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IV


Florence

It was madness.

Both of them knew it. But still he kept returning to her, slipping through her window in the dark night, stripping off his thick black robes – sometimes still stained with blood – to lie beside her. She welcomed him, the weight and warmth of another body, and in the darkness she could ignore the coppery smell of blood and death.

If she wept while they moved together, punishing him by raking bloody furrows down his back with her nails, and if his dreams were unsettled and troubled, then neither of them complained. He tightened his hold on her, and she held him while he tossed and turned –

False comfort or no, it was better than nothing.


And then one night, it became dangerously real.

Coming home weary and jaded from the hospital, she strayed, slipped into his world, the back streets and alleys, the covert world of Death Eater ambushes and Auror retaliation.

She was exhausted: that was her only excuse for not noticing the soft scuffing of stealthy footsteps, before and behind her, or the hair-raising certainty that she was being watched, that something (someone) meant her harm. The attack, when it came, took her completely by surprise.

Ginny Weasley, however, was made of stern stuff. She managed to fight off four of them, her wand-work strong and confident, before the fifth disarmed her and knocked her down. She fought strongly, but it was not enough; in the end, she found herself on her back, thrashing desperately, winded and unable to draw breath to scream –

A flash of eldritch green light, a vicious curse, and Draco Malfoy dragged her to her feet.

That night, they moved beyond games.