Chapter 8: Midnight Correspondence
The essay on the intricacies of protective enchantments in post-Goblin Reform taxation was a masterpiece of student incompetence. Hermione’s quill hovered over the parchment, dripping a small blot of angry red ink. She’d read the same sentence three times. ‘Thusly, the goblins, whom are not technically wizards, poses a unique problem.’ It wasn’t the grammar that stung. It was the way her own focus kept fracturing, dissolving into the memory of rain-slicked cobbles and the specific, desperate pressure of a man’s mouth on hers.
She dropped the quill. It rolled across the desk, coming to rest against a cold teacup. The office seemed to hold its breath around her. Shadows from the lone lamp stretched the titles on the overcrowded shelves into strange, grasping shapes. She rubbed her eyes. This was absurd. She was a thirty-year-old woman, a professor, a war heroine, for Merlin’s sake. Not some swooning teenager replaying a kiss in the dark.
A sharp tap-tap-tap at the window made her jump.
Perched on the narrow stone ledge, talons clicking against the glass, was a large eagle owl she recognized. Its plumage was dark grey, nearly black, and its eyes held a disturbingly familiar imperiousness. Draco’s owl.
Her heart performed a clumsy, heavy beat against her ribs. She didn’t move. The owl tapped again, more insistently. Through the pane, she saw it carried nothing in its beak. Its talons, however, were curled around two objects: a single, stemless rose of such a deep black it seemed to swallow the weak light from her lamp, and a small, folded square of parchment sealed with dark grey wax.
Getting up felt like wading through mud. She crossed the room, the old floorboards creaking under her feet, and pushed open the casement window. The night air streamed in, cold and clean, carrying the scent of damp grass from the grounds below.
The owl hopped inside without invitation, landing neatly on the corner of her desk. It gave her a look that bordered on bored, extended one leg, and waited.
“Hello, you,” Hermione said, her voice strangely tight. She untied the slender ribbon securing the items. The rose was first. Its petals were velvet-soft, cool to the touch, and perfectly formed. Not a bloom, but a tight bud. It carried no scent, just a faint, mineral coolness, like stone after rain. She set it down carefully beside the bleeding essay.
The parchment was next. The wax seal bore no crest, just a smooth, blank impression. She broke it with a thumbnail. The note inside was written in a sharp, slanting hand with silver ink that shimmered as it caught the light.
Granger.
The thought occurred to me that you might be grading essays. A fate worse than most curses I know. An intervention may be required.
Tell me—do you still duel with that vicious right hook, or has academia softened you? I have a new duelling room.The south wing. Private.No portraits. The house-elves have been instructed to ignore any screaming.
If you’re feeling brave, come Friday at eight. If not, I’ll assume you’ve been bested by a fifth-year’s misuse of the subjunctive.
D.
She read it. Then read it again. The casual, almost teasing arrogance of it was so quintessentially Malfoy it should have made her teeth ache. Yet it didn’t. It felt like a spark thrown onto dry tinder. The reference to her right hook—a lifetime ago, in the Department of Mysteries, a wild swing that had caught him square on the jaw—wasn’t a taunt. It was an acknowledgment. A shared, brutal history he was dragging into the present, not as a weapon, but as a touchstone.
She brought the parchment closer to her face without thinking. A faint, distinctive scent lifted from the paper. Bergamot and cedar. The smell of his skin, the scent that had clung to his collar when she’d fisted her hands in it on the bridge. Her breath caught, a soft, involuntary sound in the quiet room.
The owl hooted softly, as if reminding her of its presence.
Hermione looked at it. “I’m not sending a reply.”
It blinked, slow and unimpressed.
She sat back in her chair, the note still in her hand. The black rose seemed to watch her. A duel. In the south wing of Malfoy Manor. The very idea was monumental. It was a place of nightmares, of cold marble and echoing screams. He’d said it was new.Private. No portraits. He was offering her a version of his home stripped of its ghosts, or at least, the watching ones. It was an offering of immense trust, and a challenge she couldn’t ignore.
Do you still duel?
Did she? Not formally. Not since the war. Her magic was precise, controlled, used for teaching and research and the occasional contained experiment. The raw, combative power she’d once wielded felt like a muscle long atrophied. The thought of facing him, wand in hand, in that space… It wasn’t fear. It was a terrifying, liquid thrill.
It was also a perfectly constructed excuse. A reason to see him that wasn’t a dinner, wasn’t a stilted conversation over drinks. It was activity. It was something to do with their hands and their wills besides reaching for each other in the dark.
Her gaze fell on the disastrous essay. ‘Thusly, the goblins, whom are not technically wizards…’
She snatched a fresh piece of parchment and her own quill.
Malfoy, she wrote, her script decisively neat.
My right hook is, thankfully, retired. My wand work, however, remains sharp. A fifth-year’s grammar is more likely to kill me than any Dark wizard these days. You’ve just provided a welcome diversion.
Friday at eight. Don’t bother with refreshments. I’d hate for you to waste good tea when I wipe the floor with you.
H.
She didn’t sign it with ‘Granger’. She folded the note, sealed it with a plain drop of wax from her desk candle, and handed it to the owl. It took the parchment, gave a soft click of its beak, and launched itself back into the night without a sound.
Silence reclaimed the office, deeper now. Hermione picked up the black rose. She turned it slowly between her fingers.A duel. At Malfoy Manor.
A slow, defiant smile touched her lips for the first time all evening. It felt good. It felt dangerous.
She looked back at the essay, dipped her quill in the red ink, and with renewed vigor, scored a bold line through the offending sentence. In the margin, she wrote, ‘Who.Not whom. And it’s “pose.” See me.’
Then she set the work aside, the decision made, the strange invitation settling inside her like a lifted charm. Friday. Two days. She had research to do.