The moment they landed, her heels struck the floor hard enough to echo. The sound snapped through the corridor like a warning shot, sharp and unforgiving. She spun on him without hesitation. Her gown dragged half a beat behind, shimmering in protest, as though even the fabric hadn't been prepared for the violence of her movement.
She looked like she'd been ripped out of her own skin and dropped into stone.
Moonlight slashed in through the tall windows, turning the silver of her dress into liquid, catching the fraying edges of her breath, lighting up the wildness in her hair as it tumbled down her back. Her chest rose too quickly. Her spine locked too straight. She hadn't caught up with what had just happened, but her body was already halfway into a fight.
She turned toward him with a stare that would've flayed anyone else alive. Her eyes weren't asking for answers. They were demanding blood.
"What the hell was that?"
The question broke out of her before she could catch it. She wasn't afraid, not even close, but she was furious, and it showed in every inch of her.
She didn't get anything back.
He didn't speak.
He just stepped forward.
No explanation. No apology.
She barely had time to inhale before his hands were on her.
His fingers found her waist like they'd been searching for an anchor. He caught her with both hands, sharp and certain, not out of cruelty but desperation. There was no gentleness in his grip. Only certainty. He pulled her against him like the world had come loose and this was the only solid thing left.
The wall caught her back a moment later. Cold stone. A jarring contrast to the heat pouring off him. Her palms caught the edge of his chest, not pushing, not resisting, just trying to find somewhere to hold on. Her breath caught.
He didn't kiss her.
He hovered.
His mouth stopped a breath away from hers, close enough that she could taste what he wasn't saying. The air between them turned dense. Heavy. Her hands rose, caught mid-air, unsure if they were meant to stop him or pull him closer. The tension crackled around them, too thick to move through, too sharp to step back from.
This wasn't foreplay.
This was detonation.
He wasn't trembling, but the energy in him had started to vibrate. Like he'd been holding something back for hours, maybe longer, and now the lock had broken. He stared at her like he didn't know where he was. Like none of it mattered except the fact that she was here.
That Blaise had touched her. That she'd let him.
His hand found her wrist again. The one he'd grabbed in the ballroom. His grip tightened just enough to make the memory real again. Her pulse jumped beneath his fingers.
He looked at her like she was the reason he'd never sleep again.
And then he pressed forward, not slamming, not shoving, but fitting their bodies together with such violent clarity that the air itself flinched. Her back hit the wall again. Her breath hitched. His thigh slotted between hers. His chest met her ribs.
The corridor tilted.
Magic surged in quiet bursts around them, not loud enough to be seen but present in the way the floor hummed beneath their shoes, the way the torches overhead flickered even though there was no wind.
He still didn't kiss her.
He didn't have to.
Every inch of him spoke louder than his mouth ever could. His jaw was locked, clenched so tightly she thought it might shatter. His breath was rough against her cheek, hot and fast and wrong for someone as composed as he usually was. His body wasn't still. It was straining.
His free hand dropped low, fingers dragging across her hip like he was trying to carve the shape of her into memory. The pressure wasn't bruising. It was worse than that. It was careful. Intentional. It said, I want to remember how this felt. I want to know I could've taken more.
It was about possession. About knowing. About the unbearable truth that had settled behind his ribs sometime between watching her smile at someone else and feeling her wrist under his hand.
Whatever this was. Whatever it would become.
And now he was standing here like he might never let go again.
He leaned in, slow and tight with control, like every breath cost him something. His jaw clenched so hard it made his cheek twitch. His eyes were wild.
"You let him touch you?"
It wasn't a question. There was no room for an answer. The words landed low and rough, dragging something primal behind them. The sound of something snapping in a man who hadn't realized how close to the edge he already was.
"You're mine, Granger."
Not soft. Not romantic. Not sweet. It was a truth spoken like a fact, like gravity, like death. Something that didn't ask for agreement. Something that simply was.
And she said nothing.
He wasn't looking at her mouth. He wasn't staring at her throat or the dip of her neckline or the way her body had gone still in a way that wasn't afraid, just alert. He met her eyes and didn't look away. Not once.
And what burned behind his didn't glow. It wasn't warm. It wasn't anything you could mistake for hope. It was the kind of fire that eats its own smoke. A heat that doesn't flicker or dance but holds steady and awful and clean. It was the kind of fire that lives at the base of things, that doesn't light candles or warm hands. The kind that purges. That leaves bones behind.
He wasn't angry she'd smiled at Blaise. He wasn't furious that another man had touched her shoulder or leaned in too close or whispered something meant only for her.
No, that wasn't what had undone him.
He looked at her like someone who had seen a future he didn't think he was allowed to want, and then watched someone else reach for it. Someone else, with their hand on her skin, their mouth too close to her ear. It hadn't been about touch. It had been about light. Her laugh. The way she looked when she forgot she was being watched.
And he had realized, in that moment, that if someone else got there first, he wouldn't know how to live with himself after.
When he spoke again, it came broken.
"Don't let him touch you. Ever again."
His thumb pressed harder at her hip. Not hurting her. Just holding. Like he had to convince himself she was real. Like if he let go, she'd disappear and take whatever part of him she'd just set on fire with her.
She stayed still, breathing shallow, her back still pressed to the stone behind her. And she looked at him. Just looked. Like she was weighing every broken thing he had just spilled between them and choosing to let it stay.
And in the silence that followed, she let him see it—that she knew exactly what he meant. That she'd seen past the fury and the fire and the heat of his jealousy and found something underneath it. Something raw and terrifying and real.
She let him burn.
And she didn't look away.
His jaw locked tight, the muscle twitching like it might snap through bone. His whole frame held tension like it was costing him—every inch of him taut with restraint, the kind that wasn't about control so much as desperation.
He had her here. Right in front of him. His by law, by rite, by every word scratched into the ancient contract they both signed—and yet somehow, she still felt distant. Unreachable. Like she belonged more to the moment than to him.
And that was what unstrung him.
Because he knew, now, what he couldn't afford to lose.
Her smile. Her heat. That impossible calm she wore like goddamn armour.
And she? She was composed. She stood still in the wreckage like someone who had never once flinched from lightning. The kind of woman chaos made room for. The kind storms never dared to touch. Light slid over her shoulders like it knew better than to hurry her. Her breath stayed even. Her pulse didn't jump. Not even when his hands had dragged her through space and slammed the door on the world behind them.
She looked unbothered.
But her eyes met his like they had all the time in the world to decide who was going to win this.
And she smiled. Like she was already holding the answer and waiting to see when he'd catch up.
"You're jealous."
She didn't need to raise her voice. She just said them, flat and inevitable, like a woman pointing out the obvious. Like the tide noticing the pull. Like the moon recognizing its pull on the sea. There was no edge to it. No fear. No mockery.
Just fact.
"I'm your husband."
And this wasn't about his name. It wasn't about the title. It wasn't about the rituals or the rings or the ink drying on Ministry parchment.
It was about her.
About how she'd looked when someone else dared to take space that belonged to him. About the sound of her voice when it hadn't been speaking to him. About the bone-deep certainty that no one, no one, would ever see her the way he did.
His hand dropped lower, slow and deliberate, down the slope of her waist, pulling her in with that kind of force that doesn't feel like force. More like gravity. More like inevitability. Her body collided with his in a fit that felt ancient, not romantic, not gentle, just… right.
The silk between them offered no shield.
Her chest rose sharply against his, her hips pressing in like they'd never been meant to stand apart. And her breath—it stuttered. It caught.
But her eyes lifted to his, and the look in them made his spine curl. It wasn't shy. It wasn't sweet. It was blistering. Direct. Alive with something dark and new and terrifyingly welcome.
She saw him. All of him.
She saw the man who had dragged her out of the ballroom without warning. The one who had pinned her to stone without apology. The one who would burn the world if someone else touched her again.
And she wanted it.
That was the worst of it.
She wanted it.
She wanted him.
Not the neat, distant version. The ungoverned one. The version with no leash. No disguise. No plan.
And his mouth didn't go to hers.
He dipped, instead, to the soft place just below her jaw. The spot where her pulse kicked like a secret. The skin Blaise had dared to glance at. The skin Draco would spend the rest of his life reclaiming.
He kissed her there.
Barely. A ghost of a touch. A warning. A vow.
A curse in the shape of reverence.
"You don't smile at him like that."
The words broke apart as he said them. Not with volume, but with meaning. The kind that lives in the bottom of the throat and claws its way out only when it has to. Only when silence isn't enough.
"You don't laugh with anyone else like that."
His voice was wrecked now. Thinner. Brittle. His breath shook as it passed her skin, and still his mouth hovered—close, but not pushing. Not taking.
"I am not some name you bought."
The truth of it lodged between them.
"I am not your contract. I am not your charity."
And then his voice dropped again. Not lower—closer. Like it had moved inside her ribcage without permission.
"I am your husband."
And that was it.
The room around them felt too small to hold what followed. Her chest was rising fast. His hands had curled into her hips like he was drowning in the shape of them. The air between them didn't hum anymore. It crackled. Like magic. Like lightning about to strike.
And then she moved.
One hand. One slow, deliberate motion. Her fingers closed into the fabric of his coat, knuckles white from how tightly she gripped him.
And when she finally spoke, her voice had shifted.
It came low. Intentional. Warm in places it had never been before. Cold in others. It sounded like something too old to be flirtation and too dangerous to be mercy.
Her voice was quiet, but it cut through him with the precision of a blade.
"Then sometimes act like it."
The words came steady and low, like they'd been forged in fire and cooled just enough to be deadly. She said them like she knew exactly where to strike, like she'd been waiting for the moment to lay him bare, and now that it had arrived, she wasn't going to miss.
The words landed in his chest and stayed there, lodged deep, impossible to dislodge or ignore. And whatever control he'd been clinging to, snapped. It didn't fray or unravel. It broke. Sharp and final.
And he did what she told him.
He acted like it.
His body moved before his mind could catch up. There was no thought. No decision. Only heat. Only instinct. His hands found her waist in one rough, aching motion, fingers curling in the silk of her dress like they were searching for proof she was real. Like he needed something to hold, something to claim, something to anchor him before he lost the last of himself.
He pulled her in and kissed her like it was the only way left to speak.
There was nothing careful in it. No hesitation. No sweet, tentative exploration.
His mouth hit hers like a storm rolling over dry land, fast and furious, built from weeks of silence and restraint and too many hours pretending he didn't care. He kissed her like he'd been dying to, like he'd been dragging this moment behind his ribs for so long it had grown teeth.
Her fingers gripped the front of his coat like she was bracing herself, like she didn't trust the ground to stay steady under her feet. Her mouth opened beneath his, warm and sure and ready. There was no softness in the way she kissed him back—only heat, only want, only a fierce, breathtaking urgency that made his knees lock and his heart stutter.
The wall caught her spine again, the cold stone a shock against how hot they burned. Her back arched, her body pressing into him with an unspoken demand. And he gave in to all of it. Every inch of her. Every sound. Every breath. He wanted to take and take until nothing else existed. Until the hall disappeared and all that remained was this—her mouth, her grip, the furious thud of her heart against his chest.
He kissed her like he was starving. Like she was the only thing in the world that had ever fed him. His hand slid up the back of her neck, not gentle, but not cruel. Just firm. Just real. Like he needed the feel of her skin under his palm to keep himself tethered. His other hand locked around her hip and pulled her tighter, until there was no space left between them. No air. No question.
Only heat. Only friction. Only truth.
He was shaking now. So was she. Every inch of him told the truth his mouth couldn't form. That he'd needed this. That he hadn't expected her to give it. That he didn't know how to come back from it.
And still, it wasn't enough.
He kissed her like he could bury himself in her mouth and be reborn. Like he could write a new name into her skin, one that only he got to say. It was teeth and breath and heat. It was prayer without god. Worship without shame. When he finally pulled away, his chest heaved like he'd run a mile underwater.
She looked at him like she knew what he was. The part of him that hadn't known how to say please stay, so he'd tried to own her instead.
She just saw him.
She whispered his name like she was summoning something. Like she knew what she'd awakened and had no intention of putting it back to sleep.
His hands didn't know how to let go. They stayed wrapped around her hips, fingers still flexing like he was trying to memorize the shape of her. Like he was trying to make this moment permanent. She didn't move either. Not at first. Her breath came slower now, more measured, like she was settling back into herself. But she didn't look away. Her eyes stayed on him, soft in places that hurt to see.
Her lips were kissed raw. Her pulse beat high in her neck. And she didn't say a single word.
Then she stepped back.
Her steps were slow. Steady. The way she moved didn't match what had just happened. There was no trace of hesitation. Just the impossible calm she always carried, the kind that made you believe she was never out of control.
And she left him standing there.
Breathless. Burned.
Her magic lingered in the air, thick and stubborn. It clung to the corridor, to his clothes, to the back of his throat. It smelled like her—like crushed flowers and something older, something weightless and wild. It settled into his skin like smoke, like she'd set a fire in him and walked away without looking back.
And he let her go.
Because he had to. Because if he reached for her again, he didn't know who he'd become.
Just desperate. Just honest.
Because she had kissed him in a way that didn't ask for control. She had given him mercy when he expected fury. She had seen the worst of him and chosen not to run.
And now every part of him ached for her.
He stood there for a long time.
Chest heaving. Mouth parted. Hands still half-raised like he hadn't quite registered that she'd gone.
And he knew he wouldn't kiss anyone else again.
Not after that. Not after her.
So he stayed frozen, breathing through the ache that spread through him like fever.
For the first time in years, he stopped lying. He stopped pretending that the hunger inside him was pride or control or fury. He stopped hiding it behind clever words and careful cruelty. He let it live, raw and trembling, right there in his chest.
He had touched her like a man who did not know how to ask. He had kissed her like someone confessing instead of seducing, like someone begging instead of claiming. He had poured all his restraint into that one desperate, reckless moment, and she had met him there.
Not with fear, not with retreat, but with grace. She had kissed him back with the kind of tenderness that comes from forgiveness, from understanding, from seeing the wreckage and stepping closer anyway. She had taken his chaos and answered it with stillness.
He did not deserve that. He knew it.
He did not deserve her steadiness or her patience, the quiet conviction in her voice, or the impossible hope she carried like a lantern through every shadow. He did not deserve the kind of woman who could look at a creature built from pride and ruin and still say yes.
But he wanted her all the same.
He wanted her voice, calm and real, to steady the noise in his head. He wanted her nearness in the hollow places that silence had carved into him. He wanted her faith in him, that impossible belief that he could be something other than what he had been made to be. He wanted the way she looked at him and saw not his damage, but his endurance.
He wanted her, completely.
And he wanted to be the man she had seen when she looked at him like that. The one she believed might still exist beneath the ruin.
He wanted that more than he had ever wanted forgiveness.
Draco did not know when it began. It came quietly, like mist working through a crack in stone, sliding past doors he had sworn were sealed, curling into the hollow places between his bones, seeping into the breath between words he had not learned how to say. By the time he noticed, it had already reached everything.
When he finally understood he had fallen, the question of how no longer mattered. It stood as a simple truth, and it came with surrender. He was in love with her, not in the polished, acceptable form that belongs in books and drawing rooms, not in the careful little phrases his mother once wrapped in expectations, and not in the loud, sloppy declarations he had heard in smoky clubs from men who enjoyed their own melodrama. What lived in him was darker, closer to hunger than to warmth, something that did not ask permission to grow. It gnawed the inside of his ribs and howled through him when she walked away, and it tightened along his spine whenever another gaze lingered on her too long. It was not neat or pretty. It belonged to him the way a scar belongs to skin.
It took root without warning, threading through old breaks and empty spaces, binding itself around wants he had buried so deeply he forgot their names. Now it sat in the center of him like a second heart, thudding harder whenever she breathed near him or laughed too brightly or looked at him as if she truly saw.
He liked her, and the word felt too small; he liked the way she moved through rooms barefoot and unapologetic, the way she refused to shrink or perform, the way her magic hummed ancient and subtle in anything she touched, the way her mind ran swift and exact and somehow still invited him to keep pace. He liked the quiet strength in her voice during an argument and the soft exhale that followed when the heat had passed, the way her silences carried more truth than most people's speeches. He liked all of it so much it ached.
She became everything in the ways that matter and in the ways that hurt, beautiful with a danger that made it difficult to look for long, quick with a streak of sudden humor that cut through tension and left him breathless, sharp enough to peel a man to his essentials without drawing a drop of blood, clear-eyed enough to look at him and not flinch. She remained untouchable where it counted and unknowable in the corners he had not reached, and still, somehow, she was his, wife by magic, match by contract, undoing by any honest measure. That truth tore at him.
She wore his name with a quiet ease that did not seem to grasp the worth of what she held, and yet it suited her. She kissed him without fear and let him touch her with all the confusion and heat crowding his chest and answered him with a tenderness that did not retreat. She took what he was and did not run. She stayed. He had no idea how to live through that kind of mercy. He suspected he might never learn. He loved her, and there was no path back.
A year had gone by since parchment sealed and wards flared and the world turned with her name bound to his in law and blood and something older, and still he could not tell when the shift had happened. At some point her voice settled into the back of his mind even when she was not in the room. At some point her laughter started to move with him through the corridors like light that remembered its way home. At some point the soft hush of her slippers meant more to him than his own heartbeat. He could not mark the first time he watched her sleep and felt that clean ache that changes a man, not simple lust, not even simple love, but the kind of longing that redraws a life.
Between shared meals and separate beds, clipped conversations and long fireside silences, the bright shocks of unexpected laughter at breakfast and the wordless exchange of books in the evening, somewhere between the quiet pattern of living and the noise of all they would not yet say, it took hold.
He watched the door before she entered, listening for the rhythm of her step, the brush of her fingers on the frame, the whisper of her robe across the floor. He kept the kettle warm too long and counted the cups she finished. He learned her habits, filed her sighs, and read her moods like weather.
The thought of someone else closing the distance, someone else allowed what he had not yet earned, a mouth too near hers, laughter shared in a private key, fingers brushing fingers, the taste of what he had waited to hold with care, loosed something terrible inside him, old as bone and sharp as a new blade.
He wanted her safe and would spend anything he had to keep her that way, but the want went deeper than safety. It whispered mine with heat instead of softness. He wanted to be the name she spoke into the dark and the mouth she chose when the room was empty, the arms she slept inside because it pleased her, the only one who traced the line of her spine and learned the sound she made when touched with reverence or ruin. He wanted her honest and unguarded. He wanted to be the man she trusted, the one she believed, the one who reached for her and survived it. He did not know when the axis shifted, whether it was the first time she brewed his tea with exactly three leaves, or the night she left a light on without remark, or the afternoon he found his name stitched into a book of pressed flowers that she never mentioned again. Somewhere between hush and softness she stopped being a wife on paper and became the center around which he now turned, and he would never, could never, be the same again.
***
Morning slipped in quietly, the way it always did, gentle at first and then too bright, as if the night before had not happened at all. Sunlight filtered through the tall panes of the conservatory, catching on the glass and bending into soft gold patterns that trembled over the stone floor. The orchids opened slowly in the warmth, their violet petals glowing in the stillness, and the air held the faint sweetness of pollen and the underside of leaves just beginning to stir. The room breathed around her, warm and slow, as though nothing in it had cracked or burned or changed.
Hermione lay curled on the chaise in the center of it, her knees drawn in, one arm tucked beneath her cheek, the other resting at her waist like someone guarding a place that still ached. Her robe hung loose over one shoulder. Her hair had dried in uneven waves, strands lifting in the slight breeze that whispered through the open glass vents. Anyone else might have thought she had simply fallen asleep there in a moment of quiet. Her stillness did not look dramatic. It looked lived-in, as if her body had refused to move once the weight of everything finally settled.
She had not truly slept. Not in the way that grants rest. Her breathing had evened out, but she had stayed aware of herself the entire time. She had drifted through the edges of dream without leaving the memory of the corridor, the wall at her back, his breath against her mouth, the sound his voice had taken when it broke open and showed its center.
Her skin still remembered him. That was the truth of it. The place just beneath her jaw felt warm when she touched it, as if the pulse there had learned a new rhythm overnight. Her lips were tender. Her hips remembered his hands, the way he had held her not to claim, but to steady himself. Her spine carried the echo of stone and heat and the strange clarity of being seen with no defenses left to hide behind. The memory lived beneath her ribs like something humming.
There had been no knock afterward. No quiet steps down the corridor. No attempt to explain what had happened or soften it. She had not gone to him either. The silence had not been rejection. It had been something more uncertain and fragile. A breath held between two people who did not yet know what shape the truth would take in daylight.
So morning acted like morning does. It carried on. The conservatory filled with light. The plants reached for her. The house settled into its usual quiet. And she stayed where she was, curved like a closing flower, thinking of his hands on her hips, thinking of the sound he made when he said her name, thinking of the way she had answered him without hesitation or doubt.
She did not try to name any of it. Naming things too soon had a way of turning them brittle.
She lifted her teacup and sipped, though she could not remember brewing it. The tea had cooled. It tasted faintly of jasmine and whatever thought she had been half-chasing before she lost it again. Her fingers traced the rim of the cup, slow and absent, as if trying to find the point where memory met something real.
The ache beneath her sternum did not feel like regret. It felt like a shift she had not prepared for. A quiet upheaval. A door opening to a room she had not realized she was built for.
Her gaze drifted without settling. Her thoughts moved the way fog moves over still water, folding and unfolding in silence.
Then the hearth behind her flashed green in a sudden bloom of flame, bright and abrupt enough to pull her back fully into her body. It was not loud, but the shift in magic was immediate, the kind that changes the air before anything else moves. The fire curled high for a heartbeat, as if something had arrived with purpose.
She only lifted her eyes.
The magic in the air shifted, a silken ripple that turned the stillness inside out.
The hearth flared in her periphery, spilling green light across the conservatory, bright and slow and wrong enough to catch the breath in her throat. The flames rose high, thick with emerald fire, curling around the edges of the stone and washing the glass walls in color until the shadows looked almost alive.
From that light stepped Blaise.
He emerged with the easy grace of a man who had never once doubted the welcome he deserved. His robes fit with tailored precision, yet his collar sat open enough to look careless. The fabric caught the firelight, half smoke and half temptation. His hair fell into his eyes as if it had been placed there by design, and his smile unfurled slow and sure, already halfway between mischief and sin.
"Morning, Goddess," he said. His voice was silk dragged over the quiet. Smooth, low, and too familiar. The word itself curled through the space with the intimacy of touch. He brushed a bit of soot from his sleeve with the deliberate laziness of someone who expected the world to clean itself around him.
His gaze wandered across the room. He looked at the flowers that bent toward the light, the crystal of her half-finished tea, the way the sun touched the edge of her hair. And then he found her.
The look landed like an anchor. Slow. Heavy. Intentional.
His eyes traced her legs where the robe had parted against the cushion, followed the line of her body to the delicate dip of her collarbone, then stopped where the faintest shadow of a bruise darkened her throat. The mark glowed like a secret he wasn't meant to see. He took it in, let his gaze linger, and smiled with something that looked too close to satisfaction.
"You look," he began, his voice wrapped in smoke and amusement, "a little unmade." The corner of his mouth lifted, bright with indulgence. "The beautiful sort. Like the world fell apart in your hands, and you didn't mind."
She did not answer.
Her stillness carried the quiet danger of someone who knew silence could wound more deeply than any spell. The light caught the side of her neck as she tilted her head, her expression unreadable. Her eyes were calm, unclouded, and far too steady.
Blaise watched her like a gambler reading a table. He wasn't used to quiet that didn't bend. He stepped closer, not enough to invade, but close enough to test the distance. The faint scent of smoke trailed behind him.
He was holding something now. A silver thermos, sleek and shining, charmed with delicate runes that shimmered when he moved. Steam rose from its mouth, sweet and spiced, carrying the scent of rare leaves and citrus.
He lifted it between them with a small, practiced flourish, the gesture half-offering and half-challenge. "I brought tea," he said, his tone too light to be harmless. "The good kind. Straight from the Ministry reserves. Focus, clarity, and just enough arrogance to get through the morning." His grin deepened, lazy and knowing. "It might even help you forget you married a man who broods for sport."
The words hovered. His tone might have been teasing, but his eyes betrayed something heavier. They moved from her mouth to her hands, to the pulse that fluttered at her wrist.
The space between them thickened with something unspoken.
He took another step closer, slow and sure, until the scent of the tea mingled with the faint trace of her perfume. It was not an approach built from confidence, but from certainty. He knew his charm worked on most people. He just wasn't sure it would work on her.
When she finally looked up, it was with the calm of someone who had already decided who she was. Her gaze met his without warmth, and still, somehow, without cruelty.
Blaise's smirk flickered, a single breath's worth of hesitation. Then he set the thermos down beside her cup.
"Consider it an apology," he said, softer now. "Or an invitation."
The light shifted again. The air trembled between them.
And for the first time that morning, Hermione smiled just enough to remind him that he wasn't the only one who knew how to play with fire.
He poured the tea it into a fresh cup with the kind of unnecessary flourish that implied habit more than care, the scent of the tea curling up between them like a question neither had voiced. He handed it to her without waiting for her acceptance, the delicate porcelain warm between her fingers before she even looked down. Then he settled beside her on the chaise the cushions sighing beneath the weight of him as if even the furniture was aware of how little distance existed now between his body and hers. His knee brushed hers, not overtly, not insistently, but enough to register, enough to claim space he hadn't been offered.
She didn't flinch. Didn't draw back or realign herself or break the stillness that had wrapped around her like a second skin. But she didn't soften either. Her body remained languid, loose in posture but not in spirit, her spine curled slightly as if she had draped herself there with no intention of rising. She was present but unreachable, like a ghost made of silver threads and half-said thoughts, like moonlight caught behind thick fog—visible, luminous, and utterly untouchable. She accepted the tea, held it gently in both hands, but she did not sip. And she most certainly did not accept the comfort that came with the gesture.
"Are you alright?" he asked, the question gentle in tone but too precise to be casual, too weighted to be dismissed, delivered with that maddening softness only Blaise could weaponize—carefully, almost reverently, like he was placing it at her feet rather than throwing it in her face. It wasn't the kind of question meant to be answered easily. It was a key disguised as kindness, a door cracked open by the sheer implication of concern, and he stood behind it, patient and silent, waiting to see if she'd step through.
No urgency, no demand—but there was something underneath it. Something older. Something male. Something that watched for weakness not to exploit it, but to catalogue it, to wrap it in velvet and pretend it wasn't still sharp enough to cut.
His voice had dropped—lower, smoother, a note gentler than before, the kind of sound used when tending to delicate things too precious or too dangerous to touch directly. A deliberate shift, a softening of tone that said: I see something, and I'm not pretending I don't. The question settled into the space between them like ash, not loud, but impossible to brush away.
And then his eyes shifted—not from her, but within her, trailing not just over the contours of her face but following the slow bloom of heat up her neck, the way the light caught on the side of her jaw, the delicate place just beneath her ear where a single fingerprint of color had bloomed. Not the blue-black bruise of harm, but the flush of pressure and passion and something dangerously close to worship. The mark was faint, but it spoke volumes. He saw it.
And the moment he did, something behind his expression altered, darkened—not anger, not jealousy, but something colder and cleaner. Precision. Focus. Possession without entitlement. Concern without the performance.
"He didn't hurt you, did he?" The question landed like a charm uttered through a closed door—not loud, but undeniably there, his voice low and leveled but backed by a weight she hadn't expected. Not protective in the heroic sense. But territorial. Careful. Calculating. Not because he wanted to interfere—but because he needed to understand.
She didn't answer.
Not right away.
Because how could she? How did one articulate the particular kind of ruin that didn't leave bruises? That Draco hadn't broken her skin, hadn't raised his voice or even reached for his wand—but that somehow, he'd still shattered something. That her body had been fine. More than fine. But her mind had been left humming with a frequency she didn't recognize.
It had been Draco's hands, urgent and reverent, gripping her hips like she was something he'd starved for. It had been the tremble in his mouth just before he kissed her, the tension in his voice when he'd said you're mine like it was both a warning and a plea.
It had been the wall at her back, cold and real, and his body pressing into hers like he was trying to brand the moment into her spine. It had been the desperation in her own fingers, curled into the fabric of his coat, not pulling him away but holding him there, keeping him close, begging him silently not to let go.
She could still feel the imprint of him in her ribs, in her breath, in the way her body had answered him with terrifying clarity.
She'd wanted it. Wanted Draco. Not in some soft, candlelit fantasy. But like a reckoning. Like gravity.
He had undone her.
Unmade her in ways that didn't bruise but left her aching all the same—torn between the illusion of control she'd built and the staggering truth of what desire looked like when it had claws. And she didn't know how to say that. Not to Blaise. Not to anyone.
So she looked away.
And said nothing.
Blaise shifted beside her, the mood in him souring almost imperceptibly, his smile disappearing beneath the tightening set of his mouth. Something about her quiet sharpened the lines of his face, turned the softness of his concern into suspicion.
"Hermione," Blaise said again, firmer now, the syllables of her name shaped by something sharper than concern, something that was beginning to edge toward frustration or fear. He leaned in slightly, not close enough to touch her, but just near enough to make the shift in his tone unmistakable—a voice no longer wrapped in silks, no longer pretending not to pry. "If he did something—if he crossed a line—"
But he didn't finish.
Because the moment those words left his mouth, something shifted.
Not loudly. Not with a crash or a crack. But with the kind of quiet that made everything else stop breathing.
The temperature dropped—not by degrees, but by magic, sudden and clean and unnatural, the warmth of morning leached from the conservatory in a heartbeat as if the sun itself had withdrawn in caution. Hermione's gaze moved past Blaise's shoulder toward the doorway.
He turned.
Draco stood there.
No sound. No magic flare. Just presence. His eyes were pale and sharp, fixed on the two of them, on the closeness, on the empty space his absence had left behind. His hair was damp, his collar open, a faint mark darkening the side of his neck where her mouth had been.
Blaise didn't speak. He didn't have to.
Because Draco's gaze had already said everything.
His hair was still damp, strands curling at his temples, not from vanity but necessity, as if he'd scrubbed himself raw in the shower in some desperate, futile attempt to wash away the memory of her sighs, her mouth, her name on his tongue.
His boots were muddy—fresh dirt from the edge of the manor garden still clinging to the soles, tracking proof of restless pacing across tile and warded stone. The open collar of his shirt exposed the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest, the sharp line of his collarbone, the shadow of a bruise blooming down the side of his neck—either from the night before or from the silence that followed it.
They didn't seek her.
They found Blaise.
And locked there.
Icy and bright and fathomless, like the way a predator is contained right before it sinks its teeth into something soft. They narrowed slightly, imperceptibly, as they swept over the tableau before him—Blaise, too close by half, seated where only he should sit, fingers dangerously near her knee, the delicate porcelain cup in her hands that bore no trace of his magic. His gaze drifted lower and something in his jaw clicked hard enough to echo. A muscle twitched beneath his cheek like the warning coil of a wandless curse.
Magic pulsed off of him in waves—silent, seething, thick with the ache of restraint barely holding, warping the air like heat rising off dragon fire. The sunlight recoiled from him. The glass panes of the conservatory clouded slightly. The vines above Hermione's head stilled mid-sway as if the house itself was waiting for someone to make the first move. Even the breeze that had stirred through the open windows earlier seemed to pause, caught between inhale and catastrophe.
Blaise, to his credit—or his foolishness—did not speak.
He tensed, yes. Shoulders straightened, posture sharpened. But he did not shift. Did not retreat. Instead, he smiled—slow and lazy and lethal. His eyes didn't leave Draco's, but they softened slightly as he lifted his cup toward Hermione with mock ceremony, brushing the rim against hers.
A toast without words.
A provocation measured in inches, not spells.
And Hermione simply exhaled, quiet and calm as ever, her fingers tightening just slightly around the cup's handle as she raised it once more to her lips. The tea, still warm, kissed her mouth with the barest taste of tension and citrus.She knew.
This wasn't going to end quietly.
Draco's voice sliced through the thick, humid air of the conservatory like a blade honed on ice—razor-sharp, unmistakable, and so cold it felt as if it had stolen the heat from the room itself.
"Get. Out."
The words didn't rise in volume. His tone was low and controlled, but carried with it the weight of something lethal—something forged in months of silent tension and slow-burning jealousy that had now, finally, reached ignition. That voice wasn't made to scare; it was made to kill. The syllables snapped through the air like incantations, carved from pure, ancient fury, and it chilled the enchantments threaded through the walls. Every living thing in the room seemed to recoil, shrinking away from the sound like it had felt the edges of a curse cut too close to its stem. Even the glass above them fogged slightly, as though the temperature had dropped in reverence or fear.
The conservatory fell utterly silent. Not the comfortable silence of shared space, but a silence that waited. That tensed. That held its breath like the second before a spell makes contact.
Blaise raised his eyebrows slowly, too slowly, as if the situation amused him more than it concerned him. He looked at Draco the way one might look at a thundercloud on the horizon: worth watching, not worth worrying about.
Like he didn't see the danger. Like he should have.
He leaned back further on the velvet chaise, one arm stretching along the back of it with infuriating ease, his knee still brushing Hermione's, still too close, still trespassing. And then, with the audacity of someone who had never once feared retribution, he lifted the porcelain teacup again and took a sip—slow, deliberate, as if tasting the calm before the storm.
"Well," Blaise drawled, voice silky with feigned indifference, "I suppose it's a bit early for threats, even for you, Malfoy. But if this is how you want to—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Because Draco moved.
Just motion—pure, unfiltered, and explosive, like something ancient had been cut loose from behind his ribs and could no longer be held. The transformation from stillness to violence was so sudden, so absolute, it was like watching lightning strike from a clear sky.
One moment, he was by the door, the next, he was across the room, closing the distance in a blur of dark robes and fire-laced fury, teeth bared, his eyes glowing with something near-feral, something that had nothing to do with etiquette or restraint and everything to do with claim. He just launched, propelled by the kind of rage that didn't want to destroy, but punish.
Blaise rose to meet him, to defend, but he was a beat too slow.
Draco's hand had already twisted into the front of his robes, yanking him forward with a force that knocked the teacup from his hand. Porcelain shattered on the floor. Liquid splashed onto her slippers. No one noticed. No one cared.
His other arm pulled back, fist clenched, muscle taut with devastating intent—ready to break bone, dignity, silence.
Magic radiated off him in waves, visible now, the kind that distorted the air and raised the hairs on skin, the kind that made doors tremble and oxygen thin. It was gold-touched and burning, spitting sparks along the cuffs of his sleeves, and in his eyes, it was wildfire. Unholy. Unrelenting.
The air snapped with tension. The room crackled.
And then—Hermione moved.
Fast. Faster than logic allowed. Faster than anyone barefoot in a silk dressing robe had any right to move.
Her hands rose, small and steady, and flattened against Draco's chest, fingers splaying wide over the fabric as if pressing directly into the heart of his wrath.
And he froze.
"Enough," she said, and her voice was quiet, barely louder than a breath—but it carried the gravity of an ancient charm.
Draco didn't lower his fist.
He stood there, chest heaving beneath her palms, shoulders tight with restraint that trembled on the edge of violence. His eyes weren't on Blaise anymore—they were locked on her, wild and molten, pupils blown wide, not from magic now, but something far more human. Possession. Panic. Want.
His gaze flicked to the bruise at her throat—the mark he had left. Then to the fall of her robe, the one he'd watched slip from her shoulder hours earlier. And then to the soft, bare curve of her collarbone, now far too near Blaise's reach.
She looked him straight in the eyes.
And then—she slapped him.
The sound cracked across the conservatory like a spell cast without a wand.
His head turned with the impact and when he looked back at her, his eyes had changed.
No longer fire. No longer gold. Just grey. Cold and real. Present.
"You are not an animal," she said, and her voice was trembling now—not with fear, but with fury, with ache, with something righteous that she had barely kept leashed. "You don't get to act like one."
The room held its breath.
Even the vines on the ceiling stopped moving.
Draco blinked once. Then again. And something inside him shifted. Focused. Contained. His eyes dropped slowly to her lips. Then her throat. Then her hands, still pressed to his chest like she had the power to stop him.
He stepped forward.
Into her space. Into her breath. Into the only part of the world that still made sense.
His voice, when it came, was almost too quiet to hear. Gravel-worn. Wrecked. Honest.
"No," he said. "I'm not an animal."
A pause. A breath. The space between everything they had been and everything they might become.
"I'm your husband."
And the way he said it didn't sound like obligation.
It sounded like a warning.
Like a vow. Like a claim.