Chapter 2: Forty-Two Buttons
The east bedroom had been made up by someone with a sense of humour. Draconia suspected her mother.
There were candles on every surface. There were rose petals, actual rose petals, scattered over the green silk counterpane of a four-poster bed large enough to land a Hippogriff on. There was a second bottle of champagne sweating in a silver bucket, two glasses, and a bowl of strawberries, and on the pillow, folded into the shape of a swan, a nightgown so sheer it was more of a suggestion.
Draconia picked up the swan, looked at it, and threw it into the fireplace.
"I liked the swan," said Harry, from the doorway.
"Then you wear it."
She sat down on the edge of the bed in her grandmother's dress and folded her hands in her lap. It was a quarter past eleven. Dawn was at a quarter to five. She had worked out, on the back of the list, that this gave them five and a half hours, which was an obscene amount of time, and she had no idea what to do with any of it.
Harry shut the door. He did not come any closer. He leaned against it with his hands in the pockets of his dress robes and looked at her across the candlelit room, and the look made her want to stand up and walk into the Manor's lake.
"Define properly," she said.
"What?"
"In the garden. You said properly. I'd like a definition. I'm a curse-breaker, Potter, I don't work without terms."
He considered this. Then he pushed off from the door and crossed the room and crouched down in front of her, so that for once she was looking down at him.
"Properly means you want to," he said. "Not the contract. Not Selwyn. Not your father's bloody cufflinks drawer. You." He was very close. She could see the faint silver line of the scar on his forehead, and the green of his eyes going dark in the candlelight. "So I'm asking. Do you?"
She opened her mouth to say something cutting. Nothing came out.
"Because if you don't," Harry went on, quietly, "I'll sit in that chair till dawn, and we'll let the contract take the vault, and I will personally hunt down every lawyer in Britain until we find another way to break it. I'm not doing this to you. I'll only do it with you."
The candle beside the bed guttered. Draconia looked down at her husband, at his ridiculous hair and his steady hands resting on his knees, not touching her, and something hot and frightened rose in her chest, and she knew exactly what it was, and she would rather have died than say so.
So she stood up, and turned her back to him.
"The buttons," she said. "I can't reach them."
There was a pause behind her. Then she felt him stand.
There were forty-two of them. She knew because she had counted them while her mother's elf did them up that afternoon, and now she counted them again, one by one, as Harry undid them. He went slowly. He was not good at buttons; she could feel him concentrating. His knuckles brushed her spine at every one. By the tenth, the skin between her shoulder blades was prickling. By the twentieth, she had stopped breathing properly. At the twenty-first he paused, and she felt his breath on the nape of her neck, and then, very lightly, his mouth.
She went rigid.
"You said no kissing," Harry murmured against her skin. "You didn't say where."
"That is a technicality."
"You're married to a technicality now." He kissed the knob of her spine, just below her pinned-up hair, and undid the twenty-second button, and the twenty-third, and her knees nearly went. "Stop me if you want me to stop."
She did not stop him.
The dress came loose. It slid off her shoulders and down her arms and fell around her feet in a soft rush of silk, and she stood in the candlelight in nothing but the thin ivory shift she'd worn beneath it, with her back to him, and felt his hands settle on her bare shoulders. Warm. They were always so warm. She had noticed that in the cellar on Tuesday, when he'd pulled her behind his shield. She had noticed it in Cairo, holding his hand in a Muggle hospital while he refused to wake up. She had been noticing it for two years.
She turned round.
He was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the garden. As if she were the only lit thing in a dark room. She reached up, with fingers that were not quite steady, and unfastened the clasp of his dress robes, and pushed them off his shoulders. Then his tie. Then the buttons of his shirt, which were a great deal easier than hers, and when she got the shirt open she stopped.
There was a mark on his chest, over his heart. An old burn, healed white and shiny, in the shape of an oval with a looped chain. She had heard rumours about the locket. She had never known it had left this.
She put her palm flat over it.
"Merlin, your hands are cold," Harry said, a little hoarsely.
"They're always cold."
"I know." He covered her hand with his, pressing it to his chest, so that she could feel his heart going hard and fast under the scar. "I like it."
And that, of all things, undid her.
She went up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.
It was nothing like the kiss in the garden. That had been slow and certain and his. This was hers, and it was not careful. She kissed him like she was angry about it, which she was, and he made a low, startled sound and then his arms closed around her and he kissed her back just as hard, his hand sliding up into her hair and scattering pins across the floor. Her hair came down. He wound it around his fist and tipped her head back and kissed her throat, the hollow of it, the place under her jaw that made her gasp, and she dragged at his shirt until it was off and her hands were finally on his bare back, all that heat, all that solid warm skin she had been not-touching for two years.
"Bed," she said against his mouth.
"Yeah?"
"Potter, if you ask me one more time if I'm sure, I will bind your magic myself."
He laughed, breathless, and walked her backwards until her knees hit the mattress, and they went down together into the rose petals.
He took the shift off her slowly, the way he had done the buttons, and then he just looked. She lay back against the green silk with her hair spread out over the pillows and let him, and felt her face burn, and did not look away. His eyes moved over her the way his hands did a moment later, careful and unhurried, as if he were memorising a map. He kissed the inside of her wrist, where the silver line of the handfasting glowed faintly. He kissed her collarbone. He took her breast in his mouth, and she arched clean off the bed and said a word that had not been on any list.
"All right?" he murmured.
"Don't stop."
He didn't stop. He moved lower. She felt his mouth on the soft skin of her stomach, his breath on her hip, his hands sliding her thighs apart, and she realised what he was going to do a moment before he did it, and grabbed a fistful of the counterpane.
The first touch of his tongue between her legs made her whole body jolt. He was slow about it, maddening, learning her, licking up through the wet heat of her and circling until he found the place that made her hips stutter, and then staying there. She heard herself make a sound she would deny until her dying day. She threaded her fingers through his hair, meaning to pull him off, and instead held him there, rocking up against his mouth, the candlelight blurring above her. He slid a finger into her, then two, curling them, and the pressure built and built, low and bright and unbearable.
"Harry," she gasped, and it was the first time she had ever said his name, and she felt him groan against her, and that was what tipped her over.
She came with her back arched and her thighs shaking around his head and his name still in her mouth, in long rolling waves that went on and on while he worked her through them, gentle now, until she was trembling and pushing at his shoulder because it was too much.
He crawled up the bed and lay beside her, propped on one elbow. His mouth was wet. He was looking at her like she had done something miraculous.
"You said my name," he said.
"I did not."
"You did. Twice."
"Shut up," she said, and pulled him down and kissed him, and tasted herself on his tongue, and reached down between them to unfasten his trousers.
He was hard and hot in her hand, and he swore against her mouth when she wrapped her fingers around him. She stroked him once, slowly, watching his face, the way his eyes went unfocused behind his glasses. She took the glasses off and set them on the bedside table. Then she pushed him over onto his back and swung her leg across his hips.
"I'm on top," she informed him.
"Course you are," said Harry, his hands settling on her waist. "You're a Malfoy."
"Exactly."
She sank down onto him.
It was a stretch, and a slow, full ache, and she had to stop halfway with her palms braced on his chest and breathe. He did not move. His hands were shaking on her hips with the effort of not moving, and his eyes were fixed on hers, and he said "Take your time," in a voice like gravel. She took her time. She took all of him, inch by inch, until she was seated against his hips with him buried deep inside her, and they both let out the same unsteady breath at once.
Then she began to move.
She had thought she would be in control. She was, for a while: rolling her hips slowly, finding the angle that made sparks go off behind her eyes, watching him come apart underneath her with a fierce, private satisfaction. But he kept looking at her. He kept saying her name. Not Malfoy. Draconia, low and wrecked, as if it were a word in another language that he had only just learned how to say. And his hands kept moving over her, her hips, her back, her breasts, the inside of her wrist with its glowing line, until her rhythm broke and she was gasping and grinding down against him without any control at all.
He rolled them. She let him. He came down over her and pushed back into her in one long stroke, and she wrapped her legs around him and held on.
"Look at me," he said.
She looked. The candles had burned low, and his face above hers was all shadows and green eyes. On the pillow beside her head, her wrist was bound in his hand, and both their marks were glowing, brighter and brighter, until the bed was full of silver light.
"Harry," she said. "Harry, I—"
She came again before she could finish, so hard that her vision whited out, and she felt him follow a moment later with his face pressed into her neck and her name breaking out of him. The light around their wrists flared, blinding, hot as a brand, and then faded.
For a long time neither of them moved.
She lay with her cheek against his shoulder and his heart slowing under her ear, and the candles burned down one by one, and outside the window the sky over Wiltshire was still black. Three hours until dawn. They had been fast, in the end. They had more than enough time.
Then she lifted her wrist to look at the mark, and her stomach dropped through the mattress.
The thin line around it was no longer silver. It was gold.
She knew what that meant. She had read the rite. She had read it six times, in the original Latin, at three o'clock in the morning, because she was a curse-breaker and she always read the small print. Silver for duty. Gold for the whole heart.
She sat up. She dragged the sheet up with her, and turned her wrist inward against her stomach, and kept her back to him.
"There," she said. Her voice came out very steady. "That's sealed. The contract's void." She swallowed. "It meant nothing. You understand that. It was a requirement, and we've met it, and that's all."
Behind her, the mattress shifted. She heard him sit up.
"Draconia," Harry said slowly. "Show me your wrist."
"No."
"I saw it. When it flared." There was something in his voice she had never heard before, something careful and astonished and very quiet. "If it meant nothing, then why is it gold?"