Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Very well," it ground out, finally."…Sir."

The fairy darted off down the hall. Gathering her cloak around her, Hermione moved to follow, but Draco stilled her with a hand on her arm.

She tilted her head back. "What?"

"Wait just a minute."

He turned her to face him, and looked at her consideringly — a long slow look, up and down. Hermione felt a blush start at the open neckline of her sensible button-down cardigan, and spread up towards her face.

"Put you cloak back," he said. When she didn't move, he hissed an exasperated breath through his teeth. "Fine-I'll do it," he said, and unbuckled the front of her cloak with a fluid movement, pushing the separated halves back over her shoulders. His hands went to her waist, pulling her cardigan out of the waistband of her skirt, fingers rucking up the material, cold on her skin. She shivered.

"Draco, what are you — "

His voice was low as he replied. "Just trust me." The word trust sounded strange in his mouth: an intimate threat. Hermione stood stock still as his fingers glided over her clothes, flipping the lower buttons out of their holes, tugging the cardigan up and tying it tightly under her breasts, leaving her stomach bare. He tackled her skirt next, folding the waistband over several times, shortening the skirt until the hem of it brushed the tops of her thighs. He straightened up and looked at her, the gleam of evaluation in his eyes.

Hermione struggled not to blush. "If you think that I — "

"You said undercover," he said, and tugged the barrettes from her hair, a swift but not ungentle gesture. Her hair — frizzing a bit at the ends from the damp outside — tumbled down over her shoulders, and he ran his fingers through it, quickly, tangling it. "Better," he said, and pressed the barrettes into her hand. "Don't glare. This is a good look for you."

She glared at him. "What look is that? Underaged Prostitute?"

He ignored this. "Just follow my lead and do whatever I say," he said, and started off down the corridor. "I know how to handle these people.

They're my kind."

"I wouldn't be so proud of that," she said sharply.

He glanced back at her over his shoulder but didn't stop walking. "At least I'm not the one with visible knickers."

"I hate you sometimes," Hermione muttered under her breath, but he was already halfway down the corridor and couldn't hear her. Tugging ineffectually at the hem of her skirt, she followed.

Upon learning of his wife's betrayal, the wizard spent the next few days closeted in his tower, perfecting a number of spells. Then he dressed himself his finest robes and presented himself at his wife's chamber. She greeted him there as modestly and sweetly as she always had, taking his hands and drawing him to the bed, but he resisted her. All her beauty seemed to him now to have taken on a ghoulish aspect.

She sensed his mood and wished to know if anything was wrong.

"No," he said. "It is only that I shudder at your touch," which was, after all, true enough. "Now lie down upon the bed."

And she did so, shrugging her robes to the floor and stretching herself out along the bed. She looked up at him through her hair as he drew a number of silk ribbons from his pockets, and held them up.

"You wish to bind me, Lord?" she asked.

"They will not hurt you," he said. "They are only ribbons."

With a cat's smile, she held her wrists out to be bound, and he knelt over her and bound her wrists together, and then her ankles, before she could protest.

She writhed in sudden anguish. "What have you done to me?" she wailed.

"Gold," he said, with some satisfaction, for threads of gold metal had been woven by him by enchantment into the ribbons. "And may it burn your skin to the bone, demon witch. May you writhe in the anguish you planned for me, before I hurl you out into the sunlight and end your hell-spawned existence."

She wept and pleaded then for mercy, and begged him in the name of his love for her to spare her life. But he had stopped his heart to her pleas.

All his love for her had curdled into the purest hate. Hate that once was love is the strongest sort of hate. Hate that does not forget or know forgiveness; hate that is unmerciful.

At last she subsided into silence, and lay limp in her agonizing bonds. "My Lord," she said, looking up at him, "I know now that you will show me no mercy. And surely you can claim my death. But there is something that you do not know. I carry your daughter, Lord, in my body. Your blood runs in her veins as well as mine. Will you not, then, show mercy to her?"

"Love," observed Tom, kneeling next to the dead girl, "that curious condition."

He took a moment to admire the picture she made. All red and white and gold, pale bare skin and hair torn out of its braids and just a little blood.

At first he had been irritated that her struggles had resulted in ripped and shredded clothes, but upon reflection the disarray added to the overall symmetry. She could have been Leda after the swan's ravages -

although Leda had survived that rape, and this girl was quite, quite dead.

A swift spell had broken her neck, and she'd collapsed forward into him, pliant and willing: his hands that were not only his hands had held her up, carried her to the bed, and inside him that tiny part that was still Seamus had wept and beaten its fists against him and finally fallen sick and silent long before he was done.

He ran the back of his knuckle gently along her freckle-dusted cheekbone, up to her temple, his fingers stroking the soft hollows behind her ears. He sat back on his heels — he was reluctant to go, to leave her, she was so beautiful lying the way she was, with her hair all about her; he had never forgotten that hair, the precise color of it, like blood in wine. The marks of his fingers were darkening on her throat. Where her shirt had torn at the shoulder, he could see the blue tracery of veins against her peach-pale skin.

Earlier that day he had found a bruise on his arm, just below the elbow, dark against Seamus' winter-pale skin. It had startled him for a moment.

He had no idea how Seamus had gotten that bruise — playing Quidditch, climbing trees, something innocent and pointless and foolish — and for a moment he had swum dizzily in the disorientation of knowing that he inhabited a borrowed body, that he was powerless over its history. And even as he wore Seamus' bruised skin, so he retained, somewhere in the depths of the living, thinking mind he had stolen, the memory of Seamus' love for Ginny. He had felt the ache of it, like the ache of the bruise on his arm, an ache like hunger. An ache he hated. An ache he did not understand.

It was easier when he thought of it as hunger. Hunger he understood; hunger could be cured. Surely love, too, could be cured by feeding it what it wanted. He leaned now to kiss her unresponsive lips, and searched inside himself for that bruise, that ache-of-love, but he felt nothing.

Elated, he sat back, his fingers trailing along her lips where his mouth had just been. If only he could — but no, he could not stay. He had only bought an hour with her, and she would be missed, whoever she was really; the brothel owners would come seeking her, and would be angry to find her dead, all her usefulness spoiled. Still, she had been useful to him at least.

He had fed the hunger that was the love inside him, had stuffed it on a surfeit of death and desires fulfilled, and in doing so surely he had destroyed it. He was strong now, whole and perfect, all vulnerability burned away. He had to be.

With a last touch of his fingertips to her fiery hair, Tom rose to his feet, drawing his robes close about him. He knew exactly where he had to go now.

"Irregular," muttered the green-skinned demon who had turned out to be the manager of the Midnight Club. He wore long silk robes of deep purple that had been altered to accommodate his vestigial arms, and a red bowler hat with an ostrich plume. He stood behind the enormous mahogany desk in his gleaming walnut-and-cherrywood paneled office, tapping nervously at the open letter on his desk with the tip of a bronze quill. Beneath the brim of his hat, gold antennae quivered with agitation.