She trembled, chained on the large bed, hearing the familiar footsteps approach along the wooden corridor. How long had she been here? She no longer knew. She knew that Harry had won, and that they'd lost everything almost the second he had.
It had been so obvious when you thought about it; why should Voldemort be the only one with a Horcrux? No-one had realised that at the time though. No-one had even considered the idea that any of his followers might have had one too. Not even when Harry was killed and Kingsley was killed. Molly had been found dead in her own kitchen and someone had started a full-scale wizarding civil war; atrocities had turned up on both sides to keep the pot boiling until half the wizarding world had fallen with hundreds of people on both sides dead. The obvious suspects had been the few Death Eaters that had survived Voldemort, but when Andromeda Tonks had been found dead while the Malfoys were in custody people had realised that there was a new player in town.
When that player had stolen the Elder Wand, and used it to assassinate Lucius Malfoy and his family in their own home together with the aurors guarding them, that was when she had finally managed to put two and two together. Too late. She'd been the next on the list, taken that same night as if mistress had only been waiting for her to realise that she herself owned the Horcrux in question, an unyielding wand of walnut and dragon heartstring, twelve and three-quarter inches long.
The door opened and she slid off the bed to her knees, kissing the floor before mistress. She had no real idea why she, alone of mistress's victims, was alive. Perhaps it was the sex; mistress enjoyed using her after all. Or perhaps it was simply that mistress was no longer entirely sane; she cried every night for her sisters, the same sisters that she herself had killed. Poor woman.
Hermione looked up at the ruined, once-beautiful, dark-haired woman in front of her. As usual she felt utter terror; as usual she wanted more than anything to comfort those terribly haunted eyes. What kind of mistress would it be tonight? The torturer or the penitent?
Mistress dropped to her knees in front of her. She flinched from the impact of flesh on wooden floor but mistress didn't seem to notice. It was the penitent, as it was more and more often now.
"Please. Help me." It was barely a whisper; a child's cry in the dark.
As always she hated herself for heeding that plea. As always she heeded it anyway; no-one deserved this sort of pain, not even mistress. She had to try; maybe tonight there would be enough regret to put the shattered soul together again. Maybe tonight she could heal the desperate witch. Maybe that was why mistress kept her alive, still.
Hermione reached out and pulled the piteously crying form of Bellatrix Lestrange into her arms.