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"You have truly incredible tits." Ginny nodded appreciatively at Hermione's breasts. "And the knickers are lovely."

Hermione's tits—by any measure incredible, covered in intricate red lace that obscured nothing and revealed everything—lifted and rotated with her body as she arched her back, raised an arm over her head, then turned her face, eyes half-lidded, towards the camera. There was no sound in the photograph, but it was quite clear that at the end of the loop, she sighed.

Hermione popped an over-crisped chip into her mouth. "Thanks, Gin."

"Are you sure you're going to be able to fit your mouth around all that meat?" Ginny asked.

"I'll manage."

Hermione had picked up a paper-wrapped burger, stacked and draped with cheese, bacon, avocado, and sundry, nominal vegetables. She brought it to her mouth, took a vast, imprudent bite, then tipped back by increments in Draco's desk chair, which gave a sudden, predictable lurch backwards at the quarter mark as you leaned.

"Oh, gods, yes." Hermione covered her mouth with her hand. "Yes. Yes, that's it right there."

Ginny pulled her own, less extravagantly proportioned burger from the greasy paper sack she'd brought into Harry and Draco's shared office in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and watched Hermione with a skeptical eye. "We need to find a nice, friendly penis for you before you develop a burger kink."

Hermione swallowed. "I'd probably need to have a significant sexual experience adjacent to a cheeseburger in order to form a kink."

"Are you sure that you're not having one right now?"

"Possibly. Lord, I miss meat." Hermione tore away another feral bite.

"At least you can sneak around vegetarianism's back without any consequences beyond streaks to your arteries. What I miss are tits."

Hermione bobbed her head in sympathy.

"That's the only thing I dislike about being with Harry." At her place at Harry's desk, pushed flush with Draco's so that on the rare occasions that the two men sat down at the same time they faced one another, Ginny unwrapped her burger, pulled a sliced pickle from under a straggling strand of lettuce and tossed it aside. "If you're a girl who likes girls but you're monogamously attached to a man, people always assume you're straight. But you're not."

Hermione shook her head. "No, you're not, Gin."

"At all. I enjoy the cock, obviously, but the loss of women with beautiful breasts in nice lingerie is something you mourn, you know?"

"I hear and see you. You are a breast woman." Hermione gestured at the half dozen photographs spread out in front of Ginny on Harry's desk. "So you think they're tasteful? Not pornographic?"

Ginny glanced at the photographs, then looked thoughtfully at the rejected pickle sitting flat and lifeless on a serviette. "If it's meant to titillate, then I'd argue they're pornographic. These are some pretty titillating tits you have, Mione. And you didn't have the pictures taken for a bloke?"

"Not at all," said Hermione. "It's part of Tracey's whole philosophy. Her photography sessions are meant first and foremost to help women take ownership of themselves as sexual beings."

"So you went to her place and took off your kit?"

"I went to the lovely professional studio in her home and put on lingerie in a comfortable private changing area, yes."

"Then let her take pictures of you looking like an all you can eat muff buffet. A muffet."

Hermione snorted, and drew back from the bite she was set to take of her burger. "And then I posed in a deeply empowering eroticized fashion, yes."

"Do you think Harry would like it if I had a set taken for him?" Ginny leaned forward in Harry's desk chair. "He could frame it and prop it just here, so everyone in the office thinks his girlfriend is an underwear model."

"Tracey does full nudes as well."

"Even better. Everyone will think I'm a naturist."

Hermione wiped her hands with a serviette and reached across Draco's desk towards Ginny. "Here, let's have those. Gods forbid they come back early and find us looking at my pornographic pictures."

Ginny licked her fingers, then lifted the photographs by their edges and slid them back into a white envelope. She passed the envelope to Hermione, who set it on top of the heavy paperboard media mailer it had been owled in.

"Why'd you have them sent here, anyway?" Ginny asked. "Seems risky."

"It is, but it seemed riskier to have them owled to either the old flat or the new one while I'm still moving, and I was too busy to go pick them up at her studio this week. In any case, they made it to my desk safe and sound."

"Are you still off dating?" Ginny lifted the top half of her burger's bun and pulled away another pickle.

"Unequivocally, yes. After that last experience I'm wondering if breasts are the better option."

"You mean the one that asked . . ." Ginny raised both eyebrows.

"You don't inquire after that half an hour into the get-to-know-you dinner."

Ginny shook her head solemnly. "You really don't."

"And if that's what's truly critical to you, you put it in your dating profile."

"That's exactly right. You put it right there." Ginny splayed her hands in the air in front of her. "Front and center."

"It would certainly save me a lot of time."

"Are you having any sex, at least? Quick and dirty shag here and there?"

Hermione groaned. "That's a bust as well. Unfortunately there's no way to sort out the ones who are perfectly content to get off and leave you lying there wondering what just happened."

"Shameful practice."

"Borderline criminal. And some of them are just weird. I met a man in my singles' theatre club who seemed promising, but he actually said the words 'All aboard,' as he headed in."

Ginny guffawed. "No, he did not."

"He truly did. I sent him through the Floo still pulling his pants back on."

Ginny pulled a face. "I can understand your wanting to stay out of it then. Anyone you already know worth your interest, maybe? Someone around the office?"

"You mean besides Percy?"

Ginny's scowl deepened. "We're not talking about your love life anymore if you start seeing Percy."

"He's a lovely man, Ginny. Enormously intelligent. Ambitious. Considerate and courteous. Although to be honest he comes across as being a bit reserved with women."

"'A bit' is underselling the point."

"I'll admit to liking a take-charge attitude from a man in the bedroom, and I worry he'd fall over himself apologizing if a woman asked for a little smack on the bottom now and again."

"I don't consent to this conversation."

"Alright. But in the office, besides your attractive brother—"

"Stop."

"—there's a limited selection."

"What about whatshisface—the fellow with the dark hair? The mail room witches are all ready to bend over for him? Always smiling? I call him Handsome Ted?"

"That's Jonathan."

"Is that his name?" Ginny asked. "He looks like a Ted."

"Yes, Handsome Ted is called Jonathan. I'm trying to set him up with one of the receptionists in the Office of the Minister for Justice, but he's not seeing past the shapeless cardigans just yet."

"There's always . . ." Ginny glanced pointedly at the desk in front of Hermione.

"What?"

Ginny repeated the look. "You know."

"No, I don't."

Ginny's eyebrows slowly climbed upwards. "His name rhymes with Fake-o Palboy."

"Gods. No."

"Why not? Come on. To our collective horror he's turned out to be a snack. A meal, frankly. One of the really drawn-out ones you get in an expensive restaurant where they don't let you choose your own food."

"A table d'hôte or prix fixe menu."

"Exactly. He's both fit and a particular, fussy sort of snob. I'll bet he'd give your prix a proper fixe. I keep telling Harry to grow his hair out like that, but unfortunately he's not wrong that it wouldn't lie quite the same way."

Draco's chair protested as Hermione leaned further back. "I have reconciled myself to the fact, as we all must, that Malfoy is widely considered fit."

"He's fit as hell, Hermione."

"But I will also remind us all that underneath that haircut and the god-awful smirk he makes with his very terrible mouth, Malfoy is still Malfoy."

"What's wrong with his mouth?"

"You know." Hermione made a puppet-like, mouthy gesture with her fingers. "Sort of angular, but pillowy? Obviously some people like that sort of thing."

Ginny sifted through her chips. "I shouldn't think you would."

"I don't."

Hermione took another bite of her burger, then masticated and pondered.

"All of that's irrelevant anyway," she said at length. "Particular was just the word. Half the weekends he's on the continent gadding with models who also have titles."

"'Gadding'? Crochet me a nose bag for Christmas, will you, Gran?"

"Yes, they gad. I shouldn't think a salaried Ministry prosecutor who works seventy hours a week in a grey pencil skirt and heels with supportive insoles would be anything like his cup of tea."

"A Ministry prosecutor hiding a set of remarkable tits under her frumpy work blouses. This is the exact set-up for a whole genre of erotic fantasies."

"That may be so, but . . ." Hermione brushed a bit of burger bun from the front of her white cotton Oxford shirt and picked a stray crumb from her Gryffindor lanyard. "I can't think that a set of serviceable breasts and a bottom large enough to make a bit of stretch to fabrics a necessity makes me an enticing companion for yachting on the Mediterranean."

"I suppose men do turn their nose up at a woman in a bikini if she's got a generous handful of breast and a great round arse."

"When they like six foot tall women shaped like popsicle sticks with a thigh gap I imagine they do."

Ginny finished off her burger and tossed the greasy wrapper into the paper bag. "I feel like you've given this a bit of thought."

"What?"

"Malfoy. Yachting. Popsicles."

Hermione laughed, short and hard and sharp. "How can I not think about him? His bony backside is parked on the corner of my desk half the day rattling on about Muggle books he's read, and Muggle films he's watched, and whether I've read and seen them as well. He's forever harassing me about what I get up to at the weekend. I haven't a clue when he conducts his law enforcement duties. I've a mind to trigger an inquiry about his job performance."

"Sounds like he needs someone to ride him a bit."

"I get it," Hermione said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. "He's made it clear—repeatedly—that he dates Muggle-born women, but that doesn't mean I ought to be his primary resource for cultural awareness."

"Some people can be quite thick, can't they?"

"So thick."

'Well." Ginny held her hand out for Hermione's burger wrapper and her empty paper chip boat, then tossed both in the bag. "If I were you, I'd seriously consider inviting him over for a ride. You might be surprised by his level of interest in the way your bottom looks in a pencil skirt."

"You're a filthy woman, Ginny."

"I have six older brothers, I don't know how anyone expects otherwise. Oh, balls!"

"Hide the evidence!" Hermione whisper-shouted.

Ginny rapidly Vanished the trash as the door handle to Harry and Draco's office turned.

"Oh! Hello." Harry, hair committed to lying in no particular direction whatsoever, pushed through the doorway with an overstuffed file folder pinched under his arm and a paper hot drinks cup in his hand, milky tea sloshing over the rim and onto the floor. "I wasn't expecting to see the two of you here." He sniffed the air. "Which of you smells like bacon?"

"Do you want me to have dirty pictures taken for you?" Ginny leaned back in Harry's chair and laced her hands over her belly.

Harry set his cup down on his own desk, and paused with the file folder held out over Draco's stack of incoming paperwork.

"Do I—" He narrowed his eyes. "Is this a trick question?"

"Kit off or naughty knickers?" Ginny asked. "Either way I'll be erotically empowered."

When he dropped the folder, the papers inside slid like an avalanche over the top of Draco's desk.

"That's . . ." He trailed off and looked at Hermione. "Is there a wrong answer here?"

"Where's your partner?" Hermione asked Harry, digging under the paper lahar for her envelope. "Off gadding with one of his willowy Swedish marchionesses?"

"No, he's in the closet."

Hermione's hand stilled. "Oh!" She shuffled half the papers back into the folder, only to have them slide out again. "Do you mean . . .? Lord. I hadn't caught on to that at all." She took in a stiff breath through her nostrils as she pushed a pair of the white envelopes that crime scene photographs arrived in from the developer back into the folder. "I suppose people need to remain closeted sometimes, for lots of perfectly valid reasons."

"No." Harry sat on the corner of his desk, and took a sip of his tea. "He's in the supply closet." He tipped his chin towards a narrow, half-open door in the corner of the cramped room. "It's his month to muck out and refresh the field supplies."

The closet door swung all the way open, and Draco, wearing his customary waistcoat and tie, his gleaming DMLE badge on a chain around his neck, slid through it in a slat-backed wooden rolling chair.

"Hello."

His plummy lord-of-the-manor voice was at odds with the hard-used patina of his leather wand holster and the careless roll of the cuffs at his elbows. He ran a hand through the long bit in the front of his perfectly imperfect hair.

He was clearly, openly, intensely amused.

If Hermione wasn't restrained by the law she upheld for a living, she'd have erupted out of Draco's desk chair and hexed him right in his smirking, pillowy mouth.

The office was quiet except for the sound of Harry slurping dumbly at his tea and Ginny's ineffectually smothered snorting.

"I realize you two have lunched already"—Draco swiveled his chair from side to side and drummed his short, manicured nails on its arm—"but I could go for a meal right about now."

Hermione grabbed her envelope and shot up from his desk. The skin of her throat and cheeks prickled with heat. "Enjoy yourself. I couldn't possibly eat another bite."

Draco leaned his chin in his hand. "Not even a snack?"

"I think she's had enough meat for the moment, Malfoy." Ginny launched into a fresh round of drawn-out snorts, her eyes gleaming with moisture and her face uniformly pink.

"The two of you are awful, atrocious people," snapped Hermione. She turned on her heel and walked to the door with her chin hoisted.

Harry tossed his empty cup in the shared dustbin next to his and Draco's desks. "I thought you'd gone vegetarian?"

I'd like chicken biryani, please, ordered in at six o'clock.

Hermione sent off the note to her secretary.

Ten minutes before her three o'clock meeting, the airspace over Hermione's desk was crowded with a half dozen paper airplane Ministry memos, a paper parachute with a brown paper package suspended underneath, and a growing flock of tiny paper intraoffice birds, all in a holding pattern and bumping up against one another in their anxiety to land.

"I'll get to you all in a moment." She waved her wand and the crowd moved as a whole to the left side of her office, jostling one another over the head of a drooping ficus. Indirect light, inadequate food for photosynthesis, sifted through the papers from the high, narrow window in the rear wall of her office that she'd enchanted to show the sky over Sydney.

"As I informed the Secretary's office last week—" Hermione tilted her neck, which gave a satisfying series of dull cracks, and swiveled her chair towards the Floo "—there's a limited number of charges the Ministry would be able to bring in this case, and all of them have very clear statutes of limitations. We're keeping a close eye on the proceedings within the French Ministry, of course, and trust that—"

In the waiting cluster of Ministry correspondence, a pink paper jackdaw began to snip at the yellow paper primary feathers of an elf owl. As a tiny triangle was cut and fell from its wingtip to the floor, it ducked below a ficus leaf for cover.

In the confusion, a small, nondescript white paper bird broke from the flock, and with Hermione's attention on the Floo, popped over the surface of her desk and flattened itself into a square note, perfectly aligned with the corners of her desk in the precise center of her work surface. The note was filled in with a distinctive, machine-like hand.

"You've gone astray, you silly thing," Hermione muttered. With half an eye on her conversant in the Floo, she tapped her wand on the paper. "Mr. Drees' desk, across the hall," she whispered. The note refolded itself into the shape of a kestrel, which lifted from Hermione's desk and flew through the open transom window over the door to her office.

The bird had scarcely vanished over the ledge when there was a trio of soft knocks, and the subdued voice of Hermione's secretary. "Your three o'clock is here, Ms. Granger."

"Just a moment, please, Miss Kapoor," Hermione called. She stood from her chair, then moved around her desk to sit at the edge, facing the Floo.

"I completely understand where your concerns lie in this case, Mr. Boucher, and you can rest assured—"

Hermione blinked, but refused to look as the door to her office opened and a narrow figure moved in her peripheral vision.

"—our office has already sent copies of any information publicly available in our jurisdiction—coroner's reports, Auror's reports and so forth—and I believe your lead detectives have been in close communication with ours. In the case of an international—"

The figure moved around her desk and sat in her chair.

"—there are added complexities."

Finally, compelled against her better judgement, she turned to look.

Draco leaned back in her chair, and tossed a file folder down on the desk behind her.

"Do not put your feet on my desk, Malfoy," she whispered.

He jerked his chin towards the Floo and shot her a look that was a clear rebuke, simultaneously stern and mocking.

As she refocused her attention on the Floo, she felt a pair of light thumps on the desk.

"Yes, Mr. Boucher. I'll have my secretary connect with your office to schedule a face-to-face next month with the Belgians."

Hermione ended her call and rotated so that she sat on the edge of her desk facing her chair, glaring at Draco.

"Take your blasted feet off my desk, you philistine."

Draco, arms crossed over his chest and eyes closed, cracked one eyelid open. "You know I love it when you call me Muggle names, Granger. What's a 'philistine'? Do you keep a Muggle dictionary in here?" He sat up by a margin and glanced at her crowded bookshelves.

"Yes, there's a large Oxford dictionary on the bottom left—" She jabbed at his toe with a fingertip. "That's not the point. Take your da—"

Draco pointed, a slack and trifling gesture, at a glass jar sitting on the corner of Hermione's desk. It had a paper placard attached to it which read Obscenities in Miss Kapoor's pretty, orderly hand, and was one third filled with a sea of Sickles, a handful of Knuts, and a few stray Galleons.

"Take your accursed feet off my desk, Malfoy. You're supposed to be a man of fancy manners."

"Fancy manners? That sounds like a cozy tea shop. And an apron with a ruffle."

Hermione leveled a glare at him.

"Kid gloves. Sugar lumps shaped like little hearts." Draco held up his hand, index finger and thumb looped into a circle the size of a heart-shaped sugar lump.

"I'll kid glove you one you won't soon forget if your overpriced Oxfords aren't on the floor in five seconds."

Draco removed his feet at a leisurely pace from Hermione's desk.

"Happy now?"

"Giddy."

Draco had a white evidence photograph envelope in his hand, and tapped it against his thigh. "Now that we've resolved that bit of tension, what is it you've summoned me here for?"

Hermione pushed at the edge of her chair with the tip of her shoe. "Get out of my chair and get in yours." She pointed a thumb at the pair of visitor's chairs on the other side of her desk.

Draco rose from her seat. As he eased past her, the wool of his trousers brushed against the fabric of the stockings covering Hermione's knees with a soft thwip.

He had a smell to him that Hermione liked very much. It wasn't an applied scent, but a mixture of ambient, incidental fragrances, quite clean and somehow steady.

"We need to discuss your and Harry's reports from the ghost killings in Market Hettlesham," she said, lowering herself into her chair. "There are some discrepancies which are minor on the surface, but will cause me enormous headaches at trial if I don't understand how they happened."

"Potter's imprecise." Draco ducked as a paper chickadee zinged past his left ear and came to a light and controlled landing on Hermione's desk before unfolding itself. "It's as simple at that."

Hermione read the note from her secretary confirming a six o'clock curry, then Vanished it.

"You fully recovered, I trust?" Hermione asked, glancing down at Draco's right arm.

"From the Ghost-Touch? I did, thank you for asking. You were spot on about the lavender water recommendation. It sped up the healing process by a full week, and as a bonus I smelled like Provence."

"You did!" Hermione cut off a smile with haste before it became over-broad. "Harry mentioned it."

"Which sections were at odds, if I might ask?"

Hermione waved her wand at the crowd of office correspondence, and the parachute drifted over to her desk, hovered for a moment, then released the paper-wrapped package and disappeared in a puff of scentless white smoke.

Hermione read the shipping label, then used her wand to slice through the twine tied around the box.

"The time the two of you came across the bodies is a bit different, to begin with."

"One twenty-seven in the morning."

"And you know this because . . .?"

Draco drew his pocket watch from his waistcoat, opened it, then snapped it shut it again. "I check. Potter estimates."

"He was off by a full hour." She tore the paper from the box.

"Of course he was. In his defense, we did have a fucking poltergeist literally breathing down our necks at the time."

Hermione narrowed her eyes and pointed at the Obscenities jar. Sighing, Draco pulled a Sickle from his trouser pocket and dropped it through the slot at the top of the jar.

"I ought to have Harry up here and not you," said Hermione.

Draco looked affronted. "Why? Because of a little fuck here and there?"

Hermione's eyes opened wide and she tilted her head.

"Shit," Malfoy said, reaching into this pocket again. "Fuck!"

The coins hit the bottom of the jar with a trio of bright clinks.

"No, it's not about that. Your reports aren't the problem, are they?"

Draco smirked, pleased with himself. "I shouldn't think so. I'm frightfully good at my job."

"I admire your ability to ruin truly any compliment with just that little splash of ego."

Draco pinched his fingers together. "A soupçon of self-regard." He tapped the envelope against his thigh absently with his other hand.

Hermione pulled at the end of the box, which had been sealed tight with what looked like excess glue.

"I can certainly do my part to up his accuracy," said Draco, "but it would help to have you mention it to him as being a problem for you, specifically. He'll take it as the worst sort of patronization if it's coming from me."

"And he won't think I'm patronizing him?"

"Of course he will, but he loves being patronized by you. Do you want help with that?"

Hermione sucked in a sharp breath as the edge of the cardboard bit underneath a fingernail, then handed the box his direction.

He lay his envelope on his thigh and took it from her.

"What's in here?" He pulled the side of the box away with one firm, steady movement, then passed the package back to her. "Faux steaks? Is that a thing?"

"No. I've ordered fresh hand towels for my new flat."

Hermione set the box down, then fixed her eye on Draco's left knee as it bounced. He picked the envelope up again and began to tap it against his knee. "Is that for me?" she asked, indicating the envelope. "Halloway mentioned he'd developed the pictures from the Didsbury ordeal and sent them your way."

"These?" Draco looked at the envelope, his eyes unfixed and wary in a way that was unusual for him. "No, in fact—" He paused. "Well, as far as the Didsbury photographs are concerned, I'm loath to have you see them at all. That was a massive fucking shitshow. Fuck!"

He reached into his pocket, and pulled out four Knuts and a Galleon.

He considered the money, then shrugged. "Unfortunately those cunt-fucking, arse-licking piece of shit bastarding sonofabitch pissartists and their bloody vampire genocide agenda deserve the full fucking force of your ability to nail a man's bollocks to the wall." He paused, eyes narrowed and gaze to the ceiling, then said, "Bunch of cockwombled gobshite arsebadgering fuckwazzocks." He dropped the Galleon in the jar.

"There was a lot of blood, then?"

"There's truly no way the pictures can possibly have done it justice." He cleared his throat, and Hermione watched as his knee sped up. "Which is unfortunately the relevant issue here."

"How so?"

"I believe you have the pictures, and we'll need them over in the Auror's office first."

Hermione shook her head in the negative. "They haven't come across my desk yet."

There were numerous stacks of papers on Hermione's desk, some incoming, others outgoing, in an arrangement lingering in the dusty borderlands where organization gave way to the tumbleweed-strewn frontier of chaos. There was a small stack of personal papers: catalogs of natural cosmetics, one for fair trade home goods whose purchase benefitted a Muggle children's aid organization, and several with the sorts of clothes she liked to wear on her days off. There was a coupon for a free small iced coffee beverage with the purchase of any scone at Plimshaw's bakery, the For Sale pages of The Daily Prophet, where Hermione hoped to find a bookshelf just right for her new flat, and at the top of the pile, her envelope full of erotic photographs.

Draco reached forward, and put a fingertip on top of the envelope.

Hermione felt as though she'd been struck by a very small, non-lethal jet of lightning.

"No! Don't—"

She sat up straight as a rod, mouth falling open, and held her breath as Draco pushed it towards her.

"I believe this is our Didsbury crime scene."

"No," Hermione said. The blood rushed in her ears. "That's . . . something else."

Draco continued to tap the envelope he'd been holding against his knee.

Hermione felt as though she was watching someone else's movements as she reached down and picked up the white envelope from her desk. Taking care to ensure the side of the picture with the image would be facing her, she lifted the envelope flap and drew out the photograph closest to her.

It ought to have been the first of Hermione's images—the one in the red lace bra and knickers, where she sighed at the end.

There was certainly red in the picture she pulled from the envelope. It was lavishly soaked in it, from the sofa in the middle ground to all four walls of the room to the door of the icebox in the kitchen beyond.

"Oh! Lord, that was . . . yes. I see what you mean."

Draco nodded. "Weasley was sick in the dustbin straight away."

"Ron is always sick in the dustbin."

"Yes, but usually not quite that quickly."

Hermione pushed the photograph back into the envelope. Her pulse throbbed, and she felt short of breath.

She couldn't look at his face.

"I'd like my pictures back, please," she said, and impressed herself with the lack of a waver in her voice.

He held the envelope out. "I only saw—" He stopped.

"It's fine." Hermione grabbed the envelope with a numb hand, then passed him the envelope with the photos from the Didsbury case.

"I didn't look at them. I realized the second they came out of the envelope."

"'They'?"

Hermione did look at him, then. He sat leaning forward, and his knee had finally stilled. He'd gone pink across the tops of his cheeks, and his face was twisted in an expression that Hermione hadn't seen on him in many years.

If she wasn't mistaken, he was deeply embarrassed.

"I always tip the photos out all at once," he said, clarifying, "but they went straight back in the moment I saw what they were."

Hermione sat up even taller. Lacking anything better to do with her hands, she picked up the box with her hand towels. "It's not a problem. I trust that this will remain between the two of us, and that we need never mention it again."

Without thinking about it, she slid the contents of the box onto the desk.

"Oh!"

She looked at Draco, who appeared just as surprised as she was.

"They've combined orders, haven't they?" she said, staring at the pile of fabric on her desk.

Draco cleared his throat.

"So you placed the order for the . . ." he trailed off and pointed. "That was separate from the towels."

"Yes. Two months ago. I'd entirely forgotten."

"Sure. Lost in the shuffle."

"Exactly. They were on back-order."

Hermione placed the cardboard box as casually as possible over the mint green silk knickers and matching bralette sitting on top of a stack of organic cotton Turkish hand towels in cream with a stone-colored stripe.

Given that there was very little fabric involved, the box covered the lingerie handily, so that only the narrow band of the crotch of the knickers looped out from underneath.

"I should imagine that it's efficient for them. Saves labor and shipping costs," she said.

Draco dipped his head in agreement. "Certainly." He shifted in his seat. "They sell hand towels and—"

"They do!"

"Ah. So—"

For a moment, Hermione was certain she could hear the tick of his pocket watch.

"Not for a bloke?" he asked.

"No."

"That's nice. Something for yourself. Wear it around the flat."

"Anywhere, really."

"Oh!" Draco's vision shifted back to the green silk and stayed there. "Errands, I suppose. Library visits. Work meetings."

Hermione nodded. "It's very empowering."

"Mm." He tapped the crime scene photographs against his thigh. "The red, of course, was . . . but mint! With the . . ." He made a wave gesture.

"The ruffle, yes. It's quite flattering."

"I should imagine so." His eyes flared for a moment. "Not that I am. That I will. That I would. Because I won't."

"Not that you would what?"

"Imagine."

The heat at Hermione's cheeks and the sides of her neck and the tops of her ears had been burning across her skin like a poorly contained forest conflagration for quite some time, but managed to redouble its efforts into something approaching Apocalyptic hellfire.

"No," she said. "Why would you?"

Draco stared at her then, open and plain, without any indication of feeling or thought. "You're asking me why I would?"

"Right?" asked Hermione, rhetorically, in a rush of heated breath. "Why would you?"

She stood up for no particular reason, and dusted her hands over the sides of her skirt.

Her palms were slicked with a sheen of sweat, which made it all the more surprising to herself when she jutted her right hand straight out towards Draco and said "Malfoy."

He looked at her hand, then down to the mint green silk, then back to her hand, then finally stood and gripped it.

"Granger." He pumped her arm once, and then twice.

Neither of them released their interest in the handshake, and Hermione found herself visually following the line of a dip between the muscles of his forearm.

"Have you been to Thailand?" he asked.

Hermione let go of his hand.

"Thailand? No."

"Yes. They have the loveliest fruit, you know, and some really beautiful vegetarian dishes. I was thinking that you might like to go sometime." He winced like he'd bitten into an especially sour pomelo.

"To Thailand."

Draco nodded, crossed his arms over his chest, tipped back on his heels and looked at Hermione with his eyes narrowed.

"It sounds lovely. Thanks for the tip, Malfoy, I'll put it on my travel bucket list."

"Do you like it?"

"Thailand? I don't know."

"Not Thailand, travel."

"Yes, I do."

"That's good." He tipped forward onto the balls of his feet.

"I think it is."

Draco found the middle balance on his soles once more, and lifted up the packet of photographs.

"I'm going to go and look at these murders now," he said.

"Thank you. I'll have a look at them myself when you're done."

"Lovely towels, by the way. Is that the color scheme for your washroom?"

Hermione looked down at her hand towels, peeking out from beneath the crotch of her knickers. "It is."

He stared at the box on Hermione's desk. "They'll look very nice, I'm sure."

"Thank you."

"Of course."

"Of course," muttered Hermione to the skull in a mocking, nobby impression of a baritone voice.

The skull smiled back at her with half its teeth, jovial and macabre.

Hands shielded inside the faint blue light veil of a gloving charm, she reached for the row of teeth on the table in front of her, and fitted a canine into its socket.

"It's all well and good for you to smile about it," she continued, dropping the tooth and picking up her quill, "but you're not the one who's flashed her naughty knickers at a painfully fit man twice in the same day."

The skull leered.

"Yes, I said that he's fit. You've caught me out. There's no denying it. He's a lovely height, and has all the sorts of dips and ridges one finds one has an appetite for. His nose is beautiful. I don't suppose you've seen him since he fetched you out of your wretched mud hole, but you have had a look. When he's out in the field and his cheeks are all wind-bitten—argue the point if you're able. I beg of you."

The skull remained silent.

"Are you laughing again?"

The skull could not deny it.

"You can chuckle all you like about the knickers, it was hilarious. Did wonders for my self-esteem to watch a man become that uncomfortable about the thought of my bottom in a pair of tiny pants. Just don't say 'dead funny' or I'll bin you, trial be damned."

The skull appeared apologetic.

"And no, you're not getting a look at any of the knickers. What I've got on under my blouse today is between me and my gods and the mirror hanging on the back of my bedroom door."

The skull seemed resigned.

"I do wish you'd be more forthcoming about the exact manner of your death," she grumbled, scratching away at a parchment laid out on the table. "We want more than circumstantial evidence here in order to serve you justice, my friend."

She shivered.

"Yes, I'm cold," she said to the skull. "It's fifteen degrees in here. For some reason the gloving spell doesn't work quite right with warming charms. Cleanliness over comfort."

"Just do your torso, Granger. It keeps you comfortable but doesn't impact the gloves. "

Hermione jerked in her chair.

"Good Lord, Malfoy, I've almost dropped my skull."

"That might put a crimp in your relationship. I know the two of you have grown quite close."

Draco walked past the wide work table in Evidence Storage holding a cardboard box in both arms. A paper sack hung from his wrist, and a bundle of red fabric was piled on top of the box.

Hermione opened her mouth to say something, but before she did, he'd grabbed the bundle and tossed it into Hermione's lap.

"If you're not going to use a warming spell, at least remember to bring your jumper down here," he said.

Before she could respond, he disappeared around the corner of one of the long, narrow, floor-to-ceiling aisles of shelving.

Hermione set down her skull and spread her red cardigan over her lap.

Draco emerged from the shelves without his box, and held out the paper bag.

"Your curry arrived as well."

Hermione took the bag, poked her head in the top and sniffed.

"Mm, yes. I'm starving." She set the bag to the side and began to gather up all of her teeth.

Draco leaned against the end of a row of shelves with his hands in his trouser pockets.

"Why are you still here, anyway?" she asked, screwing the lid back onto the glass container holding the thirteen teeth that had been knocked by an unknown blunt object from the front of the skull's mouth. "If my curry's arrived, it's at least six o'clock. What time did you come on this morning?"

"Too early. I was meant to be off at four, but Potter didn't make it to bed until nine in the morning on Wednesday, so I offered to finish cataloging everything we believe is relevant to the Pas-de-Calais situation."

Hermione stood up, lowered the skull into its cardboard nest inside the evidence box, then filed the canister of teeth next to the half dozen phalanges recovered from the skull's shallow grave on a dairy farm in Sussex.

"That was nice of you." Hermione lidded the box, dropped her gloving charm, then went to hoist the lot.

"Let me get that, you ought to dig in before your curry goes cold."

Before Hermione could protest, Draco had leaned across the table, grabbed her evidence box and, taking a note of the aisle number and the space designation labeled on its side, started off to put it away.

"Oh, blast."

Hermione had every intention of pulling on her cardigan and opening her box of curry, but instead she found herself sweeping an ochre-colored trapezium from the table and dashing after Draco down aisle twelve.

"Here," she called out. "This belongs to our cow romancer."

Draco paused with the box halfway into its space.

"Is this how you treat your friends, Granger?" he asked, lifting the box down and opening the lid so that Hermione could tuck the bone back into the glass jar filled with not enough parts of a human hand.

"Only the ones I like," she said.

Draco slid the box into place.

Hermione shivered.

"What was the point of my bringing the jumper all the way down here in the haunted rear lift if you weren't going to wear it?" Draco asked. "Here." He turned a finger in the air, and Hermione obeyed, turning her back towards him.

"You know you don't have to use the haunted lift," she said over her shoulder.

"It gets you closer to Evidence, which is especially relevant if you don't want someone's chicken curry going cold."

He muttered a short spell, and laid his open hand between Hermione's shoulder blades.

Instantly, her chest, belly and back were comfortably warm, as though she'd pulled on a heavy knit Fair Isle sleeveless sweater, or sank only her torso into a lovely hot bath.

She turned around. "Thanks very much, Malfoy."

"Not a problem."

"Didn't the curry place put it under a warming charm?"

He leaned back against the shelving and smirked.

Hermione bristled. "What's that for?"

"What's what for?"

"That." Hermione pointed a finger in his face. "Why are you doing that?"

"You're a hard woman, Granger," he said.

His voice was too quiet.

"I'm not hard, Malfoy." She'd dropped her voice to match his.

His smirk shifted.

"What now?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"No, something. Out with it."

He drew in a deep breath, and looked at the ceiling.

"I'm sorry about the knickers, Granger."

"Are you?"

"I am. And the conversation earlier."

"Which conversation would that be?"

"I wasn't really listening. It's just that one hears one's own name come up between two women, and it's a bit difficult not to."

"You could have rolled out of your closet far earlier than you did." Hermione leaned back against her side of the aisle and crossed her own arms.

"You're right. And I am genuinely sorry."

"It's alright."

"I'm . . ." He trailed off, and looked down at the dull shine of his costly Oxfords. He looked back at her. "It's hard to hear, really."

"What's hard to hear? That I don't think you're as fit as all that?"

"That," he said with a laugh, "goes without saying. But the idea that a fellow wouldn't hold up his end of things. I'm not surprised you've decided not to pursue a relationship if that's been your experience."

Hermione pushed her shoulder blades into the vertical shelf support behind her. "It hasn't all been like that."

"Good."

"I didn't say it's been good."

She snorted, and then Draco snorted.

"That's offensive, frankly. I'm offended for women, and by men, when it's not at all difficult to take at least a few moments to—"

"It can be difficult, I suppose." Hermione pushed her hands into the pockets at the sides of her skirt. "There's a bit more mystery."

"Ignorance is not the same thing as mystery."

"Touché."

"To be invited to go home with a woman, and take her to bed, and not do the job properly." He scoffed. "Honestly, I can think of five ways to get you off right now without removing a single article of your clothes."

As soon as the words fell out of his mouth, his eyes widened and his mouth hung open.

Then he closed it, and looked away.

Hermione had felt it the moment he walked into Evidence.

It was a kinetic excitation at the level of her navel.

At her stomach.

At her cunt.

At the vital center of her, whenever he entered a room.

"Five?" she asked.

As she said it, quiet enough to think that perhaps she hadn't meant to, she became aware of the droning buzz of the magic in the overhead lights in the workroom at the end of the aisle.

She was even more aware of the smell of his clothes and his body, his soap and whatever he put on his skin when he shaved.

Even at the end of the day, his skin was smooth.

He looked back at her instantly.

"You won't tell anyone?" she asked.

Despite the steady march of progress, it was mostly men in the Auror's office, and Hermione found herself often wary of them and their tendency to speak without thinking, especially when they were out in the field, despite the total clarity of Shacklebolt's expectations for gender equity and respect.

"I already said I wouldn't, Granger. Your erotic photography session is a secret I'll take to my grave. If anyone finds out about it, you'll need to speak to Lady Weasley."

"No," she said.

His brow furrowed.

She twisted her fingers into the arm of her shirt. "I meant, you wouldn't tell anyone. If you were to get me off."

His throat bobbed with a hard swallow, then he shook his head.

"No."

She closed her eyes, then opened them again.

He shifted away from the shelves and leaned towards her.

"Do you want me to?" he asked.

She nodded.

"What's this?" He smiled, something like his usual smirk only softer, wider and less playful, and mimicked her nod. "I don't know what that means."

"Yes," she whispered. "I want you to."

He leaned in further, bending his face towards hers.

She thought about his proclivities for taller, wealthier women who didn't need to wear stiff cotton shirts to emphasize that they ought to be taken seriously in the courtroom, and about how if Malfoy came close enough, she was going to care that she wasn't tall and wealthy as all that, too.

Her hand splayed out against his chest.

"No kissing," she said.

He pulled back. "What?"

"Don't you think?" She pressed her fingertips into the wool of his waistcoat, and felt the unyielding muscle of his chest underneath. "We don't need things to be awkward, since it's just this once."

"Just this once?" he asked, and his eyebrows climbed.

"Obviously. It's not like we're going to walk out of here and head straight over to your mother's for tea."

He pulled away from her. "If you don't want to, Granger, I'm not—"

On an impulse, she reached for his left hand. "I want to."

When he didn't take his hand away, she drew it downwards, and guided it under the hem of her skirt.

Draco's eyes widened again, and then fell, half-closed and calculating.

She took her hand from his, and not knowing what to do with herself, rested both on the shelves behind her.

She closed her eyes, and imagined his face as his hand traveled with care and patient curiosity up the inside of her thigh, and discovered what was there.

The silk surface of her stockings, over the bit of give that there was to the flesh of her thighs, gave way suddenly to bare skin where the stockings were held up by a set of attractive but functional suspenders.

He leaned forward again, closer, but not close enough to kiss her, propped his free hand against the shelves behind her, and smoothed his entire palm up the soft inner curve of her bare thigh.

She expected him to slow, to shift into a tentative, testing, maybe even vaguely apologetic touch to the front of her knickers, but his hand moved between her legs with calm confidence and an even, unhurried pressure.

She moaned out loud, and his hand rose higher, then ducked below the waistband of her knickers, and slid without hesitation across the bare skin of her cunt.

He tilted forward until his mouth was beside her ear.

He stroked her, with a touch that felt like affection, slowly, from deep between her legs and upwards.

"You're so soft, Hermione." He continued to draw his hand with gentle deliberation over the outside of her body. "Is this alright?"

"Yes."

He pet her like that for ages, and she moaned for him, to let him know how good his patience felt.

His touch did become hesitant, or rather it lightened and became something cautious and experimental, when he finally slid a single finger over her clit and through the moisture below.

"And this?" He pushed another finger along the same pathway, and both moved easily, comfortably, fluidly over her. "Do you want this?"

She was soaked. She wanted it. He could already feel how much.

"Yes."

He read her skin with his fingertips, and her pulse with his eyes, and he listened to her breathing, so that he learned that she liked a soft touch in one place, and a firm one in another.

Her clitoris was too much, just yet, but everything around it was not.

"You're very wet," he whispered. She tilted her neck, and recalled with wonder that she'd told him not to kiss her.

Why?

"May I?" He applied gentle pressure at her entrance, waiting for an invitation.

"Yes."

She reached for the top button of her shirt, and opened it.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

She pulled at the next three buttons, and then pulled her shirt open.

"Touch me, please," she said, opening her eyes to see him watching her left hand as it reached for his right, holding himself up against the shelves.

He laughed next to her ear. "You said no kissing."

"This isn't kissing."

"Yes, but if I'm not allowed to kiss you, I'm certainly not touching your breasts."

"What?" She tugged at his right wrist, and when he refused to move it, she arched her back petulantly, straining her breasts against the sheer green lace of her bra. "Your hand is in my knickers. Touch my breasts, Malfoy."

He brought his lips so close to her ear she could feel the movement of his mouth when he said, "No."

Then he pushed a finger inside her, and she gasped, and closed her eyes.

All at the same time, he turned his wrist, applied pressure to the forward wall of her cunt, and swiped the broad pad of his thumb over her clit.

Hermione's knees trembled.

"Do you want another one?" he asked.

"Please."

He pushed a second finger inside her, and her moans became a relentless series of pleas and affirmations.

She tilted her hips, rode his hand, and then he was moving his hand in a fast, stable pattern and running his thumb against the side of her clit, so that their dark corner of the evidence room was filled with the sound of him fucking her hard with his fingers.

"Touch me." She ran a hand over her left breast, stroking at the peak of her nipple. "Please."

She opened her eyes halfway. He was staring down at her breasts, watching them move with each incursion of his hand.

He reached down and pulled her skirt up over her hips until he could see her knickers.

"You wore green knickers, Granger." His voice was strained.

"I like green. Please." She pushed her breasts towards him again.

He laughed, breathless, and shook his head.

His hand fell into a rhythm with the roll of her hips.

It was perfect.

It was not enough.

"I want you," she whispered.

She dropped her hands to his belt, tugged at the leather and the frame of the buckle all at once, until he drew back from her ear, grabbed her wrist and pushed it against the shelves over her head.

He threaded his fingers through hers, and held her hand.

"If I can't kiss you, I'm not fucking you," he said.

She groaned.

"Hello." He looked down between them. "What was that for?" He changed nothing about his rhythm, but his eyes narrowed in thought.

"Do you like . . . ?" He considered for a while longer, then finally laughed, leaned forward until his lips were against her ear again, and whispered, "Fuck."

She couldn't stop the way her body tightened around his fingers, or the positively wanton moan that tumbled out of her mouth.

"Merlin, Granger. How many Galleons have I put in that damned jar of yours?" He laughed again, then right at her ear, unleashed a string of words, each worth a Sickle.

"Do you know how good it feels, Hermione? To know how much you like it when I fuck this wet cunt with my fingers? To feel how soaked it's making you?"

She was crying out, being truly, unbelievably loud, but she couldn't stop herself.

"Do you know how fucking hard I am right now? How hard my cock is for you? How fucking bad I want to tear these knickers down your legs and fuck this cunt, fuck it hard, stroke your clit with my fingers and feel you hold on tight when you—"

"I'm going to come," she said, her voice small and panting and shallow.

He changed nothing at all, and she came.

Her legs trembled as she gripped his left wrist, felt the tension in his arm as he kept his motions just as they were, and cried out into the half dark of the unlit aisle.

Everything felt distant and unimportant as she rode his hand. Even his muttering, which had somewhere in the midst of her collapse shifted from obscene to sincere praise, had ceased to matter. She was a good girl: of course she was. She was so beautiful: yes. She ought to come for him just like that, and she would.

Yes. Yes.

"Yes," she said, little and quiet, just before her knees gave way.

"Don't fall over," he said, laughing, and looped his arm around her back, under her arms, and held her up while she quivered all over—her thighs, her belly, her cunt, pulsing around his fingers.

She gripped the front of his waistcoat, dropped forward and mouthed at it stupidly, pressed her cheek into the hard plane of his chest.

As she slowed, he did, too, until totally supported in his right arm, she arched lazily against his left hand, now smoothing over the obscene wetness between her legs in long strokes with the very lightest contact.

If she didn't know any better, she thought he might have kissed the top of her hair.

"Thank you," she whispered to his waistcoat.

If Draco's hand entered her knickers with confidence, it left with reluctance and regret, his touch slow and lingering.

"Can you stand up?"

Hermione tested the strength of her knees, and found them sound again.

"Yes."

He kept his arm around her shoulders as she regained the support of her legs, and leaned back against the shelves.

He muttered a series of the sort of post-coital tidying up spells everyone had learned rather quickly as they entered young adulthood, then pulled her skirt back down over her hips, and straightened it for her.

He tugged her shirt closed over her breasts.

Hermione tilted her head back as he fastened her buttons one by one.

She reached forward and hooked a fingertip into the frame of his belt buckle.

"Let me return the favor."

He shook his head, buttoning her top button.

"That's not what this is, Granger."

"I want to get you off," she said. She felt drunk.

He laughed once more, and patted the front of her shirt, satisfied with his work. "All finished."

She reached down and grabbed his left arm, then turned it over until she could see the series of tattoos there.

The Dark Mark had turned out to be unremovable, but he could have had it covered with another tattoo. Instead, he'd added a series of flowers around it, following the shape of its borders.

"What are they?" she asked. "You've never said."

She brushed her fingertips over a spray of gladiolus.

"They're flowers, Granger." He pulled back, and leaned against the opposite side of the aisle. "Everyone likes flowers."

Hermione watched him in a way she'd never have allowed herself to do before.

He was breathing hard.

"Did you like the red or the green better?" she asked, and gave him a smirk of her own.

She expected the same back, but instead his cheeks flushed in the dark.

"The green."

"Predictable. Gryffindor in Slytherin lingerie."

Draco shook his head. "I can't deny the appeal there, but no."

He moved towards her again, and leaned in close.

She wanted nothing more than to turn her face to his and taste that blasted pillowy mouth.

"I liked the green, because it's the set you wanted me to see," he said.

He stood back from her, and straightened his belt buckle.

"I know what you're going to do is stay here and eat your dinner out of a box and most likely talk to your skull some more, but you should probably go home, Granger." His smile was a fraction of a whole, but not a smirk. "Allow yourself a quiet night. Relax. Just this once."

Hermione blinked slowly. "I'll consider it."

He looked away, then back again, and held up his index finger.

"Once," he mouthed.

Hermione rolled her eyes.

He turned, and as he moved around the corner to leave, gave the end of the shelf a pair of manly, conclusive pats.

"Your dinner's under a warming spell."

"Thank you."

"Don't lose any more carpal bones."

Hermione snorted.

He held up his left hand and waved the back of it at her as he walked away.

Chapter Text

“The guy in that god-awful track suit is watching us,” said Maria.

“Shit.” On the upper sun deck of the Ladon, under a dome of stars paled by the lights of Nice, Draco lifted his head from the edge of the hot tub and opened one eye. “Who?”

“One of Durand’s. From the bridge. We should probably fuck.”

He sighed, then drained the last of his champagne flute, wincing at the fruity non-alcoholic brut they’d been pouring liberally—ostentatiously—from Dom Perignon bottles for the last two days. Once, memorably, it had streamed from Klara’s glass onto Maria’s bare breasts, and been thoroughly licked away.

“Are you alright with that, Klara?”

From the corner of his eye, he looked at the Countess Klara Sofia Victoria Gyllenstierna af Fogelvik—very blonde, very tall, very thin, and the sort of beautiful that's disruptive in real life—nestled under his arm on the hot tub bench. Her hair was piled in a stylishly chaotic bun at the top of her head and the fine strands at her hairline lay plastered to her high, flawless forehead with steam and perspiration.

“Of course,” she answered. “I don’t know why you keep asking me. You’ve been fucking my wife for a month and a half. Anyway, it’s her you should be getting permission from.” She waved her glossy manicure at him. “Go on. Do a good job.”

He set his glass down and pushed through the water towards Maria, who was leaning her cheek on her crossed forearms at the edge of the hot tub.

She looked back over her shoulder at him as he approached. The otherworldly, iridescent sheen of layered telescopic and night vision spells sat over the pupils and irises of both her startling blue-green eyes. Around the border of her left iris there was a fine fuschia line left by the spell that connected her line of sight remotely to the photographic apparatus hidden behind a panel in the second guest cabin.

In the moonlight, her olive skin, exfoliated and oiled, presented a gleaming canvas for the strings of her brightly patterned bikini, and the ends of her dark, waist-length braids dragged in the water.

Maria Marchenko had been a cover model more times than she could recall without having to Floo to her agent: everything from the French, American, U.K. and Italian editions of VVitch magazine to Morgana and Witch Weekly, and once, infamously, a ten-page fully nude editorial spread in Warlock, which was billed by the publisher, only somewhat defensively, as being art. It caused enough of an uproar that Draco had read about it in The Prophet.

She was also a highly decorated Dutch agent of Ukrainian and Chinese descent on extended loan to a joint operation of the French and Belgian Ministries.

Draco once asked how many languages she spoke fluently, and felt so ashamed of how conclusively her number dwarfed his own four that his first stop when he arrived back in London was Flourish and Blotts for both Mandarin-English and Arabic-English dictionaries.

“The same as last time?” he asked, sitting on the bench beside Maria so she could straddle him.

“Same as last time?” Maria laughed. “You’re an international playboy indulging his carnal appetites on his own personal yacht, mix it up. Here.” She waved at him, indicating he should move behind her. “Do it from behind and I’ll still have a clear shot of the sale.”

In the space behind her, Draco canted his hips away from Maria’s backside, and began to make a show of pretending to pull his cock from his swim trunks.

“Foreplay, you goose.” Klara laughed. “If this is how you behave, it’s no wonder your mystery woman isn’t interested.”

Draco rolled his eyes, and leaned forward, burying his face in Maria’s neck so that his hair hid what he wasn’t doing with his mouth.

Maria moaned, loud and absurd. “That’s it. You are an animal. A tiger. Not the kind in a zoo. You cannot be tamed.”

Draco looked back over his shoulder at Klara. “Does she say these things to you?”

Klara laughed again. “Of course not. That’s just for you.” She took a long drink of her terrible champagne, with its notes of peach, apple and rancid strawberry, and winked. “For me, she forgets everything but her Ukrainian.”

“What time is it?” Maria asked.

Klara glanced at the platinum Chopard watch around her wrist, magically calibrated for perfect accuracy. “Almost midnight. If they’re going to do the handoff in the open, it’ll have to be soon.”

“Undo my strings.” Maria shrugged her shoulders at Draco, and he tugged the end of the bow at her nape, and then the one between her shoulder blades. She pulled her bikini top off, and tossed it aside.

“Now you can do your work, impatient man,” she said.

Draco pantomimed pulling out his cock below the water, rolled his hips forward and pinched Maria’s hip to signal that she should do her part. She moaned again, high-pitched and a little outraged, like she was shocked by the sensation of him, and leaned back against his chest, running her fingers over her own nipples while keeping her eyes trained on the deck of the yacht floating a hundred yards off their starboard.

“Is our track suit friend still watching?” Draco asked, pistoning his hips in the water. He was careful to avoid hitting Maria in the arse on accident, lest she take offense to his total lack of arousal.

“Mm hm.” Maria tilted her head back, and Draco flattened his closed mouth at the juncture of her shoulder and neck. “But judging by his face, it’s for the sex. We’re good.”

“Fifteen minutes.” Klara put down her drink and floated over to them.”Can you last that long?”

“How’s the donor selection going?” Draco asked, changing the subject.

“Ugh.” Klara shook her head. “It’s quite strange, choosing a father from a catalog like a winter coat. Size, color, shape.”

Draco laughed. “You said you want four? Babies, not coats.”

Maria nodded. “I’m from a big family.

“And you’re carrying first?”

“I am.” Maria bounced forward, cried out and grasped the side of the hot tub like Draco had thrust into her with particular force. “I’m excited. She’s nervous.” She leaned to the side and kissed her wife, long and lingering. “Personally I think I’m going to enjoy it. My mother had very easy pregnancies.”

“I worry about you. You work too hard. Take too many risks.” Klara checked her watch again.

“I promised, this is our last job in the field,” said Maria. “I’m ready for you to knock me up.”

“So you’ve said.” Klara sounded like she wasn’t convinced. “I, on the other hand, am quite content to renovate the house in Uppsala and change nappies for the next decade. Ten minutes twenty eight seconds to midnight.” She reached a hand up and pulled at Maria’s right nipple. “Are you sure you won’t reconsider being the donor? You wouldn't be obligated for anything at all, legally or otherwise. I can’t deny that we’d love to have your genes.”

Draco shook his head. “I know you said you’d allow me to meet them, even have a relationship, but it would bother me too much—not actually raising them.”

“I understand. Come here for a moment,” said Klara. “It looks like you’re neglecting your second partner.”

While Klara ran her hand over his chest, beaded with water, Draco leaned into her neck, then reached over and moved his elbow like he was doing something more interesting with his hand than running his palm in a tight circle over the outside of Klara’s thigh.

Klara grabbed his hair and tugged at it. “We’ll keep at the coat catalog. I’m sure just the right one will turn up. How’s your mystery girl? Still not taking the hint?"

Draco sighed.

"Did you ask her to the Bowie concert like we told you to?” asked Maria.

Draco gripped Maria’s left shoulder. “I have the tickets, but I haven’t asked. There was … progress, I suppose. Of a sort.”

“No concert, but progress.” Maria sat up, reached back and curled her fingers over the back of his neck. ”Did you kiss her?”

“She said no kissing.”

“Oh!” Klara perked up. “My gods, Draco, did you have the no-kissing sort of sex with this girl?”

Draco winced. "No. Not exactly."

Klara slid into the space between Maria and the edge of the hot tub. “Not exactly?”

“This is very exciting and terrible,” said Maria. “I love kissing.” At that, she kissed her wife, and as she pulled away, drew her bottom lip between her teeth. “Not exactly,” she repeated. She thought for a moment. “Did you go down on her?”

“No.”

“Did she go down on you? ” asked Klara, mouthing at the side of Maria’s right breast.

“No, no one went down on anyone.”

Klara looked into Maria’s face. “Hand jobs.”

Maria nodded. “Absolutely hand jobs. It was hand jobs, wasn’t it? And don’t lie, we’re the very best at our line of work, we’ll know.”

“Not jobs .” Draco stood up tall, hand still on Maria’s shoulder, and stretched out the cramp in his lower back.

“ One hand job, then.” Klara kissed Maria’s sternum and then pushed her breasts together. “Please tell me you didn’t let her get you off without doing anything for her.”

Draco scoffed. “I’m a gentleman.”

“You got her off, then. That's good! But you don’t seem happy about it.” Maria reached back and grabbed Draco’s right hand, and brought it to her mouth. “There’s some motion on the deck. A few of Durand's men, and I think a small craft is coming up without its lights on. Is it alright if I suck on your fingers?”

“Sure.”

She took his index and middle fingers and slid them past her lips.

“She’s been different lately,” he said, pushing his fingers roughly over Maria’s tongue but avoiding the back quarter of it so she didn’t gag. “I feel as though I’ve done something wrong.”

Klara narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you do a good job? Did she come?”

"I take a great deal of pride in all of my work.”

Klara’s expression shifted from hard to harder. “You’re not being strange about it, are you? Acting pleased with yourself, or making things sexual when it should be professional?”

“Not at all. As far as I know, I’m behaving just as I was before.”

Klara looked at Maria. “I wonder if she’s feeling self-conscious.”

Maria nodded and pulled Draco’s digits out of her mouth. “It’s very possible. It’s a power shift, isn’t it? If he’s touched her like that.” She wrapped her lips around his fingers again and sucked until her cheeks hollowed.

“It is," Klara agreed.

"There were some photographs, too," Draco said carefully. "That weren't intended for me to see."

Klara stared at him. "How did you come to see them, then?"

"They were left on my desk, by accident. I didn't look at them. Not all of them, anyway. Not for long. In any case, she knows that I saw them."

"How embarrassing for her." Maria mumbled wetly around Draco’s thrusting hand. “That’s two sorts of uneven, isn’t it?”

“It is!” Klara nuzzled at Maria’s breast. “You’ve seen her photographs. Made her come. You should talk to her," she went on with conviction. "Be frank. Reassure her of your respect and regard.”

“It’s so hard to talk to women,” he said. He pulled his fingers from Maria’s mouth and rested his hand over her throat without applying any pressure. “Is this alright?”

“Yes, of course.” Maria moaned theatrically, then laughed, mocking but kind. “You’re talking to women right now, you know.”

“This is different.” Draco looked away as Klara began to nip with some earnestness at Maria’s breasts, looking up at her through her pale eyelashes with a teasing smile. “She’s brilliant, truly, but …”

Klara pulled her mouth off of her wife’s nipple with a pop and frowned. “But what?”

“I tried to be subtle, and then I tried not being subtle at all, and nothing’s happened except … what went on last week, which perhaps was too much. Or the wrong thing. I don’t know. I think she’s just not interested.”

His belly lurched the way it did whenever he allowed himself to follow that particular train of thought.

Maria tensed. “The buyer and his muscle have boarded on the starboard side. Everyone is coming out onto the deck. Fuck, Durand’s there. Everyone. This is it.”

Draco glanced at their target, floating in the full moon. Michel Durand’s yacht was bigger than Draco’s by six metres, which was, Draco thought, probably why Durand himself had failed to notice that a known DMLE Auror happened to take frequent holiday weekends on the Côte d'Azur, conveniently within surveillance range.

Durand’s hired goons were, to a man, blinded by Maria and Klara's breasts.

Draco sped up his hips, and gripped Maria by her shoulder.

“There’s no way he touches that egg himself. Time?” he asked.

“Thirty seven seconds to midnight.”

Draco pounded away at the water behind Maria’s backside while Klara mouthed at Maria’s neck and trained her eyes on her watch.

“Twenty seconds,” said Klara.

“Go hard and then be still. If we’re right I have only a minute to get clear shots,” said Maria.

They were all silent, faux fucking and waiting.

“They’ve brought a box onto the deck.” Maria's knuckles were white with tension at the side of the hot tub “Durand’s man is opening the lid.” 

“Ten seconds,” said Klara.

Draco laid his hand gently over Maria’s throat again, yanked her back by the hip hard for five seconds, then fell forward, pressed his forehead to the back of her shoulder, and went still.

“You’re such a good boy.” Klara patted his cheek.

He looked up, and blinked in a pattern: three slow, two rapid, then a two-second pause, two rapid, two slow. His vision blurred as the latent telescopic and night vision spells he'd cast at dusk kicked in.

Durand, a trim man in his 60s with a full head of white hair, wearing tan trousers and a white linen shirt, stood on the La Sirène with a hand held thoughtfully over his mouth while one of his employees lifted an object from inside a leather case.

“Oh, wow,” said Maria with unreserved reverence.

Draco stayed as still as possible while she blinked with a purpose, sending images to the camera below deck.

It was an egg.

Roughly the side of a Bludger, narrower at one end than the other, it would have been, at any other time, a dull, mottled brown-black, nondescript and indistinguishable from any of two dozen other species of dragon egg. But by a full moon at midnight, its surface shimmered in nebulous whorls of luminescent persimmon and pink, the only known positive identifier of an egg belonging to the coral-mouthed spitting dragon of the Sahel, lingering on the cusp of extinction.

From the bridge of the La Sirène, Durand's security guard, in his red and blue track suit, viewed them through a pair of binoculars.

"The fellow on the bridge is still watching us," muttered Draco.

Without jostling Maria, Klara stood, pulled Draco’s hair until he sat up, and pushed the perfect half globes of her breasts directly into Draco’s face.

“Grab my arse,” she commanded. “And reach down and pretend like you’re getting Maria off.”

Draco did as he was told, clutching Klara’s left buttock in his right hand, and with his left, doing more or less what needed to be done below the surface of the water, only ten inches from where it would be useful.

“Durand is moving,” said Maria. “He’s talking with the buyer. Buyer appears to be arguing.”

“Just talk to her,” Klara said quietly. “Maybe she needs you to spell it out. Sometimes very smart people can be quite stupid.”

Maria was focused. “Durand appears to be angry. He’s handling the egg.”

Draco let his eyes wander over the La Sirène, where Durand was gesturing, incredulous, at the glowing egg in his palm. Draco looked back to the bridge. “We still have an audience.”

“Damn it. Alright.” Moving quickly, Maria flung her head back, arched her bare breasts forward, and let her mouth drop open.

"Yes! Fuck! Yes, my wild tiger! Yes! " she shouted, holding herself with an impressive dynamic stillness as she blinked to trigger the camera.

On the deck of the La Sirène, the buyer nodded his grudging acceptance, and brought out a suitcase. The suitcase was opened, its contents examined, then the buyer handed it to one of Durand's men.

The buyer took the leather box.

“That’s it.” Maria didn’t stop taking photographs, but signaled to Klara. “They’re reboarding the motorboat for the Moroccan vessel. Klara, the marine team, s’il vous plait. ”

Clutching at Draco's hair, Klara brought her mouth close to her wrist and began to fire a rapid sequence of French code words into the band of her watch.

As soon as she'd finished, Draco eased away from them both, and sat on the bench on the opposite side of the jacuzzi. He let his head fall back, and closed his eyes.

Without warning, a vision coalesced in the dark behind his eyelids.

Mint green silk drew tight over full breasts with taut nipples. Tiny knickers with a ruffle bit into the skin of a plush hip.

After a meeting, he thought. She'd have chastised him, surely, for something he'd done secretly on purpose to annoy her. She'd sit at the edge of her desk while he sat in her chair.

No, his desk.

His chair.

He'd silence the room. Lock the door, so she'd know he meant to take his time. Push up her skirt, unbutton her shirt. There was something, he thought, completely intoxicating about the curve of a woman's belly just below her navel, and in his mind he kissed Hermione there, lips traveling to the border of her knickers, fingers kneading the flesh of her arse, pushing up under the smooth fabric of those little pants, so hopelessly inadequate to the task of keeping her covered.

He'd push her legs apart and hold them open. No, tell her to hold them open. Draw it out, mouthing over the soft silk until it was saturated and she was so worked up she was angry about it. He'd unclip her suspenders, then, pull her knickers down her legs. Pocket them. Tell her he'd know, for the rest of the day, that she was going around the office without. Tell her she could come and fetch them at his flat that night.

She'd be so ready it would be obvious. He'd see it. Feel it. There would be a heat there. She'd arch her hips. She'd want . He'd tease her with his tongue anyway, find what she liked, use it to bring her close and then move away, suck a bruise into the inside of her thigh that would last for days, push her legs wider, slip a finger inside.

When she was really mad, in the way that drove him to distraction, made the center of his chest ache with affection for her, he'd push a second finger beside the first, fuck her with them, pulse his tongue over her clit, keep it steady and predictable until—

As if his imagination weren't enough, it was joined by the very specific, entirely real memory of how she felt on the inside as she came.

She’d come—so hard she'd tremble, go weak again, would need his arms wrapped around her—but before any of that happened, he’d kiss her.

His cock woke with a start, suddenly and acutely interested in what was going on.

“You were great.”

He opened his eyes by half a degree to find Maria smiling at him, holding the tiny triangles of her bikini top over her breasts while Klara re-tied the strings. “I think we got everything we need.”

Draco poured himself another glass of vaguely sweet, decidedly sour bubbly water, drank it, and grimaced. “Two more weekends you said? For the look of the thing?"

"Yes, if that's alright. We can pop open a real bottle or two." Maria smirked. "You should invite your mystery woman. We'll stay in our cabin while you show her the jacuzzi."

"Sounds lovely. You’re more than welcome to the Ladon whenever you need her," he said. "Personally or professionally."

“We'll take you up on that.” Klara pulled Maria into her lap, and kissed her shoulder. “Last job?"

 “Last one. I keep my promises.” Maria rested her cheek on the top of Klara’s head and sighed. “You've been a gentleman, Draco Malfoy. We’ve both thoroughly enjoyed not having sex with you for the past six weeks. Thank you.”

Draco closed his eyes. “My pleasure.”

Though no one actually said anything until it was nearly time for lunch, a sideways look in the lift on Monday morning from Accounting Geoff—not Maintenance Geoff, the elf, and by far the superior intellect—alerted Draco to the possibility that something was going on that he wasn’t aware of.

“What?” Draco adjusted the lapels of his grey tweed suit—the one Granger had once praised as being sharp—and shrugged at the left strap of his wand holster, which had slipped out of place against his shoulder blade.

Geoff’s mouth twitched. “Nothing.” He slid the folded newspaper pinched under his left arm tight against his armpit and checked his watch. “Nice weekend?”

Geoff forever smelled like burnt toast and the sort of air freshener spell that was meant to convey the fragrance of the ocean—an absurd conceit, as the ocean smelled chiefly of the digestive byproducts of marine bacteria.

Draco squinted at Geoff. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

“We had our Billy and his wife Colleen over,” Geoff went on. “She’s having the babies on the fifteenth. They’ll have their hands more than full, won’t they? Lovely girl.”

Draco gave him the slightest nod he thought he could get away with.

“Of course you’d know from lovely girls,” said Geoff.

“What is that supposed to—”

The lift dinged, and Geoff trundled out into the corridor and beelined for the Accounting Office door, on the opposite side of the hallway from HR.

“The fuck? ” Draco muttered, sipping at the the ceramic travel cup he’d won off Granger after a prolonged and extremely bitter white elephant struggle at the 2001 Ministry Christmas party.

It had a pale blue background with a pattern of enormous bright pink and red classic English roses, and cheerful leaf-green lid.

As it turned out, the glances and insinuations of Lesser Geoff were a prelude—a concise overture—to what waited for him in the offices of the DMLE.

He received two unsolicited and unwelcome back slaps from Cormac McLaggen, the second one directly on the heels of Cormac putting his left hand on Draco’s shoulder and his right over his own heart, looking into Draco’s eyes with what Draco was unable to deny was both awe and reverence. Without a word, Cormac nodded, then walked back to his desk.

Ron Weasley was less deferential.

“Enjoy your three days off?” He leaned his gangles through the door to throw a pile of photograph envelopes on Draco’s desk. Draco was well aware that Ron had neither slept nor showered in the last twenty-four hours, and he looked it.

Draco leaned back in his chair too hard, catching the edge of his desk as it lurched.

“I did. Thank you for asking.”

“That’s nice to hear. The rest of us were up all night dealing with another exsanguinated corpse. Corpses, I should think, once we get all the pieces put back together. Photos there if you’re not too tired from your holiday to take a look. Had the pleasure of getting the owl just as I was sitting down to Katie’s pot roast and strawberry lemon cake for our anniversary. Got to sit in the dark and rain with McLaggen instead while he banged on about the benefits and drawbacks of women having breast augmentation. Would have been nice to have another set of hands. But I imagine yours were occupied.”

“What the fuck are you on about, Weas—”

Ron tipped a sarcastic salute Draco’s way and shut the door behind himself.

There was not enough fucking tea in the world, but Draco was determined to try.  

“Have a nice weekend?” Yolanda from Dispatch leaned her hip against the edge of the counter in the break room and blew at the surface of her milky tea.

“I did.” Draco fished four lumps of sugar from the bowl with a pair of tongs and dropped them into his cup. “And you? How’s the cardigan coming?"

“My weekend was grand, thanks for asking. Finished up the sleeves, now I’ll join and it’s on to the collar and button bands.”

“Still enjoying the Bluefaced Leicester?”

“I am. It has such a nice hand.” She thought for a moment. “Not as nice as the merino and baby alpaca, mind.”

“How could it be?”

“That’s just what I said to Mum on the Floo on Saturday. In any case it should be lovely and warm. The stitch definition is beautiful. I have to work on it in my room so the surprise isn’t ruined for Kath, and of course the kittens think it’s play time with the yarn. She’s thirty-two this Friday. Single, you know.”

Draco wouldn’t have been surprised had Kath been turning anywhere from twenty-five to forty-seven, nor was he surprised that she was single. As far as he could tell, she was deeply committed to her half-dozen cats.

“I’ll send over some flowers. You’re still in the flats over the bakery?”

“Mm hm. It’s a tough row to hoe for both of us. We’ve yet to go off scones, unfortunately!” Yolanda rolled her eyes and snorted with self-deprecation. “We can’t all be supermodels.”

She winked at him.

A voice in Draco’s mind leaped out from behind a closed door, waved its arms about and shouted out its well-supported conclusions. Draco swiftly shoved it back and slammed the door in its face.

“I suppose not.”

It was an office day, rather than a field day.

Potter, on double shifts the previous week, was at home sleeping off the apparent all-hands-on-deck in Dover that had McLaggen pontificating all night to Weasley on the ins and outs of saline, and wouldn’t be in until Thursday.

For the rest of the morning, left at peace behind his closed office door, Draco tucked the arms of his reading glasses over his ears and devoted himself to excavating the bottom of the wire basket holding his incoming parchments.

At eleven forty five, after five cups of tea and three trips to the gents’, there was a knock at his door.

“Come in.”

“Morning, Malfoy!” Jonathan Gable from the Beast Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures pushed through the door holding a stack of parchment and shaking a curl of dark hair out of his left eye. He glanced at his watch. “Nearly afternoon, I suppose.”

He stood beside Draco’s desk and smiled with the artless, effortless, abysmal bonhomie that made him the Ministry’s collective favorite son from the records dungeon all the way up to the Minister’s office.

Draco loathed him.

“What brings you into my office, Gable?” Draco brushed the end of his quill with agitation at the edge of his desk like a feather duster.

“Here.” Jonathan handed the stack of papers over, reserving a white photograph envelope. “I’ve just finished up in a meeting across the hall, and Hermione asked if I wouldn’t mind delivering some notes. She mentioned that you’re interviewing the St Tudy Succubus on Thursday.”

“We are.” Draco took the file and flipped through it, finding his own handwriting on half a dozen case reports, with scores of squares of sticky parchment covered in Hermione’s tight, hurried hand asking for clarification and further detail.

Did the victim report any unusual sensations prior to the onset of persistent sexual euphoria? Specifically interested in: symptoms of dehydration; warmth and/or numbness of the distal third of the fingers and/or toes; sudden, diffuse sensation of heat in the genitals; creeping dread. St. Mungo’s report detailing penile overuse injury and electrolyte impacts of fluid loss attached. 

“She asked me to tell you that she’s given you these notes in lieu of your two o’clock in her office, and,” Jonathan drew a stack of photographs from the envelope, “I was to check these,” he riffled through them, “before giving them to you. Merlin, that’s … you know I’ve read probably a dozen academic volumes on succubi, but I suppose from reading you don’t get the full sense of—” He cut off and stared at a photograph. “I wasn’t aware that one man could make that much …” He cleared his throat and slipped the photographs into their envelope. “Anyway, here you are.”

He held the envelope out to Draco, who took it and tossed it onto his desk.

“She asked you to bring these by?” Draco asked dumbly. “In lieu of our two o’clock.”

“Yes.” Inexplicably, Jonathan drew up a chair from the side of the room, and straddled its back beside Draco’s desk. He pulled a folded newspaper from under his arm.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d seen your article in the paper,” he said, and unfurled the newsprint onto Draco’s desk.

A color photograph covered the top third of the front page of the gossip section of the Daily Prophet.

It was of higher quality than Draco would expect for a photograph taken from a distance, but on reflection he considered that professional telephoto lenses were probably quite powerful.

For photographing tigers and so forth.

In the picture, the Countess Klara Sofia Victoria Gyllenstierna af Fogelvik straddled Draco’s hips on the white cushions of a lounger on the pool deck of the Ladon, her breasts—unaugmented and uncovered—censored with small circles of blur directly over her nipples, which she stroked with her fingertips as she rolled her hips. His right hand clutched at Klara’s hip hard enough to leave indents, and his left held both of Maria Marchenko’s braids behind her head while Maria, also topless, laved at his bare chest with her wet, pink tongue.

Draco’s head was tilted back, and what could be seen of his expression around his Ray Bans exemplified both boredom and entitlement.

He looked like being thronged by the world’s most beautiful women was par for the course on a sunny Saturday in France, which, he supposed, it had been as of late.

If he recalled the moment correctly, from her position in his lap, Klara had a clear shot of a party on Durand's yacht and had snagged scores of photographs that would be of particular use to the Algerian Ministry.

The headline read Malfoy Mauled by Mistresses in Monaco.

Mon Dieu, mes amis! The copy began, and Draco had to lay a hand over his eyes before continuing. Draco Malfoy, sole heir of the Malfoy fortune and sometime Auror, appears to be enjoying the single life to the hilt as he continues to gad about Europe’s pleasure grounds with Maria Marchenko and the Countess Klara Sofia Victoria Gyllenstierna af Fogelvik. Ms. Marchenko and the Countess Klara are both represented by François Moreau Model Management, and, citing their right to privacy, have repeatedly declined to confirm reports that they wed last year in a lavish ceremony in Paris.”

Draco slammed the paper shut before he read anything further. “Who the fuck says ‘gad’?”

“I was wondering,” said Jonathan, “if you don’t mind my asking—”

Draco leaned back in his chair with both hands over his face, and flailed as it tipped hard and fast by ten degrees. “I’m entirely sure I’m going to mind.”

“It’s only that I read a very thoughtful and in-depth profile in Warlock last year on Maria Marchenko—you may recall it, there was a bit of a brouhaha over the Rachel Reznikoff photographs, which were extraordinary, the way she establishes mood with light and shadow is so totally unexpected, and her haunting approach to negative space—”

“Get on with it, Gable.”

“In the article, Maria mentioned her academic research in the American South with Magical Yoruba-Catholic communities and the unique magicoreligious syncretism that they’ve developed, and I wondered if she’d mentioned anything further about her sightings of rainbow serpents in the Louisiana coastal wetlands.”

Draco uncovered his face, and stared hard at Jonathan Gable.

Draco’s sexuality was a solid Women, Please and Thank You, but he had to agree with the mail room witches: Gable, dark and athletically built and more handsome than any other man Draco was personally acquainted with, had excellent genes.   

“Do you like women, Jonathan? I mean, do you like to have sex with them?”

Jonathan frowned in confusion. “Very much so, but I’m not sure how that …”

“You like to have sex with women, but you read that article in Warlock, printed next to images of a fully nude Maria Marchenko, and looked at that photograph of her licking my left nipple just now, and what you’re dying to know from me is everything she knows about magical rainbow snakes?”

“She’s”—Jonathan made a gesture describing his own head exploding outward—“stunning, obviously. She's also a truly brilliant academician, and to choose Rachel Reznikoff for such a vulnerable set of photographs shows an eye for—” 

“How do you feel about giving your sperm to women who want it?”

“Oh!” Jonathan sat back in his chair. “You mean donation? I haven’t ever thought about …”

“Do you want to talk snakes with Maria? I can set you up. You can Floo her, she’ll talk swamp snakes with you all you want. She and Klara have a beautiful home in Uppsala. Great for a large family.”

“That would be extraordinary, thank you!”

“My pleasure,” said Draco.

He'd been saying it a lot recently, and the irony of the echo wasn’t lost on him.

For a man who’d spent the previous six weeks having his nipples toyed with by mind-blowing women, he’d had rather little of it, and none of the sort he wanted.

The lifts were nearly empty of Ministry employees by six o’clock each evening.

“You canceled our two o’clock, Granger.”

Hermione didn’t need to look up from the brief she held flat in front of her as he followed her into the lift for him to see the tops of her cheeks flush pink.

“It wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I communicated everything I felt we ought to consider prior to the interview. My notes were extensive.”

Draco leaned his shoulders against the rear of the lift, and let his head fall back in frustration.

“They were." He adjusted his suit jacket over his arm. "So is that it, then? Are we going to communicate via sticky parchment for the rest of our lives?”

She looked up at last.

The dusting of freckles over her nose and cheeks was a softening embellishment on a face that, while narrowed somewhat by adulthood, remained fundamentally round-cheeked and youthful. Despite the seriousness of her job and her no-holds-barred approach to tackling adult life, he felt that her blush, her freckles, her cheeks, her hair—never fully tamed, and today making a strand-by-strand escape from the undersized and under-powered gold clip holding it back off her face—advertised the remaining traces of her schoolgirl temper and best-in-class competitive drive.

She always looked as though, when she showed up to play, she meant to win.

She was dressed in her daily uniform of a button up shirt and narrow skirt in dull, practical colors and easy to launder fabrics. Today her shirt was pale pink cotton lawn with a grey skirt and nude stockings and heels. There was a gap between the third and fourth buttons of her shirt, and in the anarchic hair at her temple–a lawless principality no clip could dream to govern—there was a snipped triangle of pink parchment stuck in the coil of a curl.

Her cheeks had gone from pink to red.

She was either angry or embarrassed. Maybe both.

He fucking adored her.

In the gap between her buttons, there was a flash of aubergine.

"What do you want from me, Malfoy?"

Fuck, it was lace again. Dark purple. Sheer.

"Well?" She crossed her arms across her chest, and the gap widened.

Very sheer.

He blinked.

What did he want from her, was the question.

He wanted to make her come again, for starters. With his hands, or his mouth, and after that, he'd like to fuck her. It didn't really matter where or how, but he’d do it properly, so that when her cunt tightened down in the sinusoid curves of contraction and release he already knew—had already felt—he’d be inside her.

But before all of that, what he wanted most of all—maybe with his hand slipped between her third and fourth buttons, palm flexing over the hard peak of her nipple through the absurd, pointless, perfect fabric of her bra—was to kiss her on her plush, pouting, velveteen, sweet, angry mouth.

He stopped looking at her lingerie, and brought his attention to her indignant face.

“I’d like us to be friends, Granger. Have I done something wrong?”

Her lips tightened into a rigid line. “No. You haven’t. You’re entitled to as many models as you like.”

Her eyes widened, and she turned, stiff and slow, to face the front of the lift.

He thought back to Maria’s words on the yacht.

Two kinds of uneven.

Hermione’s security clearances precluded the possibility of explaining his Mediterranean escapades without blowing the cover of two agents.

But he could address the other—and from his point of view, far more relevant—elephant in the room.

“If you’re feeling embarrassed, or as though there’s been a shift since—”

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Hermione erupted, turning back toward him. “You’ve seen photographs of me in lingerie, and you’ve given me an orgasm.” She sucked in a chestful of air, held it, and turned a bit purple. “A very intense one,” she said in a rush of breath. “I’d say there’s been a shift, yes.”

“Hermione, you will always have my respect, no matter—”

She waved her hand in the air, dismissing him.

“It’s not about respect, Malfoy. It’s about”—she narrowed her eyes, searching for the words she wanted—”not being caught up.”

“The entire Ministry saw my nipples today. The entire country. I’m not sure what the Prophet’s circulation numbers are, but it’s certainly global.” It was Draco’s turn to feel his cheeks heat up.

“That’s bloody well different, isn’t it?”

“How is it any different?”

“You were caught in a ménage à trois which every man in the Ministry is falling over himself to congratulate you for, not posing for photographs by yourself, for yourself, in your naughty knickers.”

“I enjoy naughty knickers very much, but wearing them isn’t my particular pot of tea.” He winced. “That’s not the point. Don’t think for a moment that your photographs are anything but beautiful. They’re perfect.”

“I feel …” She stared hard at the doors of the lift and clenched her jaw. “I feel as though I’m behind in class. And you’re standing there with your models, and that little bit of the lining of your sleeves that shows at the top of your cuff roll like you obviously mean it to, and your stupid clever hands, with their muscles and their bones and their veins —” She turned on him without warning. ”Why are veins sexy? That makes no sense whatsoever."

“I have no idea.”

“And your lickable chest,” she went on, “pleased as can be with yourself, like you’ve been given a perfect Outstanding in sex, and in sexiness, and I’m still chewing on the end of my quill, trying to fill out my test form. And I hate it.”

The lift doors opened onto the Atrium with a ping.

 She paused as she stepped forward. “You’re still wearing your reading glasses, I hope you know.”

“Granger …”

But she was in motion again and didn’t stop, not even for a backward glance, the rapid clack of her heels ringing out from the marble floor as she walked.

“Hermione?”

His voice reverberated in the empty space she left behind as she stepped into the Floo.

An hour later, he knocked twice at Tracey’s door with his knuckles, and once more with a dull thud of his forehead.

She answered wearing an over-sized jumper and no trousers.

"This is a nice surprise."

Tracey had spectacular bronze-brown skin, great, wide, dark, smiling eyes and a whiskey voice, hoarse and rasping but unparalleled in its ability to soothe. When she rested her temple against the side of the door, examined him and said “You look miserable. What’s happened?” Draco felt as though he might recover after all.

"I’ve brought cake.” He held out a white paperboard box with a pink and white striped ribbon. “Strawberry lemon.”

The ground floor of Tracey’s townhouse in London was given over entirely to her photography business, airy and stylish but still crowded with orderly cases of gear and props and lighting equipment. He followed her upstairs to the high-ceilinged studio apartment where she lived.

“Who the fuck is it?” Someone stirred in the sumptuous nest of white linens on Tracey's bed, pushed up against the rear wall below a window.

“It’s only our Draco,” Tracey answered, sliding the cake box onto her kitchen counter. “No need to put any clothes on, my duckling.”

The duvet heaved and shifted then flopped forward, and Pansy sat up with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lips. “It is you.” She reached her arms out and made a grabbing gesture with both hands. “Want. Come.”

Draco slid off his shoes. “Are you heading to bed at seven o’clock or just getting up?”

He lifted the corner of the duvet and slid in beside Pansy.

She was wearing nothing but a threadbare Guns n’ Roses t-shirt and, he saw as she wriggled toward him and the shirt rode up her belly, a minuscule black lace thong.

She wormed her way into the crook of his arm, and then slung one thin leg over his waist and one thin arm over his shoulders and hoisted herself on top of him like a juvenile sea otter.

"Take your cop shit off, it’s jabbing me.” She sat up, straddling his belly, and began to undo the straps of his holster.

“I’m not staying in here if you’re going to smoke,” he said.

She spat the unlit cigarette over the edge of the bed. “Happy?”

He sat up marginally while she pushed his holster off then undid his belt, sliding it and the attached standard issue Auror’s emergency potions kit onto the floor. “Somewhat.” He lay back down, and Pansy followed, tucking her hands up under his shoulders and sighing, heavy and content.

“You didn’t answer before,” he asked. “Is this morning for you or something approximating bedtime?”

Pansy grumbled. “I’m convalescing.”

Draco lifted his head and looked at Tracey, slicing cake in the kitchen.

She slid a narrow piece of cake onto a plate and sucked frosting off the tip of her thumb. “She came by drunk as a lord at dawn.”

“Your bed is better than mine for a convalescence.” Pansy waggled her hips, and Draco ducked his hands under the back of her shirt and began to knead both thumbs along the bare skin at either side of her spine.

“She’s mostly slept it off," said Tracey, "but—”

“I have a dislocation,” Pansy said, muffled in Draco’s shirt.

Tracey lay a fork on the plate. “She has a dislocation.”

“What have you dislocated?” Draco asked.

“My cunt.” Pansy flattened her cheek against the center of Draco’s chest.

“You can’t dislocate your cunt, Pans.” When Pansy moaned, Draco dug in harder with the side of his right thumb near her tailbone.

“Alright, then it’s a sprain. Up now.” She shimmied her shoulders, and Draco obeyed, running the heels of his hands up under her shirt and pressing them between her shoulder blades.

Tracey walked up the surface of the bed on her knees, and sat on her heels next to Draco and Pansy. “Here.” She held out a bite of cake on her fork, and Pansy opened her mouth for it like a baby bird.

“Fuck me. That’s fucking orgasmic. More.” Pansy opened her mouth wide for another bite.

“She’s been seeing Justin Nguyen again,” said Tracey.

“The fellow with the motorbike and the enormous cock?” Draco ran his fingertips up the back of Pansy’s neck and made short, feather-light strokes just at the start of her hairline.

She squealed as her whole body spasmed. “No! No tickle. I’m sprained. Justin Nguyen doesn’t have a cock, he has a murder weapon.”

“You said you came six times.” Tracey held out a forkful of cake for Draco.

“That’s exactly the problem,” Pansy whined. “I gave him a cheeky hand job straddling him on his bike just as he picked me up last night. I made him come and everything—I have to use both hands, you know—and he immediately bent me over the handlebars and had another go. Who does that?”

Tracey offered Draco more cake. “Justin Nguyen.”

“You let them fuck you three times in one night, and they always think they want to marry you. It’s such a bore.” Pansy waggled her arse. “Do my bum.”

Draco rubbed deep into the muscle of Pansy’s backside. “You have a cock hangover.”

“I do. Which is why we’ve ordered up hot Thai noodle soup and the beer is quite cold in the icebox and we’re going to watch Lord of the Kings on Tracey’s projector screen—”

“Rings,” offered Tracey.

“Fucking Rings of the Kings”—Pansy yawned—”and no one’s going to fuck us even once.” She stilled for a moment, then sat up tall. “What are you here for, anyway?” She tensed. “There’s no fucking available today.”

“We don’t fuck anymore,” Draco reminded her. “We’ve been good for months.”

“That’s true. We’re very well behaved now.” Pansy’s shoulders relaxed. “What is it, then?”

“I was wondering,” he began tentatively, “if Tracey might help me out with something.”

“No fucking,” Pansy reminded him.

“That is not at all what I meant. You're well aware that Tracey and I have never once slept together.”

“I always preferred Ravenclaws,” Tracey offered. “Far less baggage, generally.”

“Oh!” Pansy slapped her hands down hard on Draco’s chest. “This is about your girl.” Her eyes hardened with suspicion. “What have you done?”

“Why do you always think I’ve done something wrong?”

"Because you're always doing the wrong thing."

“He was in the papers this morning having a ménage à trois,” said Tracey.

Pansy slapped his chest for real. "No."

"It's true." Tracey gestured at Draco. "He looks entirely over it, I couldn't breathe for laughing. I've snipped it out and saved it for you, Draco." 

“What the actual fuck?" Pansy shouted. "Since when do you have group sex?”

“I don’t. ”

“You’re an irredeemable fucking romantic monogamist. A year ago I had to cut you off because you wouldn’t fucking let go of what my vagina was getting up to when you weren’t around, or stop hinting about whose hair color would win in a genetic cage match. It's my vagina, I decide what goes in and what comes out of it. If I wanted someone to use my body like they owned the deed I’d damn well let them know it.”

Draco slung his arm over his eyes and groaned. “That’s not ... there’s a story there. It wasn’t what it looked like.”

Tracey set the cake aside and pushed up under Draco’s other arm. “It looked like they were both having a very nice time despite your ennui.”

“They’re very nice women. They’ll be incredible mothers.”

Pansy leaned back like he might bite. “Please tell me you haven’t made these nice women pregnant.”

“No! No. They want me to, but I’ve told them I won't do it."

Pansy grimaced.

"There’s this fucking prick at the office that’s perfect for the job," Draco said. "Mr. Louisiana Swamp Snake."

"Is that a nickname for … ?" Tracey gestured crotchward.

Draco huffed. "Fuck me, I hope not. Merlin, he's a cunt."

“Let me make sure I understand. You’ve gone and fucked up your chances with the girl you’ve been moaning about for how long now?" Pansy asked.

"I don't want to talk about it."

" … by having a three way you didn’t want with women who'd like you to impregnate them.” She smoothed her hand over his chest and patted him twice. “Well done, Draco.”

“Setting aside the group sex for a moment, the actual problem is that there’s a sort of inequity issue. I’m not sure how to approach it. I’ve brought you cake, you need to help me.”

Tracey sat up on one arm. “What do you mean by inequity?”

Draco chewed at his lower lip. “I saw some … images. Of this girl.” He waved his hand in a vague circle. “On accident.”

Tracey regarded him. “Like the ones I take for my clients?”

He blinked in acknowledgement. “And there was a …”

“Did you fuck her?” Sitting up tall on his abdomen, Pansy arched her back until it made an audible pop.

“No. No. Merlin. Fuck. Gods, fuck, I suppose, in one sense …”

Pansy leaned forward until her nose was centimetres from Draco’s, and looked with sharp interest into both of his eyes. “What did you do?"

"It's a matter of discretion."

"You kissed her.”

“No,” he said with regret.

Pansy’s eyes narrowed further. “I see. You have fucked this up, haven’t you?” She considered for a moment. “Unreciprocated blowjob.” She patted his cheek hard enough that it might have fairly been called a slap. “Don’t you dare say yes, I raised you better than that.”

“No.”

“You ate her out.”

“No.”

“She jerked you off.”

“No.”

“You jerked off in front of her.”

“No.”

“You jerked her off.”

Draco said nothing.

“Did you do a good job? Did she come?”

“When, any time after the first six months after we started having sex, have you known me to not bring my partner to climax?”

“How hard?”

“What?”

“Was it memorable?”

Draco thought. “Do you remember the time we were in your mother’s box at the Royal Opera and you said you didn't think I could make you come while an Italian clown was singing and crying at the same time?”

“Oh!” Pansy’s eyebrows rose. “Good gods. Well done. And she’s not interested in more?”

Draco shook his head. “It seems to be the equity issue. I thought that if had a photograph of my own, and she were to ‘accidentally’ see it, we’d be on more even footing.”

Tracey perked up. “That’s an idea, isn’t it?”

“What, like a picture of your cock?” Pansy asked. “That sounds like a criminal offense.”

“No, absolutely not.” Draco shook his head hard. “No genitals. More sensual, less sexual?” He sounded doubtful.

Tracey bobbed her head. “Like the Rachel Reznikoff photographs of Maria Marchenko in Warlock. ”

“She might like to see your cock, come to think of it,” said Pansy. "It’s so sweet.”

“I do wish you’d stop calling it that. It makes it sound small.”

“Pretty,” Pansy mused.

“It doesn’t want to be sweet or pretty,” said Draco. “It wants to be formidable. It wants you to pause and consider its grandeur. To wonder, with some trepidation, what its objectives are.”

“No. I’m sorry, my darling. It’s quite beautiful. You very much want to snuggle it up inside yourself and keep it there. And it’s entirely impossible not to lick it.”

“Pans.”

“Kiss its tip.” She wrinkled her nose in affection. “I promise you there are worse fates for a cock.”

“It’s not pretty.”

“It’s the loveliest one I’ve ever seen,” said Pansy.

“It’s well above average,” Draco whinged.

“Nineteen point eight centimetres is quite large, actually,” said Tracey.

Draco laid a hand over his eyes. “Why do you have to go around telling everyone?” 

“Because it’s so, so perfect.”

“Barring overt pictures of your large, beautiful dick, which no woman wants to be given without having asked for them,” said Tracey, “I’d say waist up? No shirt? Joel Brodsky photographing Jim Morrison in New York City, 1967, only you have no chest hair whatsoever.”

Tracey slid out of the bed and began digging through a bureau housing camera cases.

Pansy tugged Draco’s shirttails from his trousers, and then began pulling at his tie. “We should do him in the bed, Trace. Rumpled linens.” She tore his tie away, then his shirt, then unbuttoned his trousers and yanked them down. Finally, she pushed her hands up into his hair and ruthlessly ruffled it.

“Pans," groused Draco, "what the fuck?”

“Trust me,” she said, and then she was up and out of the bed.

Fuck.

Pansy stood beside Tracey, both women talking in low voices, looking at him and gesturing.

Tracey nodded her enthusiasm.

“Close your eyes,” Pansy ordered.

Draco did as he was told, and after a moment felt someone fussing at the linens around him, shifting and tucking and folding until they were happy with the artistry of their dishevelment.

“I want you to think about her,” said Pansy, quite close to him beside the bed. “Think about her mouth. You like mouths.”

Draco let his mind’s eye find Hermione sitting at her desk.

She was busy at her paperwork and wasn’t looking, and he allowed his attention to wander up her arm, shifting as she wrote in her impatient hand over a sheet of parchment. He traveled over the curve of the side of her breast under her white shirt, over her throat, and up to her face. From the peak of her forehead he meandered down again, starting at the frayed curls at her hairline, sloping along the freckled arch of her nose, dipping through her cupid’s bow and curving over her top lip, until he could see the swollen volume of her bottom lip pressed under the hard white line of her top teeth while she concentrated on her work.

“Is it going to happen today? What you really want?" Pansy asked.

"Yes."

"Are you looking at her mouth?”

“Yes.”

"Does she lick her lip?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Draco held his breath. “She’s nervous.”

“Why is she nervous?”

“Because we haven’t done this before.”

“Haven’t done what?” Pansy’s voice was low.

“Kissed.”

“But she wants it. You both do. So very much. Where are you?”

Draco let the image shift.

Her hair was tumbled, her shirt wrinkled at the elbows, her skirt rotated slightly off center around her waist.

“In the lift. At the end of the day. We’ve both stayed later than we ought to have done.”

“Do you talk?”

“Always.”

“You tease her.”

“Relentlessly.”

“You make her smile. Laugh.”

“Often.”

“She’s been laughing—with you, at you—but you’ve stopped. She glances up, and looks at you. For too long."

Hermione's brown eyes watched him in the low light of the lift.

"You don’t think about it as you push the button to stop. The reflexiveness of it terrifies you. Excites you, too.”

In his mind, there was a question written over Hermione’s face as he flattened his finger over the button.

“She wonders why you’ve stopped the lift, even though she knows,” said Pansy. “And it's because she knows that she’s nervous.”

Hermione shifted from one foot to another, and crossed her arms over her chest. Fiddled with the top button of her shirt.

Licked her lip.

“But you don’t say anything. You smirk a bit, like you do. It drives her mad. Look at her. Make her wait. Make her wonder. Who’s going to move? Put your hands in your pockets. It won't be you. Not yet.”

Draco slid his hands into his pockets.

“It seems like too long. You start to wonder if one of you might laugh, or grow uncomfortable. She’s always thinking, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"She wants to say something clever and scathing, but hasn't figured it out just yet.”

Hermione’s brow knit together, and her mouth opened by a degree. 

“But then,” said Pansy. “Before her clever little brain can figure out something to ruin the moment, she sees the way that you look at her. The way that you always look at her."

Hermione’s mouth closed again, and her eyes grew wide.

“She knows. She blushes, because as smart as she is, something about relationships and sex eludes her—something about you eludes her—and she's not used to confusion. But it's fascinating, too, what her body wants from the world. She takes one step into you. She lets her body decide."

A tint of pink traveled up from Hermione's throat to her cheeks as she shifted into Draco's space.

"You’re not worried about being professional now. Notice her hips. Her arse. Her breasts. Let her see you looking. It feels powerful to be wanted by someone that you want.”

Draco let himself look.

There was a perfect round curve to her arse. He'd woken up one morning, alone, drowsy and aroused, and thought quite specifically about holding it in his palms while he thrust up into her from below and watched her breasts move again and again in sympathetic rebounds.

In the lift, her shirt was tucked into the waistband of the skirt, and through the gap between her buttons he saw a hint of mint green.

"Give in. You win no matter who's the first to touch."

Draco slipped his hands from his pockets, and let his left hand go where it wanted to, curling around Hermione's waist.

"She’s warm. Solid. She feels real.”

He could feel the heat of her skin radiating against his palm. The counterweight of her flesh under his hand.

“There’s a part of her that you’ve been desperate to touch.”

“Her hair,” said Draco, not meaning to say it out loud and only half aware that he had.

“You run your free hand up into her curls,” whispered Pansy. “They’re a fucking mess. She’s learned more from books than any wizard in half a generation, but never quite understood what to do with that fucking head of hair. Pull. Gently. Do it with care. You want and respect her.”

Draco threaded his hand into the back of Hermione’s hair, mangled his fingers through it, and drew back.

Hermione gasped.

“She likes to feel like someone else is in charge for once. That she’s not the most competent person in the room,” said Pansy from somewhere off in the ether. “But she’s never quiet. How does she tell you what she wants?”

“She says it. She’s direct. Bossy thing.”

Touch me. Fuck me.

Draco’s chest constricted with want.

“Then she’ll say, ‘Kiss me,’ won’t she? In that way she does when she’s not being given her way fast enough.”

Kiss me, said Hermione’s mouth, keen and irritable.

"Do as you're told," ordered Pansy.

Draco, giving and benevolent, brought his lips to Hermione's.

He wasn’t sweet. Instead, he moved rushed and rough against her mouth, licking at her in pettish and demanding strokes, punishing her softly for her obtuseness and her pride, teaching her the hard facts of his want.

“Is this where you fuck her for the first time?” Pansy’s voice, a thousand miles away.

“No.”

“Good boy. On your knees.”

Hermione whined as his mouth left hers.

He dropped to his knees, pulled her knickers down without ceremony or tact, hitched her leg over his shoulder.

“Make her come. Quickly. You’re in a public place, and you don't want to be caught.”

He made short work of her.

Following the trail of sounds she made, he drew her on with fast, flat strokes, not bothering with his fingers, but keeping the focus of all the efforts of her body and his tongue on the single mercenary point of her clit.

Before five minutes had passed, her legs clenched at his shoulders and her hands, woven into his hair, roamed scattered and aimless over his scalp.

“Tell me when she comes.”

Finally, Hermione’s body seized and stilled, moving in tight bursts of tension, arching against his mouth and then suddenly moving away.

Yes.

She whined when she came, forever petulant.

“Yes. Just like that,” Draco whispered.

“Let her ride it out. She looks incredible when she comes.”

Fuck.

Hermione's legs quivered under his hands.

“Did you do a good job?”

“Yes.” His cock was so hard it hurt.

“Open your eyes.”

Draco let his eyelids lift, and heard the click of a shutter.

Chapter Text

“Oh.”

It was more than a breath, and less than a word—a particle, drifting through the air at the edges of the bastardly briar patch of the English language.

“Oh?” Draco frowned. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing at all. It’s…” Hermione considered, hand hovering. “It’s so nice.”

“It’s not nice, it’s—oh, fuck.”

“God, you little bast—” Hermione bit her tongue. “You can shove right off.” She swatted at a blue paper parakeet as it careened across the sill of the transom window over her door, enthusiastic to the point of derangement, and flapped around her left ear. She picked up her wand, swiveled in her chair and blew the bird across the room in a gust of air. “In the corner with everyone else.”

“They pile up quickly, don’t they?” said Jonathan Gable, crossing his right knee over his left on the grey chesterfield next to Hermione’s office door.

“They do.” Pushing a seditious curl out of her right eye, she slid further back on the corner of her desk, crossed her ankles and swung her legs to and fro. “My apologies, Jonathan. I’m a bit scattered today; I’m afraid I’ve lost the plot.”

“No need to apologize. I was only saying that I’ve developed a pet theory about that string of unfortunate discoveries on the Channel coast. I understand DMLE doesn’t have a working hypothesis at this point, and I’ve been wondering if it’s worth bringing my thoughts to Robards.”

Hermione plucked a leaf of bok choy from her takeout box and examined it. “At this point Robards would be happy if you could make a sound case for the arrest of his own grandmother. He's clearly had his fill of pensioners whose dogs have fetched in shoes with the feet still present.”

“I think the pensioners have had their fill of that as well.”

“Indeed. Of course I only come into the picture at case intake, not at the point when bits wash up on the strand in Clacton-on-Sea. No one's asking for my opinion, but I’d say he's open to help from any quarter.”

“I believe the shoe was in Margate,” said Jonathan. “Clacton-on-Sea was the entire Belgian fellow.”

“What a relief that was.”

“Yes! No assembly required. Mine is a funny theory, I’ll be the first to admit.”

Hermione set down the greens and picked up a box of salt-and-pepper tempeh. “Try me.”

“Are you familiar with the lesser scaled Norwegian sea snake?”

Hermione shook her head. “I can’t say that I am.”

“Hydrophis bergensis. It's one of only three known species of magical sea serpents in the Northern Hemisphere. Sightings are vanishingly rare, but it's fully accepted that they actually exist."

"Interesting! I had no idea."

"It's a fascinating animal. But what I've been thinking of recently is its cousin. There's only been one creditably documented sighting, all the way back in 1919—by Newt Scamander, unsurprisingly.” Jonathan looked at Hermione with an air of expectancy. When she nodded, he continued. “This cousin, if it exists, is similarly scaled, but much, much larger. Hydrophis sandwichus.”

“Mm!” Hermione pointed her chopsticks at him. “The Sandwich Sea Serpent. I read about it once in a compendium of monster lore. I thought it was mythological. A sort of Hydra of the Strait of Dover.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Is what Scamander saw a real animal? Is so, how much has it been embellished over time in the local imagination? And if we accept snakes the size of naval vessels in the English Channel as a possibility, do they represent a separate species, or somehow the outer limits of individual variation? Newt wasn't known for exaggeration."

“Snakes are one of your personal interests, aren’t they?”

“Yes. My particular obsession is magical serpents of the Americas. Did you know that there’s a small, non-venomous, semi-spectral snake native to coastal New England that’s invisible to everything except cats? It evolved without them being present, and hasn’t adapted to their extra-dimensional perceptive capacities. I'd love to allocate some grant money to researching them. Have you ever heard of Maria Marchenko?”

Hermione stiffened. “The name sounds vaguely familiar.” She leaned back as though stretching out her spine, and with the edge of her little finger pushed the folded gossip pages of The Prophet further under a memo.

“She’s done scholarship in this field, and as it turns out, Draco Malfoy is personally acquainted with her.” Jonathan’s eyebrows rose like an exciteable Muppet.

“Is he?”

“He is! Can you believe it?"

"It's astonishing. I had no idea."

"He very generously put me in contact with her three weeks ago, and we discovered that she and I both have great-grandmothers in Glasgow. I have a little house near Loch Lomond, and Maria and her wife Klara are keen to visit. They’re going to come and stay for a long weekend. We’ll talk serpents, they'll meet Holly, and we’ll all have a go at Ben Lomond.”

“Holly?” Hermione’s face fell. “I didn’t realize you had a partner.”

Jonathan laughed, his expression evolving from happy-go-lucky to outright beatific. “I don't, as such. Have I not showed you? Come and have a look.” After digging his wallet from the back pocket of his trousers, he gestured for Hermione to sit beside him.

She eased herself onto her sofa, stabbed a piece of tempeh and prepared to meet Jonathan’s not-as-such partner with equanimity.

“This,” he said, flipping his wallet open and showing her a series of small photographs, “is Holly. She’s the best part of my life if I’m being honest.”

“Oh!” Hermione leaned in closer. “She's beautiful. She looks so—" She dug around for the correct word "—energetic.”

“She is that! I think it gets to her a bit, being stuck in the city during the work week, but we hop out to Scotland most weekends, and go out on runs, bike rides, that sort of thing.”

“Does she like cats?” asked Hermione hopefully.

“The question is more appropriately: do they like her? They often don’t care for her level of interest. She wants everyone to stay in line, and cats aren’t overly fond of being told what to do.”

“I see.” Hermione’s hopes began a protracted and wistful deflation, like a beach ball with an invisible hole on a warm day at the seaside.

“I've just added a picture from our most recent holiday."

Hermione leaned in closer as he flipped through his photographs.

“Here we are.” He stopped on a picture of himself, muscular and tan in canvas shorts and a fitted white t-shirt, crouched beside a smiling border collie with a red bandana around her neck. "This is Holly and I in the North Cascade mountains in Washington State, in America. Truly spectacular country. She isn’t fond of Portkey travel, but I’d love to go again.”

As Hermione opened her mouth to respond, her door swung open.

“No!” She wafted her hand at the doorway. “I’m in a meeting.”

Draco, halfway through the door with his hand still on the knob, scrutinized Hermione’s empty desk and the unoccupied pair of visitor’s chairs in front of it, and finding no one, peered around the edge of the door toward the chesterfield.

Jonathan waved from his place beside Hermione. “Hello, Malfoy.”

Draco’s eyes narrowed. “You.”

“Me!” Jonathan smiled, broad and genial, and nodded at the takeout sack in Draco’s hand. “Looks like you’ve brought your lunch.”

Draco glanced down at his takeout, then stared at Jonathan for a moment before turning away from him as though he were an object as prosaic and uninteresting as a standpipe.

He pulled a paperboard box from the bag and held it out to Hermione. “I’ve brought you beef chow fun.”

Hermione gasped. "Oh, God, yes.” She jumped up from the sofa and grabbed the box, inhaling deeply as she opened the lid and made her way to her desk. Abandoning the box of tempeh, she sat down in her chair and began to eat.

Draco set the empty takeout bag on the corner of Hermione’s desk, then pulled a file folder from under his arm and tossed it on top of her stack of case files for immediate review.

“Not there! Unless it’s urgent.” She pointed her chopsticks at a separate pile. “If it can wait, put it there.”

Draco dug a pair of chopsticks from the takeout bag. “It’s very urgent. Top priority.”

He picked up Hermione’s discarded box of tempeh and sat down in a semi-sprawl on the chesterfield so that between his long arms and longer legs he managed to fill the two thirds that Jonathan wasn’t using.

He turned to Jonathan and stared at him while he jammed a piece of tempeh into his mouth.

“Comfortable?”

Jonathan considered the chesterfield, rubbing his palm over its arm. “It’s a lovely sofa, isn’t it? It’s funny, but it occurs to me that in all the meetings we’ve held in this office, I can’t say that I’ve ever sat on it before.”

“And you had to do it, didn't you?” Draco took another bite of tempeh. “Are you here on business, Gable, or is this a social call?”

“A little of both. But duty calls, I’m afraid.” Jonathan stood up, put his hands in his pockets and jingled the coins in the left hand side. “I suppose I’ll go and have that chat with Robards, if you think he’d be open to it, Hermione.”

Hermione dipped her head in approval. “Can’t hurt anything. The worst that could happen is he'll think you have a weird snake fixation.”

“Gable does have a weird snake fixation,” said Draco, inching into the space Jonathan had vacated on the sofa.

“Speaking of which, Malfoy: did you know that I’m having Maria and Klara to Loch Lomond next—”

“I heard. May your friendship be a long and productive one.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Jonathan smiled at Draco, and was rewarded with an unvarnished grimace. “Alright! I’ll be off. Enjoy your lunch!”

As Jonathan saw himself out the door, Draco put the box of tempeh on the low table beside the chesterfield, then stretched out lengthwise, tucked his arms behind his head and closed his eyes.

“Enjoying yourself?” Hermione asked.

“Immensely.”

“You're not the liege lord of my sofa, you know.”

Draco opened one eye and regarded her. “Granger, if a woman tells a man he’s the only person who ever uses her sofa, and one day he walks in to find another man sitting on it, bold as brass in broad daylight, he’s bound to be put out.”

Hermione paused with her chopsticks halfway into her box of chow fun. “ One time —and it was several months ago now—I made the mistake of saying that you’re the only person who ever sits on the blasted thing. I never implied that you’re the only one allowed to do so. There’s no such thing as settee monogamy.”

Draco closed his eye again. “Was he as good as me?”

“He was extraordinary. My cushions will never be the same again.”
Draco performed a caricature of a pout.

“Maybe the needs of my upholstered  sitting surfaces aren't being met.” Hermione failed to prevent a sliver of amusement from appearing on her face as she stabbed her chopsticks into her lunch, set the box down on her desk and swiveled her chair from side to side. “You’ve never once called me over to show me photographs of your holiday travels with your beloved canine companion, no matter how often I’ve begged you for it.”

“A man is allowed to have limits. Showing you pictures of my dog on this sofa is one of them.”

"You don't have a dog."

"No, but if I did, I certainly wouldn't show it to you. Hard limit, Granger." He reopened his eye. “Are you speaking to me again?”

She leaned her elbow on the arm of her chair with her chin resting in her hand, watching him, but when he looked back at her, she turned away.

Her skin buzzed with self-consciousness.

“I was never not speaking to you,” she mumbled into her palm. "You make me sound like a child."

She heard him turn over on the sofa to face her.

“Is that a new blouse?” he asked.

“What?" She looked down at herself. "I suppose it is.” She felt, as she did so often since their encounter in Evidence Storage, unable to look at him. She twisted away from him in her chair, and peered at him from the corner of her eye.

He watched her, resting on his elbow with his head cradled in his hand.

"What are you looking at?" she asked.

“Come over here.”

She fought back the upward drift of the corners of her mouth, and was victorious. “Why?”

“I want you to show it to me.” He spoke very quietly, his goddamned pillowy mouth twisted up into its comfortable, customary smirk, pleased as ever with itself.

Hermione stood, pulled by invisible strings, and crossed the room.

“Here,” she said, coming to a stop next to the sofa. “See? It has flowers. I've been wondering if it isn't a bit low cut.”

Draco rolled over onto his back. “It's fine.”

If there was a good reason why Hermione sat beside him in the narrow strip of space at the edge of the chesterfield, she wasn't aware of it.

The look of self-satisfaction that bloomed across his face when she did was enough to make her want to tell him where he could put his chow fun.

“It’s very nice." He drew one hand from behind his head, and took the fabric at the side of her blouse between his fingertips. "Soft.”

“It is, isn’t it? I wasn't sure about pink, but it's growing on me.”

“I like it very much.” He gave a slight tug at the edge of her sleeve. “It's different for you.” His eyes traveled over her like he was contemplating what else she might have bought for herself to wear.

“What’s in the file you brought me?” she asked.

At that, Draco’s face turned whiter than usual in some areas and took on a feverish rouge tint in all the others.

“Just some photos." He arched an eyebrow at her. "I think you'll find them relevant to our unresolved case.”

Hermione rotated to face him head on. “Have you brought me photographs of a Channel snake?"

Draco opened his mouth and then closed it again. "That seemed a bit precipitous. And can we please call it something else?"

"Do you prefer 'serpent'? I'm sure 'monster' is taking it a bit far."

"I agree that would be over-selling it. It's not going to be causing dislocations any time soon."

"Dismemberments."

"What? Good God." He furrowed his brow. "What are we talking about right now?"

"Jonathan was in here telling me about a theory he has. Something about a sea monster.”

"What monster?"

"In the Channel."

"The English Channel?"

"Yes."

"Ah." He looked relieved. "Hold on—Gable thinks there's a literal snake in the English Channel?"

"Apparently. Newt Scamander claimed to have had an encounter with one."

"If there's a sea monster down there, I'll take Gable up on his invitation to climb The Buachaille. I'll wear a kilt while I'm doing it. Take a photograph with his dog, and then I'll show it to you, sitting right here on this sofa."

"I'm going to hold you to that." She tilted her head to one side. “I had such hopes for Jonathan for Kath, but he seems to be partnered with his border collie.”

Draco guffawed. “You're trying to set up Gable with Kath? Over in Justice? Of course you are. Obstinate woman."

Hermione bristled. "I am not obstinate—"

She burned at the manifest affection in his expression.

"Hermione, I don’t know how you’ve managed to fix that mind of yours on Kath and Jonathan, they're—”

“She’s only a year or two over thirty. He's very kind, and she deserves someone kind. It’s not out of the question that he’d—”

Draco’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “That is not the problem. I trust even Jonathan understands the appeal of an older woman. The problem is that Jonathan Gable is a very nice man who needs to meet a very nice woman who will enjoy both light mountaineering and frequent trips to the cinema. Kath, on the other hand, would like to continue to wear her cardigans two sizes too large and sit at home with a book and the pride of cats that she enjoys treating like human infants, pining over Mr. Drees.”

Hermione leaned back. “Arnold Drees?”

“That’s right.”

“But Mr. Drees likes men."

Draco nodded.

"Brunettes," Hermione added.

"Just so."

"Sort of narrow, artistic fellows.”

“He does.”

Hermione’s dreams of office matchmaking hissed away their last cubic centimetre of air and lay flaccid in the waves on the strand, pushed to and fro by the tide of her evident myopia.

“How do you know all of this?” she asked.

“I pay attention when people talk to me. And when they don’t.” He reached up and pushed the rebel curl out of her eye. “Unlike some people.”

His fingertips dropped to Hermione’s wrist, and she pulled away.

“Hermione.”

“What?”

“Please don’t be angry with me. If I’d known it would upset you, I never would have—” He broke off. “Tell me what I need to do.”

She regarded the funnel of hyperactive birds and aeroplanes whirling in the corner by the anemic ficus, and twisted the chain of her long gold necklace with a pendant H around her fingertip.

He’d been in the papers all spring and summer, and by August his personal affairs had become a full-blown national obsession.

It began with snippets of printed gossip with no pictures: Draco Malfoy sighted dancing with unidentified women in Berlin. Having dinner with a model in Paris.

The photographs, when they started to appear, were tame.

Holding his companions' shopping bags in Cannes. Sunbathing in Villefranche-sur-Mer.

But in the face of mounting evidence, increasing in suggestiveness with each passing week, one was forced to conclude that Draco Malfoy enjoyed the intimate company of supernaturally beautiful women, and indulged in it as often as his duties to the Ministry would allow.

It might not have troubled her at all, if she hadn’t deluded herself into believing that for a period of months, he’d been trying to flirt with her. And what was worse, she had been silly enough to imagine his intentions were sincere.

As the summer wore on, if she paused to consider why she flipped to the gossip section of The Prophet before she consumed the more sober reporting of the front page, she decided it was only to humble herself with the knowledge that sometimes, despite the perspicacity for which she was justly renowned, she was wrong. 

“What I need,” she said without further deliberation, “is for things to be equal between us.”

Draco’s gaze flicked to her desk. “So you’ve said. I think you might find—”

“I'm going to need to give you a handjob.” She sat up tall and peered down her nose at him.

His eyes grew wide to the point of comedy, then regained their customary detached composure. Shoulders jolting with the beginnings of a laugh, he surprised her by reaching up, sliding his hand around the back of her neck and pulling her down at the same time that he pushed up on his elbow, lifting his face toward hers.

His gaze fixed on her mouth with a hazy expression as he drew her close.

"Come here."

Her hand slapped over the center of his chest.

“No kissing.”

He stopped moving and stared. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“That’s—” She eyed her obscenities jar.

“Fuck your jar right now.” He frowned, and Hermione was startled to find that he looked genuinely hurt. “No kissing? Why?”

Because I like you more than you like me, she thought.

It felt childish. And perhaps it was. But less so than what she actually said, which was:

“Because that’s not even, is it?” Her chin lifted, buoyed by fabricated pride.

He sat back on his elbows, evidently thinking. After a long while, he looked up at her, his face resolute.

If she thought she had put on a convincing display of self-regard, it had nothing on the hauteur of an unaccountably wounded Malfoy.

“No.” He sat up, swung himself from the end of the chesterfield and stood.

Hermione stared at him in disbelief. “No?”

He faced her, hands buried in his pockets. “No thank you.”

“You’re telling me right now”—Hermione rose from the sofa—”that you do not want a no-strings-attached handjob.”

The way he rocked back on his heels enraged her. “I do not.”

“What’s wrong with my handjobs, Malfoy?”

“What’s wrong with your—" He blinked. "Nothing. I’m sure they’re perfectly—” he foraged around for the correct word “—adequate.”

She watched his face contort in a slow-motion cringe.

“My handjobs,” she said, her insides fizzing with embarrassment, “are far beyond adequate.”

A trio of soft raps sounded at Hermione’s closed office door.

“Is everything alright, Ms. Granger?”

“Everything is fine, Miss Kapoor. Actually, it’s not fine. It's outstanding. ”

She turned her attention back to Draco.

“My handjobs are spectacular, Malfoy. I’ve studied numerous approaches, and taken every available opportunity to put them into practice. Based on several observable measures—”

He covered his face with his hands. “Fuck me.” 

“—my manual technique is superb. I’ve been given highly favorable feedback from multiple partners.”

He let his hands drop. “Let me be perfectly clear.” He looked straight into her eyes. “I very much want you to give me one of your swotty handjobs.”

“Good!" She stepped toward him.

“I also”—he gripped her wrist as she went for his belt buckle—”really fucking want to kiss you, Hermione.”

She pulled her hand back. “This is extortion.”

“No, it’s a boundary."

“Fine."

“Fine?”

“Yes, I said fine.”

Draco breathed out in relief, then grasped the back of her neck again, and began to lean in to her, the red at his cheeks deepening and his eyes falling halfway closed.

“I meant fine, no handjob." She pushed at his chest and stepped out of his reach, waving a hand in the air in a gesture of dismissal. “We'll just have to be uneven forever.”

He stared at her.

“Fuck,” he said.

She sucked in a breath. What she wanted, more than anything in the whole entire world, was to give in. But as she was herself and could not be otherwise, ceding this point or any other remained beyond her capabilities.

"Please recall that swearing in my office—"

He marveled at her, then reached into his pocket.

“Fucking—" he pulled out a Galleon, and with a flick of his thumb sent it sailing into the obscenities jar, where it landed with a heavy tink "—fuck."

She seethed.

“Keep the change, Granger.”

With that, he walked around her, hauled open her office door, and was lost in the shuffle of the halls of justice.

“I’ll keep your change, alright,” she muttered to herself, jamming her quill down into her inkwell and spattering her thumb with a wet indigo stain. She wiped her hand off on a cloth she kept at her desk for that purpose, then pushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Bloody N.E.W.T. level. Both hands, and you won’t soon forget it.”

At the tip of the tail whooshing from the end of her signature, her quill tip snapped.

“Bollocks.”

“You doing alright, Mione?”

“I’m fine. Perfectly adequate. ” Hermione held out the freshly signed Azkaban inmate interview request form to Ron, who drew the extra quill from Hermione’s ink well and signed it himself before handing it back.

Ron drummed his long fingers against his knees. “It’s only that you’ve got … ” He pointed at his temple.

“What I want to know,” Hermione said, leaning forward at her desk, “is where exactly he gets off, when he’s been promiscuously gadding for months, acting affronted by the limits I’ve articulated about the kind of intimacy that I’m comfortable with.”

Ron's mouth set in a hard line. "You'll get no argument from me. I know you’re terribly fond, and honestly I was fully convinced he was as well before he started in on this business of yachting with naked women, but—”

Hermione’s shoulders clenched toward her ears. “I am not fond. Who ever said anything about fond? When is that a word?”

Vexed, she flipped open the file folder Draco had tossed on her desk earlier, only to find a single white photograph envelope labeled Evidence in Draco’s narrow, fussy hand. She pulled it out and tucked it inside her folder full of miscellany related to the unexplained Channel deaths. 

“Sure.” Ron picked up a box from her desk, wrapped in a pink and white striped ribbon. “You quite clearly don't fancy him. And if you did, you certainly wouldn't have started just after the two of you arm wrestled at the Ministry Solstice retreat last year.”

“I won fair and square.”

“You were off your trolley and had candyfloss in your hair, and he couldn’t stop laughing about it, but okay.”

“I’m very powerful when I’m full of mead.”

“And you very powerfully deserved it when he threw you in the lake. Here.” He held out his box. “Scone? You’ll feel better. Katie told me I'm not allowed to say so, but I don’t like him flirting with you the way he does if it's just a lark. It was a struggle to not tear him a new one after I saw that photograph in The Prophet the other week.”

“I’m a big girl, but thank you for the sentiment.” Hermione eyed the box with suspicion. “Have they got sultanas in?”

“God, no,” he said, untying the ribbon and removing a plump yellow scone with no bits of dried fruit baked inside. “Here, you can even have one of the little jam pots. They're so cute you'll forget all about that pillock.” He handed her the scone, and then a tiny glass jam jar with a red and white gingham lid.

“Mm," she said, less speech and more grunt.

“Don’t pout.”

“I’m not pouting.”

"That's just delusional.” Ron beckoned her with a jerk of his head. “Come on then.”

She dragged herself from her chair and maneuvered herself around her desk and into Ron’s open arms.

“It’s physically painful for me to say this, but you’re a very clever couple of idiots.” He folded his arms around her, bent his head and rested his chin on the crown of her head. “If you do fancy one another, you’ll figure out how to stumble into bed eventually.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

“Mm.” Ron mimicked her, patting the back of her hair.

“You haven’t said anything to anyone?” Hermione grumbled into the button placket of Ron’s shirt.

“Of course not. I’ve had Harry Obliviate the existence of Evidence Storage from my mind. McLaggen has to fetch everything up and down the lift now.”

“Be serious.”

“I seriously have no desire to talk about Malfoy outside of these chats that you and I have. Beyond repeating absolutely everything to Katie, I haven’t said a word. She’s convinced he’s besotted with you, did I tell you?"

"No."

"We’ve made a wager over it. If she wins I have to shag her in her signed Oliver Wood jersey and say 'Magpies', when she asks me which is the greatest Quidditch team of all time in the middle of it. I'm only just now realizing it's a win for me in any case.” He laid his hands over the tops of Hermione's shoulders and squeezed. “She’s getting some friends together to turn old Quidditch jerseys into quilts for the St. Mungo’s children’s ward at the weekend, by the way. I told her you wouldn’t be interested in sewing, but you might want to come by for the company. Write get well cards out for the kids. I’ll make sandwiches and George will do up his margaritas and you can tell everyone their seams are uneven.”

“That sounds grand.”

He leaned away from her and looked her in the eye. “If you want me to speak with him, I can. I think Robards sent him off on a boating expedition this afternoon, but maybe tomorrow or Sunday afternoon. He owes me a few favors. I can take him out for a pint under duress.”

“Merlin, no. No one should ever speak with Malfoy.”

A series of sudden, extraordinary shouts resounded from the hall.

Hermione trailed behind Ron’s lanky frame out of her office, through the huddle of secretarial desks in the open front room of the Ministry Prosecution Service, and into the hall.

Gawain Robards, Head Auror, stood just outside the door to the DMLE offices, deep in conversation with one of the women from Dispatch. He looked up and frowned.

Draco was stalking down the corridor, followed at a distance by Cormac, the pair of them leaving a trail of puddles as they went.

“I heard you say, ‘Let’s take a beer.’” Cormac's voice was elevated and defensive. “Was I supposed to be in a rush over it?”

“No, I very much said ‘The snake’s right here.’”

“They sound the same.”

“No, they fucking do not. And who the fuck says ‘take a beer’? What is that? Is it like taking tea? Were we going to pour ourselves pints and stare at one another like a pair of spinster aunts in a Victorian drawing room?”

Cormac shook his hair, sending a spray of water over Arnold Drees, Percy Weasley’s personal secretary in the Office of the Minister for Justice, who was making his way from the lifts with an armload of dusty parchment rolls.

“There was rather a lot of water between the two of us. You didn’t exactly come through loud and clear on the commspell.” Cormac paused, tipped his head to one side and bashed at his temple with the heel of his hand as though he was trying to shake loose an earful of water.

Draco stopped, turned on his heel, and lifted a black leather band around his wrist close to his mouth. “Phons maxima.” He narrowed his eyes at Cormac. “How’s this? Can you hear me now?”

“Yeah, of course I can—”

“There’s a giant fucking snake down here! ” Draco shouted into his wrist.

Cormac clapped his hand over his ear. “Fuck! Merlin, that fucking hurt!”

“You know what really hurts? Getting five liters of seawater up your sinuses in one go because your co-investigative officer has been weighing whether he ought to serve a stout or a lager in his best china teacups, and let the boat drift by thirty metres.”

Cormac looked wounded. “You’re a fast swimmer.”

“Not”—the water dripping from the tips of Draco’s fingers sent out concentric circles as it fell into the growing puddle around his feet—”as fast as that snake.”

Cormac, having successfully evacuated the water from his ear canal, glanced over at Hermione. His eyebrows lifted, and he appraised her from head to toe, his mouth pulling into an arch smile. 

“Nice shirt, Hermione. That’s a new look for you.”

He winked.

Hermione looked at Draco.

His black speckle tweed trousers and waistcoat were saturated, his tie askew and white shirt translucent, and his hair, in damp disarray, looked dishwater blond.

He’d gone very pale and quite still.

Without another word, he made a wandless gesture with his left hand—a back-handed, elegant sweep down the length of his body from his forehead to his hip. All of the water fell off him, leaving his hair, skin and clothes perfectly dry, and spread in a vast puddle beneath him on the dark marble of the Ministry floor. A second gesture—left-handed again, a shallow scoop with a curved palm and fingers held close together—swept the water forward and gathered it into a sphere on the ground in front of him, and a third—palm flat, fingers splayed, an upward lift then a sharp shove forward—pulled it up from the floor then sent it toward Cormac at a velocity that ruffled Mr. Drees’ hair as it passed.

Cormac had already tugged his wand out from its holster, and as Draco made his last gesture, he cast a clumsy Protego. When the ball of water struck the surface of the magical shield, it burst, spraying out at an angle toward Mr. Drees.

The door to the Office of the Minister for Justice swung open.

“What’s going on out here?” Percy Weasley—as tall as Ron, equally long-limbed, but a darker ginger and groomed to uncompromising perfection in a midnight blue three-piece suit—peered out into the hallway. He looked down at Mr. Drees, a slightly built man of thirty whose sandy hair was perpetually in need of a trim. “Why are you wet, Mr. Drees?”

Mr. Drees sat back on his heels and made a fatalistic sweeping gesture with both hands at the soaked mass of parchment on the floor in front of him.

“Apparently there’s a bloody great snake in the Channel, isn’t there?” he said, voice quavering. “And now everyone’s fighting, and my records request has been spoiled.” He wiped his forehead on the back of his shirtsleeve. “It took me all week to compile these.” He looked up at Hermione with his limpid eyes. “That is a lovely blouse. Pink's a great color on you. Very soft.”

She looked down at her shirt front, then back at Mr. Drees.

“Thanks, Arnold.”

“Want a scone, Drees?” Ron held out his pastry box.

The water dripped from Mr. Dress’ elbows onto the floor.

“That would be grand.” He pointed limply at his own temple. "Hermione, love, you've got ink just there."

"Have you polished up your 'I told you so'?" Hermione held the door to the Office of the Minister for Justice open for Jonathan Gable.

"I will admit to being pleased that the Beast Division's expertise is relevant to the situation," he said, chin propped on top of the stack of books in his arms. "I'm not as up on the specifics as the rest of you are, but I understand there's a snake down there after all?" His eyes gleamed. "Malfoy actually saw it?"

"So it seems. Here." Hermione drew her file of miscellaneous Channel documents from under her arm and slid it under Jonathan's chin. "Everything that's made its way over to me is in there. It's a reasonable overview. You can look through that while the meeting gets underway."

They skirted the sea of clerks at their desks in the open front office, passed a door with a brass plate mounted beside it that read:

Percy Weasley

Second Permanent Secretary

and quietly stepped into Meeting Room 5.

“ … give them another five minutes before I send a note over to Miss Kapoor—”

Percy, sitting at the head of the conference table, cut himself off as Hermione eased sideways through the door.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t open your memo straight away, Perce.”

Percy’s memo had arrived in a timely fashion, but Hermione, absorbed in editing a draft of a legal pleading and failing to notice that it was marked Urgent, had shunted it into the maelstrom at the rear of her office. There it swirled in mounting agitation before it finally broke free of Hermione’s holding spell, torpedoed itself at the back of her head and became pinioned by the pair of hair sticks corralling her curls in a shaggy bun at her nape.

Percy watched her coolly as she took her seat beside Draco at the long edge of the table closest to the door, then turned his eye to Jonathan, who hauled his stack of books to the seat directly across from Hermione and to Robards' immediate right. He dropped them in a teetering column that threatened to collapse sideways into Robards' lap.

None of their secretaries were present, suggesting that whatever they were going to discuss involved highly classified information of the sort Hermione was rarely privy to.

She arranged her parchment and quill in front of herself, folded her hands on the table, and waited.

“Now that we’re all present,” said Percy, flipping open a thick folder, “let’s begin.”

He placed a series of photographs in the center of the table.

Almost all of the photographs were of men, and Hermione only recognized three of them.

One was a British national whose body was found by a Muggle teenager on the beach in Boulogne-sur-Mer a month previous. His file had come across Hermione’s desk on numerous occasions in connection with criminal conspiracies ranging from smuggling Dark artifacts and illegal Potions to trafficking, but investigators could never tie him definitively to anything more serious than larceny and a string of petty crimes.

Another of the photographs was of a French recreational diver connected to nothing criminal whatsoever, whose body had been repatriated to his country after being mostly discovered in Deal.

The third man Hermione had seen before was—

“Michel Durand,” said Percy, indicating the photograph in the very center of the table. “Is there anyone at this table who doesn’t recognize him?”

Everyone remained silent.

“Copies of his dossier have been made for each of you to review at your convenience, but for the purposes of this discussion, we only need to understand that he is French Belgian, from an old and distinguished Pureblood family, and holds both French and Belgian citizenship. He is an entrepreneur with the second highest net worth of any individual Wizard in Europe.” Percy glanced reflexively at Draco. “He is also a known racketeer.”

Durand was in his 60s, fit and exceptionally handsome, with a full head of grey hair. In his photograph, he brushed his hair out of his face, looking somewhere off into the Mediterranean from the deck of his yacht.

La Sirène, Hermione recalled from a recent profile in Magiconomics Quarterly.

It was six metres longer than the Ladon, whose dimensions Hermione had once read about in Witch Weekly, sitting in her stylist’s waiting area, in an article titled The 10 Most Eligible Wizards in the World.

The most eligible wizard in the world was a Canadian named Storm Remington who modeled men's designer pants and had once punched a great white shark while surfing in Mozambique.

The second most eligible sat to Hermione’s right in Meeting Room 5 adjusting his reading glasses against the bridge of his nose.

Across the table, Jonathan ranged his stack of books into three piles, and opened up the file folder Hermione had given him.

Percy resquared his papers, and then his quill, and then his ink well to the edge of the table.

“One of several areas where Durand’s personal and business interests have intersected is the hunting and live collection of animals protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Magical Species. Intelligence has been available for decades relating to the invitation only hunting parties he hosts on his estate in Tanzania.”

Jonathan turned through several pages of documents in Hermione’s folder, held up a photograph, looked at it, then put it down again. Over the top of his fence of books, Hermione watched him lift the flap of a white photograph envelope.

“It will come as no surprise that a vast body of intelligence has been collected that connects Durand to a host of illegal activities,” Percy continued. “Until recently, no one has been able to pin him, personally, to any of it.”

Jonathan drew a photograph from the envelope, and then stopped moving entirely.

Percy paused to remove his black horn-rimmed glasses, clean them with a polishing spell, and then slide them back over his ears. “This year, the French and Belgian Ministries entered into a joint operation focusing exclusively on Durand’s purchases and sales of endangered magical reptiles, tracking the activities of his representatives and monitoring local poachers.”

Jonathan stared at the photograph.

“They were ultimately successful in identifying a handful of critical sales where Durand himself could potentially be documented directly conducting the transfer of prohibited animals.” Percy peered through his spectacles as he flipped through his files, gathering a stack of photographs.

Jonathan looked from the photograph in his hand, over to Draco, then back down at the photograph again.

“This afternoon, thanks to the astute thinking of Jonathan Gable—” Percy began.

Jonathan looked up and scanned the faces at the table. “Hello.”

“Yes. Hello. Thank you, Gable.” Percy's stoicism held. “This afternoon, Aurors Malfoy and McLaggen took what was meant to be a preliminary survey of the seabed at the Strait of Dover. They were prepared, at most, to uncover evidence of recent human activity. However, Auror Malfoy made the almost immediate discovery of this creature.”

Percy tossed the photographs into the center of the table, one after another.

Viewed in sequence, the images read like a narrative in a comic book.

In the first photograph, taken from inside the waterproof pocket of air Draco had conjured for himself at the bottom of the Channel, Draco's wand directed a strong beam of light out into a wall of ink black water, illuminating no more than suspended dust-pale specks of tiny marine life. Nothing happened in the loop but the aimless drift of the current, until the very end, when the water in the far background swirled almost imperceptibly.

In the next photograph, a pair of lucent white circles resolved into view from the black.

In the third image, a curved midnight blue snout shot forward through the water, and its jaws unhinged.

Hermione turned to Draco.

“It was so fast.” She was well aware of the throb in her voice.

He waved a hand at her. “It wasn’t as bad as it looks.”

“It looks like you were a metre away from shuffling off your mortal coil.”

Draco shrugged.

The remaining images told the rest of the story: a rapid Apparition to the surface; a brisk swim; several tumbles through the murk, like being on the inside of a washing machine; a brief moment of respite with Cormac in one of the DMLE’s dinghies; the blanched look of horror on Cormac’s face as the blue-black coils of a snake pushed against the side of the boat; the chaotic tilt and roll of the capsizing; a return to the dark water; then a sideways image of the Dover strand.

“Yeah. That’s a snake.” Robards, brick-built, heavily scarred and still muscled from years in the field, scratched at the buzzed grey hair at the side of his head. “But I don’t get the exsanguinations or the blokes we found in bits. Has anyone brought the photographs of the two fellows at Dover?”

“I have a set in my file,” said Hermione, nodding at the table in front of Jonathan.

Percy folded his fingers beneath his chin. “This is as good a moment as any, I think, for Mr. Gable to jump in with the available information on the species.”

“I’m doing what?” asked Jonathan. He’d turned pink as a plum and watched mutely as Robards reached over and slid Hermione’s file toward himself. He looked back at Percy. “Snake?”

Percy closed his eyes. “Yes. Snake please, Gable.”

Robards flipped the file open.

Jonathan appeared to recover himself, taking in a deep breath and rolling his shoulders back. “Unfortunately all we’re going to be able to do for the time being is make educated guesses based on what we know about what we can assume to be related species. I’ve had two thoughts that may be of interest. One, is that this snake is highly likely to be venomous.”

“You don’t say?” Draco picked up the underwater photograph showing the snake’s open jaws. Four rows of short, thin, needle-pointed teeth lined the roof of its mouth.

Robards lifted a photograph from Hermione’s file and stared at it.

“If hemotoxic,” said Jonathan, “its venom could easily cause exsanguination, particularly in the quantities a creature like that would deliver.”

“But Robards’ question still stands," said Hermione. "What about the dismemberments?” She tapped the end of her quill on the table in front of her. “Snakes don’t chew, I know that much.”

Robards looked across the table at Draco, then back down at the photograph in his hand. His mouth pulled into a semi-concealed smirk.

“This is where I suspect our stories all collide,” said Percy. “I’ve been following the Durand case with some interest, as a number of his associates are British nationals, and Durand’s activities are international in scope. Miss Granger, of course, has been consulting with the French and Belgian Ministries on crimes Durand’s deputies are suspected to have committed abroad.”

“Oh!” Hermione bolted up tall in her chair. “He wants the eggs!”

Percy’s marine blue eyes regarded her with infinite patience.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Hermione slapped the table. “He’s sent his men mucking about down there, stirred up this snake while trying to steal its eggs, and people have died. Some combination of run-ins with the snake itself, and then what? Equipment accidents?”

Robards tucked the photograph from Hermione’s file back into an envelope.

Draco tumbled his quill between his fingers. “Durand’s cleaners. They’re vile. Sloppy.”

“People would talk, too, wouldn’t they?” said Hermione, twisting in her chair toward Draco. “Especially if they’d hired ordinary laborers for the job, divers and so forth. They might run on about it at the pub.”

“This is one of yours Malfoy,” said Robards, holding the photograph envelope out over the table. 

“That's precisely what the evidence suggests, Miss Granger.” Percy drew a clipped stack of papers and photographs from his file, handed it to Draco, then brusquely took the envelope from Robards’ hand.

Draco glanced at the documents for half a second, then handed them to Hermione.

She laid them out on the table in front of herself.

It was a series of highly classified reports, heavily redacted. Hermione read as quickly as she could, trying to resolve the story around the sea of ink blocking out identifying details.

All of them documented what appeared to be a months-long sting operation.

“He’s been arrested, hasn’t he? Durand, I mean,” said Hermione. “I read it in the papers.”

“He has.” Percy opened the flap of the photograph envelope he’d snatched from Robards.

Durand was observed, Hermione could see in the reports, for some months. In Paris for a while. Belgium. Berlin, in cooperation with the German Ministry. Then he began his customary summer holidays on the Côte d'Azur.

Shopping in Cannes. Sunbathing on his yacht. Picking up women a third of his age in Nice.

There was a photograph of him reclining on a lounger beside the pool on the La Sirène, the cliffs of Monaco soaring sunlit and sepia toned in the distance.

It would have been taken from another yacht.

Hermione turned to Draco and stared, her mouth ajar.

He kept his eyes forward, examining the photographs on the table.

“My apologies if we’ve overlooked one of today’s photographs, Mr. Malfoy. I know you acquired them at great personal risk."

Percy drew the single photograph from the white envelope in his hand, and tossed it in the middle of Draco’s one-man underwater reptile encounter.

“Oh.” For only the second time in Hermione’s memory, Percy's face registered genuine surprise.

For better or for worse, there was no snake visible in the picture Percy had just thrown onto the table.

Draco had apparently retained his trunks for the photo shoot, the top centimetre of which were observable at the bottom edge of the photograph, riding low on his hips.

They were grey.

The tumbled linens around him were white, from the crumpled pillow beneath his head, his raised right arm clenched around its edge, to the folds of the sheets in an artful jumble behind and around him.

His body was beautiful.

She supposed too late that she might have looked away, but before the thought had even occurred she’d taken in his topography, from the strands of muscle in his arms to the curve of his pectorals, both hard and soft, to the crease running from his hip to his groin.

His hair was mussed, as though he’d been fucking. Not sleeping. There was a difference. Hermione had never realized there was before, but laid out for her consideration in the photograph, the distinction was obvious.

Pink blossoms of heat flowered at his throat and cheeks, and in the loop of the photograph he breathed hard, chest rising and then falling and rising again.

At the start of the image his eyes were closed, but then they opened, slow and laborious as though the effort of lifting them exhausted him completely.

Dilated to wide black discs, his pupils saw nothing that was in this world.

His tattooed left arm, parallel to his torso and visible only to the wrist, shifted inward, as though his hand drifted reflexively to his cock.

All five of those assembled in Meeting Room 5 stared at the table before them.

Hermione's thoughts had fallen into anarchy.

Water, snake, bed, boat, strand.

Eyes, chest, arm, wrist, cock—unseen, implied, anticipated. 

One’s heart found its way into one’s throat with the surprise of it, Hermione thought. The sudden swirl of movement in the deep and the dark, the opening eyes, the thrill and fear of discovering precisely what one had been looking for, where one least expected—where one never wanted—to find it.

Draco reached forward, picked up the photo of himself, and considered it for a moment before sliding it along the table toward Hermione.

"That's for you."

With the edge of her finger, Hermione slowly pushed it underneath her meeting notes.

Percy made a neurotic adjustment to the button of his left shirt cuff. “French constitutional law prohibits the extradition of its own nationals. Our goal is to determine whether chargeable offenses have been committed in connection with each of the deaths in the Channel—whether by Durand himself, or merely at his direction—within our jurisdiction. We’ll compile any evidence that would result in prosecution by the U.K. Ministry, and turn it over to the French Ministry so that he can be tried for his crimes by their courts.”

Robards, hand pressed over his eyes and face red, had for some time been choking back a laugh.

Percy picked up a stack of parchment and knocked its bottom edge flush against the table, then fitted it neatly into his file folder. “Mr. Malfoy and Miss Granger, please find Form IR-206C, Disclosure of Consensual Workplace Relationship, in the display of commonly used documents located in the foyer of Human Resources.”

“Oh!” Jonathan looked between Hermione and Draco with his border collie smile. “Really? I suppose I owe Mr. Drees a week’s worth of chocolate biscuits at lunch, don’t I?”

Robards’ efforts, zealous as they were, abruptly failed.

At 6:07, Hermione shifted her work satchel against her shoulder, and jammed her finger hard into the down button mounted in the wall outside the haunted rear lift.

After an interminable ninety seconds, the lift door dinged in a harmonically dissonant tone that made Hermione’s spine tingle.

“After you, Granger.”

Draco, standing to her left, swept his hand toward the open lift door.

She entered, hiking her satchel higher on her shoulder, and he followed, suit jacket slung over his arm and his own leather satchel dangling from his shoulder on the same side.

The lift doors closed with an expirational groan.

Hermione regarded the button panel.

“Atrium, please,” said Draco. He was using his Malfoy voice, thick with money and pedigree.

Hermione wanted to belt him one with her satchel.

She stabbed at the button labeled A—backlit with a weird, wan, grey-yellow light—and after a disconcerting interval, the lift car began to creak its way downward.

Hermione stared straight ahead at the dull metal surface of the doors, and shifted from one foot to the other.

“You know I would have used the front lifts if I’d had any idea you were going to leave this way,” she said at last.

She swiveled to face Draco.

He leaned his shoulder blades against the back of the lift, watching her.

“There’s room enough for two in here, Granger.” Underneath his usual smarmy expression, he looked extremely tired.

“You’ve still got your reading glasses on,” she said, sharp for no reason.

“I suppose I do.” He reached up and adjusted the arms against his ears. “Do you hate them?”

She allowed herself to look at him for a moment. “No.” Then she faced forward again.

They passed from Floor 3 to Floor 4 in silence, except for the mechanical grumbling of the lift.

She turned around to look at him once more, her belly churning with a mixture of feelings both known and novel: embarrassment; stubborn, simmering sexual desire; annoyance; regret; and something that felt like an unfamiliar species of want each time she investigated its shape.

“I suppose—” she began.

She had to think, harder than she was used to having to do, pushing aside all the wrong words but forced to watch, helpless, as they flowed and crowded back into place like dry sand.

“It must be nice. In Nice.” She pinched her eyes closed. "That was not meant to be a joke."

When she opened them again, he was still watching her, his amusement becoming more obvious and acute each time she opened her mouth to speak.

“I read an article, once, in Warlock, about your friend. The brunette, from the French Riviera.” For some reason she felt compelled to defend her reading material. “It was Cormac’s. The Warlock, not the article.”

He stiffened.

“An inmate interview was delayed at Azkaban,” she said, waving her hand in front of herself to banish the concept of intimacy with Cormac. “It was the only thing either of us had brought to read. The photography was remarkable.”

He tilted his head to the side, and waited.

“I thought at the time that it was so very interesting,” she prattled on, “that a woman with a Doctoral degree in Magicoherpetology would also model knickers for a living.”

“It is a fairly unusual combination, I imagine.”

His reading glasses made it difficult for Hermione to concentrate.

What she needed was precision and care.

“It would be difficult,” she said, trying. The words were critical. “To know—to care—a very great deal about endangered animals. Without taking some kind of action on their behalf."

Draco nodded. “I believe it is.”

Words weren’t going to cut it.

She searched his face instead, peering into each of his clear eyes, his black pupils and the desaturated blue of his irises, and asked him to tell her what she needed to know.

He stood up taller, looked back, and showed her—

Regret? Remorse?

No. She ran her awareness over the want-ish shape inside herself, found the name for it on his face, and called it longing.

“Thank you.” Pulling her satchel up on her arm, she meant to say, for the photograph that is sitting inside the book that is sitting inside this bag, which you meant for me to find and have to forgive me for unintentionally discarding and revealing, but instead she said, “For the picture. I suppose that makes us even.”

His face fell.

“That’s really what’s important to you?” he asked.

No.

She said nothing.

His focus settled somewhere far away, and then came back. “Alright.”

She was confused. “Alright what?”

“Alright. If it’s that important to you.”

“If what’s that important to me?”

“Getting me off. Getting even.”

She stared at him. “Oh.”

For a brief, mad, moment, she considered the emergency buttons on the lift panel. There was a button with a bell, one bright red button that said nothing at all, and one with a picture of an ax, which seemed like a strange and threatening sort of redundancy.

She reached her hand toward the red button—red for stop, one had to imagine?—and licked her bottom lip, wondering why a fantasy she’d had more than once about getting Draco off in the lift between floors now felt like a mouth full of wet cardboard, when he stepped forward and flattened his hand over the button panel.

The lift creaked between Floor 5 and Floor 6.   

“Shall I tell you what’s going to happen?” he said next to her ear.

Hermione shuddered.

She nodded.

He stepped away, but only just.

“What is it that we do most nights? At the end of every lift we take together?” he asked.

The specter of desire roiled in her gut.

“We walk across the Atrium.” She glanced at him over her shoulder, and a guerilla curl chose just that moment to leap into her eye. “To the Floos.”

“That’s exactly right. And while we walk, we—”

“Talk.”

He tipped his head in agreement. “And then what?”

The lift shuddered unevenly between Floor 6 and Floor 7.

“We say goodnight.” Hermione couldn’t look at his face for very long. “And then Floo home.”

“We say goodnight,” he agreed, “and I Floo back to my house. But that, tonight, is where our routine is going to diverge. Do you know what I normally do the moment I arrive at home?”

She imagined him taking off his wand holster. Sliding off his shoes. Loosening his tie. Pouring himself a drink.

“No,” she admitted.

“I would normally put away my things from work where they belong, then fix myself a drink. In that order. Do you know what I’m going to do tonight?”

“I have no idea.”

He leaned in close again.

She could smell his tiredness on him, like a spent pillowcase. She wanted to bury her face in his neck.

“The moment I’m through the Floo,” he went on, “I’m going to set my wards to admit no one except ornery little attorneys with curvy backsides and large, insubordinate hair.”

A jolt passed through the center of her body, from her nape to her cunt.

“And then I’ll put away my things,” he said from just behind her. “And after that, I’ll pour a drink.”

When she didn’t speak, he continued.

“While I’m doing those things, in that order, you are going to stand by the Floo, probably for quite a while, trying to decide whether or not you’re going to follow me back to my house, and achieve peace of mind in the way you’ve decided you must.”

The lift settled with a short dip and sway, and Hermione could say nothing at all.

“But,” he said, “if you do make up your mind to come by, I will insist that you stay for dinner. Before or after we’ve evened the score makes very little difference to me.”

Hermione’s lower belly vibrated, the crowd of highly specific wants gathered there growing by the minute.

The lift doors opened with a chime.

“Do you cook?” Hermione asked, stepping into the long, bending hallway from the rear elevator to the Atrium and marching toward the Floos.

“Neither often nor well,” he said as he walked beside her. “But I am very good at Owling for takeout.”

They made the remainder of the walk in unaccustomed silence, and stopped in front of the Floos.

“Granger.”

Eyes trained hard on the fireplace in front of him, he vanished in a flare of green.

Hermione did what she did both best and worst, and thought.

Standing on the dark marble floor of the Ministry in her sensible heels, she counted two hundred reasons to go home to her own flat. All of them in one way or another looped right back around to what a terrible idea it was to follow Draco Malfoy back to his house and find out what he looked like when he came in her hand.

Because what she would like instead, was—

She closed her eyes, and ticked off five minutes in her mind.

Then she opened them, took a mental note of the state of her knickers, drew a pinch of Floo powder from her satchel, stepped into the flames and said “Draco Malfoy’s house. Kensington.”

She was fraying when she walked through the Floo, then came undone with the loosening of his tie.

“Can I get you a drink?”

He leaned against the edge of the bar in the sitting room Hermione had entered through the Floo, black tie drawn down, shirtsleeves rolled up, swirling a red-gold liquid in a crystal glass, looking like a collection of contradictions.

His gaze was cool, but his hands were unsteady.

He stood in an unbothered slouch like her presence changed nothing, but was breathing hard enough that she could see it.

She watched his eyes widen when she tossed down her satchel and kicked off her heels by the Floo, and widen again as she padded across the floor in her stocking feet, so that by the time she stood too close and took the drink right out of his hand, there was no cover left to hide his surprise.

Scotch, with a single cube of ice. She rolled it over her tongue before she swallowed.

“Bedroom?” She tilted her head as she handed him back his glass.

He scrutinized her. “Last door on the right.”

She left his smirk behind and wandered down the hall, pushing the door open to a bedroom with a wide bed with dark linens, as fussy and neat and casually cool as the suits he wore to work.  

She climbed onto his bed on her knees, turned to face the door, and sat back on her heels.

“Getting even before dinner, then?” he asked, leaning in the doorway.

“Come here.”

His hesitation was slightly above the threshold of being unnoticeable, but he recovered, put his drink down on the bureau opposite the bed, and walked to her with his hands in his pockets.

She bit at the corner of her bottom lip.

She licked it.

She unbuttoned the top button of her low-cut pink silk blouse.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We’re making things even, aren’t we?”

“If we’re being equal, it’s me that ought to be opening my shirt here.”

Hermione drew her shoulders to her ears in a shrug, fingers still working their way down the line of buttons, then drawing her blouse open.

She'd worn the mint green silk.

It was comfortable.

For a moment she thought he stopped breathing.

“Come here,” she said again, and when he stepped close enough, she traced her fingertips over the frame of his belt buckle.

“If I do this”—she tugged the tail of his belt through the loops of his trousers—”we’ll be even, won’t we? And we can go back to how we were.”

A cloud of displeasure rolled across his face. But with a pair of intentional breaths, his equanimity was restored.

“I hope so.”

“Hm.”

She kept one hand on his belt, but the other went trailing without any pressure up the button placket of his shirt, over the valley of his navel and the plains of his belly and chest, tripping lightly over the skin of his throat until her fingertips rested against his mouth.

“But if I were to kiss you?” she asked.

His mouth opened by a bare increment, and she felt more than saw the surreptitious nip of his soft, angular lips at her fingers.

“What would happen then?” She stroked his lower lip, then drew away.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d want it to happen more than once.”

“Twice?”

“More than that.” His face was steady, but in a way that suggested he had to try.

“I see.”

Hermione sat up higher, and with both hands again, began to undo his belt buckle in earnest.

His posture wilted.

Belt, then button, and then zip, and with a slip of her flattened hand over his lower belly and into his trunks, her touch as confident as his had been, she wrapped her hand around his already hard cock, and drew it out.

It was—

“Oh.”

“Oh?” Draco’s facade failed. “What’s wrong with it?”

There was absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with it.

“Nothing at all,” said Hermione. “It’s …”

It was perfect.

Large in both dimensions of interest; smooth and incredibly soft; friendly, which had sounded absurd when Ginny had said it, but now, during the practical exam, made perfect sense; and decidedly moreish, like if she had some once, it would be something she would always crave.

Hermione wanted nothing more than to bend down and give its tip a kiss of heartfelt appreciation.

“It’s so nice, ” she said.

“It’s not nice, it’s—

She had no desire to argue the point, and instead slipped her hand over the beaded moisture at its tip and slid it down and around and back up again, with a twist of her wrist.

“Oh, fuck.” His head fell back, his eyes fell closed, and his mouth dropped open.

“Do you like this?” Hermione repeated the gesture, but increased the pressure of her grip.

“Yes.”

“What about this?” She reached her free hand down, wrapped it around his base, and worked both hands over him, gliding in a shared rhythm over his large, smooth, perfect cock.

His eyes snapped open, and he looked down, watching her hands moving over him, his expression almost affronted. 

“Fuck.” His left hand started like he meant to reach for her breast, and then dropped back.

“What about this? ” She sat up tall on her knees, pulling at his cock just as she had been, and kissed him.

His whole body jolted, a shock, and then his hips jerked forward.

Hermione thought he might have come then, but the velocity of his body as it crashed into hers wasn’t that.

He moaned, soft and reproachful, taking no time whatsoever to turn the press of her lips against his into shared open heat, mapping the interior dimensions of their mutual desire, now laid open for their leisurely and exhaustive perusal.

On the back half of the first real kiss, his hands found her hair, pulling out the pair of silver sticks tethering it back and tossing them to the floor like he disliked them, then drawing down her curls with long strokes until they covered her shoulders and fell down her back.

Her shirt was of equal superfluity and obstructiveness, so he tugged it free of her blue linen skirt, unbuttoned it with naked impatience, pushed it down her shoulders, abandoned it there to find the buttons at the front of her skirt, pulled at them, drew her skirt down her hips, and was distracted from that, too.

His tie slid audibly through the collar of his shirt, and landed draped on the bureau. His shirt was a prison, his buttons the bars, and he’d conducted an escape before she’d finished pushing his trousers and then his trunks down his hips.

He leaned forward, and arms pulled tight around her waist, kissed her down onto the bed.

He laid her out flat, yanked her skirt off her hips, and kicked his trousers toward the door. As she wrestled herself from the sleeves of her blouse, he hauled her with his hands looped under the backs of her thighs to the end of the bed.

He fell to his knees between her open legs.

“Can I?” With his mouth hot against the soaked slick silk of her mint green knickers, she agreed, speechless, with a dip of her head, and he was hungry enough to accept it as a yes. He didn’t grab the ruffles at her hips, but pulled the center to the side, began with intention and continued that way, converting her glorious lexicon into a language of sighs and half-apologetic whimpers.

She not-quite came, arcing against his mouth with a hand in his hair, but he left her there, hanging in the climb before the climax. He moved the narrative up the bed and made it about stripping her of everything she had left: ruffles down the hips, thighs, calves, feet, finished with their work and tossed aside.

He might have unhooked her bra, and he did, but not without tugging the fabric down first, laying his mouth over her breast to lick and bite and suck while he submitted to the tedium of hook and eye closures, until finally there was nothing left to make undone, and he rolled onto his back.

“Good girl,” he said, and she wondered, filling herself up with him by heady increments, at the thrill of a gold star on the top of a paper, at being good, being the best, being—

“Fuck, you’re so fucking perfect.”

His hands held her hips—held them back.

While she was well aware that if she tightened down on purpose in one way at the same time that she lifted and fell on his beautiful, soft, hard cock in another, she was going to make herself come but probably send him there first, she whined when he sat up, pressed his chest to hers, and insisted she—

“Slow down, Hermione—fuck, fuck!” He looked up into her face, imploring. "It's been a while."

"How long is a while?"

"A while. Go easy on me."

He pushed up from below, slow, not jolting, offering her friction and pressure just—

“There.” She said it, mouth half-open, only three-quarters intelligible, against his ear.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

So he fucked her, slow, right there, brought the pads of his fingers to her clit, and he kissed her.

She came, shaking, in his lap, let him pull her down again, propped herself up with her palms against his chest, her arse in his hands and his cock making a half dozen hard thrusts from below before he pressed his forehead to the center of her chest and watched himself finish inside her, both their bodies slick with sweat, salty as seawater.

He stayed inside when he turned her over, and she was glad to keep him there, as close as he would ever be in the whole of their lives, while they kissed until her mouth felt bruised.

He slipped out, her mind came back to her, and after what seemed like a sensible interval, Hermione began her sliding retreat from his bed.

“I suppose I ought to be going.”

“No you don’t.” He swung one of his unsurprisingly strong arms around her waist, and pulled her back to him. “We’re not doing this anymore.”

She wriggled half-heartedly in his arms, then relaxed. “Not doing what?”

Her back to his front, he began to mouth, lazy and indiscriminate, at the smooth expanse of skin between her shoulder blades. “Do you like me, Hermione?

She wriggled again, for the look of the thing.

“I do.”

“Good.”

She rolled over onto her back so that she could run her fingers through his hair, messy from fucking, not sleeping.

Sitting partially up on his elbows, he set forth on a cartographic expedition, mapping the terrain of her breasts with his lips and tongue. 

“Since you like me, you’re going to stay”—he mouthed softly at the underside of her left breast—”and we’re going to fuck some more”—he scaled the peak of her nipple with the tip of his tongue—”and then we’re going to sleep.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.” He furrowed his brow, equal parts confusion, annoyance, and adoration. “Where else? On the sofa in your office? That’s for fucking.”

“I’ve never used it that way.”

“You will on Monday. Sleeping, obviously, is going to happen in my very nice, very large bed.”

“Which spoon are you?” Hermione asked, swiping her thumb absently over his left eyebrow, just because she could.

“I’m going to be the big spoon, and you’re going to be the little, horrible spoon,” he said, planting a kiss directly between her breasts, “and in the morning I’m going to make you adequate eggs and toast, and then we’re going to fuck, and then we’re going to see the Tantra exhibit at the British Museum, and with any luck you’ll become aroused again.”

“Alright.”

“Mmm.” He made a horrendously pleased-with-himself noise while he drew her right nipple into his mouth, sucked on it gently, then let it go. “I’ve made you compliant with sex.”   

Her fingers traced over the flowers tattooed around the Dark Mark on his left arm.

“What are they for? You have to tell me now.”

“I’m getting hard again, don’t spoil it,” he said, muffled in the flesh at the side of her breast. “Girl Weasley wasn't joking, you do have truly incredible tits.”

“Draco.”

He sighed, then sat up and let her follow the lines of each rose, delphinium and daisy with the tip of her index finger.

“There is a flower there,” he said, somewhere between a murmur and a whisper, “for each of our schoolmates who did not get the chance to grow up.”

She stared at him then. Openly. Nakedly.

His eyes were grey and clear, swimming in regret, his sincerity as obvious to her now as it might have been for quite some time if she had cared to look.

She kissed him as though she hadn’t done it yet, and wanted to remember.

“Do you want to do it again?” Her hand flowed over his chest and belly and found his lovely cock again.

His eyes rolled back in his head. “Thousands of times, actually.”

“Merlin,” she muttered, twisting her fist around him. “That would take—”

Chapter Text

18 Months Later

Hermione’s chesterfield needed another twenty centimetres.

Flat on his back, the heels of his stocking feet propped on its arm, Draco crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes.

Within moments, he found himself dressed in his Hogwarts uniform in his childhood bedroom in the Manor, standing before his great gaudy four-poster bed with its heavy green velvet curtains.

Granger was there, too, sitting on the end of his mattress, dressed in her skirt and jumper and robes and Gryffindor tie, knees pulled to her chest and hands wrapped around her calves, grey wool socks pulled up to her knees, a hint of white cotton knickers on the other side of her crossed ankles.

“Let’s see it, then, Malfoy.”

Her teeth were very large.

“Now?” His voice practically echoed with the length of his lineage, as wide open and ringing as the largest vault Gringotts could provide.

“That’s right. Pull it out and show me.”

With reluctance, he withdrew his wand from his pocket.

It was clearly his wand, and at the same time it was a slightly bent maple stick with a shriveled, shivering red leaf still attached at the end.

He held it out for her to see.

She considered it, head tilted to one side, squinting and twiddling her thumbs.

“Is it enough?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Do a swish and flick for me.” Letting go of one calf, she arced her hand and wrist through the air to show him.

“Don’t tell me what to do with my own wand, Granger. I don’t like it.”

A wave of incredulity swept across her face. “You love it. ”

Draco looked down, and found that he was standing in nothing but his pants.

For a moment he observed the undeniable evidence of how much he did, in fact, enjoy her telling him what to do with his wand, then looked up again.

“I suppose I do.”

Hermione was now in her knickers, too: plain full-coverage white cotton bra and high-waisted pants, still wearing her socks, and she’d somehow slipped on both his Slytherin tie and his reading glasses.

She hooked her thumbs in the sides of her knickers and began to pull them down.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “We can’t do this here.”

They had moved without him realizing to the Hogwarts library, where Hermione sat up on her knees in the middle of Madam Pince’s desk.

“Swish and flick, Malfoy,” Hermione ordered.

He stared at the maple twig in his hand, which had grown even smaller and more bent.

“Good morning,” said Dream Hermione, sensually.

"Good morning," he answered, and wondered at how a phrase which could be very sexy indeed when waking up beside someone fell a bit flat in a library.

"Are you awake?"

Was he awake?

He decided, consciousness adrift in the stretch of sea between his place on the chesterfield in Hermione’s office and the library where her knickers were sliding down her thighs, that he wished to remain asleep, withered and weirdly angled wand or no, so he rolled away from Real Hermione’s warm hand as it smoothed over his belly and chest.

“Wake up, Draco.”

“Let me be,” he muttered, rolling toward the back of the sofa. “I’m about to swish and flick you one fit for the Restricted Section.”

The edge of the cushion bent under her weight as she sat beside him.

“I’m hosting a meeting here in thirty minutes.” She took his earlobe between her fingers and stroked it in a hinting circle.

He was quite awake then, eyes rolling back in his head, and he shuddered from his shoulders, down his spine and into his hips.

He rolled back over toward her.

‘That’s cheating.”

She shrugged. “So says my very own Slytherin.”

She’d braided her hair, then wound the braids up and around her head in the style she always chose when she did any serious domestic labor around his house in Kensington— theirs for the past six months—wearing a worn cotton jumper and a pair of dungarees, which he greatly enjoyed unbuckling whenever she’d let him.

When she put her hair up like that, her curls engaged in all manner of tiny misbehaviors, popping up in corkscrews around her hairline and rioting down her nape.

“You look like you’re going to rearrange some furniture,” he said, pulling a curl behind her ear and letting it spring back up.

She laid a hand against the side of her hair.

“I didn’t sleep well last night, and then overslept my alarm.” She flattened her palm against the center of his chest again. “What time did you roll in this morning?”

Curling his own hand around hers always made his chest swell with both contentment and pleasant anxiety, and this morning was no exception.

“Seven o'clock.” He squeezed her fingers. “I figured by the time I got a start on the reports and headed home, you and I would pass one another in the Floo. So I came in here to rest my eyes and wait for you so I could at least say good night. Good morning, rather.”

“You did alright? No one was injured?”

Draco shook his head. “Harry’s spectacles got smashed just at the end. Robards twisted his ankle, but that was just a fluke run-in with a depression in the grass. Ron did get a bit of a burn.” He’d learned to keep his petty jealousy at the way she stiffened whenever she’d learned Ron or Harry had been in harm’s way to himself. “Nothing serious at all, which was frankly a miracle. And we made the arrests. I am, however, exhausted. You sure you won’t skive off with me and help me wash off all the grit?”

He waggled his brows at her.

“As much fun as that sounds, truly,”—she leaned forward and laid a chaste kiss against his lips, then ducked out of his arm before it could cage her to his chest—”I’m afraid I have a full day ahead of me.”

She reached into the work satchel slung over her shoulder, withdrew a white paper photograph envelope, and tossed it on his stomach.

‘What’s this?” he asked. He lifted his head and regarded the envelope with concern, as though it might explode.

At her desk, Hermione unpacked several fat file folders from her satchel.

“Take a look.” She eased herself into her chair, and got to work shuffling papers between the stacks on her desk.

A pink paper kingfisher flew over the transom window, followed immediately by a memo plane.

“Gods, it’s not gone eight o’clock,” she said, annoyed. She allowed the intraoffice bird to open itself up on her desk, read the note, Vanished it, and jotted something on her calendar.

Draco opened the envelope with a wary lack of haste, and withdrew—

He blinked in amazement. “I thought we said never again in the office.”

He swiveled his face toward Hermione, and saw that her face was pinched in the half-placid, half-deranged expression she made when she didn’t want to seem overeager for him to like something she was sharing with him: a gift, a passage in a book, a new set of lingerie.

Or in this case, a photograph of—

“There’s a special Disillusionment charm on it,” she said, cheeks flushed. “If a person’s name isn’t Draco Lucius Malfoy, it looks like my professional headshot with a note attached that says ‘Please return to Hermione Granger.’”

Draco blinked again, half wanting to see the alternative.

But of course, this version was perfectly acceptable.

He recalled, dimly, a row of floor-to-ceiling windows set in the face of Tracey’s house, covered in sheer white curtains that blew inward on the warm, sunny days when Tracey opened the casements.

He stared at the photograph, tracing the long, stretched S curve of Hermione's body, from her feet—bare and folded over one another—to her legs—one knee bent over the other—to the round swell of her bare backside, the dip of her lower back, her shoulder, the side of her breast—her nipple in clear silhouette against the window—to her arms over her head, grasping the window frame, and then to her face, framed in her wild dark hair, all in silhouette at first, and then—

In the loop of the photograph, she turned from the window slowly, reluctantly, as though she were shy.

When her eyes found the camera they were half-lidded, demure, really, but amused, and then—

“I love it so much when you smile,” he said softly.

He hadn’t meant it to be his first observation, but Hermione didn’t look displeased.

He had to remind himself that Tracey was a witch, and was sure to have Disillusioned her windows and not left Hermione visible to the street while she was wearing nothing at all except—

A diamond, large and perfect enough to appease Draco’s sense of what was appropriate for a Malfoy, and sourced with enough care to soothe the ethical compunctions of a Hermione Granger, sat on the ring finger of Hermione’s left hand in the photograph.

Draco looked at Hermione, watching him from her desk, aware that his mouth had fallen partially open and failed to close again.

He held the picture up. “Is this—” He clapped his mouth shut, swallowed, and felt it fall open again. He schooled his face into what he knew must have looked like a very stupid sort of pomposity. “Is this a yes?”

Hermione merely nodded.

“Say it.” He performed a quick tonal backpedal. “Please.”

She leaned back in her chair, and folded her arms across her chest. “Yes.”

And then she smiled, large and silly and spontaneous and real, and Draco realized that he would never for a single day of his life stop falling in love with her.

“When did you have this taken?” He waved the picture at her.

“Saturday, the week before last.”

“You—” He sat up on the sofa while he performed a quick bit of mental arithmetic. “You had this taken the day after I asked? You knew it was yes?”

Hermione held her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “I knew that, given a moment, I'd say yes, but I did need to think. You know how I am. I was able to talk it over with Ginny, and Maria while we were both in Paris, and Pansy was quite helpful. We had brunch, you know.”

“You did not.”

“We did. It was her idea, though I still think she doesn’t like me. Anyway, you and I had discussed it so little—”

“I brought it up constantly.”

She twisted from side to side in her chair, then looked at him with her great, sharp, brilliant, hopelessly, willfully obtuse brown eyes.

“Yes, but not seriously. ”

He stared at her.

"I'm coming over there."

"Are you?"

He nodded. "When did you say you had a meeting?"

He might have taken some time between her legs while she sat on her desk and he sat in her chair, which he was rarely allowed to do—Hermione cited professionalism, which was a word he liked to insist she’d made up for her own use—but he was impatient to be possessively, animalistically inside of her. So it was that he took a cursory first glance at the knickers she’d bought in Paris with Maria during a two day work trip before yanking them to the side, then standing up from her chair and sliding into her warm, wet cunt, and asking—

“Is it here?” He sucked at the side of her throat hard enough to leave a mark. “Can you put it on now?”

“My right desk drawer.” She rolled her hips against him while he situated himself deep inside her and made shallow thrusts at an angle that always made her breathless.

He pulled her drawer open and scrambled inside until he’d located the little box, itself tastefully jeweled, held it by the lid, flicked it roughly open with one hand and plucked the ring from its pillow.

She held out her left hand, and while he slid it over her finger, his thrusts picked up speed.

“This summer,” he said between disorganized nips and strokes of his tongue at her sweet, soft mouth. Her left hand, ring firmly in place, gripped the back of his neck. “June.”

“That’s three months away,” she said, panting and making little mewlish moans as he began to fuck her in earnest, causing the coins in the Obscenities jar at the edge of her desk to jingle. “What about next summer?”

He shook his head. “August. This year.”

She pulled him down for a dissipated and appreciative kiss, then smiled against his mouth. “Alright. If you’re willing to accept the vendors we’ll be able to get and pay out the nose for rush service.”

“I’ll rush your service alright, Mrs. Malfoy.” The coins rang out their enthusiasm from their jar.

“I’m keeping my name. We have talked about that. Many times.” Her eyes clenched shut and her mouth fell open. “Oh, Merlin, Draco. Just like that.”

“Mrs. Malfoy in bed. At least on occasion. Let me have that much.”

“We could both hyphenate. Malfoy-Granger. Granger-Malfoy.”

“I’m not a fan.” He looked down in surprise as she tightened her interior muscles around his cock. “Oh, fuck, don’t do that just yet.”

“Blended? Granfoy. Malger.”

“Granmalgerfoy. Malgranfoyger.” He laughed as much as he was able while her serious work skirt was hiked up around her hips and her silky work shirt was opened to reveal pale lilac lace over her perfect tits.

“Mrs. Draco Malofy,” she suggested.

“That was one typo. Let it go.”

“I never will.” Her heels in their stockings pressed into his bare backside. “Harder.”

“Yeah?”

She dropped her forehead to his chest and looked down between them, her breath grown ragged. “As hard as you can.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

She’d gone Muggle.

Draco made a prayer of his own to the gods of silencing spells as Hermione’s cries picked up in volume and the room filled with the characteristic lewd timbre of mutually enthusiastic penetration.

Bent forward, her left hand clutched white-knuckled at the front edge of her desk and her right pinched at her nipple, her bra cup yanked down and mostly out of the way.

In a nod to formality, her knickers were finally around her knees, which Draco appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint as he pulled her back against himself with both hands at her hips, going genuinely as hard as he was able.

His eyes, bleary and unfocused, settled on a framed photograph on her desk.

In the image, Draco, hair blown by a stiff wind, stood beside Jonathan Gable, the view from the final summit of Buachaille Etive Mor spread out behind them—low green valleys and peaked mountains in shaded blue wearing melancholy shawls of fog. Holly, smiling in a Tartan kerchief, sat at their feet.

Both men wore kilts, hose, and cable knit jumpers, Jonathan’s Tartan to match Holly’s and Draco’s of some familial origin he refused to explain in anything but the vaguest of terms. In the loop of the photograph, Jonathan beamed while Draco, cheeks flushed, frowned, until Jonathan turned to him and clapped a hand against his shoulder. At that, Draco’s face broke unto a wide and unreserved smile, and then a soundless laugh as his arm circled Jonathan’s shoulder with a masculine slap, and both men turned, grinning, to the camera again.

The frame wobbled under the tectonic movements of the surface of the desk.

“Spank,” said Hermione, breath running wild through her. She pulled her skirt, already well out of the way, higher.

Draco brought his hand down against her arse in a practiced slap, more noise than connection, and watched her skin bloom a soft and pleasing pink.

“Praise,” she gasped, collapsing onto her chest and her grip on the edge of the desk faltering. “Tell me how it feels.”

Draco lowered his mouth as close as he could to her ear without losing leverage, and used his left hand to circle her clit while he muttered his tawdry adulation at her earlobe.

“You feel so fucking good, Hermione. I think about fucking you like this, fucking you hard”—he brought his right hand down against her arse again—”constantly. Against your desk, watching you take my cock, your tits out, your perfect cunt so fucking wet for me—fuck—”

She was on the verge, the contraction inside of her involuntary now, her moans pitched and pleading and her words meaningless.

He sped up and held on as best he could, eyes closed, forehead resting between her shoulder blades, pouring vulgarities into the damp silk of her unbuttoned shirt.

He gave her everything he had.

Gladly.

Joyfully.

Because it was hers.

The photograph tipped forward, then back, then forward again, and fell over onto its face.

She cobbled together a syntax.

“Draco, I’m going to come.”

He could do this. Only a few more strokes, she was just there.

Eyes closed tight under the strain, he saw nothing, only felt the glorious intense wet heat of her, the jolt of her flesh meeting his, and the rapid approach of his own undoing. He heard the creak of the desk, the sordid sounds of their frenetic connection, and the brisk repetitive clink of the coins in the jar.  

“Oh God, oh God, oh God...”

She stiffened, tightened, suffered from a lack of speech, quivered from the hips and pressed back against him like he could possibly in some other universe of enhanced possibility provide more, and—

Head still at her shoulders, he laid his left hand over hers at the forward edge of the desk, her probably too-large diamond hard in his palm, and thrust into her like he’d never get the chance again.

The coins clanked maniacally against the glass walls of the jar, and Hermione cried out, still arching her hips back up into him.

“Oh God, Draco, oh my God, oh f—!”

“Yes—fuck.”

She swore rarely during sex, and when she did, he turned into an idiot.

He pawed at her right breast like an absolute boor, and then he came, blindingly hard, in the same moment that Hermione reached out her right arm, and shouted “Oh, fuck!”

In the stilling, spasming, spilling, sweet perfection of his final arrival, there was a splinter of silence, and then an eruption of sound, sudden and catastrophically exact: the bright breaking of glass, and like a swift, torrential rain, a jar full of coins set free.