Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"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," Lucius snapped. "And please refrain from calling me by my first name. Whoever your parents are, they have taught you no manners." A horrible thought occurred to him. "Muggle-born, are you? I shall have to have my desk thoroughly cleaned if so."

"Oh, no," said the boy, softly, his eyes never leaving Lucius' face. "My mother was a witch. You used to tell me that that cancelled out my father's dirty blood, that I must be all her son, with none of him in me.

But then you were always a past master at telling me what I wanted to hear. Even when you were just a child."

Lucius narrowed his eyes. "When I was a child, you wouldn't even have been born, my insolent young friend." He leaned against the closed office door. "I admit that your method of entry into my office initially intrigued me. But you are proving tiresome. Either explain what you are doing here or I will have you ejected from this place and your parents notified."

The boy had slid himself into a sitting position now and had swung his legs over the desk. "Oh, Lucius, Lucius," he said, shaking his head. "You break my heart. Don't you know me, don't you know me at all?"