Chapter 10: Draco wakes screaming as Briana materializes astride him in the dream, her warm thighs gripping his hips as she impales herself on his throbbing cock. 'She's using your lust against you,' Briana growls, rolling her hips in slow, deep circles while tracing glowing sigils across his chest. 'So we'll weaponize it.' As Draco arches beneath her, Briana's magic flares - golden vines erupt from the ground to wrap around their joined bodies while she fucks him harder, their sweat-slick skin slapping tog
The Chevaliers’ Bind felt like swallowing live wires. It settled behind Draco’s breastbone, a coiled, humming knot of hostile magic that promised exquisite annihilation if he crossed its terms. He’d insisted. Potter had performed the incantation, his voice devoid of emotion, his wand tip tracing burning lines of light in the air that seared into Draco’s skin before vanishing. The vow was simple: intentional betrayal of the Hawthorne sanctuary or its defenders meant death. It didn’t care about his thoughts, only his actions. It was a cage. He’d never felt more relieved.
Exhaustion pulled him under the moment his head touched the pillow in the spare room they’d given him. The dream didn’t bother with seduction this time.
He was standing in the labyrinthine garden from his previous vision, but it was decaying in real-time. The gnarled trees wept a sap that smelled of infection. The whispering wind was now a chorus of muted screams. The path under his feet was soft, giving, like rotting flesh.
“Little scion.”
The voice came from everywhere. Morrígan Gaunt stood before him, but she was not a woman. She was a composition of shadows and memory. Her form flickered—sometimes a gaunt, hungry-looking girl with matted hair, sometimes a wraith of swirling dark petals, sometimes a beautiful, cruel woman with eyes like cracked rubies.
“You let them chain you,” she sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. “A dog on a leash. You were the promising one. The bitter one. Full of such delicious, wasted spite.”
“I’m not your anything,” Draco snarled, but his voice had no power here.
“Aren’t you? Your blood knows mine. It sings the same furious song. They took everything from us. Our name. Our place. Our pride. They gave it to muddy little heroes and muggle-lovers.” She glided closer. The scent of nightshade and rot intensified. “Join me. Not as a servant. As a kinsman. Help me scrape this world clean. We’ll start with that pretty little witch whose magic smells of spring. We’ll make a garden of her bones.”
The image slammed into him: Briana, not in passion, but in ruin. Her vibrant eyes glassy and empty, vines of thorny, black roses bursting from her mouth, her chest, her fingertips. A masterpiece of decay.
Revulsion and a terrible, pulling curiosity warred in him. The bind in his chest tightened, a warning flare.
“Fuck you,” he gasped.
“As you wish,” Morrígan smiled. Her shadowy form dissolved into a cloud of biting insects that surged toward him, filling his mouth, his nose, his lungs—
A door slammed open. Not a physical door. A tear in the fabric of the nightmare.
Light, not the warm yellow of sunshine, but the cool, relentless silver of full moon magic, flooded the corrupted path. The insects shrieked and dissolved into smoke.
Briana stood there.
She was naked, but not vulnerable. Her skin gleamed as if lit from within, covered in intricate, glowing runes that pulsed with a steady, thrumming power. They were not drawn; they were born from her skin—silver sigils of protection, binding, and fierce, vegetative growth. Her hair was a wild cascade around her shoulders, and her eyes were solid, radiant pools of that same lunar light. She held no wand. She was the spell.
“Get the fuck out of his head,” she said, and her voice was not a voice. It was the sound of roots cracking stone.
Morrígan’s form recoiled, hissing. “The gardener. You trespass.”
“You’re the trespasser,” Briana countered, stepping fully into the dreamscape. Where her feet touched the rotten path, sickly-sweet grass and small, white starflowers sprouted, pushing back the decay. “This mind is under my protection.”
“His mind is a ruin I inherited. I am merely redecorating.”
Briana didn’t look at Draco. “Draco. Get up.”
He was paralyzed, a spectator.
“He can’t,” Morrígan crooned. “He’s listening. He wants to hear what I have to say.”
Briana’s luminous gaze finally fell on him, and the disappointment in it was worse than any curse. “Is that true? You want this?”
The image of the bone garden flashed again. Followed by the real memory: Briana handing him a plate of bacon, her fingers briefly brushing his. The living warmth of the Hawthorne kitchen. Luna’s radish earring. Neville’s steadfast nod.
“No,” he rasped.
“Then fight her.” Briana took another step, and the garden shuddered. “You know how. This is your mind. Your territory. You are a Malfoy of the Manor. ACT LIKE IT.”
Her shout was a catalyst. The bind in his chest didn’t hurt—it ignited. It was a tether, not just a restraint. A line cast to a safe shore. He grabbed onto that feeling, the vicious promise of pain for betrayal, and used it as a weapon against the numbness.
He imagined the Malfoy dungeons. Not as a prison, but as a vault. Cold, impersonal, impenetrable. The rotting garden flickered, walls of damp stone erupting around Morrígan’s flickering form.
She shrieked in outrage.
Briana was moving. She crossed the space to Draco, the runes on her skin flaring brighter. “This is going to be vulgar,” she said, her voice dropping to a raw, practical whisper. “And I need your permission. She’s rooted in your desire. We have to burn it out. We have to fuck her out.”
He understood. This was the ritual in reverse. Not Sanguinis Fumus to reveal corruption, but something older, wilder—a claiming. A seeding of life in a fallow, poisoned field.
“Do it,” he growled.
She pushed him onto the newly-grown grass, which was cool and alive under his back. She straddled him, her glowing weight settling over his hips. He was hard, a helpless, biological response to the overwhelming confluence of terror, magic, and her fierce, radiant proximity.
Morrígan slammed against the inside of the dungeon walls he was holding. “You dare? You soil yourself with this?”
“Watch,” Briana hissed.
She took him in her hand, guided him to her entrance. She was already wet, a shocking, human warmth amidst the surreal conflict. She sank down onto him in one relentless, claiming motion, sheathing him completely in her tight, hot grip.
He cried out, back arching. The sensation was too much—real and unreal, carnal and profoundly magical.
Briana began to move, a hard, driving rhythm that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with conquest. Each downward thrust was a punctuation mark.
“This,” she chanted, her voice gritted with strain, “is not… your kingdom.” With every word, a rune would flash, searing itself against the inside of his skull.
She rode him with a brutal, focused intensity. Her nails dug into his shoulders. Her breasts brushed his chest with each movement. The slick, wet sounds of their joining were loud in the shifting dreamspace. He could feel her walls clutching him, a desperate, muscular rhythm. He was lost in it, his hips rising to meet her, a willing participant in his own exorcism.
“You are not… his blood,” she continued, sweat beading on her rune-marked skin.
Morrígan’s screams were the sound of tearing metal. The dungeon walls began to fracture.
Draco was close. The pressure coiled, unbearable. Briana felt it. She leaned down, her mouth at his ear, her breath hot. “Come inside me. Now. Flood her out.”
The command undid him. With a raw, shattered groan, he erupted. It felt like his very spine was unspooling. The release was blinding, a torrent of white-hot magic that wasn’t black, wasn’t gold, but pure, obliterating silver.
As he pulsed within her, Briana threw her head back and screamed her own culmination. A ring of power, visible like a shockwave of moonlit energy, exploded from their joined bodies.
The spectral dungeon shattered.
Morrígan’s form dissipated with a wail of absolute fury, not of pain, but of eviction.
“This isn’t over, gardener! I’ll blight every seed you’ve ever planted!”
Then she was gone.
The dreamscape melted, reforming into a quiet, neutral darkness. Briana collapsed against him, her glowing runes fading to faint, silvery scars before vanishing entirely. They were both slick with sweat, shuddering in the aftermath. He was still inside her, softening now, the physical intimacy suddenly awkward and overwhelming.
She pushed herself off him, the separation feeling strangely like a loss. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“It worked,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The ward is set. She can’t just walk in anymore. You’ll have to be careless to let her back in.”
She stood, and with a wave of her hand, simple robes appeared on both of them. The dream was ending, the connection fraying.
“Why?” Draco asked, staring up at her. “Why go that far?”
Briana finally looked at him. The lunar light was gone from her eyes, leaving only exhausted, resolved green. “Because it was the most direct counter-magic. Life. Connection. However fucking messy it is.” She hugged her robes around herself. “And because the bind you chose requires trust. This… built a channel. Now I’ll know if she’s trying to get to you again. Before you do.”
It was tactical. Clinical. And it had been the most intimate experience of his life.
“Get some real sleep,” she said, and dissolved like mist.
Draco woke in his bed at Hawthorne Manor, gasping. The sheets were tangled, his body humming with residual energy and the ghost of sensation. The bind in his chest was quiet. For the first time in weeks, his mind felt like his own—a quiet, scarred place, but his.
He got up, legs unsteady, and went to the window. The first grey light of dawn was touching the gardens. He could see a figure down by the greenhouses. Briana, already dressed, inspecting the leaves of a venomous tentacula as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t just fought a war inside his soul, using their bodies as the battlefield.
He watched her. The pragmatic set of her shoulders. The careful way she touched the plant.
The memory of her riding him, chanting those words, was not arousing. It was awe-inspiring. And terrifying.
She had looked into the heart of his corrupted desire and hadn’t flinched. She had weaponized her own body to cleanse it.
He understood now, with chilling clarity, why Morrígan saw Briana as the ultimate threat. It wasn’t just her magic of growth. It was her willingness to get her hands dirty in the soil of someone else’s ruin. To plant something new in the rot.
Turning from the window, he saw a single, fresh, white starflower resting on his bedside table. It hadn’t been there when he’d fallen asleep.
A receipt. A reminder. A seed.
Down in the garden, Briana straightened up and looked directly at his window. She didn’t wave. She just held his gaze for a long moment, then turned and walked back toward the house.
The war outside was coming. But the first, crucial, filthy battle had been won. And Draco, for better or worse, was now inextricably, painfully, bound to the gardener.
The scent of her lingered on his skin, a phantom of moonlit sweat and crushed grass. He pressed the heel of his hand against the Chevaliers’ Bind, feeling its silent, dormant weight. It wasn’t a cage. It was an anchor. Downstairs, a cupboard door slammed. The ordinary, domestic sound felt more surreal than the dream.
He dressed slowly, each movement testing the reality of his own body. The memory of her grip, the consuming heat, played on a loop behind his eyes, not with lust but with a staggering, humbled awe. She had seen the worst of what he could be—the attraction to that beautiful, final decay—and had met it not with cursework, but with a savage, merciful defiance of her own. He was in love. The realization was quiet and absolute, settling into his bones with the same finality as the bind. It changed nothing. It changed everything.
The kitchen was thick with the smell of frying eggs and simmering magical antibiotics. Neville stood at the stove, his back to the room. Luna was at the table, carefully polishing what looked like a dagger made of woven glass. Briana was rinsing a handful of dirt from her fingers at the sink, her sleeves rolled up. The morning light caught the fine, silvery lines on her forearms—the faded echoes of last night’s runes.
“You look like shit, Malfoy,” Neville said without turning around. “Sleep okay?”
The casual question hung in the air. Draco’s gaze locked with Briana’s in the window’s reflection. Her green eyes were calm, guarded. She gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“Like a stone,” Draco lied, pulling out a chair. Its legs scraped loudly on the flagstones.
“Good,” Neville said, sliding a plate of eggs and toast in front of him. “We’ve got work. The wards on the eastern tree line felt a probe last night. Just a touch. Slick, though. Old magic.”
Luna looked up, her gaze drifting between Draco and Briana. “Your auras are braided. It’s quite tight. Like ivy on a chimney.”
Briana turned off the tap. The silence was sudden and heavy. She dried her hands on a towel, her movements deliberate. “We had to solidify the ward. After the bind. It required a direct channel.”
Neville finally turned, his face unreadable. He looked at Briana, then at Draco. His eyes, usually kind, were flinty. “What kind of channel?”
“The kind that leaves a trace,” Briana said, her voice low. “So I can feel it if she gets close to him again. Before he’s compromised.”
“You let her into your mind?” Neville’s question was aimed at Draco, but his anger was radiating toward Briana. “Voluntarily?”
“It wasn’t a tea party, Longbottom,” Draco snapped, his own frustration flaring. “She invaded a dream. I built a fucking dungeon in my head to trap her. Briana… provided the counter-assault.” The word felt inadequate.
Neville’s jaw tightened. He understood. The specifics were unspoken, but the raw, charged energy in the room was explanation enough. He slammed a spatula down on the counter. “Godric’s balls, Bri. That’s a two-person spell. If she’d pushed back harder, she could have pulled you both into a psychic sinkhole. You’d be vegetables.”
“She didn’t push back harder because we fucking routed her,” Briana shot back, her composure cracking. “I know the risks. I calculated them. His mind is clean. For now.”
“He’s not worth—” Neville began, then stopped himself, but the words echoed in the sudden, terrible quiet.
Draco flinched as if struck. The old shame, cold and familiar, curled in his gut. He set his fork down carefully, the food now ash in his mouth.
Briana moved. She crossed the room to Neville, not with anger, but with a fierce, focused intensity. She grabbed the front of his shirt, forcing him to look at her. “Look at me,” she demanded, her voice a raw whisper. “You think I did that for him? I did it for us. For you. For Luna. For every fragile, growing thing in this place that depends on us. She was in his head, Nev. She was offering him the world in exchange for helping her burn ours down. And he said no.”
Neville’s anger faltered, his eyes searching her face.
“He said no,” she repeated, softer. “The Malfoy who had everything and lost it looked at a chance to have it all again, and he said no. He asked for a bind that would kill him if he betrays us. That’s not our enemy. That’s our frontline. And I will use every tool, every ritual, every vulgar fucking spell in my arsenal to keep him standing there.”
She released his shirt. Her chest was heaving. The kitchen was utterly silent. Luna had stopped polishing her glass dagger, her wide eyes full of a strange, sad understanding.
Neville looked past Briana, at Draco. His expression shifted through conflict, frustration, and finally, a grudging, weary acceptance. “The eastern tree line,” he said again, his voice rough. “After breakfast.”
He turned back to the stove. The moment was over, but the atmosphere had fundamentally changed. The accusation was gone, replaced by a tense, new acknowledgment.
Briana walked back to the sink, her shoulders tight. As she passed Draco’s chair, her fingers, briefly, brushed the back of his neck. A point of contact, electric and deliberate. A silent reaffirmation of the channel. Of the choice.
Later, in the cramped potions lab tucked beside the greenhouse, the air simmered with the sharp tang of hellebore and dragonfly thoraxes. Draco was meticulously grinding ingredients, the rhythmic scrape of the pestle a focus against the storm in his head. The door opened and closed.
Briana leaned against the workbench, watching him. “Neville’s sorry. He won’t say it. But he is.”
“He’s right to be wary,” Draco said, not looking up.
“Maybe.” She picked up a dried petal of monkshood, crumbling it to dust. “He’s also terrified. We all are. Love makes you stupid about the people you’re terrified for.”
Draco’s hand stilled. The word hung between them, acknowledged now.
He finally looked at her. The careful distance she’d maintained since the dream was gone. In its place was a stark, weary openness. He saw the fatigue, the weight of leadership, the fear she hid from everyone else. And beneath it, a flicker of the same desperate, clawing need that had driven her onto him in the dreamscape.
“The channel,” he said, his voice low. “Is it still open?”
“Yes.”
“Can you feel what I’m feeling right now?”
She inhaled sharply. A faint silver echo of the runes shimmered just under the skin of her wrists. “Yes.”
He put the pestle down. The space between them was charged, humming with the aftermath of shared violation and the raw, unspoken thing growing from its ashes. There was no dream magic to blame now. This was just a dim, cluttered room smelling of bitter roots.
“I can feel your heart,” she whispered, a confession. “It’s beating too fast.”
“What are you going to do about it?” The challenge in his voice was pure Malfoy, but the need underneath was entirely new.
She closed the distance. There was no grace to it. She grabbed the collar of his shirt, pulling his mouth to hers. The kiss was a collision—all teeth and shared breath and the sour-sweet taste of fear and want. It was nothing like the dream. This was messy, real, and hungry.
“Fuck,” he growled against her lips, his hands finding her hips, dragging her into the edge of the table. Jars rattled.
“Yes,” she bit out, her fingers already fumbling with the button of his trousers. “That’s the idea.”
This was not a ritual. This was a claiming in daylight. She pushed his trousers down just enough, her own underwear a mere inconvenience she dealt with by shoving the fabric aside. There was no patience, no tenderness. She guided him, lifted herself, and sank down onto him with a sharp, gasping cry that was swallowed by his mouth.
He was already hard, and she was wet, but the fit was tight, almost too much. She took him deep, seating herself fully, letting out a shuddering breath. For a second, they were still, foreheads pressed together, connected in the most brutally physical way, the channel between their minds blazing wide open. He could feel her pleasure-pain at the stretch, the dizzying spark of her magic meeting his. She could feel his overwhelming surge of possession, his awe, his terrifying love.
Then she moved.
She rode him with the same fierce, driving purpose as in the dream, but now every sensation was amplified, grounded in solid flesh and wood. The table dug into the back of his thighs. Her nails scored his scalp. The wet, slapping rhythm of their joining was obscenely loud in the small room. He thrust up into her, meeting each downward plunge, chasing the coiling, tightening heat building in his gut.
“You’re mine,” she panted, her voice ragged, her eyes blazing into his. “You belong to this. To us. She doesn’t get you.”
“Never,” he grunted, his hands gripping her arse, pulling her harder onto him. He could feel her climax beginning, her inner muscles fluttering wildly around his cock. “Briana—”
“Come inside me,” she commanded, her body tightening. “Fill me up. Let me feel it.”
It was the permission that shattered him. With a broken shout, he obeyed, pumping his release into her in deep, pulsing waves. Her own orgasm ripped through her a second later, a silent, convulsing seizure against him, her head thrown back, mouth open in a soundless scream. The magic in the room spiked, making the glass jars sing, and for a blinding second, their linked senses overloaded—he felt his own pleasure echoed through her nerves, felt her fierce, protective joy sear through his veins.
They slumped together, a tangled, sweating mess of limbs and hurried clothing. His spent cock slid from her, and she winced, collapsing against his chest. Their hearts hammered against each other, a frantic, synced rhythm. The channel between them glowed like a freshly forged link, strong and humming.
In the quiet, broken only by their ragged breaths, the truth was undeniable. He was bound to her. They were all bound to her—Neville with his fearful devotion, Luna with her serene understanding, and now Draco, with this desperate, fucked-up love. She was their anchor. And she would let nothing, not a dark witch, not their own fears, not the whole rotting world, take any of them from her.
The door to the lab opened. Neville stood there, holding two steaming mugs. He took in the scene: their disheveled clothes, their flushed faces, the intimate, heavy air. His expression didn’t change. He simply placed the mugs on a clear corner of the table.
“Eastern tree line,” he said, his voice utterly flat. “Ten minutes.” He turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Briana let out a shaky laugh against Draco’s neck. “Told you he was sorry.”
Draco held her tighter, his face buried in her hair, inhaling the scent of earth and them. The Gaunt woman was out there, probing the wards. The world was still dark and dangerous. But here, now, he was home. He was hers. And they had work to do.