The kitchen was supposed to be neutral ground—a sanctuary of structure and order untouched by the strange, delicate chaos Granger carried with her like a second skin. It was meant to be the one room immune to her softness, the last space in the manor unbent by the quiet gravity of her presence, a place where function reigned above all, where routine was sacred and nothing so irrational as feeling had ever been permitted to take root. Draco had assumed—foolishly, in retrospect, laughably so—that here, at least, she would not have infiltrated. That the kitchen would remain practical, efficient, untouched by her uncanny rhythm.
He had told himself it was impossible to weave lavender and moonlight into copper pans and butcher's knives. He had believed the kitchen, more than anywhere else in the house, would resist her.
He entered that morning without ceremony, driven by the dull, tight ache beneath his ribs that reminded him he hadn't eaten since the evening before—a hollow throb that had grown from irritation into something more insistent. He moved through the corridors like a man expecting combat, his jaw already tight, his sleeves rolled to the forearm in a way that gave the impression of carelessness he did not feel, his expression unreadable but clearly not in the mood. He wasn't fully dressed—just enough to pass for respectable in the off chance Luna wandered through—but his head ached from too little sleep and his patience had already begun to fray before he even reached the threshold.
He expected stillness.
He expected silence, perhaps broken only by the familiar clatter of cookware or the gentle hiss of flame beneath a tea kettle. He expected to walk into a room bathed in cool morning light, find something simple and hot already waiting—eggs, maybe, toast, a pot of dark tea steeping quietly at the center of the table, and the house elves moving in the periphery like silent sentinels. He expected obedience, formality, the sort of disciplined quiet that gave him space to think, to breathe, to remember that there were still parts of his life untouched by her.
But what he found was something else entirely.
The kitchen was warm. Not just heated—but filled with a warmth that had no source he could identify. The air was thick with something that felt like steam and smelled faintly of rosemary and sunlight and bread, for fuck's sake—freshly baked, golden-crusted bread cooling on the counter like this was a cottage and not a fortress. There was a hum in the air too—not a sound exactly, but a feeling, a low, vibrating note of contentment, so deeply embedded in the atmosphere it settled between the floor tiles and the light itself. Not joy, not celebration—but a quiet, steady happiness that made his jaw clench and his chest go tight with something unplaceable.
And then he saw them.
Three house elves—his elves, the ones who had served the Malfoy estate through war, through ruin, through the darkest corners of history without ever daring to raise their eyes to his face—were moving around Granger as if she were not merely welcome, but revered. Not bowed in fear, not tense with expectation, but... fluttering.
That was the only word for it. They flitted around her like hummingbirds, quick and bright and pleased with their own movements, offering her platters and napkins and teacups like sacred gifts. One was braiding a strand of her hair with sprigs of dried chamomile. Another was chattering to her in low, excited tones. A third was spooning jam onto a scone and humming under its breath.
And she—Hermione bloody Granger—was smiling. Not politely. Not awkwardly. But easily, naturally, the corners of her mouth soft with fondness as she listened to them speak, her hands moving to accept whatever they offered, her fingers brushing theirs with something dangerously close to affection. She wasn't holding court. She wasn't performing. She simply was, wrapped in that loose morning robe he had already grown to despise for how it clung to her collarbones and whispered against the floor like smoke, barefoot as ever, standing in his kitchen as if it had always belonged to her.
She looked up at him only when the elves did, as if summoned by the shift in air pressure that followed his presence. Her expression didn't change. She didn't flinch. She just met his eyes, steady and unreadable, as if he were the one intruding. As if he were the one who didn't belong.
One elf stood precariously on a wobbling stool just behind her, its tiny arms stretched as high as they would go, fingertips trembling with delicate precision as it adjusted a thin, intricately woven crown of soft wildflowers and starlight petals atop her head—a gesture carried out with the reverence of someone anointing a queen, or perhaps restoring something sacred to its rightful place.
Another knelt beside her, cross-legged on the tiled floor with the comfort of someone who had done it a thousand times, carefully arranging tiny bundles of enchanted herbs onto a carved wooden tray that had been set beside her teacup like a ritual object—sprigs of rosemary tied with gold thread, fresh verbena charmed to hum gently, little thistles kissed with frost. The third hovered just off the ground, hovering with that quiet levitation magic elves sometimes used when they were too reverent to walk, cradling a smooth ceramic bowl filled with paper-thin slices of honey-glazed root vegetables, presenting it to her as if it were a relic, or an offering—not a meal, but a gift to something powerful and deserving.
And Granger— Hermione , though he still couldn't bring himself to think her name like it belonged to him—was seated calmly at the head of the table like she had always been there, like she'd grown up in the bones of the manor and never needed to ask permission. Her robe, a soft cascade of pale grey silk, clung to her like mist curling along the banks of a lake, slipping over her shoulders and down her arms as though the fabric had chosen her rather than the other way around. Her legs were folded beneath her chair, bare feet tucked in without tension, and both hands curled around her teacup in a gesture that was not defensive but wholly, unselfconsciously at peace. Her hair, long and wild and unbrushed in the kind of deliberate way that defied aristocratic polish, spilled down her back and across her chest in sun-touched tangles, the crown of flowers nestled into it so seamlessly it looked like it had grown there.
She didn't seem surprised by the attention.
Didn't blink when they touched her. Didn't stiffen when they hovered near her shoulders or whispered soft spells into the curls at her temples. She wasn't performing. She wasn't even reacting. She simply was—smiling faintly, serenely, like this was the most natural thing in the world. Like this—this, the crown and the herbs and the offerings, the warmth of the hearth, the glow in the walls—was not a performance of grace but her natural state of being.
As if crowns were normal.
As if the house elves hadn't spent years shrinking under his gaze and were now singing under their breath as they laid enchanted honey-root at her feet.
As if she had always belonged here.
Draco stood in the doorway with one hand still on the stone frame, not frozen by anger, not even by jealousy, but by the slow, suffocating realization curling deep in his lungs: the house was already hers. Not just the magic, not just the rhythm of the wards, but everything. The air, the light, the scent of wild herbs and summer fruit drifting through the windows. The stillness that no longer waited for him to fill it. The elves who now smiled when they served.
The house had already begun to shift in her favor.
And worse—everything inside it had, too. Including him .
One of the elves turned toward him, the motion slow and deliberate, and blinked—blinked—with an eerie composure that landed wrong in Draco's chest. It wasn't the nervous tic of a servant anticipating punishment, nor the frantic, darting glance of someone used to fear. It was something steadier. Calmer. Almost human. The elf's oversized hands remained folded neatly in front of its small frame, its shoulders relaxed, posture serene—unflinching in a way that made Draco's pulse flicker uneasily beneath his skin. There was no hesitation. No flinch. No instinct to cower or obey. Just a quiet stillness that pulsed with a new certainty, one Draco didn't recognize and hadn't permitted. It didn't even glance at his wand hand.
Instead, the creature turned to her.
It looked at Granger with something dangerously close to reverence. And then, with a slow, sweeping bow so graceful it seemed rehearsed—sacred, almost—it addressed her in a voice that carried not the usual tremble of deference, but a low, ceremonial tone, as if it were addressing a priestess or a queen returned from exile.
"Mistress Hermione," it said, with utter clarity, "would you prefer mint blossom or lemon sage in your tea this morning?"
The moment held.
And then she giggled.
Not sharply, not mockingly—there was no malice in it, no smugness. It wasn't the laugh of someone who had just won something or claimed a throne. It was lighter than that. A breathy, gentle sound that slipped past her lips like steam from a teacup, soft and warm and carried on some private amusement she didn't bother explaining. She didn't even look at Draco. Just kept her eyes on the elf, her fingers wrapped around her cup, as if the moment didn't deserve any more weight than that.
It was unbearable.
His hand twitched. A muscle in his jaw jumped.
His fingers curled slowly toward the wand holstered at his side—automatic, instinctive, the old training rising like a blade behind his ribs, the reflex of command, of correction, of asserting control when the edges of it began to slip. He had trained for obedience. Fought for order. Suffered for it. It had been bred into his bones that defiance was dangerous, that magic bent to will, and that will was his to exercise when the world began to spin too far from its proper axis.
But something—something sharp and brittle and terrifyingly new—stopped him.
Maybe it was the fact that she hadn't even flinched. That Granger sat there in her robe and crown of wildflowers, sipping her tea like she had always belonged to this place, as if the house had been waiting for her to settle into its seams. Maybe it was the way the elves didn't watch him. Didn't wait for his command. Maybe it was the heat rising in his throat, the slow, creeping realization that the rules he used to enforce no longer lived here.
Power had shifted.
And it had not shifted in his favor.
"Enough," he said, the word falling from his mouth like a spell too heavy to cast properly, his voice slicing through the warmth of the room like steel pulled fresh from ice. It rang cold and sharp, meant to remind them who he was—what he was—that this was still his name on the deed, his house, his family's ancestral seat. That no amount of soft smiles and steeped herbs could erase that. "Leave."
The elves froze instantly.
Every fluttering movement stopped. Every ear went still. Even the magic in the air seemed to pause mid-breath, suspended between then and now, between what was and what had become.
But they didn't look at him.
Not one.
One by one—slowly, deliberately—they turned.
To her.
And they bowed.
All three of them. Low, unhurried, not in fear but in recognition, like they were acknowledging something older than blood, deeper than name, a bond already forged and sealed in quiet glances and morning rituals. It wasn't the kind of bow Draco had received in his youth—rigid and reluctant, born of duty and ingrained hierarchy. This was different. This was willing. This was faith.
This was allegiance.
And in that moment, as he stood there in the doorway of his own kitchen, watching the house elves he'd once commanded without thought lower their heads to the girl who'd been his enemy, his rival, his undoing—he realized something else, too.
She was no longer simply living in her house.
She had become the quiet sun of its universe.
And everything, everything, including the people and magic he'd once thought immovable, was beginning to turn in her orbit.
Draco's jaw clenched so tightly he thought something might snap—bone against bone, a grinding pop that radiated up the side of his skull like a fault line giving way. His molars throbbed with the effort of restraint, a dull, punishing ache he welcomed, because it was physical and real and easier to manage than the slow, coiling rage blooming beneath his skin. His magic stirred beneath the surface like a curse half-formed, crawling along his nerves with the itch of a spell that had nowhere to go, nothing to strike, aching for release.
A beat later, the elves vanished—three soft, clean cracks of magic and absence that left the air strangely hollow, as though something vital had been pulled from the room. They took their presence with them. Their deference. Their loyalty.
But they left the flower crown.
Still perched delicately atop her head. Still perfect, not a single petal disturbed. Still hers.
She looked up at him then—not startled, not sheepish, not even smug—but with the same maddening composure she always seemed to wear like a second skin. Her fingers remained wrapped gently around the warm porcelain of her teacup, palms cradling it like it was something fragile and sacred. She didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just watched him from beneath the weight of wild curls and woven blossoms, her expression wide open and unreadable, not passive but present—alert in the way predators are, not aggressive, but waiting. Like she knew he was searching for something and was willing to let him look until he either found it or broke from the effort.
Her voice, when it came, was low but clear, brushing the edges of silence with all the weight of something more dangerous than fury—understanding.
"What the hell are you doing to them?" he hissed, and it wasn't a question, not really. It was an accusation, a fracture in his voice shaped like disbelief. It came out rough, pulled from somewhere deep and ragged, not quite a whisper, not quite a growl, trembling on the edge of fury because he didn't understand—and that alone was enough to burn him alive.
Granger blinked slowly, tilting her head to the side, not in confusion but in contemplation, like she was considering the question from some angle he couldn't see, some axis he hadn't even thought to exist. "I asked their names," she said simply, as if that explained everything—as if centuries of ingrained hierarchy could be undone with four words and an open mouth. And the worst part was—maybe it had.
He stared at her.
Just stared.
Because he couldn't decide if she was joking, if she was toying with him, or if she honestly didn't realize what she had done—how she had shifted the weight of the room, rethreaded the very fabric of his household with a handful of syllables and a warm voice.
"You what?" he asked, though the answer already rang in his bones.
"They said no one had ever asked," she replied, gently, without triumph, without agenda—just the maddening, infuriating softness she always carried like a spell humming under her skin. "So I did. And they were lovely."
And for a long, slow second, he couldn't speak.
Because there was no fury big enough to answer that without it sounding absurd, no logic fierce enough to refute what she had done without revealing something hollow in his chest. To shout would be to lose. To mock would be to flail. To deny would be to admit that kindness—simple, human, unasked for kindness—was enough to unseat him.
She had turned the kitchen into a sanctuary.
His servants into something like believers.
And she'd done it without demanding a thing.
Draco stood there, spine rigid, fists clenched at his sides, every muscle locked in an effort to hold himself together as she reached—unhurried, unbothered—for the small dish of honey sitting beside her tea. She lifted a delicate wooden spoon between her fingers, graceful and casual, and extended it toward him without theatrics, without mockery, as though they were simply two people sharing a morning.
"Would you like some?" she asked, her tone warm, unforced, impossibly sincere. Not an olive branch. Not a provocation. Just genuine.
And her smile—gods, that smile—it wasn't cruel. It wasn't smug. It didn't even seem aware of the earthquake she'd just caused. It was gentle. Open. Kind. And that, somehow, was worse than if she'd wielded it like a blade. He could have fought a weapon. But this—this quiet, maddening grace—he had no defense for that. Not from her.
He didn't take the spoon.
Didn't take the honey.
Didn't say a word.
He turned, sharp and fast, the movement too loud in the stillness she'd wrapped around the room, boots thudding against ancient wood, cloak swinging in time with the quick fury of his exit. It wasn't dignity. It wasn't power. It was escape.
And yet as he stalked down the hall, away from her crown, her tea, her unbearable peace, the scent of lavender and golden honey still followed him.
Refusing, as ever, to let him go.
He had managed, by some fragile miracle of timing and solitude, to claim five whole minutes of peace in the small reading room tucked away behind the eastern corridor—a space he'd taken to retreating into when the weight of the house, and her presence within it, became too loud to think through.
The room was dimly lit and still, its silence more sacred than the wards that laced the windows, and for a moment—just a moment—he let himself believe it would remain untouched. He sat with a book open across his knees, untouched, unread, its words nothing but a screen between him and the thoughts he couldn't name, his fingers curled around the worn leather spine like it might hold him together. The fire crackled. The room was warm. It was, briefly, bearable.
And then the door swung open with the audacity of a hurricane dressed in silk.
She didn't knock. Of course she didn't knock. She entered, not like a guest, not even like a wife—but like someone who had claimed the right to challenge his existence wherever it might hide.
"You are not allowed to speak to them like that," she said, and it wasn't just a reprimand—it was a sentence, carved clean through the quiet like a blade honed in glass and justice. Her voice cracked against the calm like something sacred breaking, and her eyes—gods, her eyes—flared with that terrifying, incandescent fury she reserved only for injustice, the kind of ancient, unwavering fire that didn't burn out so much as consume.
Draco blinked once, slow and unimpressed, still seated as if the gravity in the room hadn't changed, as if her outrage couldn't touch him. "Who?"
"The elves," she snapped, stalking further into the room, her fists curled tight at her sides like the mere memory of his tone had struck a nerve so deep it reverberated down to her bones. "And since we're airing out grievances—don't speak to me like I'm one of your fucking tenants, either."
His head tilted slightly, book sliding half-shut on his thigh. "I didn't," he said, slow and cool, like the words were ice he expected her to choke on.
Her lips curled—not a smile, but something crueler. "Oh, but you did. You always do. You talk down when you think you're being challenged, like your opinion is a throne I'm lucky to kneel before." Her voice dropped, steadier now, lethal in its precision. "Don't you dare mistake my silence for submission, Malfoy. If you want something, say it like a man, not like a fucking lord."
His brow arched, slow and deliberate, a smirk flickering at the corner of his mouth as if he couldn't decide whether to laugh or spit. "Merlin, Granger. Dirty mouth on you."
She didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Just stepped closer, and her voice went quiet—not soft, but sharpened to a dangerous whisper. "Not as dirty as my blood, right?"
The words hit like a spell. He was on his feet before he could think, the book falling forgotten to the floor, his expression collapsing into something far colder, far sharper, and infinitely more dangerous. He closed the distance between them in two long strides, his jaw set, his eyes bright with something unreadable and deeply unsettled.
"I am not that man anymore," he said, but it didn't come out like an oath—it came out like a wound, each word dragged from somewhere raw and unfinished, each syllable soaked in fury and shame and all the years he had spent trying to silence the echo of the boy he used to be. "I don't believe in that bullshit anymore, Granger," he went on, voice fraying at the edges, cracking like old wood beneath pressure. "Don't you dare—"
But she stepped into him before he could finish, closed the space between them like a door slamming shut, her chest brushing his, her chin tilted up with the kind of blistering defiance that didn't beg for understanding—it demanded it.
Her presence wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It was concentrated fire, slow-burning and devastating, and it made the air between them hum like something spell-bound.
"That's why you won't speak to me, then?" she asked, and though her voice barely rose above a breath, it landed like a slap. "Because you say you've changed, but the second I ask for anything more than your silence—anything real—you disappear behind your precious fucking restraint? You don't get to rewrite yourself and expect the rest of us to forget the ink you bled into us. Just because you've decided you're not that man doesn't mean I don't still have the scars he left."
He froze—not like someone who'd been caught, but like someone who'd been pierced. Like her words had slipped beneath his skin and found something too vital to ignore. For a breathless second, he didn't blink, didn't speak, just stood there as if the floor had fallen out from under him and he was still deciding whether or not to let himself fall.
And then—he moved.
Not back. Not away.
Forward.
He caged her in without hesitation, his arms braced on either side of her head, palms slamming flat against the bookshelves with a force that made the wood groan. His body was all tension—shoulders tight, jaw clenched, every muscle taut with the kind of restraint that didn't feel like control anymore, but like desperation barely leashed. His face hovered inches from hers, breath hot, shallow, shaking. Not from anger. Not quite. From everything else.
"What do you want from me, Granger?" he asked, and gods, he sounded broken. Not wounded in the romantic way, not the kind of hurt that invites comfort, but shattered in the brutal, self-inflicted kind of way that comes from choosing the wrong words over and over again until your voice becomes the very thing that drives people away.
"Do you want me to fall in love with you?" he went on, his voice fraying like parchment left too long near flame, cracking with things he hadn't meant to say but couldn't stop from spilling. "Do you want me to fuck you? Do you think just because this marriage is inked on Ministry parchment that we're anything more than a headline and a cautionary tale?"
She didn't answer.
She didn't blink.
She didn't rise to it, didn't throw something back like he almost begged her to, didn't call him names or claw open the wound he'd just handed her with bare, shaking fingers. She only looked at him—still, steady, silent—the kind of silence that wasn't passive, but powerful, her eyes wide and wounded and so fucking quiet it made something in his chest splinter like bone under too much weight.
And then—she left.
Not with rage. Not with noise. She stepped back once, slowly, like she was peeling herself out of the moment, and then turned and walked out of the room with the kind of grace that made it worse. The hem of her dress whispered against the floor behind her, soft and damning, like a sigh he wasn't allowed to catch, and he didn't call after her, didn't follow, because what right did he have? No slamming doors. No triumphant retort. Just her absence. And gods—it was so much worse.
Draco stood there for several long, suspended seconds, as if her leaving had knocked all the air out of the room. His breath hitched and caught in his throat, chest rising and falling in shallow bursts, something sour and burning curling in the back of his mouth like the taste of failure. When he moved, it wasn't graceful. He collapsed into the chair like a puppet cut free of its strings, his body folding forward, elbows braced on his knees, one hand dragging through his already-ruined hair while the other pressed hard against his jaw, as if he could physically shove the words back into his mouth.
Why?
Why would he say something like that?
Why would he use his voice, his sharpest weapon, to wound the one person who had never tried to use hers to hurt him?
Why had he taken the kindness she offered with trembling hands and shoved it back down her throat like it was poison?
Because he didn't know how to receive it.
Because he didn't know what to do with someone who didn't want to control him, or fix him, or punish him—someone who just wanted to see him. All of him. And still stay.
Because she had been too soft, and too sincere, and that—that—was the problem.
No one had ever been that kind to him before.
Not without a cost.
***
He hadn't meant to walk in.
Or at least—that was the lie he told himself, the one he clung to like a threadbare excuse, muttered half-silently in the back of his mind even as his hand had reached for the door and his feet had carried him forward without pause. He would argue, if pressed, that the door hadn't been properly charmed to indicate it was occupied, that the small runes usually etched into the wood to glow when in use had failed to light. That the wards, which always stirred when she was nearby—fluttering faintly across the back of his neck like invisible wings—had been silent for once, or muted just enough to give him plausible deniability. He would insist, bitterly and with too much precision, that he had only come seeking something ordinary: a towel, perhaps, or a breath of space that didn't reek of honey and tension. Just a moment alone. Just one room not soaked in the smell of her.
But the truth—which he refused to look at directly—was that some part of him had known.
And still, he walked in.
He stepped across the threshold with his usual sharp, clean confidence, the kind that came from years of moving through rooms like they belonged to him, every inch of his posture tense with the expectation of annoyance. He'd fully intended to snap at the flickering sconces again or cast a charm to dry the tiles, or scowl at whatever strange enchantment she'd left soaking into the walls—but none of that happened.
Because the moment he stepped into the bathroom, the air changed.
It hit him not like a warning, but like a seduction: thick, warm steam laced with lavender so strong it pressed against the inside of his nose, and something deeper beneath it—neroli, maybe, or bergamot, or some kind of ancient flower pulled from a spellbook he hadn't opened in years.
There was heat everywhere, not oppressive, but enveloping, the kind that slid over skin like silk and made you forget your armor. The room wasn't bright—it glowed, gently and unevenly. Stones had been scattered across the floor in a pattern he didn't recognize, each one softly lit from within in hues of silver and blue, pulsing in slow, steady intervals like the room itself was breathing. Floating candles hovered along the tiled edges of the bath, their flames low and gold, reflecting on the water like stars caught in liquid. The sound of it—gentle, constant, unbothered—lapped softly against porcelain. And then there was the music.
It wasn't music in the proper sense. Not with rhythm or structure. It was a hum—a tone vibrating just beneath the silence, a harmony built into the walls and the stone and the steam. It felt like the kind of song the earth would sing if it ever remembered how to speak again.
And in the center of it all—Granger.
Her hair was gathered atop her head in a loose, careless twist that had already begun to come undone, strands slipping free and curling like whispers down the side of her neck, clinging in delicate arcs to the damp skin just beneath her jaw. It wasn't styled so much as surrendered—tucked up and left to fall as it pleased, soft and unhurried in its descent.
Her eyes remained closed, lashes dark against the curve of her cheek, her expression utterly at peace in a way that made something clench inside his chest, because nothing in his life had ever looked so unbothered. Her arms were stretched along the edge of the bath, long and relaxed, fingers dipped just slightly into the surface of the water as though she were listening to it more than holding it. There was a subtle rhythm to her posture, a poetry to the way her limbs flowed with the room around her—like she wasn't in the bath so much as she was the bath, the air, the light.
The water shimmered with enchantment—he could feel it even from where he stood—as soft iridescent magic floated just below the surface, casting spectral light in slow ripples that moved across the dark tile floor and climbed the walls in waves. The glow didn't pulse like a spell meant to impress. It flickered like moonlight caught in water, restless and alive. It danced along the line of her collarbone, the arch of her shoulder, the long, unbroken line of her back.
Her skin gleamed—not with vanity, not with effort, but with something quieter. Something sacred. It wasn't just the oil glistening on her shoulders or the steam clinging to her chest. It was the sense that she had been touched by the house itself, by the moon above them, by the enchantments he couldn't read but that obeyed her without question. It was like the light bent for her. Like the gods who had once named beauty now bowed to her instead.
She was humming again.
No words. No tune he recognized. Just a simple, quiet sound that seemed to begin in her chest and spill gently into the air like steam curling from a cup. There was no need for melody. No reason for it beyond the fact that it wanted to exist. Her voice slipped between the candlelight and the soft sound of water and wrapped itself around the room like a blessing, a ward, a spell that didn't need incantation.
Draco froze.
Not in shock. Not in rage.
But in something heavier, something more dangerous.
He should have left—immediately, without a word, without a breath, before the stillness became unbearable and the image of her became something he would never be able to forget. He should have turned and closed the door and shoved the memory into the darkest part of himself where no one would ever find it.
But he didn't.
He stood there.
He watched her.
And he stayed one moment too long.
His breath hitched in his throat and stayed there, caught somewhere between shame and awe. The heat in the room felt different now—less like warmth, more like a hand on his chest, steady and heavy and impossible to move. It sank into his ribs, pressed into his lungs, and settled low in his spine, curling there like a flame with nowhere to go.
His eyes traced the slope of her neck, the soft shadow beneath her jaw, the way the water clung to her skin like it had no intention of ever letting go. Every movement was slow, fluid, unrushed. The bath held her as if it knew her weight. As if it had waited for her.
And his mind, usually so sharp, so filled with counters and logic and control, went still.
Not peaceful.
Not calm.
Just still.
The kind of stillness that came just before something cracked.
The kind of stillness that preceded either catastrophe—or surrender.
Then—without hurry, without drama, without even lifting her head—she opened one eye.
Just one.
It was a slow, languid motion, the kind that made it clear she'd known he was there from the beginning, that she had sensed him not with her ears or her eyes but with the quiet, impossible awareness she seemed to carry everywhere—like the house whispered to her, like the water itself had warned her he was watching. The exposed eye didn't widen or harden; it remained half-lidded and calm, touched by candlelight, a little drowsy, a little curious. Not surprised. Not shy. Simply awake.
"You should learn how to knock," she said.
Her voice was soft. Barely a breath above the sound of the bath. Low and unbothered, shaped around the edge of a smile that didn't quite form, just hovered at the corner of her mouth like something she hadn't decided to give yet. She didn't sound amused. She didn't sound mocking. She just said it, like an invitation, like an observation, like the most natural thing in the world.
He vanished.
Not with grace. Not with control. Not with a single dignified step backward and a closed door behind him, but with a storm of splintering air and disapparation that cracked through the room like a broken bone snapping beneath pressure. The magic burst around him, sharp and angry, half a second away from chaos. He left behind a hole where his body had been, a gust of wind that made the candles flare violently and then nearly go out, and the steam—all that lovely enchanted steam—screamed as it rushed into the vacuum of him, hissing against the sudden cold he had left in his place.
But she didn't move.
She didn't flinch.
She simply blinked once, closed her eye again as if nothing had happened, as if the man who'd been watching her like he was both drowning and starving hadn't just erupted out of the room like a storm, and picked up her hum right where she'd left it—soft, slow, shapeless, threading through the bathwater like a lullaby meant only for the stones and the steam.
Later that night, long after he'd locked himself in his room with the windows shut and every silencing charm layered thick enough to smother a scream, long after he'd paced the floor until the edges of his temper dulled into exhaustion, Draco dreamed.
Not of her bath. Not of the way the light had touched her skin. Not even of her voice.
He dreamed of her hands.
Of the way they moved beneath the water. Of the way they hovered above her own knees, fingers loose, spreading gentle ripples with every shift. Of the softness in her wrists, the curve of her knuckles, the slight lift of her pinky as she reached for nothing and touched everything.
He dreamed of her hands.
Moving through water.
Touching nothing.
And still—somehow—undoing everything.
***
The study had always been his sanctuary.
Even in this house—this strange, living manor that did not belong to him and never had, a place that pulsed quietly with her rhythms and softened its corners to match the mood of her footsteps—he had managed, through sheer force of will and a lifetime of entitlement, to carve out a space that was untouched by whimsy.
It was a room built in defiance of everything else she had transformed: no enchanted flora spilling down the windowsills, no floating candles with dancing flames that changed color depending on who entered, no sweet-scented air drifting through hidden vents like a sigh. Instead, it was dark and severe, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with ancient grimoires and magical law texts, the furniture carved from mahogany and lacquered to a hard, shine-less finish. The quills were sharpened just the way he liked them, the parchment heavy and textured beneath his hands, and the books—his books—had learned to fall open to the right pages without asking.
He had claimed one of the rooms on the second floor the first week they arrived, walking into it like a general entering a battlefield. He stripped the space bare of the charms she had lovingly sewn into the walls, cleared out the bundles of dried herbs suspended from the ceiling, banished the floating orbs of colored light that had been spelling constellations above the desk. The cushions were replaced with high-backed chairs upholstered in clean, cold slate.
He warded the windows to block the shifting hues of morning and dusk, charmed the light to remain cool and steady, without variation or flicker. No lavender was allowed past the threshold. No windchimes dared hang near the door. No enchanted tea trays appeared at his elbow without consent.
Just walls.
Just structure.
Just silence.
It was where he went when the rest of the house became too loud with quiet—when her absence was somehow more suffocating than her presence, when the floorboards creaked with the weight of unsaid things, when the air began to taste too much like rosewater and restraint. It was the one place where he still believed he could think clearly. Where he could remind himself who he was before her.
And where, more and more often, he realized he no longer recognized that version of himself at all.
That morning—or perhaps it was already drifting into afternoon, though the charmed windows let in no hint of time, and the heavy wards on the room dulled the passage of light into something that felt detached from the rest of the world—he was well into his third hour of what he would later call research, but what was, in truth, avoidance in its most desperate and dignified form.
The table in front of him was a battlefield of parchment and parchment weight, covered in a sprawl of letters—some unopened, some half-burned, others scrawled over in thick strokes of ink—as well as official scrolls from the Ministry, annotated legal tomes passed down through the Malfoy family, and ancient, cracking grimoires bound in dragonhide and brittle pride. Many bore the crests of long-dead ancestors, etched in faded gold beside titles like Magical Heirship Doctrine and Bloodline Enforcement Charters. He had flipped through them all with the intensity of a man trying to claw his way out of a grave someone else had filled.
He scanned page after page with eyes that refused to blink, scribbled notes in the margins with sharp, deliberate motions, circling phrases he had memorized as a child but now read as if they might hold secret meanings he'd overlooked. He underlined clauses he thought could be manipulated, added arrows between contradictory statements, and folded the corners of pages that might—if angled just right—suggest precedent for reversal. He wrote letters too: one carefully worded inquiry to the Wizengamot, couched in legal hypotheticals; another to a solicitor who had once helped his father arrange the kind of discreet transactions that never made it to public record. He drafted a third, a fourth, started a fifth.
He burned them all.
Not because they were incorrect, but because they were too frantic. Too obvious. They reeked of discomfort, of loss of control. Of someone scrambling. And Draco Malfoy did not scramble.
He picked up the contract again.
The one written on thick, Ministry-regulated parchment. The one sealed in three colors of wax. The one Luna had signed in soft, flower-scented ink that still, maddeningly, held her scent in its grooves. He stared at the letters of her name—rounded, unhurried, serene—and then at his own, dark and precise beside hers. The ink shimmered faintly. The binding magic embedded between the strokes still pulsed when touched, still hummed in a low, living vibration beneath the surface, as if the page remembered the moment it became irreversible.
He searched it for cracks.
He looked for any flaw, any fault, any hairline fracture in the spellwork or the wording or the lineage it invoked—some delicate seam he could pull apart with the right spell, the right ritual, the right name whispered in the right dead language. He reread the laws, line by cursed line. The Bloodline Reconciliation Act of 2005. The Magical Reparations Treaty. The Bride Price Charter and its fourteen obscure amendments. He dug into footnotes, into case studies, into precedents buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and forgotten wartime treaties.
Loopholes existed. Always. Especially for men like him, who had been raised to believe the law was a weapon to be wielded, not followed. All it took was gold, influence, and patience. And he had all three.
There had to be something. There had to be. Some clause buried in the language, vague and ancient, that would render the match unstable. Some contradiction in magical authority. Some misalignment in bloodlines. Some tiny, overlooked technicality that would nullify the contract. Reverse it. Undo it. Twist it into something that could be broken without consequence.
But he found nothing.
Nothing but ink and law and the quiet, undeniable hum of magic older than memory.
And her name.
Written beside his.
As if it had always been meant to be there. As if the paper itself wouldn't recognize him without her. As if the contract knew more than he did—and had already decided he belonged to her.
Draco leaned back in his chair, exhaling through his nose with a slow, measured breath that did nothing to relieve the pressure banding across his shoulders, the stiffness locked into the joints of his jaw, or the way his entire body felt like it had been held too long in a posture that no longer fit. His spine ached.
His shoulder blades were tight from hours of leaning forward, from hovering over parchment and ink and old parchment law with a desperation he refused to name. His fingertips were stained with ink—dark smudges pressed into the creases of his knuckles and the beds of his nails, evidence of how many times he'd refilled his quill, how often he'd underlined the same sentence over and over like repetition could make the words surrender. There was a spot of wax hardened onto the cuff of his sleeve, a smear of cooling amber from the candle he'd refused to relight once it had guttered down into its own melted bones, and behind his left eye, a headache throbbed in slow, steady pulses that made the edges of the room feel slightly too sharp.
And that's when he saw it.
On the arm of the chair.
A bloody ribbon.
Delicate. Pale. Twisted slightly at one end, as if it had been unknotted in haste, unlooped with distracted fingers, dropped without any thought or ceremony. At first glance, it almost blended into the upholstery—a loose thread, perhaps, or some leftover remnant of a charm that had lost its anchor. It could have been nothing. It should have been nothing.
But it wasn't.
Because he recognized it.
A narrow strip of fabric the color of faded blush, soft and weightless-looking, almost translucent in the low light of the room. It had a silk edge, fraying slightly at one corner, and when the light touched it just right, it shimmered faintly—like morning mist or the inside of a seashell. He had seen it before.
Three days ago, knotted loosely in her hair as she padded through the corridor, the ends of the ribbon trailing behind her like vines swaying in a breeze only she could feel. It hadn't been neat. One side hung lower than the other. The knot had looked improvised, haphazard, like something she'd tied without a mirror, without care, as though her hands had been moving faster than her thoughts.
And now it was here.
Sitting on the arm of his chair.
Casual. Careless.
Or deliberate.
He didn't know.
All he knew was that it looked entirely at home. Like it had always belonged there. Like she had always belonged there.
He didn't touch it.
Not at first.
He just stared.
Longer than he meant to.
Longer than he could explain.
Minutes passed. Then more. Time stretched and folded around the space the ribbon occupied, and he sat frozen in place, watching it like it might move, like it might breathe. Like it might speak.
It smelled faintly of rosewater.
And something else.
Something subtler. Something warmer. A sweetness that curled under the sharper floral edge like a secret. Maybe it was mint. Maybe it was neroli. Maybe it was the bath oil she used or the steam from the tea she always left unfinished. Maybe it was just the scent of her skin after moonlight and sleep. Maybe it was all of those things, or none.
Maybe it was just her.
And that was the problem.
He didn't know why it hit him the way it did—why something so small, so seemingly innocuous, so delicate and pale and easily overlooked as nothing more than a piece of ribbon, managed to cleave through him with the precision of a curse, leaving behind not blood but something worse: awareness. Maybe it was because this room—this one space, this last sanctuary, this single unclaimed corner of a house that responded to her moods more than his commands—had been his, unquestionably his, and he had bled effort into making it that way, scrubbing every surface of the softness she left like fingerprints, stripping it of her invisible brushstrokes, her scents, her humming magic and unbearable stillness.
He had rebuilt it in his image, made it cold and strict and quiet, filled it with iron-willed purpose and ink-stained logic—and now it had been touched. Breached. Infiltrated by a ribbon so slight and unassuming that it felt like a dream, or worse, a trick. Maybe she'd left it there on purpose. Maybe it had slipped from her hair, from her wrist, from the bend of her elbow as she passed the threshold without thinking. Maybe she hadn't entered at all. Maybe she'd stood just outside the door and the house had carried it in for her, as a message, or a promise, or a warning.
The thought made his stomach twist—not with fear, not even with anger, but with something low and curling and impossible to shake, like the aftertaste of something he hadn't meant to swallow.
He didn't throw it away.
He should have. He knew that. He could have. There was no barrier. No spell keeping him from banishing it with a flick of his wand, no enchantment binding it to the chair. One word. One motion. The ribbon would've burned into smoke, or dissolved into dust, or flown out the window on a gust of wind that smelled like scorched flowers. It would've been easy. It would've been rational.
But he didn't.
Instead, he reached out, slowly, carefully, like someone approaching a dangerous creature with no leash, no cage. He touched it—lightly, with the barest brush of his fingertips, as though expecting it to recoil or bite or vanish on contact. When it didn't, when it remained soft and still and real beneath his hand, he picked it up between two fingers, holding it like a secret too fragile to speak aloud.
The fabric was warm.
Not magically. Not unnaturally. Just… warm. As if her skin had only recently let it go. As if it had been resting in the hollow of her throat not an hour before, soaking in the heat of her pulse and the scent of her magic.
He didn't put it in a drawer.
Didn't slide it between the pages of a book, or stuff it into his coat pocket like a stolen thing.
He just held it.
Sat there, the ribbon draped between his fingers, his other hand ink-stained and hovering uselessly above the parchment he no longer had the will to read, and let the quiet gather around him like a spell that hadn't finished casting. His blood hummed beneath his skin—not fast, not frantic, but steady, low, insistent—like the moment before a duel, when all the variables disappear and there's only one breath left between restraint and ruin.
He did nothing.
Just stared.
And time, like the air in the room, thickened and slowed and finally stopped.
When he rose from the chair, hours later—neck stiff, eyes dry, jaw aching from how long he'd held it clenched—the ribbon was still in his hand.
Still untouched.
Still hers.
And the parchment on the desk—all the spells, all the laws, all the carefully constructed arguments stacked like armor—looked smaller somehow. Thinner. Less like weapons.
More like noise.
The house bent for her. The walls listened. And worst of all, his body did too.