Chapter 3: Interrupted
The words hung in the air, seared onto the parchment and into her mind. …what happens to witches who talk back.
A shudder, hot and cold at once, ran through Hermione. Her throat felt tight. She was leaning over the glowing rectangle, her hair curtaining her face, her entire world narrowed to that one line of script. The flat was utterly silent, a vessel holding only her ragged breath and the phantom sensation of his described touch.
Then, a sudden, violent cracking sound shattered the silence.
Not from the parchment. From her front door.
Three sharp, insistent knocks. Wood against wood, hard and real.
Hermione jolted upright, her heart leaping into her throat. The parchment slipped from her fingers, landing face-down on the cushion, its glow instantly extinguished as if doused. The magical heat in her palm vanished, leaving only a cold, clammy emptiness.
Silence again, thicker now. Heavy with interruption.
Her eyes darted to the clock on the mantle. Nearly two in the morning. Theo wouldn’t be back. Harry was on a stakeout in Nottingham. Ron… no, Ron was at the Burrow. A primal, stupid thought flashed: It’s him. He’s here. But that was impossible. The parchment was a closed loop. He couldn’t know where she lived from it.
Another series of knocks, louder this time. “Hermione?” A voice, muffled but familiar. Not Theo’s playful baritone. This was higher, tinged with concern. “Hermione, it’s me. Let me in.”
Ginny.
The relief was so profound it felt like a punch. She scrambled off the sofa, her legs wobbly. “Coming!” she called, her voice scratchy. She swept the parchment off the cushion, folded it once with trembling hands, and shoved it deep into the pocket of her discarded robes on the floor. It felt like hiding evidence.
She yanked open the door.
Ginny Weasley stood on the dim landing, her red hair a fiery mess piled on her head, wearing an old Harpies hoodie and a frown. She held up her mobile phone, its screen bright. “You didn’t answer your Floo. Or your phone. I saw your last text from hours ago saying you were ‘heading into the abyss with Theo.’ I got worried.” Her sharp eyes scanned Hermione’s face. “You look like hell. And you’re still in your work robes.”
“I got… sidetracked,” Hermione managed, stepping back to let Ginny in. The normalcy of her friend’s presence was a lifeline, pulling her back into a world where things made sense. “It was just firewhiskies. Theo left ages ago. I’m fine.”
Ginny closed the door behind her, leaning against it. “You’re not fine. You’re white as a sheet and you’re breathing like you just ran from a Dementor.” She pushed off the door and walked into the living room, her gaze sweeping over the empty glasses, the scattered books. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Hermione said too quickly. She moved to the kitchen, a pathetic attempt at hostessing. “Tea? I was just about to make some.” Her fingers felt clumsy as she filled the kettle.
“Don’t ‘just about’ me. Spill.” Ginny had perched on the arm of the sofa, her eyes missing nothing. They landed on the folded robes on the floor, the edge of the charmed parchment just visible from the pocket. Hermione’s breath hitched.
“It’s nothing, really,” Hermione insisted, keeping her back to Ginny, focusing on the clink of mugs. “Theo was being Theo. We got smashed. He made me send some stupid… thing. A message. To a wrong person. It’s embarrassing.”
“A wrong person.” Ginny’s tone was flat. “What kind of message?”
“Just a… a joke.” The kettle whistled, a shrill scream in the tense quiet. Hermione poured the water, watching the steam rise. “A drunken joke.”
“Theo’s jokes usually involve body parts and punchlines I don’t want to hear.” Ginny stood and walked over, leaning against the kitchen doorway. Her voice softened. “Hermione. Look at you. You’re shaking.”
Hermione looked down at her hands. They were, indeed, trembling slightly around the mug. She willed them to stop. They disobeyed. “It was just… explicit. Theo charmed this parchment so I’d send it to a random department head as a prank. Only it… it didn’t go to a random person. I think it went to someone specific. And they’re replying.”
Ginny’s eyebrows shot up. “Replying? Explicitly?”
Hermione gave a tiny, miserable nod. She couldn’t meet Ginny’s eyes. The words were too big, too sharp to say aloud. He described… he said he’d…
“Who?” Ginny’s voice was low, intense.
“I don’t know,” Hermione whispered, the confession a relief and a terror. “The handwriting… it’s formal. Sharp. It’s not anyone I’d expect.”
“Show me.”
Hermione hesitated. The parchment in her pocket felt like a live wire. Showing Ginny would make it real in a new way. It would give it a witness. But the pressure of holding it alone was becoming unbearable. She set the mugs down with a dull thud, crossed the room, and pulled the parchment from her robes. She handed it to Ginny without a word.
Ginny unfolded it. Her eyes scanned the first few lines—Hermione’s own drunken ‘no rules,’ the stark reply about her mouth. Her lips tightened. She read on, her expression shifting from concern to intense focus as she absorbed Draco’s clinical, devastating descriptions. The color rose in her cheeks. When she finished, she slowly lowered the parchment. She stared at Hermione, her gaze piercing.
“Blimey,” Ginny breathed after a long moment. “That’s… graphic.”
“Tell me about it,” Hermione said, her voice weak.
“And you don’t know who this is?” Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “Hermione. Look at this.” She held up the parchment, pointing at the script. “This isn’t some randy old wizard from the Floo Network Authority. This is… deliberate. This is targeted. This is someone who knows you. Watches you.”
“I know.” The admission tasted like ashes.
“It’s also wildly hot, in a completely terrifying way,” Ginny added bluntly, and Hermione choked on air. “What? It is. The ‘I’d make sure you couldn’t’ line? That’s pure villain dialogue. That’s ‘tie-the-heroine-to-the-train-tracks’ energy. Who do we know that’s a high-born, repressed, secretly massive ponce with excellent penmanship and a scary amount of focus?”
The list was very, very short. A face, all sharp angles and storm-grey eyes, flashed unbidden in Hermione’s mind. She violently shoved it away. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not.” Ginny’s voice was serious now. “You said the charm was supposed to send it to a random department head. Who’s on that list? Who did Theo’s stupid spell decide was your ‘secret desire’?”
Hermione’s mind, finally clearing of alcohol and adrenaline, began to race. Department heads. There was Perkins in Magical Transport. Robards in Auror Office, but he was seventy. Macmillan in International Cooperation… and Malfoy. Head of his little division in Mysteries, for all his youth. A department head in title, if not in public profile. Her stomach bottomed out.
“It can’t be him,” she said aloud, but the protest sounded hollow even to her.
“Why?” Ginny pressed. “Because he’s Draco Malfoy? The boy who called you a Mudblood? People change. They get obsessed. They develop incredibly specific and disturbingly well-articulated kinks.” She tapped the parchment. “This reads like someone who’s been composing it in his head for years. It’s got ‘repressed pureblood’ written all over it.”
Hermione sank onto a kitchen stool, the weight of it all pressing down on her. The observation about her mouth, about her arguing. The cold, possessive certainty. It did fit a particular profile. A profile she’d spent years actively ignoring.
“What do I do?” Her question was small, lost in the quiet hum of her flat.
“Well, you can’t leave him on read,” Ginny said, a smirk tugging at her lips despite the severity of the situation. “That’s just rude.”
“Ginny!”
“I’m serious! You opened this… whatever this is. This magical sexting channel from hell. You can’t just ghost a Draco Malfoy who’s just confessed his deeply twisted fantasy of shutting you up. He’ll show up here. Probably with a signed contract in triplicate.”
The knocking on the door echoed in Hermione’s memory. The coincidence was too sharp. “He can’t know it’s me.”
“Are you sure? Theo’s charms are clever, but they’re not infallible. Maybe the ‘random’ part glitched. Maybe it went straight to the person you were last thinking about.” Ginny’s eyes were knowing. “Who handed you a book today, Hermione?”
The air left the room. The memory was crystalline: the cool brush of his fingers in the Ministry atrium, the weight of the tome, his grey gaze flicking to her mouth as she’d caught her lip. She had been thinking of that, of the strange, charged silence between them, just before Theo had shoved the charmed quill into her hand.
“Oh, no,” Hermione whispered.
Ginny saw the confirmation on her face. She let out a low whistle. “Well. That complicates things.”
The folded parchment lay between them on the counter, innocent as a napkin. Hermione stared at it. The heat it had contained was gone, but the potential for combustion felt higher than ever. If it was him… every past interaction, every sneered comment, every silent glance across a crowded Ministry function, needed to be re-examined. The idea was vertiginous.
“He’ll know it’s me now,” Hermione said, a new kind of panic rising. “My last message… I was challenging him. If he’s really… watching… he’ll know I got flustered.”
“So beat him to it,” Ginny said, her Quidditch instincts kicking in. “Take back control. You’re Hermione Granger. You don’t get flustered by poncy gits with good vocabulary. You render them speechless.”
“How?”
Ginny picked up the parchment and handed it back to Hermione. The vellum was cool, inert. “You reply. You don’t ask him questions. You don’t let him describe another damn thing. You tell him what you want. You turn his own game back on him. If it is Malfoy, he’s expecting you to be shocked, to run, to be the prim little swot he thinks you are. So don’t be. Be the witch who wrote ‘no rules’ in the first place.”
Hermione took the parchment. It felt different now. Not just a secret, but a weapon. Or a key. Her mind, usually a library of carefully categorized information, began to whir with a new, dangerous calculus. The fear was still there, cold in her gut. But beneath it, tempered by Ginny’s unflappable logic, something else was stirring. A defiant, curious heat.
She walked to her desk, the parchment in hand. Ginny watched silently from the doorway, a supportive shadow.
Hermione took a fresh quill—not the cheap one, but her favourite eagle-feather one. She dipped it into her personal ink, a deep, enduring black. She didn’t sit. She stood, planting her feet firmly on the floor of her own flat. She unfolded the parchment, looking at his last, unfinished line about witches who talk back.
She didn’t address it. She didn’t acknowledge the knock on the door or the interruption. She wrote beneath it, her script steady and clear, each letter formed with deliberate intent.
‘Descriptions are a coward’s tool. They’re safe. Theoretical. If you’re so certain, prove it. My door is warded, but it opens to a direct challenge. You have until sunrise to decide if you’re playing a game, or if you’re in one.’
She didn’t sign it. She tapped her wand to the message, sending it soaring into the magic that connected the two sheets. The parchment glowed once, fiercely, and then went dark and cool.
She turned to Ginny. Her friend’s face was split by a wide, fierce grin.
“Now,” Ginny said, crossing her arms. “We wait.”