Turn 8 of 36

The binding magic shifts.

It is subtle — not a tug but a settling, the way a house settles on its foundations at night. Hermione feels it in her chest, a warmth that has nothing to do with comfort. It is the magic recognising proximity, acknowledging that both parties to the contract are within arm's reach of each other for the first time since the signing. The amber thread between them hums once, low and almost inaudible, and goes quiet.

"Thirty days," Draco says. He has moved, without seeming to decide to, toward one of the benches that line the atrium wall. He does not sit. He rests one hand on the back of it, his knuckles white against the dark wood, and stares at the floor as though it contains instructions he has misplaced.

"The cohabitation terms. Thirty days to begin living together. Public conduct requirements — appearances, events, the performance of a functional marriage for whoever the Ministry sends to verify."

"You've read them." "My mother read them. I read what she underlined." Hermione takes a breath. The air in the atrium is cool and stale, thick with the particular silence of a building that has been emptying for hours. She thinks of her flat — small, tidy, hers — and tries to imagine Draco in it. She cannot. She tries to imagine herself in the Manor, beneath those enchanted ceilings, surrounded by the weight of a family that has never wanted her there. The image will not form.

"We will need to discuss the terms," she says. "Practically. Where, when, what the Ministry expects us to —" "I know." He says it the way someone says *I know* when they have been thinking about nothing else. His hand lifts from the bench and falls to his side. When he looks at her, his eyes are dry and clear, the redness from earlier gone, and what remains is something harder and more deliberate than exhaustion. Not resignation. Decision. The look of a man who has finished weighing something and arrived at an answer he has not yet shared.

"I will not make this worse for you than it has to be," he says. The words are careful, chosen with a precision she has never associated with him.

"That is not generosity, Granger. It's strategy. If I survive this with the family name intact and without giving the Ministry the satisfaction of watching me crack, that is what success looks like. I am not pretending to like you. I am asking you not to make me perform hatred when we both have more important things to do."

Hermione stares at him. In eight years, Draco Malfoy has called her a slur, tried to hex her, gotten her petrified, and stood by while his aunt carved a word into her arm. He has also, in the last hour, signed away his family's last line of defense against a Ministry that despises them, because his mother needed to see whether he would. And now he is standing in an empty atrium at midnight, telling her he will not make this worse.

"What does surviving it actually look like?" she asks.

"Not the principle. The practice. Thirty days from now, what are we doing?"

Draco is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is stripped of its usual drawl, and what is left sounds almost like honesty.

"I don't know yet," he says. "But I have a week to figure it out before the documents arrive. And so do you."