Tom unfolds a sheet of cotton and swallows her with it, enveloping her in the fluffy folds, his arms, and the hazy, droopy-eyed state he's left her in.
He ties a towel low on his carved ivory waist.
"You were reading late last night?" he says, setting her down on the end of her bed. Wet tendrils of her hair soak into the towel. "You look exhausted."
Why the fuck should he care.
"I want my books," she says.
"You have plenty of books," he reasons idly from somewhere inside her closet.
Outside, a blue heron on the shoreline unfolds its wings and skims across the mirrored bay.
He returns from the closet with a baby peach wrap dress, soft enough to lounge in. Could be cute with fishnets and a studded belt.
She lets the towel fall away from her shoulders, scowling at his offering.
"Go to my mom's house and get my books. My clothes," she says.
He seems to look beyond her as his brows climb his forehead. He doesn't mention her little slip of the tongue, her relinquishment of that crowded house. But his cheeks stain with pleasure.
"I'll get your books and homework, but your clothes are out of the question."
"They're mine."
"They're unsuitable."
She snarls.
"Unsuitable for what?"
"For a mother," he says. "Arms up."
He tugs the dress over her head and fastens the crepe cotton bow. For such a slippery garment, it has a fitted, high-end construction. It's also really, really short and her nips show through. She glimpses herself in the mirror.
Big bellied Kate Spade baby doll.
Ugh.
"Why aren't you in school, Tom?"
He shrugs.
"Sick day."
"Someone needs to get my homework." Anxiety spins in her voice. "Ron was collecting it, and—"
"Hermione," he scolds, his authority immutable. "Your priorities are in the wrong place, you need your rest."
"You really think I can just carry on with my classes without catching up? You know how hard they are!"
As her pitch ratchets upward, he swoops closer, sinking beside her on the mattress. Lending the quiet menace of his body to her, as if all fraught things simply need a firmer hand. With his middle finger, he tucks her hair behind her ear.
"You're thinking too small, cherished. Doors open for clever people who know who and how to ask."
"Sounds like bending the rules."
Tom's sudden laugh startles the baby inside Hermione, the Moro reflexone of her books called it. It matches the ice cold sensation jolting through her chest.
"Hermione," he says, "Rules are for ordinary people in ordinary situations, neither of which relate to you."
"That's not what Kant would say."
"And that!" He plants his finger against his palm like an invisible open book. "That is exactly our impasse, Granger, you're still too afraid to let go of maxims and universals even while they're not serving you. You forget that the people who make the rules are as human as you."
It's really no use with him, this line of thinking. He just goes straight to fucking Neitzche every time.
Hermione flops back on the comforter, its downy depths sucking her in like a great heap of mashed potatoes.
"You're an absolute nightmare," she says.
Tom is insistent about bedrest, but true to his shadowy boundaries, he lets her push the definition of bed.
They spend the afternoon downstairs in the living room, books spread out on the cubist, buttery leather couches. A fire crackling in the huge soapstone hearth. Tea perched on the lucite coffee table: lapsang souchong for him, the compulsory red raspberry leaf for her.
"It tastes like grass, and not the good kind," she whines.
Tom tsk tsks her from behind his book.
At precisely 2:30 he slaps his Brontë shut and gets up off the couch.
"I'll be in my office until dinner," he says. "I expect to find you here, or in bed."
Hermione sticks her finger in her mouth with a fake gag.
His patient chuckle burrows under her skin like a splinter.
The moment he disappears down the hall, with the click of a distant door, she creeps up from the couch.
Outside, lavender grey clouds have gathered low over the frothing bay. The patio below is buttoned up for winter, a cover pulled over the pool. A fucking pool. Washington isn't the sort of climate where just anybody has a pool.
Hermione can't find a phone anywhere. It's like Riddle doesn't have one?
She finds the phone while sneaking down the hallway.
His voice startles her out of her skin.
"No, Abraxas, we've been over this."
She freezes, clutching her belly.
There's a creaking, like a desk chair registering his casual backward tilt. Mister World-on-a-String.
He continues, muffled by the oak door,
"Listen to me, Malfoy, Potter has nothing. A pile of wrinkled sign up sheets collected outside a grocery store."
Sickness washes over Hermione.
"The permits will come through, leave that to me. And I'll handle Potter."
She makes a small sound, her throat closing.
"Email me the schedule," he says. "I'm working from home this week. Family matter."
His conversation drifts to logistical topics and she tears herself away from the door, padding back up the hall.
Hermione had always wondered how a fucking high schooler ran a successful shipping conglomerate. A nefariousconglomerate, to hear Harry speak of it.
What the hell is Tom going to do to him?
She finds herself in the kitchen, opening that giant fridge. Feeding her jitters seems like her only option for the present.
He'd made her a very classy pancetta panini for lunch but now she wants something sweet.
Something cheap and nasty.
Like ding dongs.
There's nothing like that in his fridge, or his pantry. It's like, all fresh vegetables and fancy olives and shit.
Okay, Healthy McHealtherton.
She pulls down a clamshell of globe grapes and rinses them in the porcelain basin sink, which is more like a bathtub for a small person.
Munching her grapes from a handmade stoneware bowl, she climbs back onto the couch. No sense in having him catch her snooping.
He has to go back to school sometime.
Then it's time for his little pet to prowl.
After a quiet dinner delivered from some bougie restaurant she's never heard of, she retires quickly to her room with a,
"No thanks, I've never seen "The Office" and frankly, it sounds dumb."
She files away that he has TiVo for future use. Maybe she can record a bunch of horrible infomercials over his stupid office show. Oops, sorry, Daddy.
Hermione steamsin her bedroom.
I'll handle Potter.
The fuck does that mean?
She huffs,
"Like hell you will!"
Infomercials remind her of her mother.
Who will care for her in that terrifying house? She's gotta be super out of pork rinds. God…
Hermione climbs onto her bed and curls up into a ball.
Her head swirls, Harry and Mom, Mom and Harry. Nagini. Corporate negligence. Dead Potters.
Tom. Always, Tom.
She dreams about slutty magazines with page after page of nude, smoldering Tom; piles of them: filling her bedroom at her mother's house, towering above her head. They collapse onto her.
And she wakes up.
Tom twists off the gas burner and places a pot lid halfway over the cast iron pan filled with a veggie scramble. A decent source of folic acid.
At this point, he's practically halfway to becoming an obstetrician, he's read so much.
Hm. Spread your legs for Doctor Riddle, Granger.
With a ghost of a smug smile tugging at his lips, he wipes down the counter and leaves the breakfast for her on the stove. There's a student government meeting before AP History and he can't really trust that drug-addled Nott to run it for him. Not with prom on the horizon.
It falls on May 26th this year. Hermione's due date.
His chest twists.
Most likely later though, he sucks in a calming breath.
He should put her in a flouncing A-line, perhaps a Dolce and Gabbana, and shock those bigoted little pricks.
Perhaps he'll invite Ms. Umbridge to chaperone, her scandalized pearl-clutching might make the event at least somewhat entertaining. Something to look forward to, since he's a trifle bored of being made prom king.
That's right. Think about handing those miserable shitheads their own asses. Not Hermione breaking...
Fuck.
Buck up, Riddle. She's a sturdy little thing. Those good breeding hips, that indomitable grit. No trouble at all.
But the truth is, Tom loathes that perilous thread between life and death.
He can handle the clinical diagrams and descriptions, but firsthand accounts paint a picture too close, too terrifyingly raw. His own mother couldn't traverse those dark waters; the travail swallowed her into the deep.
What if it's genetic?
His watch reads 5:12.
He shoulders his leather satchel and wipes a curtain of cold sweat from the back of his neck.
One quick look and he's got to go.
Tom steps into his office and clicks an innocuous folder in the corner of his desktop window. A live feed opens up, five different angles of her angelic radiance.
Still asleep, his darling girl.
He jots down a few lines on a sturdy piece of notecard, placing it on the kitchen countertop on his way out the door.
He's determined to cheat death.
If there is a way, he'll find it.
Chapter Text
Unfortunately for Hermione, Tom locked the door to his office when he left for school that morning, and the phone with it.
Damn his sneaky, perfect ass.
She tries a butter knife in the doorjam, the spring of an unscrewed pen in the lock findings. His forks are too nice to bend the tines (ow,) but she succeeds at breaking off the pointy tip of a radio antenna.
That doesn't work either.
The front door is open, but the garages are sealed up tight, and he never bought her a single shoe. She squints dolefully up the frosty driveway, her breath misting in the golden shimmer. It's not like she can just go running barefoot down the street in January. Not with this previa shit.
She decides to go steal some shoes in his bedroom, but that door is locked too.
Lame.
It's not like she's actually ready to escape.
She just wants to know she can.
Step one: get some shoes.
He's left a fragrant egg dish for her on the stove. The coffee maker is still hot on its plate but he didn't leave her any.
Jerkwad. One cup is fine, all the books say so.
She dumps half the bag of expensive single origin trying to fill the grounds basket. The coffee pot gurgles happily, filling the kitchen with a rich, comforting aroma.
Fuck, these eggs are good. She gets a fork (the one she tried to bend) and eats straight out of the pan.
His note catches her eye halfway through her mug of coffee and she sloshes her beverage reaching for it.
Hermione—
You are to stay seated all day, or better yet, lying down. I'm aware that you have difficulty following instructions, so I'll leave you with the promise that I will enforce your bed rest by any means necessary. Obey and you'll be rewarded; disregard me and you'll be punished.
It's for your own safety, my girl.
—TMR
"Ugh, imperious dipshit…"
Hermione tosses the note.
How's he really going to punish her? With a spanking?
She snorts and jabs another forkful of eggs, flinging little bits across the granite.
It hurts a little, the way she's turning his pristine kitchen into a vortex of chaos.
Just kidding.
Fuck him.
He wants to trap her like an unruly pet? Fine. She'll turn the whole house upside down. She'll chew the snooty couches' pine legs, shred open cushions, hurl one of those stupid coffee table centerpieces through a window.
Hermione will make Tom sorry that he didn't bring home piles and piles of her homework to keep her busy. Sorry that he didn't bring her Bridges' Constructive Analysis or her tattered Doc Martens.
She snickers, dumping the rest of her coffee across his white carpet. The thirsty pile sucks up her disdain in a fat, copper stripe.
If he wanted a nice little Suzy Homemaker, he should have knocked up a girl who was housetrained.
Tom steps out of his Bugatti, windswept and tired. He clicks the garage door shut, stretching the pleasant ache in his shoulders. His hair has that salt-tousled film from rowing practice.
The team is in no shape for the March regattas, not with Longbottom giving him hangdog looks all afternoon. Some people don't have the self possession to understand that criticism is an expensive gift. Tom only has so much emotional energy with which to hand out his hard-won prowess.
And now he can think of nothing better than a shower and dinner.
But mostly the shower.
His cock stirs in his gray joggers.
Perhaps Tom can't fault boys like Longbottom. Children, still popping their zits in the mirror and wondering who's talking about them between classes. Their worlds are small and so are their minds.
No wonder they all crave the steady leadership of a man. A business owner. A father.
Tom paces toward his house. Warmth glowing from the windows like the satisfaction mulling in his chest.
When he opens the door, a very different emotion rushes in.
His duffle bag hits the floor.
"HERMIONE."
Over the thunder of bratty ruckus blasting from his speakers, a scuffle issues from underneath the pile of couch cushions built in a giant blanket fort.
It sounds like a bag of chips.
...I kissed a girl and I liked it, hope my boyfriend don't mind it…
Toilet paper hangs from the ceiling. Books—clothes—mostly underwear and bras flung everywhere.
A brothel gone to hell.
Every cooking accoutrement he owns is on the kitchen countertops, caked in an ill-fated attempt at something chocolate, its nuclear meltdown splattered as far as the dining table.
He steps on an empty tub of ice cream, drooling onto the hardwood.
...It's not what good girls do, not how they should behave...
Something is burning and it's not in the kitchen.
She is finished.
Absolutely fucked.
Tom storms into the living room and yanks up a couch cushion. In the middle, it's singed black by a lamp perched hazardously inside her fort.
...It felt so wrong, it felt so right, don't mean I'm in love tonight…
Inside a ring of cushions, his stolen bride lounges like the shrine of a fertility goddess.
Her skin is flushed from the hot little light, her hair mussed and floating about her head in ephemeral static.
But his eye wanders to the cheeky curve of her ass plumped around a frilly black teddy. Her hair spills down its low back, breasts brimming along the lace edges of its plunging neckline. She's taken a pair of scissors to the pair of overpriced thigh highs clinging to her long legs, her glossy skin peeking through the holes. Thank God he didn't buy makeup or she'd really be Mistress Goth Queen, Lady of the Eternally Damned. And he's already contemplating jumping into the abyss right with her.
She blinks up at him, the pretense of surprise flickering in her long lashes. As if she's been leafing through Flannery O'Connor all day long, of course, why are you looking at me like that?
A bag of tortilla chips at her side crumbles into the rug.
"I'm laying down," she simpers up at him, the vivid sliver of rebellion glowing around her edges.
Calming thoughts, Riddle.
He lets a long breath unwind.
Smiles.
"How clever of you, angel," he says, bending down. His knees crack like an old, wily beast. "It must have been quite difficult putting the house in such a state while following your instructions, hmm?"
Her brows draw together and she pouts a lip.
"Very difficult, yes."
They watch each other.
Breaths sieving slowly, the collide of hot and cold and hot again which forms the base of every hurricane.
Now Tom grinds his teeth.
The vein in his neck throbs with the primal drive to subdue.
A thousand generations of wicked ancestors thrum in his churning blood, silently handing him their vicious script. All the Riddles and Gaunts before him demand the same thing: heed the snake.
He could shove her thighs apart right here. Fuck her amid the ridiculous shitstorm of her defiance.
Bad kitty girl.
Hermione bristles. Eyes livid. Her hair drifts about her head in the static like the moments before a twister.
She makes the first move and Tom, still contemplating impregnating her for a second time, reacts too late.
Grabbing a couch cushion, she shoves it at him and scrambles to her feet.
"Hrrr…!" For a split second, he struggles for balance. His voice claps the vaulted ceiling, "Do not run!"
But Hermione has already taken off up the stairs, moving with surprising agility for someone in their sixth month.
He's hot on her heels, totally buzzed over. His prey drive firing on all cylinders.
He's left his lecherous ancestors way behind and degraded all the way back to the Mesozoic.
She screams when he seizes her ankle, catching herself on the top step.
"None of that!" he snarls, snatching her up into his brutal grasp.
Hermione doesn't struggle, but she curses him,
"You disgusting sociopath!"
She spits into his face.
The saliva slides down his cheekbone and he laughs.
"Too late for labels, girl," he hisses in her ear. "You're mine now."
He carries her down the hall and Hermione's brain races.
He wouldn't… like… actually punish her, right?
Right?
Laying her on the bed, he towers over her shivering body, his eyes beautifully monstrous. The rage of a tyrannical, benevolent emperor.
"Stay there," he says, his voice husky. Ruthless.
Hermione's chest rises and falls, sweat beading along her collarbone. Her pussy squelches, sousing her flimsy lace gusset.
Tom disappears into her closet, snicking a drawer open and shut. Its slam betrays his barely leashed fury.
He steps out with several straps of padded leather in his hands. The buckles clink as he approaches.
"What the hell is that?" Her mouth drops open.
Tom closes a big paw around her calf, tight enough to leave a red handprint under the hose. Gently, he tows her to the end of the bed. He buckles a strap around one ankle, then the other.
"Darling Hermione," he purrs. "Thus far your judgement has fallen below the standard of your safety, which means that I'm obligated to uphold it for you. Is that clear?"
Her heart flails like a snared rabbit.
"You are absolutely insane," she gasps. "You won't!"
Darkness gathers around his features.
"Even the slightest threat to you—to both of you—is too great a risk to me, do you understand?"
She doesn't know how to respond to that.
"Wrists, angel."
After a moment's hesitation, she holds them out, in spite of herself. Maybe just to see what he'll do.
Maybe because the vicious purr of his voice fills her pelvis with little glittering curiosities.
"Good girl," he hums, tenderly buckling her up in the fleece-lined straps. "Lie down."
As she folds against the comforter, he leans over and she hears a clinking sound.
A chain zzzzhs up and around the bed and he clips it to her, kissing the palm of her hand.
Hermione nearly shrieks,
"Was that lurking under there the entire time I've slept in this bed?!"
He crosses to the other side of the bed, vague amusement flitting across his mouth. Another chain clips her to the other corner.
"You know it's not recommended I lie on my back," she says, swallowing hard.
"I do know." He tucks a pillow under one side of her back so her uterus is tilted off her vena cava. "I have made it my mission to know everything about what you need, Hermione." Another pillow goes under her knee, her belly; he builds a cushiony cloud nest for the sole purpose of strapping her to the goddamn bed.
Fucking asshole.
When he snaps her ankles to the corners, he adjusts the chain so she's really, honest-to-God locked down. She can't move or pull away. She can't resist him.
He sits beside her, indenting the bed. Smirking smugly.
"My, my, look at you." He strums the sopping pool seeping through her gusset. "I had a suspicion you would enjoy this."
"You are such a prick, Riddle." She jerks the chain with a fierce clink. "I'm not exactly appreciative of this nonsense."
"Is that so?" He tickles her clitty. "I think you love it when there's a linear causal relationship between your actions and what happens to you."
"The fuck does that mean?"
"You've gone long enough enduring terrible shit, Hermione. Things you had no control over. Things that weren't your fault."
She looks up at the ceiling. Thoughts swirling.
Tom loiters featherlight strokes where her thigh muffins over the elastic of her stockings.
"You are provoking me because you want to trust someone," he continues, "but everyone else has let you down. Their feelings have always been more important than yours.
"You want to know if I'll do what I say," he says.
"That's not true," she fires back. "I'm provoking you because you're being an ass."
The low chuckle reverberating in his chest awakens a tiny flutter of feet. Hermione sucks in a breath.
She can't see Tom. She's still looking at the ceiling, but she feels his body respond, tensing like a spring.
With excruciating slowness, he slides his hand up her thigh.
When, at last, he wraps both palms around her womb, the stars align.
A kick.
He makes the smallest sound, a reply from somewhere as deep in him as her baby lives in her.
Tom unlatches the gusset of her teddy and peels the stretchy lace back from her swollen belly. His breath whispers over her skin, but she can't hear what he says.
He lingers a kiss, just there.
Then, he fastens her lingerie back together and sits up.
"Suppose I'd better get started on homework," he says, grinning devilishly.
"You're going to leave me here?" she quavers, still not quite come down from his heady sweetness.
"Of course not, cherished." He slides off the bed. "But you'll stay there until I decide you've learned to respect the doctor's orders."
"What if I have to pee?" she whines.
"I'll let you out, and then put you right back in."
She fights the urge to frenzy her limbs against the chains. This is too raw. Too vulnerable.
"You're a monster," she whispers.
"Yes, Hermione," Tom says. Soft. "But I'm your monster."