Turn 4 of 36

Hermione meets Narcissa's gaze. She will not look away first — not from a Malfoy, not from any of them, not even now. The binding magic sits behind her ribs like a second heartbeat, patient and alien, and she is acutely aware that she signed before she understood what she was signing. Before anyone told her there was something to understand.

"I signed because the alternative was worse," Hermione says. Her voice is level.

"If there is something in that contract I should know about, I suggest someone tell me now."

Narcissa's expression does not change. She reaches across the desk — Thicknesse flinches, actually flinches — and lifts the contract with one hand. She turns it, reads, and her finger stops at a passage near the bottom. A passage Hermione read three times and dismissed as standard legal boilerplate.

"Clause fourteen," Narcissa says. "The binding magic is anchored to the Malfoy family line. Not to both parties equally. To the line." She sets the parchment down and looks at Draco.

"Which means that when you sign, the obligation flows through you. If the union is broken, if either party fails to uphold the terms of public conduct and cohabitation, the penalty is not shared. It falls on the Malfoy name. On the bloodline."

The silence that follows is not the kind that breaks easily. Draco is very still. His face has gone white — not pale, white — and for a moment the mask is not there at all. What is beneath it is not rage. It is recognition. He knows. He has understood something he did not let himself understand until his mother said it aloud.

"You knew," he says to Narcissa. Not to Hermione. Not to Thicknesse. To his mother, and his voice has dropped to something raw and barely controlled.

"You read it before I —"

"I read it the day they drafted it." Narcissa's composure does not crack.

"I tried to have it amended. The Ministry refused. They want collateral, Draco. They want a leash on this family that cannot be cut, and you are about to hand them one."

Thicknesse is standing now. "The terms were negotiated in good faith with the family's representative —"

"Lucius," Narcissa says, and the name drops like a stone into still water. "Lucius agreed to terms from a cell. That is not negotiation. That is surrender dressed in legal language, and you know it."

Hermione looks down at her signature. At the amber glow long faded from the ink. At the contract that now binds her to a family she despises, through magic that runs one direction, through clauses that cost her nothing and cost him everything. She signed freely. He has not signed yet. And the quill is still lying on the desk between them, untouched, waiting.