He stalked away from his betrothed, doing his best to keep from bursting out in a fit of rage, keeping his face down so that the pinkness of his cheeks was not quite so apparent. Draco wanted very badly to smack someone or punch a hole in one of the walls of the Greengrass' manor.
How dare that little whore pretend to be so naive and innocent when she had been lying to him for the past four months, allowing herself to be passed off as a perfectly healthy young girl fit for marriage in just a few years time! Who knew if she even had a few years left in which to get married. Hell, for all he knew, his young bride might drop dead that very night as she laid down to rest. If he was so lucky then at least there would be the opportunity for him to contract himself to someone new. But, judging by her stubborn nature, Draco had no doubt she would stay obnoxiously alive up to their marriage and right through the eight years he would have to wait to be able to give her up for a better bride.
How dare she do this to him, playing at and pretending to be something she was not? Slytherins were supposed to be cunning and crafty, yes, but this was on a whole new level. His very livelihood was at stake now just because Greengrass and her father thought they could get away with pulling a fast one on him.
She'd seemed shocked when Draco told her that he knew the truth and that only made his blood pump that much faster out of anger. How far into their marriage had she been intending to wait before telling him the truth, if she planned to ever actually do so? Merlin's beard, he really wanted to rip someone's throat out at that moment.
"And where, exactly, is it that you think you're going, Draco?" Violet Runcorn smirked at him, arms crossed over her chest when he turned around to glare in her direction. "I hope you weren't intending on meeting some other girl in one of the spare bedrooms. After all, you've got a little bride waiting just downstairs for you. Not that being betrothed has ever stopped you before, has it? Why should it now?"
He scowled at the brunette, not feeling up to dealign with Violet right then, not when his brain was far too overwhelmed with the knowledge that he had been betrayed. "Go home to your husband and leave me alone, Violet. I'm not in the mood for your games right now, not when I've got way more serious things to get to."
"He isn't my husband yet, Draco darling, it isn't cheating until you're married." She giggled childishly. "Oliver decided to wait until next month, right before he heads back to school, for us to get properly married so I've still got almost four weeks. But what really matters is that you're mad about something." Violet ran her eyes up and down his body before smiling coyly, looking at him thoughtfully. "Oh, darling, don't tell me you only just found out that your seemingly perfect little bride isn't as wholesome and honest as she appears to be? Surely you knew about her special condition before now? I know the parents have tried to keep the whole thing a secret but it's not as though you can do something like that for very long when little Greengrass gets sick enough to need hospitalisation on a semi-regular basis and even Daphne fell seriously ill more than once, having to go to St Mungo's for three weeks straight in our third year. Don't you remember any of that, or are you really so oblivious?"
Her word gave him reason to pause. Had he truly never noticed Daphne missing school because she was sick? Surely he shouldn't be expected to pay any attention to the behaviour of someone two years younger than himself, but Daphne had been in his year and house, sharing a table for meals and attending the same classes as him. He presumed Pansy said something about it in the past—as she greatly loved complaining about and teasing Daphne whenever possible—but Draco far too regularly tuned out what his formerly betrothed said that he could never say for certain if she'd ever told him about the Greengrass' illness.
"I never felt it of much benefit to pay attention to the unimportant second daughter of a family that is, by my standards, wholly insignificant. I wanted very little to do with the younger students, not when I was busy actually doing something with my life. I had to mature far more quickly than the rest of them, which meant I've always had very little in common with the likes of Astoria."
"But now that you're tied to her, you've got no choice but to discover everything you can before it's time to be married. After all, you don't want to be caught off guard again, do you?" She reached out and grabbed his hand, pulling Draco into the shadows of the staircase, still with that smirk on her face. "If you really want to ensure that there won't be any more surprises then come upstairs with me. Ah, don't look at me like that, you know that wasn't what I meant. No, no, I only mean that we're at the Greengrass' house right now—there must be all sorts of secrets and hidden dirt about them somewhere in the building."
If Draco were a more intelligent man, he would have rejected her offer and returned to the party. If he'd been thinking reasonably, he would recall that it was unseemly for two people who were not betrothed to one another to be snooping around the upper floors, away from everyone else. But his brain was far too consumed with anger towards Astoria and her father—he couldn't think straight. Draco didn't want to think straight, not any more.
He just wanted revenge.
"Fine," he said coldly, moving past her and heading up several steps before looking behind him at the now broadly smirking Violet. "Since you seem to think you know so much, why don't you show me where to go?"
Violet sashayed up the stairs, a flirtatious look in her eyes before she turned to face forward. They moved to the first floor, where there was very little lighting at the moment, making the whole place take on an eerie vibe, like Mr Greengrass might jump out at any moment and demand to know what they were doing. Violet waved for him to follow her into what was clearly supposed to be Greengrass' office, which, surprisingly, only had the most basic of locking charms on it. Draco would have thought that someone like Granville Greengrass would be a bit more paranoid about someone uncovering his family's secrets. Or perhaps he was overly confident that no one from the party would come up here.
She moved over to the desk and, with a series of charms only slightly more complicated than Alohomora, was rewarded with the clicking satisfaction of breaking the lock. Violet looked up at him proudly, smug almost, and pulled out several files along with a lengthy, rolled-up sheaf of parchment that tracked the Greengrass family back to the eighteenth century, chronicling the generations. Unfolding the tree, the smug look on her face broadened, smile getting wider with each new generation she looked over.
"Look, a little marker next to every single member of the family who appears to have died of the same illness your little wife has. Fourteen people across nine generations, starting with Cedellia Greengrass at age nineteen." Violet opened one of the files she'd tossed on the desk, the oldest looking one that was labelled Cedellia. "Hm, interesting. Apparently, at least according to the rumours, her father, Thaddeus, made enemies with a powerful dark wizard when he refused to marry Cedellia to him. As revenge, he cursed both she and the Greengrass descendants to suffer from a horrible illness, passed from parent to child with no clue when it might pop up again." She flipped through a few more pages. "Ah, it would seem that the fourteen listed on the tree are those who have died that were directly linked to Cedellia's only child, her son Anaeus. Another seventeen who were born to other families but had Greengrass blood have also passed away over the last two centuries. That's thirty-one total."
"So then, if we do have children, this could potentially pass on to them or their children?" Draco scowled, feeling the strong desire to punch someone rising in him once more. "They've fucked me over, haven't they? I'm well and truly screwed now. Of course my uncle loves this union he's created—he knows I won't want to risk having kids with her and he also knows Greengrass will never want to go back on tying his daughter to my family."
"It's unlikely that will happen, though. The disease seems to only pop up every few generations before falling quiet again. You'll probably be safe having children with her as long as she doesn't die before then." Violet turned away so that he wouldn't see the tears that sprung to her eyes. He didn't like to see weakness in his women, she knew that. "You'll be fine—it's your uncle who's the real moron here, considering his children are just as much from the Greengrass line as yours will be. They're still in danger."
Storming over to the desk, Draco grabbed one of the other files—Enemies—and was shocked to see his own face on the very top, a picture of him cut straight from The Daily Prophet following his trial. Underneath was a note, reading Malfoy Jr, unstable but knows quite a bit, could be used to our advantage. Will consider the proposal of marriage. Just worried for Astoria's sake—hate the idea of using her as a spy again.
Marriages in the Pureblood world were often for political or economic purposes, he knew that. His parents married because the Blacks were rich and powerful and the Malfoys were one of the few families left who were truly pure. There would likely never be love between himself and any woman he ever married, but this...this was so much worse. There could be no trust, no sense that he would ever hold Astoria at anything closer than arm's length for the entirety of their marriage. How would he ever be able to tell that she wasn't spilling all of his secrets to her father, going behind his back to stay loyal to her own blood?
Just then, they both heard footsteps coming down the hallway and a man's voice—Mr Greenrass' voice. Violet and Draco looked at each other, panicked, knowing they couldn't just run out of the office without getting caught, considering it sounded like he was just outside the door.
"Come on," Draco hissed at her in a low voice, sending the files back to their proper place with a wave of his wand before heading towards the window. There was a large oak tree just outside and, throwing the window open, the two leapt outside, letting the window lock tightly behind them just as Mr Greengrass entered his office. Before he could notice the two young Purebloods in his tree, they scrambled down to the lower branches and dropped to the ground right outside where the party was still going on in full force.
"Oh, my dress is torn!" Violet batted at the rip in her skirts, repairing it quickly with her wand, doing such a fantastic job that Draco would need to squint just to see where the tear had been. She looked over at him, noticing that he was still red in the face, and from more than their hurried movements. "Are you still going to marry Greengrass after all I've shown you tonight? You deserve better than her."
"What, like you? Even though you're going to marry Rivers no matter how you feel and I'm going to marry Astoria no matter what I want to do? I can't get out of my marriage without admitting that I broke into Greengrass' office or at least went through some sort of unsavoury means of gathering the information I have. Neither of us has a choice and besides that, as I've told you before, you would never want to marry me if you could, not really. You know far too well what kind of person I am, especially to those I'm supposed to love."
He leant in and kissed her on the cheek, wishing they were living in a different world. But because they were living in this one, Draco pulled away sadly and, shaking his head, made his way back to the festivities, hoping that no one would connect his disappearance with Violet's. It was his duty to look like an upstanding and respectable member of society; after all, part of succeeding in life was doing whatever necessary to stay ahead of everyone else, including his own soon to be wife.
Draco didn't want to appear unstable.
It was time once more to pretend to be the dutifully betrothed, the loving and honourable member of society who was entirely unaware of the political machinations of those around him. He would kiss Astoria and allow her to think that he'd accepted the situation, to ease her and her bloody father into a false sense of security. But he would never forget any of this and he would never forgive them, either. Malfoys did not fail and they did not falter—not to anyone and certainly not to someone like Granville Greengrass.
He would not be called unstable.