Chapter 18: The Cold Stone Balcony
The iron railing bit into his palms, a grounding shock of cold. Draco dragged the dawn air into his lungs, letting the clean, damp chill of the hills scour the salt and heat from his throat. It didn’t work. Her scent was in him now. Jasmine and honey and that dark, musky undertone of pure omega need. And underneath it, the sharp, possessive tang of his own release. The evidence was drying on his skin, a map of his surrender.
“Fuck,” he whispered to the mist.
He could still feel the phantom pressure of her hand, the sleek slide of her fingers. The look on her face when she’d tasted him—not submission, but conquest. He’d given her that. He’d barked like a trained dog and painted her with his come because she’d asked, because her voice had wrapped around his brainstem and pulled.
His muscles twitched with the urge to turn, to go back through the French doors, to finish it. To give her exactly what he’d described in that brutal, honest torrent of words. The bed was right there. She was right there. Wet for him. Wanting him. His knot ached at the base of his cock, a dull, persistent threat.
He closed his eyes. Remember why.
Not because of some noble, outdated pureblood code. Not because of his father, whose idea of claiming was a transaction sealed with a curse. He held back because of her. Because Hermione Granger, Deputy Head of the DMLE, scourge of the Wizengamot, was, for five days every quarter, reduced to a biological imperative. She hated it. She fought it with potions and schedules and sheer, infuriating will. To take her now, in the fever-grip of it, felt like proving every cruel thing anyone had ever said about omegas. That they were creatures of need, waiting for an alpha’s discretion.
He heard the soft click of the door latch behind him.
He didn’t turn.
Her footsteps were bare and quiet on the stone balcony. The cloud of her heat-scent washed over him first, a physical wave that made his saliva glands ache. Then her warmth, close enough to touch. She stopped beside him, not looking at him either, her hands gripping the railing just as tightly. She’d pulled on one of his discarded linen shirts. It drowned her, the collar sliding off one shoulder. The sight of his mark on her skin—the faint, silvery tracery of his family’s protection runes he’d woven into her skin years ago during a less volatile heat—made his chest clench.
For a long moment, they just stood in the silence, the valley sleeping below them.
“You left,” she said finally. Her voice was flat. Controlled. But it vibrated with a banked fury.
“I needed air.”
“Air.” She gave a short, humourless laugh. “Right.”
“What do you want me to say, Granger?”
“I want you to say what you’re thinking. For once. Without the… the fucking alpha posturing. Or the guilty martyr act.”
He turned his head then. Her profile was sharp against the greying light. Her lips were swollen. Her hair was a wild, tangled mane. She was the most beautiful, infuriating thing he’d ever seen.
“I’m thinking,” he said, each word measured, “that if I go back in that room, I won’t leave it until your heat breaks. I’m thinking I will fuck you through every peak, I will knot you so deep you’ll feel it in your teeth, and I will probably bite you. I’m thinking that once I do, you will look at me tomorrow with that much more hatred because I was the weakness you couldn’t overcome.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping. “I’m thinking you asked for my come on your skin because you knew it would wreck me. And it did. Happy now?”
She flinched, but her eyes, when they met his, were blazing. “You think this is about winning? You think I’m curating your humiliation?” She shoved away from the railing, facing him fully. The shirt gaped, revealing the swift, frantic beat of her heart at the base of her throat. “I’m drowning, Malfoy. The potions have worn off. It’s just the heat, and you, and this… this thing between us that feels like a live wire. I touched you because I needed to. I wanted to. Not to score a point.”
“It’s the heat talking.”
“It’s me talking!” The shout echoed off the hills, startling a flock of birds from a nearby pine. She stepped into his space, her small frame vibrating with frustration. “When does it become me, for you? When I’m poring over law briefs? When I’m arguing with you at a Ministry gala? Those are parts of me. This is also a part of me. This want. It’s real. And you dismissing it as just biology feels a hell of a lot more insulting than you giving in to it.”
His control was a thin, cracking veneer. He could see the pulse in her neck. Smell the slick heat gathering between her thighs, a scent so potent it was a taste on his tongue. His hands came up, not to push her away, but to frame her face, his thumbs rough against the apples of her cheeks. He felt her shudder.
“It’s not just biology for me,” he snarled, the words ripped from a place he kept locked. “It hasn’t been since the first time I smelled it on you. Do you have any idea what it does to me? To sit across from you in a meeting, knowing what you sound like when you come? To watch you drink your tea and remember how you lick my cum from your fingers? This isn’t holding back because I don’t want. It’s holding back because I want too much. I want everything. And you… you would give it to me now, and regret it forever.”
A tear escaped, tracking a hot path over his thumb. She didn’t pull away.
“What if I wouldn’t?” she whispered.
The question hung between them, fragile and immense.
The French doors behind them blew open with a sudden gust, not from wind. A silvery Patronus—a sleek otter—darted onto the balcony, circling Hermione’s head with urgent, nimble strokes. Harry Potter’s voice, strained and official, filled the space between them.
“Hermione. Code Silver. We’ve got a situation at the Edinburgh safe house. A containment breach on the smuggled artefacts. Suspect dark magic resonance. I need you to consult, now. I’ve sent a Portkey. It’s activating from your last registered location in… ninety seconds.”
The otter dissolved.
The real world crashed back in, cold and brutal. Code Silver. A high-level threat. Her work. Her duty.
Her eyes widened, the heat-haze in them clearing for a second, replaced by sharp, familiar focus. Then they flicked to his, and he saw it—not relief, but a crushing, terrible conflict. The heat was a tidal wave inside her, but the call was a chain around her ribs.
“Ninety seconds,” she breathed.
He dropped his hands from her face as if burned. The switch was catastrophic. The alpha in him roared at the threat, at the idea of her leaving, vulnerable, in this state. The man who knew her saw the Deputy Head stirring, fighting to the surface.
“You can’t go.” The words were pure alpha command, guttural and final.
She was already moving, stumbling back into the bedroom. “I have to. It’s a resonance breach. If it’s interacting with dormant magics…”
“You’re in heat!”
“I’m aware!” she shot back, yanking open a drawer, searching for trousers. Her movements were jerky, uncoordinated. “I’ll take a double dose of Suppressall. I’ll… I’ll manage.”
“A double dose will make you vomit and then pass out. You know that.” He followed her, blocking the doorway to the ensuite. “Tell him no. Tell him you’re incapacitated.”
She stared at him, her chest heaving. The shirt was slipping again. The scent of her was a desperate, angry plea. “And say why, Draco? What’s my reason? ‘Sorry, Harry, can’t save the world today, my fated alpha has me on lockdown until my biological cycle completes’?”
“Yes!”
“That’s not who I am!”
“It is today!” he roared.
A soft pop sounded from the bedside table. A small, brass hourglass materialized, the sand already beginning to fall. The Portkey.
Sixty seconds.
Her gaze darted from him to the hourglass. Agony etched itself into every line of her face. The heat was peaking; he could see the tremor in her thighs, the sheen of sweat on her upper lip. She needed to be in that bed. She needed his weight on her, his teeth in her skin.
She took a shaky step toward the Portkey.
His hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist. Not hard, but absolute. “Hermione. Please.”
She looked down at his hand, then up at his face. Her eyes were glistening. “This is what I meant,” she said, her voice breaking. “You see the heat first. You see the omega. You don’t see that I have to go.”
“I see that you’re going to get yourself killed or worse because you’re too stubborn to accept a biological reality!”
“Let. Go.” Each word was a shard of ice.
The sand was half gone.
He didn’t let go. He was losing. He was losing her to duty, to principle, to a world that would always demand more of her than she had to give. The bond between them stretched taut, singing with her fear, her determination, his utter terror.
With a sob of frustration, she wrenched her arm. He held fast.
“Thirty seconds!” she cried.
“Then stay!”
Their eyes locked. A lifetime of rivalry, of tension, of this terrible, clawing need flashed between them.
Her expression shifted. The fury didn’t leave, but it morphed, solidified into something colder, more decisive. She stopped struggling. She went very still.
“Alright,” she said quietly.
The word was so unexpected, so flat, that his grip loosened a fraction.
In that fraction, she moved. Not away. Toward him. She rose on her toes, her free hand tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck, and pulled his mouth down to hers.
It wasn’t a kiss of passion. It was a claim. A branding. Her lips were fever-hot and desperate, her tongue sweeping into his mouth with a taste that was all Hermione and heat and goodbye. He groaned, his free arm encircling her waist, crushing her against him, answering the kiss with a helpless, drowning fervor. For three seconds, the world ceased.
She broke the kiss, her breath mingling with his.
“That’s not a promise,” she whispered against his lips, her eyes wide and devastatingly clear. “It’s a reminder.”
She twisted her wrist free from his slackened grasp.
And before he could move, before he could think, her fingers closed around the brass hourglass.
A hook yanked behind his navel. Colour and sound swirled.
She was gone.
The balcony doors slammed shut in the sudden vacuum.
Draco stood alone in the silent bedroom, the taste of her still on his tongue, the imprint of her body already cooling in his arms. The only sound was the frantic, thunderous beating of his own heart.
And then, a new sound. A low, inhuman growl that started deep in his chest and echoed in the empty room.
She’d left.
She’d taken a Portkey into Merlin-knew-what kind of danger, soaked in her own scent and his, half-mad with need.
His fingers curled into fists. The protective runes on his forearms, the ones that matched the marks on her skin, began to glow a faint, urgent silver.
He was moving before the thought fully formed, striding to his wardrobe, yucking on the first pieces of dark clothing his hands found. His wand was in his hand a second later.
She’d gone to Edinburgh.
Fine.
He’d just have to go and get her back.