between their bodies as they clung together. It was pain like a winter chill, sweet and piercing.
Her hands on him were restless and a little uneasy. Her fingertips glided over his face, she stroked his hair as if he needed or wanted reassurance; she made a whispering sound when he kissed her that was like the soft sound of snow falling in layers on the ground. He kissed her throat, then, and the lids of her closed eyes, and she shivered and moved so that he could kiss her mouth. The lazy, sensual falling sensation was leaving him, sinking away like spilling sand, and he felt the new urgency in her as she moved against him. She locked her arm around the back of his neck and he rolled towards her, hooking his leg around the back of her knee, pulling her against him, her breasts against his chest. And he knew that he should stop what they were doing, stop it right now, and wondered if it was his illness and exhaustion that had killed all his willpower or if he really was the awful person that Harry apparently had always thought he was, and if Harry hated him anyway there was no point in stopping, in fact there was hardly any point in not doing anything he wanted to do.
His hand, no longer trapped between them, still throbbed with a dull painful ache as he traced the line of her collarbone down to the top buttons of her pajamas and began to undo them one by one. He thought at first that it was the pain in his hand that was making the operation so difficult and it was only after a few seconds of fumbling that he realized that there was something caught in the buttons. He tugged at it, impatiently, and it came away in his hand, startling him. He tried to close his hand around it, but it slid through his fingers and hit the tiles with the sound of splintering crystal and only then did he realize what it had been.
Hermione gave a little gasp and scrabbled for it with her hand. 'My ring — '
She twisted around to pick it up and held it up between them. It was not shattered, but a thin and branching crack had spread through it, almost splitting it in thirds. 'It's all right,' she said. 'It's all right, I can Reparo it.'
'Can you?' Draco said. His voice was affectless, and his face was calm, but she could see the pulse jumping in his throat. He propped himself on his elbows and looked down at her as she drew the chain through her hand and then closed her fingers around the ring itself. She felt suddenly aware of his weight pressing her down. For two boys so similarly built, Draco and Harry felt very different. Harry was wiry-thin, hollow-boned like a bird, all light touches and tangled hair and inexpert sincerity. Draco was more substantial, muscle curving over bones, stomach flat where Harry's was more concave, hair silky where Harry's was fine and rough and yet in other ways they were very much the same.
Draco reached down to touch her face.
Without thinking, she shied away. 'Don't,' she said.
He let his hand fall. 'Don't what?'
She shivered. The ring was cold in the palm of her hand. 'Don't touch me,' she said. 'Because if you do, then I will — and I can't. We can't.'
He looked at her. Their faces were inches apart. She could see his eyes, her own reflection in them, the texture of the irises. This close up, they were more than just gray, she could see where they were threaded with blue and slate and hazel. 'And why not?' he asked, his voice still very calm and cold.
'Because of Harry.' She shivered again. 'I don't want to hurt Harry.'
'Oh,' he said. He half-smiled and she thought how that pretty mouth was no longer pretty when it twisted like that, into a cruel amused line. 'Well, I do. Isn't that what this was all about?'
She froze. 'Get off me,' she said.
He laughed. His breath stirred her hair. 'Whatever you say,' he replied in a mocking tone, and moved to get off her, slowly, very slowly, so that she could feel every inch of him as he slid down her body. He rolled casually off her and sprawled on the floor, legs apart, booted heels angled against the marble tiles.
'Is that why you kissed me?' she demanded, sitting up, scooting backwards away from him. 'To hurt Harry?'
'No,' he said.
She felt a wave of peculiar relief.
'It's why I didn't stop, though,' he added, flicking an invisible something off his cuffs with a sharp nail.
The relief vanished, and bitterness took its place. 'Well, I don't want to hurt Harry,' she said, through her teeth. 'If you do, that's your problem.'
His eyes narrowed like a cat's. 'So,' he hissed, his voice all velvet, 'if I didn't want to hurt him, then it would be acceptable? Mealy-mouthed self-serving protestations of good intentions excuse our behavior, somehow?
Oh, I don't want to hurt Harry, so I'll announce that I don't want to hurt him before I go right ahead and rip his heart out, that'll make it okay. Or were you planning on fucking me but keeping it a secret? Because you couldn't, you know. He'd find out. And he wouldn't want you anymore, not after that.'
She expelled her breath in a ragged little gasp. 'That's not true — '
'It is true,' he said. 'He wouldn't want you. Not if it was me.'
'You — '
Hermione bit off what she was going to say. He was looking at her, glaring really, all his old refined malice plain in the set of his shoulders and the tense line of his mouth. His eyes were the only expressive things in his face: like bright fissures in a blank wall. She saw the rage in them, the fury and the fierceness, and behind the fierceness a terrible emptiness that seemed to spiral away to a place without any light. She had always wondered why she never envied this odd, bitter, intense boy who had so much of her Harry, and now she knew: no bond, however close and beautiful, was worth buying with this pain of loss, this terrifying severance. Not for her. Perhaps for Draco it was worth it. But she would never know, because she could never ask him.
'You don't need to be cruel to make your point,' she said, which was not what she had been going to say. 'However cruel you are to me, you're worse to yourself. And I hate watching it. So I'm going to sleep. Do what you want.'
He looked startled. Hermione felt a vague disconnected pleasure at the fact that she had been able to startle him. She leaned forward and very carefully laid the blue glass ring down on the floor between them. She heard him inhale softly and sharply, but she didn't look at him. She got to her feet and turned around and walked into her bedroom and managed not to turn around and look back at him before she shut the doors.
'Are you quite certain it is not my son?' Lucius said to the nervous-looking little secretary standing in front of his office door. Lucius wondered briefly if the man had some goblin blood in him — he was extremely ill-favored, and there was a certain lumpish cast to his nose that Lucius did not like. He resolved to fire him as soon as possible, and also to fire the assistant to who had hired him. 'It is not Draco?'
The secretary shook his head. 'It is not the young master.'
'Some other boy? And he barged into my office and demanded to speak to me?'
'Yes. He said you would be glad to see him. He seemed quite certain of it.'
'Indeed.' Lucius' voice was dry. 'We will see about that.'
Lucius pushed past the trembling secretary and threw the door of his office open. He strode inside and cast about for the intruder. Who was not hard to spot — a fair-haired teenage boy lay sprawled across Lucius' desk on his back, his hands raised above him, tracing lazy circles in the air with his fingertips. He turned his head as Lucius closed the office door behind him and smiled engagingly. 'Hello there, Lucius,' he said. 'You are looking well.'
Lucius blinked.
Are you quite certain it is not my son? he had asked the secretary, and the secretary had said, It is not the young master. And he had been correct: it was not. Whoever this was, he was a complete stranger to Lucius, although he seemed to have made himself so at home in Lucius' office that this fact would have come as a surprise to any casual observer. The boy was lying across Lucius' elegant rosewood desk, his dark school cloak wadded up and stuffed under his head to make a pillow. He was slender and tall and blond like Draco, although his features were much less sharply defined. A handsome boy. Open-faced, a conspiratorial grin, and, when he fixed his eyes on Lucius they were the color of dark blue water looked at through blue-tinted glass, and Lucius was somehow sure he had seen those eyes before.
He went rigid, cold all over. 'You are trespassing in my office,' he said coldly, biting off each word. 'I hope you can explain yourself, boy. Do you know who I am?'
'I think,' said the boy, straightening up slowly, 'that the more appropriate question, Lucius, would be, do you know who I am?'
'Considering I've never seen you before in my life, I think the answer to that question is fairly obvious,'
