Chapter 3: The Trap Springs
The week unfolded with a brittle normalcy. Hermione graded essays, taught her classes, and smiled at colleagues in the halls. The anonymous note, however, was a phantom limb. She felt its absence in the Arithmancy text, a pocket of silence in the library corner she now avoided. The scent of bergamot seemed to have seeped into the stone of the castle itself, or perhaps her memory, conjuring itself at odd moments—faint and jarring, like a stray note from an unfamiliar song.
On Thursday, a thin winter sun glittered on the frost-rimed grounds. Needing air that wasn’t tinged with parchment or questions, she took a walk by the lake. The ice was a fractured pane of glass, groaning softly under its own weight. She walked briskly, her breath pluming in the cold, boots crunching on the gravel path.
“Professor Granger!”
Scorpius Malfoy appeared from the shadow of a large oak, his textbook held awkwardly under one arm. He looked convincingly harried. “I’m so glad I caught you. About the Probable-Existence Charm project—I think I’ve completely misapplied the variance theorem in the third calculation. Would you have a moment?”
Her guard, already up, didn’t lower. But he was a student.Her student. And his grey eyes, so like his father’s but open where she remembered Draco’s being shuttered, held only academic concern.
“Of course, Scorpius. Let’s see.” She stopped on the path, tugging off a glove.
He fumbled with the book, pages fluttering. “It’s this bit here,” he said, stepping closer and holding it out. The wind chose that moment to gust, snatching a loose parchment from between the leaves. She reached for it automatically, and his hand shot out to do the same.
Their fingers collided not on the paper, but on the cold, leatherbound spine of the textbook.
The contact was brief. A fraction of a second. But as her skin met his, a violent, searing heat erupted in the left pocket of Scorpius’s school robes. A muffled, blue-white light flared through the thick wool, stark against the winter greys and browns. Hermione had a half-second to register the shock on his face—a performance that was, she would think later, absolutely perfect—before the world snapped, twisted, and vanished.
It was not Apparition. It was a brutal, hook-behind-the-navel yank. Colors smeared into a nauseating blur. Sound vanished, replaced by a high-pitched whine in her ears. She was a rag doll in a cyclone, her scream trapped in the vacuum of the travel.
It ended as suddenly as it began.
Her knees buckled, and she landed hard on a thick, expensive rug, the impact driving the air from her lungs. The scent of bergamot and parchment—not old library parchment, but new, crisp, business-like—flooded her senses, choking her. The stone-cold air of the lakeside was gone, replaced by a dry, wood-fired warmth.
She was on the floor, disoriented, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She pushed her tangled hair from her face and looked up.
She was in a study. A masculine, impeccably ordered study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of dark wood held leather-bound volumes and sleek, modern artifacts. A fire crackled in a marble hearth. And behind a vast, polished mahogany desk, Draco Malfoy had risen from his chair, his face a mask of utter, bloodless shock.
He was older. Lines carved from regret, not arrogance, bracketed his mouth and eyes. His platinum hair was shorter, perfectly groomed, but it did nothing to soften the stark planes of his face. He wore dark robes of expensive, subtle cut, open at the collar. The grey eyes that locked onto hers held not disdain, but a kind of horrified recognition.
“What in the name of—” His voice was lower than she remembered, roughened by the shock.
Hermione scrambled to her feet, her legs trembling. Fury, hot and immediate, burned through the disorientation. “You,” she breathed, the word a weapon.
He rounded the desk, hands raised in a placating gesture that only infuriated her more. “Granger, I don’t—how did you get here?”
“Don’t you dare,” she spat, taking a step back, her shoulder knocking a small side table. A delicate silver astrolabe wobbled. “Your son. Your note. And now a bloody Portkey? Is this some kind of sick game? Have you not outgrown schoolboy cruelty?”
He flinched as if struck. The word ‘cruelty’ hung in the warm air like a slap. For a second, raw pain flashed in his eyes, there and then gone, buried beneath a quicker, dawning comprehension. His gaze flickered past her, towards the empty air from which she’d arrived, and his expression shifted into something colder, sharper. “Scorpius.”
“Yes, Scorpius!” Her voice rose. “He ambushed me by the lake, and then—contact Portkey.Brilliant. A family tradition of underhanded tricks.”
“I did not authorize a Portkey,” Draco said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet pitch. He wasn’t looking at her now; he was staring at the space she’d occupied, his mind clearly racing. “I would never… force your presence.” The last words were deliberate, weighted. He finally looked back at her, and his gaze was intense, searching. “The note. What note?”
The genuine confusion in his question gave her a moment’s pause, but the anger was too vast. “Don’t play ignorant. Scented parchment. Second chances. Left in my book.” She hugged her arms around herself, feeling violently out of place in this room that was so clearly his domain. “Was the goal to humiliate me? To have a laugh at the swot who’s still lonely enough to—“
“Stop.” The word wasn’t shouted. It was a command, flat and final. He took a single step closer, then stopped himself, as if physically restraining his movement. His jaw was tight. “I wrote no note. I have contemplated… questions. But I did not send one.” He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture utterly weary. “It appears my son has taken matters, quite literally, into his own hands.”
The logic of it began to penetrate her fury. The look on Scorpius’s face—the surprise that had seemed so real. The vial glowing in his pocket. This room, Draco’s obvious shock. It was a chaotic, reckless, Slytherin plot. But not from the father. From the son.
The revelation left her unmoored. The anger banked, leaving a shaky, embarrassed exhaustion in its wake. She was standing in Draco Malfoy’s private study, accused of jumping to conclusions. And he was looking at her not with hatred, but with a complicated, mortified exasperation.
“He thinks you’re lonely,” she said quietly, the fight draining out of her. She stated it as the simple, intrusive fact it was.
Draco’s shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly. He turned and walked to the fireplace, bracing an arm on the mantel. The firelight gilded his profile. “He is an eighteen-year-old with the subtlety of a Bludger and a misplaced sense of romantic destiny,” he said, his voice hollow. “I am sorry, Granger. For this… violation. I will speak to him. Severely.”
The formality of ‘Granger’ felt strange now. They were no longer children on a battlefield. They were two adults standing in the wreckage of a child’s misguided scheme. The room was quiet save for the pop of the fire. She noticed details: a framed moving photograph of Scorpius, younger, smiling next to a woman with kind eyes—his mother, she presumed. A quill set that looked goblin-made. The room spoke of wealth, yes, but also of silence. A curated, lonely order.
He looked back at her. “You should go. I can Side-Along you back to Hogsmeade. Or the school gates. Whichever is less… traumatic.”
She should go. She desperately wanted to be back in her own rooms, away from this awkward, painful scene. But the scholar in her, the part that needed to complete the equation, hesitated. “The note,” she said. “He wrote the words, but the scent… it was yours.”
Draco’s eyes closed for a brief second. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “A theft from my dressing table, no doubt.” He opened his eyes, and his gaze was bleak. “He knows I wear it. He used it to make the deception authentic.”
The question from the note, the one that had haunted her all week, now hung palpably between them, asked by a ghost but belonging to the man by the fire. Does a scholar of such formidable intellect still believe in second chances?… for a single, reformed man?
He had not asked it. But he hadn’t denied it was his question, either.
“You’re not what I expected,” she said finally, the words leaving her before she could vet them.
A bitter, quiet smirk touched his lips, not reaching his eyes. “The dungeons are drafty, and the snake motif is passé. I find a study warmer.” He pushed off the mantel. “But people rarely see past what they expect to see. Shall I take you back?”
She nodded, suddenly desperate for the escape. He moved towards her, carefully, giving her space. He held out his arm.
She stared at it. Taking it meant touching him. Trusting him to whisk her away. It was a smaller intimacy than the one that had just been violently forced upon them, but it felt, in that moment, just as significant.
She took a breath, steeling herself. Then she reached out and placed her fingers lightly on the fine wool of his forearm. She felt the firm muscle beneath, the warmth of his skin through the fabric. He was solid.Real.
“Ready?” he asked, his voice low.
She met his gaze, finding no mockery there, only a tired, shared chagrin. “Ready.”
The world compressed, and the scent of bergamot was the last thing she knew before the study vanished, this time with a whisper, not a scream.