Chapter 5: Nocturnal Awakening
The grey suede glove lay on her nightstand, a silent apostrophe to the evening’s punctuation. Hermione stared at it, the soft material catching the faint moonlight filtering through her window. Her skin still thrummed with the memory of his cold touch, a brand that hadn’t faded.
Sleep was a traitor. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the sharp angle of his jaw in the lamplight, heard the rough whisper of her name in his voice. “You spoke first.” The logical part of her mind, the healer, was screaming protocols, citing case studies on predatory magical beings, compiling a list of questions about hematological rates and photophobic thresholds. The rest of her was a live wire, sparking with a dangerous, gnawing curiosity.
She kicked at the duvet, turned over, punched her pillow. The flat was too quiet. Her own breathing was too loud. Across the courtyard, his windows were pools of absolute black. No light. A deliberate answer.
When exhaustion finally dragged her under, it didn’t feel like sleep. It felt like surrender.
The dream was not soft. It was visceral and hyper-real, saturated with a clarity that bypassed her waking filters. She was in her bed, but the room was darker, the shadows thicker. And he was there, not emerging from the corners, but simply being, seated on the edge of her mattress, watching her with that same absorbing gaze.
“You’re thinking too loudly, Granger,” he murmured. His voice was the same, but here, in this space, it vibrated through her bones.
“This is a dream,” she said, but the words had no conviction. The cool silk of her sheets under her back, the weight of the air—it all felt terrifyingly authentic.
“Is it?” He leaned forward, one pale hand coming to rest on the duvet beside her hip. The depression of the mattress shifted her towards him. “Does that make it less real?”
His touch was exactly as she remembered: cold. He traced a line from her temple, down her cheek, over the frantic pulse in her throat. Each point of contact was a shock of ice and fire. She should have flinched. She should have screamed. She arched into it.
“See?” he whispered, his mouth now a breath away from her ear. The chill of him made her skin pebble, her nipples hardening painfully against the thin cotton of her camisole. “You’re not afraid of the dark. You’re afraid of what you want in it.”
His lips were on her neck, not a kiss, but a firm, cool pressure. No teeth. Just possession. A low sound escaped her, part protest, part plea. His hands were under her shirt, skating up her ribs, palming the soft weight of her breast. His thumbs brushed her nipples and lightning shot straight to her core, a sudden, soaking heat that contradicted the chill of his skin.
“Logical,” he breathed against her throat, his own voice taut with a hunger that wasn’t feigned. “Methodical. Let’s see how you unravel.”
He was slow. Deliberate. He mapped her with a scholar’s intensity, learning the sigh she made when he bit the junction of her shoulder, the hitch in her breath when his cold fingers slipped inside her knickers and found her wet and wanting. Her own hands were clumsy, pushing at his shirt, desperate to feel the cold planes of his chest, to see if his heart beat at all. His skin was seamless, smooth marble under her palms.
“Please,” she heard herself gasp, and the word was foreign, ripped from a place she never visited.
“Please what?” He was over her, his weight a delicious, solid pressure. His eyes were black in the dream-darkness, holding hers. “Use your words, Granger. I know you have them.”
She couldn’t. Language had dissolved. She wrapped her legs around his hips, pulled him down, and answered with her body.
The penetration was a shock of cold, so profound it stole her breath. She cried out, her nails digging into his shoulders. He went still, a statue poised within her, his forehead pressed to hers. His breath was a ghost on her lips. “Breathe,” he commanded, and she did, a ragged inhale. As she warmed him, the sensation shifted, transformed into a fullness so acute it bordered on pain. He began to move, a slow, relentless rhythm that was less about friction and more about claiming space, mapping her from the inside. Each thrust was a silent question. Each ragged gasp from her lips was the answer.
He watched her face the entire time, studying the flush spreading on her skin, the way her eyelids fluttered, the moment her careful control shattered. When her climax broke, it was silent and vast, a white-hot wave that tightened every muscle before dissolving her into trembling fragments. He followed her over, his own release a sharp, shuddering stillness, a frozen moment where the world stopped. He buried his face in her hair, and his final, whispered word wasn’t a vow or an endearment.
It was her name. Just her name. A raw, unvarnished fact.
Hermione woke with a choked gasp, her body seizing. The aftershocks of the dream-phantom pulsed between her legs, a cruel echo. Her sheets were twisted, damp with sweat. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. The room was empty. Silent. Pale dawn light bled around the edges of her curtains.
She was alone.
A hot tide of humiliation crashed over her, followed immediately by a fresh, aching throb of want. She squeezed her thighs together, as if she could trap the sensation, and a pathetic, thin whimper escaped her throat. She’d never had a dream like that. So specific. So physical. So utterly debasing.
It was just a dream, she chanted to herself, pushing up on trembling arms. A stress-induced neuro-chemical fantasy. Subconscious integration of a perceived threat with latent psychosexual archetypes. The clinical terms tasted like ash.
Her eyes flew to the nightstand. The grey glove was gone.
A jolt of pure panic shot through her. She scrambled, patting the sheets, looking on the floor. Nothing. Had she imagined that, too? Had the entire encounter in the alley been some bizarre waking dream?
Then she saw it. It wasn’t on the nightstand. It was in the bed, tucked partially under her discarded pillow, as if it had been held. As if it had fallen from a sleeping hand.
She picked it up. It was faintly warm.
The humiliation curdled, morphing into something sharper, hotter. Anger. At him. At herself. This wasn’t a magnetic pull; it was an invasion. A psychological violation. He was in her head, manipulating her sleep, and her body was traitorously complicit.
She threw back the duvet and stalked to the window, yanking the curtains open with too much force. The morning was grey, damp. The windows across the courtyard were still dark, reflective, showing only the ghost of her own furious, disheveled reflection.
“Enough,” she said aloud, her voice hard in the quiet room.
She turned her back on the view. She would not look. She would not wonder. She would not give another inch of her mind to him. She had a job, a career, a life that existed in the sunlight. She marched to the shower, turning the water as hot as she could stand, scrubbing her skin until it was pink, as if she could scour the memory of his cold touch from her pores.
But under the blistering spray, her hand stilled on her stomach. The anger was a brittle shell. Underneath, humming like a trapped bee against glass, was the undeniable, shameful truth: a part of her was already planning for nightfall. A part of her was wondering what language he would speak next, and if she would be brave enough, or foolish enough, to answer.