Turn 3 of 36

Draco's fingers close around the quill. His hand does not tremble — Hermione watches for it, and it does not — but he holds the thing as though it might bite him. The nib hovers a breath above the parchment. The room holds still.

Then the door opens.

It does not knock. It does not wait. It simply swings inward, and the woman who steps through it moves as though she owns the architecture. She is tall, angular, dressed in robes of deep charcoal that cost more than Hermione earns in six months. Her hair is silver-blonde, swept back from a face that is all angles and precision. She looks at Draco first, then at the contract, then at Hermione — and something in her expression shifts. Not softens. Shifts, the way a blade shifts when the light catches it.

"Mother," Draco says. The word comes out flat.

Narcissa Malfoy crosses the threshold. Thicknesse half-rises from his seat, mouth opening to protest, but she speaks over him with the ease of a woman accustomed to speaking over institutions.

"I will not have my son sign under the impression that this is a formality."

"Madam Malfoy, the proceedings are —"

"The proceedings," Narcissa says, "are the reason I am here."

She stops at the desk. Her gaze rests on the contract, on Hermione's signature drying in enchanted ink, on the empty line beneath it. When she speaks again, her voice is lower. Measured. There is something careful beneath the steel — something that might, in another woman, be grief.

"The Ministry has assured me that this union restores the family's standing. That the terms are… generous, considering what my husband cost us." She lets the silence after Lucius's name do its own work.

"What the Ministry has not assured me is that my son understands what he is trading."

Draco sets the quill down. The sound is very small in the quiet room.

"I understand perfectly."

"You understand the shape of it," Narcissa says. "Not the cost." She turns to Hermione then, and the full weight of her attention is not admiration or contempt but assessment — the cool, thorough appraisal of a woman measuring exactly what her son is about to bind himself to.

"Miss Granger. You signed first."

It is not a question. It is an observation that carries the weight of one.