply ignoring her-she dismissed. No one ignored a forty-seven-page marriage contract delivered to their home.

Hermione was sitting at her desk in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Subdivision F: Being Classification, which was the subdivision responsible for the legal categorisation of sentient magical beings - merpeople, centaurs, vampires, hags, and the various other species that the Ministry ignores until something bit someone (which was, incidentally, also the Ministry's approach to Muggle-born rights, werewolf legislation, and the structural integrity of Level Four's east corridor,). Her office was roughly the size of a generous cupboard, which was, she had been told upon her hiring in 2000, "the standard allocation for junior researchers," a phrase that had turned out to mean "we put all the interesting work in the smallest rooms because the senior staff need space for their potted plants" (one of the senior researchers, a wizard called Dorrington, had a Venomous Tentacula that took up an entire corner office and had bitten three interns; the plant was still there. The interns were not.)

She was supposed to be reviewing a case file on a werewolf registration dispute-a werewolf named Garret Lund who had been denied a Gringotts vault on the grounds of "lycanthic financial instability," which was not a real legal term but had been invented on the spot by a goblin called Ragnok who clearly thought no one would check, and unfortunately for Ragnok, Hermione Granger always checks. The file was open in front of her. Her quill was in her hand. Her attention was approximately four floors away from the contents of either.

She was thinking about Draco Malfoy.

The problem - the core problem - was that she didn't know what Draco Malfoy was anymore. She hadn't seen him, not close enough to read, for the better part of two years. The last time had been his trial, that grim proceeding in Courtroom Ten where he'd sat in the defendant's chair looking like a violin string one turn of the peg from snapping, and the Wizengamot had ultimately found that Lucius Malfoy's control over his son constituted magical coercion under the revised Imperius precedents. He'd walked free. She couldn't even remember his face from that day - she'd been too busy cross-referencing testimony against the penal code, and the memory had since blurred into a generic smudge of pale and pointed and miserable. The Prophet hadn't printed a single photograph. Not one. In two years. Which was either a spectacular feat of press avoidance or, more likely, a spectacular feat of Galleons - she suspected the Malfoys had bought their way out of the news cycle with the same brute financial efficiency they'd once used to buy their way into the Dark Lord's inner circle (a comparison she was certain they would not appreciate, which made it all the more satisfying).

It was as though Draco Malfoy had simply stopped existing the moment he walked free. A ghost in his own life. A name without a face, a fortune without a function, an heir without a purpose - until now, when the Ministry had very kindly handed him one by assigning him a wife he'd rather eat his own robes than touch, and wasn't that just the Wizengamot's idea of a solution.

But the silence.

The silence was what gnawed. Because Hermione had planned for Malfoy's hatred. She had planned for his contempt, his spite, his instinct to belittle - these were known quantities, as reliable as gravity, as consistent as the Malfoy family's conviction that the world owed them a debt of gratitude for existing. What she had not planned for - was unknown. And Draco Malfoy, as he currently existed, was unknown. A gap. A blank space on a contract. A question mark in a house full of locked doors.

She had never been inside the Manor. She had been to the grounds - once - during the war, and the memory of it sat in her chest like a stone she couldn't cough up, wouldn't cough up, because the stone was useful, the stone reminded her, and reminding was a kind of protection too (the drawing room, the chandelier, Bellatrix's voice, Mudblood carved into her arm like a signature on a contract she never agreed to - the scar was still there, pale and puckered, just below her sleeve, and she touched it sometimes when she was thinking, the way other people touched a worry stone, except her worry stone was a word that meant less than nothing and had been cut into her flesh with a knife, which rather put a different spin on things). But the Manor itself - the living parts, the rooms where people ate and slept and moved through their days-she had no map for any of that. She had reports. She had public records from the trial that listed the property's square footage and magical registration, but those told you nothing about what it felt like to walk down a hallway, or which floorboards creaked, or whether the east wing was as cold as the name suggested or if that was just the family's disposition made architectural.

She looked down at the werewolf file. Garret Lund deserved her attention. He deserved someone who would fight Ragnok's fictitious legal precedent and win, because the precedent was fictitious, and goblins did not get to invent legal terminology on the fly just because it sounded authoritative (not on Hermione Granger's watch, they didn't). She picked up her quill.

Dipped it.

Set it down again.

Where was he?

What was he doing?

And why - why, after three days and forty-seven pages-had Draco Malfoy said absolutely nothing?

A knock on her office door made her jump so hard she knocked over the ink pot, which rolled across the werewolf file and deposited a large blue-black blot directly over Ragnok's invented legal term, which felt, appropriately enough, like a judgement.

"Granger." It was Bletchley, her division head, a barrel-shaped wizard with a moustache that appeared to be staging a hostile takeover of his entire face and was winning. "Wizengamot Administrative Services sent this down by runner. Said it's time-sensitive."

He held out a sealed envelope. Ministry stamp. Red wax, a colour she had come to think of as "Wizengamot Scarlet" or, more privately, "Oh Shit Red."

She took it, and Bletchley lingered. He had that look - "Everything alright, Miss Granger?"

"Fine," she said. "Thank you."

He didn't move. "Heard there's been some movement on the marriage assignments. Lot of people getting their notices this week."

"Is there."

"Mm." He shifted his weight. "My niece got hers yesterday. Matched with a bloke from the Improper Use of Magic Office. Third marriage for him. She's twenty-three." He said this like he was describing the weather-unpleasant, but what can you do, best bring a coat. "Whole thing's a bloody shambles."

"Yes," said Hermione. "It is."

Bletchley seemed to take this as the end of the conversation, because he nodded once, adjusted his moustache (it appeared to have advanced another centimetre up his cheek since he'd entered), and ambled back down the corridor, leaving a faint trail of pipe smoke in his wake.

Hermione waited until the sound of his footsteps had faded, then broke the seal.

It was not from Malfoy.

It was from the Office of Magical Marriages and Civil Partnerships - Pembrook's domain, or rather Pembrook's purgatory - and it was a notice, formal and unadorned, informing her that the signing of the marriage contract between Hermione Jean Granger and Draco Lucius Malfoy had been scheduled for July 29, 2003, at 10:00 AM, at the Ministry of Magic, Level Two, Courtroom Eight.

Twelve days.

Hermione was going to walk into that courtroom in twelve days and either sign a contract that protected her - or sign the Ministry's default, a contract that assumed the best of everyone and protected no one, a contract that might as well have been written on tissue paper for all the good it would do her - and walk into that manor with nothing but her wand and her wits.

JULY 19, 2003

Hermione was having a bad week, and her office knew it.

The werewolf file had grown into a werewolf pile, which had in turn spawned a subsidiary pile dealing with a separate but related centaur land dispute that had landed on her desk because no one else in Subdivision F could spell "centaur" correctly, let alone interpret magical property law. Her copy of the marriage contract lived in the bottom drawer and she had checked it seven times this morning alone - still blank, still blank, still blank - and returned to what she'd been doing, which was currently arguing with a memo that had just arrived by enchanted paper aeroplane and was doing its level best to fly into her face.

"No - I already responded to this - I responded on Tuesday - the referencing is wrong, the protocol is wrong, the grammar is wrong - go back -"

The paper aeroplane, which worked for the Department of Interspecies Legal Coordination and therefore had no soul, did not go back. It circled her head like a hawk evaluating a particularly frazzled rabbit. She swatted at it. It banked left. She swatted again. It executed a tidy barrel roll and resumed its attack run.

The knock, when it came, was not Bletchley's - three sharp raps, evenly spaced.

"Come in," she said, not looking up from the centaur file, one hand still fending off the aeroplane.

The door opened.

"Good day, Lady Malfoy."

Hermione's hand shot out and snatched the aeroplane out of the air, crumpling it in her fist. She turned. The words were out of her mouth before her brain had finished processing his: "Do not call me that."

The man standing in her doorway was tall - which made her modest office feel suddenly smaller, as though the walls had flinched. He was lean, dark-haired. He wore charcoal robes that cost more than her quarterly salary - she could tell, because the fabric had that particular sheen that only appeared in Diagon Alley shops that didn't put prices in the windows, on the grounds that if you had to ask, you couldn't afford them, and if you could afford them, you already knew.

Theodore Nott.

He was holding a leather portfolio and leaning against her doorframe.

"What do you think you're going to be on July twenty-ninth?" Theodore stepped inside - without invitation, as though the door had opened for him rather than the other way around - and closed it behind him. "Draco Malfoy's pet?"

The word landed like a slap - because it was accurate, or at least accurate to what the Ministry intended, and the Ministry intended a witch on her knees, producing heirs like a brood mare, and she had been so busy drafting clauses to prevent exactly that outcome that hearing it stated so casually, by a someone in her doorway made her jaw tighten before she could stop it.

She snapped her head up properly now, fully taking him in for the first time, because something else had just snagged.

"How do you know I'm getting married to Draco?" She didn't say Malfoy. She didn't know why she didn't say Malfoy. She just didn't. "How do you even know the date?"

He straightened, and there it was - the shift from provocation to presentation. He extended his hand with a small bow of his head. "Pardon me, Miss Granger. Theodore Nott. I'm the right hand of Draco Malfoy." A pause, deliberately placed, like a comma in a sentence that was about to get much worse. "Your husband."

"Right hand?" Hermione stared at his hand. She did not take it. Her own remained curled around the crumpled aeroplane, which was still feebly trying to unfold itself in her fist. "What do you do, wank him off?"

She had not planned to say this. It had simply arrived, and she refused to be embarrassed by it; a crude joke about Draco Malfoy's sex life - or absence thereof - was not going to be the thing that flustered her. Also, she wanted to see if she could rattle him. Also, she was fucking annoyed.

Theodore's eyebrows rose. "No," he smiled. "I wouldn't want to take your job."

Motherfucker.

His smile widened - there was a flash of teeth, white and sharp and entirely too pleased - and he pulled out the chair across from her desk. He sat and crossed one leg over the other, rested his hands on his knee, and regarded her from the unfortunate chair.

So. Theodore Nott.

She knew the name. She knew the face, vaguely - Slytherin, same year, one of the quiet ones, the ones who watched and listened and never put their hand up in class but always seemed to know the answer when called upon. He had been at the periphery of every Ministry gala she'd attended in the last three years, appearing and disappearing, never seeming to hold any official position but always turning up in the right conversations with the right people, which was, when you thought about it, a position in itself.

Not a Death Eater - or at least not one with the mark; he had been absent from the final battle and absent from the trials, which either meant he had been clever enough to stay out of it or clever enough to make sure no one could prove he'd been in it, and with Slytherins, the distinction was largely academic. (The mark was a brand, and brands were for cattle, and Theodore Nott had clearly never been anyone's cattle. He was something else - the farmer, maybe, or the fox in the henhouse.) And that - that - was the key. The question of where Draco Malfoy had been for two years, how he had managed to vanish so completely from public life that the Prophet couldn't even produce a blurry photograph of him buying soap, had been needling at her for days, and now the answer was sitting in her visitor's chair, correcting for wobble.

He didn't need to be seen, because someone else was doing his seeing for him.

Theodore Nott was the answer.

"Where is he?" She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms. The crumpled aeroplane was still in her left hand. She was beginning to feel fond of it. It was the only thing in this conversation that was on her side.

"France," said Theodore. "At the moment. He moves about. Provence this week, I think. Lovely time of year." He gestured vaguely, the way only someone who had spent significant time in Provence could - casually, as though the south of France were a sofa rather than a destination. "You should come visit the estate. It's less ghoulish than the Manor. A bit of sun, decent croissants. The house-elves make a bouillabaisse that would make you weep."

"I won't be visiting any estates. I'll be spending most of my days in this office."

Theodore looked around the office.

"I like my office," said Hermione, though he hadn't said anything. She could feel the judgment. It was radiating off him.

"I'm sure you do," said Theodore, in a tone that meant the opposite. "Draco won't."

"Malfoy's opinion about my office is not relevant to - "

"Draco's opinion about everything is relevant to everything." Theodore uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees. "You're going to be Lady Malfoy, Miss Granger. Whether you like the title or not - and I can see you don't, your left eye just did a fascinating little twitch - you will, as of July twenty-ninth, represent the Malfoy family in every room you enter. And the Malfoy family - " he glanced around the office again, very slowly, taking in the water stain and the Spellotaped shelf and the corridor-facing window, " - does not represent from a broom cupboard on level four."

"Subdivision F," she corrected. "Being Classification. And it's not a broom cupboard, it's a - " She stopped. It was, in fact, very nearly a broom cupboard. She had measured. Eight feet by six. "The size of my office is not the point."

"I agree. The point is that it will be addressed. Draco has opinions about ceilings, Granger. And windows. And - " he glanced at the corridor, visible through the glass, where a wizard in lime-green robes was currently walking past carrying what appeared to be a live toad in a filing folder, " - views."

"I like my view."

"You like a corridor?"

"It's a busy corridor. I see people. I stay informed."

"You see wizards carrying toads in folders."

"That was unusual, I'll grant you."

He reached into the inside pocket of his robes - and Hermione's hand moved instinctively toward her wand, because old habits and bad memories and a man she didn't trust reaching into his coat in her tiny office, her fingers brushing the handle, her body remembering what her mind preferred not to - but what he produced was not a wand but an envelope. Grey. Heavy. The Malfoy crest pressed deep into the wax seal, the peacock feathers rendered in such fine detail that she could see individual barbs.

"From Draco Malfoy," said Theodore, setting it on her desk, on top of the centaur file. "A counter-clause. You may hand it to your solicitor."

"I don't have a solicitor. I am my own solicitor."

Theodore blinked. It was the first time his composure had so much as flickered, and she felt an absurd spike of satisfaction. "You're going to negotiate a marriage contract with the Malfoy family - pro se."

"I believe that's what I just said, yes."

Theodore sat back. "Well," he said. "That explains the page count. Most Ministry solicitors can barely manage twenty before they start repeating themselves. Henderson says the average marriage contract is twelve pages of boilerplate and three pages of wishful thinking." He tilted his head. "Speaking of Henderson."

"Henderson Who?"

"Henderson. Bartholomew Henderson, of Henderson, Clift, and Pryce. Best criminal defence solicitor in magical Britain. He managed to free Draco and Narcissa at the trial - not much for Lucius, but then Lucius was always going to be a lost cause. Stood up in front of the Wizengamot and essentially said 'I did it and I'd do it again,' which, while admirably honest, is not a legal strategy." He paused. "Henderson is the best. We will provide him for your review of the counter-clause, if you wish."

Henderson. She knew the name - everyone in the Ministry knew the name. He was the solicitor you hired when the evidence was insurmountable and the odds were nonexistent, and he won anyway, by finding the one crack in the prosecution's case that no one else could see and driving a battering ram through it. He had gotten Draco Malfoy off. He had gotten Narcissa Malfoy off. He had not gotten Lucius off, which, based on Theodore's description, was less a failure of legal skill and more a failure of client self-preservation.

"No," she said.

"No, you don't want Henderson, or no, you won't be needing outside counsel at all?"

"I am my own solicitor, Nott. I drafted the original clauses. I will review the counter-clauses. I will negotiate the final document. I do not need Draco Malfoy's lawyer to hold my hand through a contract negotiation any more than I need Draco Malfoy's right hand to deliver his correspondence." She paused. "No offence."

"None taken." He pressed a hand to his chest, right over where a heart would presumably be. "I'm merely the courier. The right hand." The quotation marks were audible. "The wanker-offerer."

Hermione pressed her lips together very hard. She would not laugh. She would not.

"The envelope, Nott."

"Right, yes." He straightened. "He read your clauses, by the way. All forty-seven pages. I was there."

"And?"

"He said - and I quote - 'Granger sent me a fucking novel.'" Theodore's mouth curved. "And then he said, 'Get me Henderson.'"

"And?"

"And he wrote his own." Theodore nodded at the envelope. "Which you'll find in there. He spent four days on it. I've never seen him work that hard on anything that didn't involve a Quidditch bat and a grudge."

She reached across the desk and picked up the envelope. The wax was thick, the seal tight. She broke it - the peacock cracking neatly along the neck - and slid the document from inside. Grey parchment, matching the envelope.

She unfolded it.

Thirty-one pages.

The little shit.

"Right," said Hermione. "Right. I'll read it. Is that all?"

"Yes, thank you for your time." Theodore rose from the chair - it wobbled in his absence, as though relieved - and moved toward the door. He paused, one hand on the frame, and looked back at her over his shoulder.

"One more thing - what's your favourite flower?"

The question was so utterly disconnected from everything that had preceded it, that Hermione's brain actually stalled, like a record scratch in a quiet room.

"I - what?"

"Flower. Favourite. Which one."

"Why on earth do you need to know my favourite flower?"

"Humor me."

"Lily of the valley,"

"Poisonous, you know."

"I know."

"Every part of it. Even the water the stems sit in. Innocent-looking little thing, and it'll stop your heart dead."

JULY 25, 2003

Susan Bones' apothecary was on the corner of Horizont Alley and Cattern Street, wedged between a second-hand robe shop and a stamp shop that had been closed since 1987 and showed no signs of reopening, though its window display - featuring a comprehensive collection of Magical Mammal postage from the 1954 Ministry commemorative series - was dusted weekly. The apothecary itself was called Bones & Balance, which Susan had named herself over her Aunt Amelia's grave objections ("It sounds like a pudding, Susan"), and it was, by a comfortable margin, the best apothecary in Diagon Alley for anything a witch might need that she didn't want to explain to a man.

The shop was warm and smelled of valerian and sage and something faintly metallic that Hermione had never quite identified and never quite wanted to. Shelves lined every wall, floor to ceiling, each one organized with Susan's particular brand of methodical chaos: contraceptive potions next to fertility boosters ("Same shelf, different dreams, love"), sleeping draughts next to Pepper-Up ("For when you can't sleep and then for when you must"), and an entire section near the till labelled "MEN" in Susan's tidy script, which contained exactly three products - shaving tonic, hair-growth serum, and a product called Bollocks Off that Hermione had never asked about and Susan had never explained.

Susan was behind the counter when Hermione walked in, her red hair pulled back in a practical knot, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and her hands bright blue from a potion she'd clearly just finished bottling. She looked up at the sound of the bell.

"You look like shite."

"Thank you."

"Tea?"

"No. Yes. God, yes."

Susan jerked her head toward the back room, and Hermione followed her through the curtain of beads that separated the shop from the small, cluttered kitchen where Susan brewed the delicate potions - the ones that required a steady hand and a closed door and, Hermione suspected, the occasional burst of Muffliato, because some of Susan's recipes were technically legal only in the sense that no one had thought to outlaw them yet.

She put the kettle on and sat down at the scarred wooden table, kicking out the chair opposite her. Hermione sat. The kitchen was smelled like someone had been brewing Dreamless Sleep, which, based on the line of blue bottles cooling on the windowsill, someone had.

"Right," said Susan, folding her blue-stained hands on the table. "What do you need and how much of it, and don't say 'the usual' because I'm not giving you the usual, the usual is for witches who are shagging someone they want to shag, and I'm going to need you to be specific."

"More sleeping draught."

"How much more?"

"Enough."

"How much enough?"

Hermione met her eyes. "Enough that I can sleep in a house where Draco Malfoy might walk into my bedroom at any hour of the night and I won't wake up hexing first and checking clauses later."

"Dreamless Sleep or standard?"

"Dreamless. The standard gives me nightmares about - " She stopped. "Just Dreamless."

Susan nodded. She didn't write it down - she never wrote down the sensitive orders, kept them in her head like a confession sealed - and moved to the shelf, pulling down bottles.

"Calming Draught as well," Hermione added.

"Strength?"

"Maximum."

"That's the one I give to Hit Wizards who've seen something they can't unsee. You sure?"

"Susan, I'm about to move into a house where Narcissa Malfoy lives, Draco Malfoy can enter any room I'm in, and the only thing between me and a centuries-old pureblood estate with more Dark artifacts than the Ministry evidence locker is a contract I wrote myself. Give me the maximum."

Susan added another bottle to the row. "Pepper-Up?"

"No. If I'm tired, I should be tired. Tired is useful. Tired keeps me - " She stopped herself. On edge, she had been about to say. Ready. Afraid, she had almost admitted. "Tired keeps me sharp."

Susan set the bottles on the table - six of them now, a neat little pharmacopoeia of survival - and sat back down across from her.

Hermione opened her mouth - closed it - opened it again - and then said: "Contraceptives."

Susan's expression shifted. "How many months?"

"Eighteen. The full term."

"Strength?"

"Maximum."

Susan rose and went to the very back of the shop - past the shelves, past the curtain, into a section Hermione had never seen, behind a door that required a wand press and a password and, Hermione suspected, a level of trust that Susan did not extend to most of her clientele. She came back with a small bottle. The liquid inside was the colour of old amber, thick and slow-moving, like honey that had forgotten how to flow.

"This is my own brew. Not Ministry-registered or traceable. No counter-agent exists because no one knows the recipe except me and my Aunt's old notes, and Amelia's notes are in a vault that the Ministry can't open because I burned the key." She set it on the table with the others. "One dose per month. Dissolves in any liquid. Tasteless. You could put it in Firewhisky and never know. It works by creating a - well, the technical term is 'hostile uterine environment,' which I've always thought was rather splendidly aggressive - but essentially, it makes your body uninhabitable. Nothing implants. Nothing takes. It's not a preventative; it's a refusal. Your system simply rejects anything that tries."

Hermione stared at the bottle. "How long have you had this?"

"Long enough." Susan's face did something complicated. "Amelia helped me develop it. During the war. For - well. For witches who needed it. There were a lot of them, and the Ministry wasn't exactly - " She stopped. Swallowed. "Anyway. It works. It's never failed."

Hermione picked up the bottle. It was warm in her hand, or maybe her hand was cold. She tucked it into her bag.

"Double the sleeping draught," she said. "And add another Calming Draught. And - "

"And?"

"Two more contraceptives," she said. "Just in case."

Susan raised an eyebrow. "Just in case of what, exactly?"

"Just in case the first one fails, Susan, not - I'm not - it's a precaution, it's - I'm being thorough - "

"Thorough. Right. That's definitely the word I'd use for a woman who's stocking up on enough contraceptives to render the entire population of Hollyhead barren."

"Susan."

"You're right, I'm sorry." Susan added two more amber bottles to the bag. "Just in case."

Hermione took the bag. It was heavier than she'd expected - or maybe she was just tired. She'd been tired for days.

"Thank you," she said. "For - all of it."

Susan came around the counter and hugged her - Hermione stood rigid for a moment, and then, because she was tired and frightened, she let herself be held.

"Write to me." Susan said into her hair. "Every week. Every day if you need to. I don't care if it's just to say the flowers are wrong and the house-elves are rude and Narcissa looked at you funny. Write to me."

"Every week."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

JULY 29, 2003

It was done in twelve minutes.

Twelve minutes to dismantle everything she'd ever imagined for herself. Twelve minutes, a courtroom, and a man who didn't speak.

Pembrook had read the contract in his droning, crumpling-parchment voice, and the words had filled the room like water filling a bath - slowly, inevitably, with nowhere else to go. The clauses. The sub-clauses. The provisions she'd written at three in the morning with wine on her breath and fury in her chest. The counter-clauses he'd written in Provence, or wherever he'd been, wherever he'd been hiding, while she'd been staring at his blank signature space and wondering if he was ignoring her. Eighteen months. A manor in Wiltshire. A marriage that was not a marriage. A contract that was not a choice.

She had stood next to him and not looked at him but she could feel him - the sheer mass of him, which was wrong, because Draco Malfoy was not supposed to be massive, he was supposed to be lean and pointed and manageable, a blade you could see coming.

She had signed. He had signed. The quill had scratched. The ink had dried. The golden light had pulsed along the edges of the parchment like a wound knitting itself shut, and she had watched it close and known that she was inside it now, inside the wound, inside the contract, inside the cage with the golden bars, and the door was locked and the key was in his pocket and she had put it there.

And then he'd reached into his robes and produced the ring.

A huge stone and a band. White gold, or platinum, or something cold and bright and expensive that she didn't want to identify and she did not care, she would not care, about the ring that Draco Malfoy had chosen for the woman he was being forced to marry.

He'd taken her wrist. His fingers wrapped around the joint - his grip firm - and he'd held her arm steady the way you'd hold a patient's arm before inserting a needle, and she'd felt his thumb press into the pulse point on the inside of her wrist, and she'd known - she'd known - that he could feel her heart racing, that the drumbeat of her panic was being transmitted directly into his skin, and he'd held her there for one beat, two beats, three, long enough to measure, long enough to count, long enough to know, and then he'd slid the ring onto her finger with a slow push that made the metal catch on her knuckle and drag, and the sensation - the cool of the ring and the heat of his hand and the pressure of his fingers and the intimacy of being held by him, held still, held in place, like she was something he was placing rather than something he was gifting - had made her breath catch in her throat because this was the first time Draco Malfoy had ever touched her.

She'd imagined her wedding, once. Every witch does, at some point - the way every girl imagines a house with a garden, or a career with a view, or a life that unfolds in the shape of her own choosing. She'd imagined a dress - not white, she'd always thought white was presumptuous - and a venue - somewhere small, somewhere with trees. She'd imagined a man. A man whose face she hadn't filled in, because the face had never been the point - the point had been the feeling, the certainty, the knowledge that the person standing across from her was there because he wanted to be, because he'd chosen her, because out of every person in every room in every country on every continent, he had looked at her and thought yes, her, always her, no one else.

She had not imagined a courtroom on Level Two.

Hermione refused to cry.

She refused. She had cried in her flat, and she had cried in her hallway, and she had cried in the lift with her fist pressed against her mouth, and she was done crying, she had cried her allotment, she had emptied the reserves, and there was nothing left. Her eyes were dry. Her jaw was set. Her chin was up, and she would survive this, she would survive him, and she would not - would not - let Draco Malfoy see her cry on her wedding day.

Pembrook stamped the parchment with a seal the size of a dinner plate and the weight of a death sentence. "The contract is bound. The marriage is recognized by the Ministry of Magic, the Wizengamot, and the Office of Magical Marriages and Civil Partnerships, effective immediately." He shuffled his papers. "Congratulations are - traditionally - in order, though I confess I have never seen the point in such observations, as the parties are rarely in a mood to receive them."

Silence.

"Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy."

Pembrook shuffled out through a side door, his robes trailing, his footsteps receding, and then the courtroom was empty, and the torches were low, and the only sound was the hum of the wards and the hammer of her heart and the silence of the man standing next to her, who still hadn't said a fucking word.

Hermione rose.

She moved on instinct - she needs to leave. She grabbed her bag. She turned toward the door.

"Stay."

One word. Low and flat and utterly without inflection, the way you'd tell a dog to stay.

Hermione kept walking because he wouldn't follow. She knew he wouldn't follow, because the corridor outside Courtroom Eight led to the Ministry Atrium, and the Ministry Atrium was full of people - Ministry workers, journalists, photographers, the whole buzzing hive of magical Britain's bureaucratic class - and Draco Malfoy had not been seen in public for two years, and he would not break that streak for her, he would not be seen chasing his Mudblood wife through the Atrium with cameras flashing and quills scratching and the Prophet's front page writing itself in real time. The repulsion alone would keep him in that courtroom like a ward.

It was the only advantage she had. She was using it.

She pushed open the door. She stepped into the corridor. She turned left, toward the lifts, toward the Atrium, toward the Floo and the exit and the thirty seconds of freedom she had left before she had to go to the Manor and be Lady Malfoy -

The Atrium hit her like a wall of sound.

They were waiting - the Prophet, Witch Weekly, the Quibbler, half a dozen freelance photographers and twice that many reporters, all clustered near the Fountain of Magical Brethren with their Quick-Quotes Quills hovering and their cameras raised and their faces bright.

The flashes started before she'd taken three steps.

Pop. Pop. Pop pop pop.

White light, blinding, one after another, each flash leaving a purple after-image that danced across her vision and made the world fragment into shards of colour and shadow. She couldn't see. She could hear - voices, overlapping, shouting, screaming, every journalist in the Atrium fighting to be heard over every other journalist in the Atrium, a wall of sound with no words in it, just noise, and she was walking through it with her bag over her shoulder and her ring on her finger and her eyes straight ahead, and she was not going to cry, she was not -

"Miss Granger! Miss Granger, how does it feel to be the new Lady Malfoy - "

" - any comment on the Marriage Law, do you believe it's constitutional - "

" - is it true you negotiated your own contract, Miss Granger, can you confirm - "

" - sources say the Malfoy family is furious about the pairing, any response - "

" - Miss Granger! Miss Granger! Look this way, please, just one - "

And then someone grabbed her.

An arm around her waist - the hand splayed across her hip like he had every legal right to put his hands on her body and knew it. She was pulled sideways, off-balance, her feet stumbling, her bag swinging, and the cameras erupted, the flashes going off like a battlefield, and she opened her mouth to scream -

But he was already moving.

He was fast. God, he was fast, faster than she'd remembered, faster than she'd accounted for, and he was pulling her through the crowd like a man walking through tall grass, swatting photographers aside with his free arm - and the reporters were shouting and the cameras were flashing and someone was yelling "Mr. Malfoy! Mr. Malfoy, is that - Merlin, that's Draco Malfoy - " and the sound of his name was like a bomb going off in the Atrium, because Draco Malfoy had not been seen in two years, and now he was here, with his arm around the waist of a Muggle-born witch, and the story had just become something much bigger than a marriage assignment, it had become a spectacle, and spectacles sold papers, and papers meant questions, and questions meant -

Draco pulled her into the lift.

His hand hit the grille. The doors slammed shut. He punched the button for - she didn't see which floor, she couldn't see, her vision was still spotted with camera flashes and her heart was still trying to escape through her ribs and his arm was still around her waist and he was breathing hard, - the rise and fall against her shoulder, and she could feel it, feel him, the whole length of his body pressed against her back, and he was hard, not - not that, or not just that, but solid, impossible, a wall of heat and muscle and it made her want to shove him and made her want to lean into him in equal measure.

The lift shuddered. Started to move.

He reached up and pulled the emergency stop.

Malfoy won't touch me.

The lift jerked - her body lurched, off-balance, and before she could catch herself he'd spun her around and pinned her, her back against the grille, his hands on either side of her head, his body a wall in front of her, and he was close, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off his chest through two layers of robes and her robes and whatever else was between them, which was not enough, was never going to be enough.

Draco Malfoy's face was three inches from hers and he was looking at her. The look was every danger she'd drafted clauses against and one she hadn't, because how do you draft a clause against the way a man looks at you? How do you legislate against the weight of grey eyes in a stopped lift?

Malfoy won't touch me.

"What are you doing?" His voice was low.

"Getting away from you,"

He laughed - one breath. "Getting away from me - that's genuinely - no, look at me - "

She had looked away.

His hand moved from the grille - Malfoy won't  - to her chin.

His fingers - long, calloused that made no sense for a man who'd spent two years in Provence doing whatever rich recluses did - closed around her jaw and turned her face toward his, and the touch was light.

"I'm your husband,"

"You're my assignment."

"I'm your husband, Granger, and you are my wife, and you are not - " his grip on her jaw tightened, just a fraction, just enough to make her pulse spike and her breath catch and her hands curl into fists at her sides, " - getting away from me. Not today. Not any night for the next eighteen months. Do you understand?"

"I understand you're manhandling me in a Ministry lift, which is - "

"Which is what, Granger? Unconstitutional? I'll file the complaint myself. What's the form number - 77-B? 77-C? I can never remember, the Ministry renumbers everything  - "

"You're - "

"What? Say it. What am I?" He leaned closer, and the lift was not big enough for this, his thigh was between hers - not between between, just there, just pressed against her leg, the result of the lift being the size of a coffin and him being the size of whatever the opposite of a coffin was, and she could feel the muscle of his leg through his robes, "Say what I am, Granger. Use your words. You're so good with words. Forty-seven pages of them, if I recall."

"You are a fucking git."

"What else?"

"You're an arrogant, insufferable prick."

"Keep going. I’ve missed that sharp tongue of yours."

"You're a fucking death eater!"

"Better." He smiled. "Again."

"What?"

"Insult me again. I find it invigorating. It's been two years since anyone's had the balls to insult me to my face. Nott doesn't count, Nott insults me out of habit. You - " his thumb moved across her jaw, a slow stroke that made her skin ignite, " - you insult me like you mean it. Like you've been practising. Like you've been thinking about it. Have you been thinking about it, Granger? Have you been thinking about me?"

"I have not been - "

"Because I've been thinking about you." He let out a soft laugh, the sound vibrating against her. "For two years. Though not constantly - I have other things to think about, I'm not a deviant - but often enough. I'd see something in the Prophet - some article about your werewolf work, your creature appeals, your absurdly thorough legal filings - and I'd think, there she is. Still fighting. Still furious. Still Granger. And I'd wonder - "

He paused. His thumb was still moving across her jaw, back and forth, back and forth, a rhythm like the swing of a pendulum, and each stroke was a clause being broken.

"I'd wonder," he continued, his voice so low it was barely a sound, "what it would be like to be on the receiving end of all that focus. All that intensity. All that - " he leaned in, and his lips brushed the shell of her ear, this was the entire reason he'd pinned her against this grille, and she could feel his breath on her neck and she could feel the vibration of his voice in her bones and she could feel everything, every point of contact between their bodies, which were too many and not enough and wrong, all wrong, this was wrong, he was wrong, she hated him, she hated him.

" - rage. The rage, Granger. I wondered what it would feel like to have all of that aimed at me. And now - "

Her breath was ragged. Her hands were shaking, and she could not think, could not think, because thinking required distance and there was no distance, there was only Draco Malfoy filling every available inch of space and air and thought, and his smell - cedar and smoke and patchouli and black pepper - he was inside her lungs, and his voice was inside her head, and his thumb was still moving across her jaw like he was learning her.

"- here you are."

Draco reached up and released the emergency stop. The lift shuddered, resumed, began to descend.

"You're coming home with me,"

"I'm not - "

"You are. The contract says the partnered witch resides at the primary residence. The primary residence is the Manor. You signed it. You negotiated it. You wrote the bloody thing, Granger, you can't argue with your own contract."

"I can argue with anything, I'm a lawyer - "

"You're a researcher in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Subdivision F, and even if you were, it wouldn't change the fact that - " the lift stopped, the doors opened, and he stepped out into a smaller lobby she didn't recognise, with a single Floo grate and a single guard who took one look at Draco Malfoy and visibly decided that whatever was happening was above his pay grade. "you are coming home with me, and then I am going to show you to your room - your own room, I'm not a monster, the contract says I can't lock you out and I can't lock you in, but I can give you a room with a very comfortable bed and a very extensive bookshelf and a door that you can close and that I will knock on before entering because I am capable of basic fucking courtesy, Granger, despite what you may have inferred from the last five minutes - "

"Inferred? You pinned me to a wall - "

"I did it because you were about to walk into a crowd of journalists with red eyes and a ring on your finger and no plan beyond run, which - " he turned to face her, "would have been a disaster for you. The Prophet would have printed red-eyed Lady Malfoy flees own wedding, and that headline would have followed you for eighteen months, and every pureblood in magical Britain would have used it as proof that you don't belong."

He held out his hand.

"Floo. Side-Along. Your choice. But you're coming with me."