A/N: Sorry for the cliffie, my lovelies! Truly! I know you hate me right now, but I never meant to leave it there. I got the Creeping Christmas Death. OMG! Talk about sick! My fevers were so high I was seeing things! Then the hubby got it. Then the daughter's bf got it. Then daughter number one got it. Let's just say, Christmas at the Elvee home had more used Kleenex and otc medicine than Christmas cheer. Bleh.

But here we are at last, my lovelies! So without further adieu... (I hope you leave a review...) I give you chapter nineteen.

Love,

Elvee

Snatch

Chapter Nineteen

"Loyalty and devotion lead to bravery. Bravery leads to the spirit of self-sacrifice. The spirit of self-sacrifice creates trust in the power of love."

-Morihei Ueshiba

"And what have we here?" Lucius drawled, his wand held seemingly idly at the crook of his crossed arms. Surprise didn't ruffle him in the least. His shoulder length blonde hair played on the wind, but his face was smooth, almost impassive except for the tiniest hint of a triumphant smirk. "Draco, my, what a pleasant surprise."

Draco, for his part, was warily wielding his wand in his right hand. With his left he was firmly keeping Hermione behind him. "Father," he nodded, his whole body tense.

Lucius gave a short, light laugh, the darkness of violent insanity settling in his eyes. "And with Potter's little mudblood, I see. I could almost forgive your betrayal for just this one gift." He allowed himself the theatrics of a mock disapproving tut. Then his features morphed and his eyes glittered like folded steel. The smile he gave pulled his face into a feral and predatory look. "But I'm afraid, a Malfoy doesn't forget, let alone forgive."

"Leave her alone! She's mine!" Draco growled. He hissed over his shoulder, never taking his eyes from his father, "Run Hermione."

"Oh! So she is not for me. Pity." Lucius's eyebrow arched, a look of cool disdain joined his silky words. "And you think you can keep her from me? You who could not do the bidding of our Lord? You don't even have the stomach to punish this little mudblood as she deserves." He launched a curse at Hermione, but she sidestepped it by ducking quickly back behind Draco, and threw up a shield charm. The yew hedge behind her exploded into bits of branches and leaves. The shield charm wasn't much protection from a man like this, a man who oozed dark magic from his very pores. Danger lurked in his every soft syllable. "You have shamed me for the last time, Draco."

And then all hell broke loose.

"Stupefy!" Screamed Hermione even as she was shoved sideways by Draco. Lucius lazily flicked her red jet of light aside with barely a movement of his wand.

"Protego!" Draco yelled, conjuring a shield in front of her as she staggered to one side.

"Imperio!" Thundered Lucius and it was his spell that hit home. Draco stiffened and blinked. "Gather our guest and let us show her some true Malfoy hospitality."

Hermione scrambled around the edge of the hedge, nearly losing her feet. Behind her, Draco's even steps gave slow chase. Her mind whirled. If there was a counter curse to the Imperius jinx, she didn't know it. She couldn't hurt him. Somewhere out in the rest of the maze lurked Lucius, if she could only get to him and disable him, perhaps the spell's hold on Draco would loosen and they could make a run for it.

"Hermione. Don't run." He called, but it wasn't Draco's voice. Normally his voice was warm and husky, and tinged with a sardonic twist. This voice almost seemed to echo in its emptiness. Her arms crawled in gooseflesh. This was not her Draco.

She pelted toward the sound of the fountain, the uneven cobbles catching her shoes and nearly causing her to stumble, the yew branches grabbing at her hair and robes. The hedges were high and dense. It was some sort of a hedge maze, that she knew from following Draco earlier, but she had no idea where she was or how she was going to escape. At any turn she could run into Draco, or worse, his father. There was no place to hide at the foot of the bushes. The only thing she could do was keep running.

Lucius was a force of nature with a wand. How in the hell could she even consider defeating him to free Draco? Now Lucius thought Draco was working with Bellatrix to shame him. As his only surviving progeny, Lucius couldn't kill Draco, but he could torture him to within an inch of his life. With the Imperius curse on him, Draco could be forced to maim and kill against his will, permanently shredding his soul. She couldn't – wouldn't- leave him to that fate.

Lucius wasn't going to treat her like a long lost puppy, either. If he had Draco under the Imperius curse, it was likely she'd be tortured by at least one of them. If she were a betting woman, she's bet Lucius would have Draco do it just for the practice. The sick fuck. As much as she wanted to flee screaming, she couldn't. She'd have to find a way to disable Lucius and rescue Draco, or she'd be no better than Snape. She couldn't live with that.

"Come, ma cher, Father wants to play. We shouldn't keep him waiting." Her breath caught in her throat. Blood pounded in her ears. Draco's voice was a row or two away from hers. Casting a silencio on her shoes, she pelted back the way she came.

She was taking a hell of a gamble: first that she could find Lucius, and second that she could incapacitate him before he caught her. If she was caught, well, she didn't want to think what he would do to her if she was caught. He'd asked Draco to dissect a live muggle. Whatever he'd do, one thing was certain: she'd want to die before it was over with. He'd likely not stop until he broke her, until she spilled all the secrets she knew. She thought of Ron and Harry, and knew it was time.

As she ran, she dug in her beaded bag and finding the small poison capsule, carefully wedged it between her back teeth and her cheek. Only if the worst happens, she told herself. She had to be prepared not to give them the satisfaction or the information. She knew too much.

Through a thin spot in the hedgerow, she saw the golden glow of Lucius's hair as he ran ahead of her. His movements were fluid and perfectly silent, his wand held before him and ready to strike. He was a wizard on the hunt. She slowly closed in to the hole and poked her wand through. She just needed to get the shoulder of her wand arm through for a clean shot and she'd have him. She'd stun him within an inch of his life, drawing on every ounce of power left in her.

From behind her came a cry, "Sectumsempra!" The back of her right knee was slashed right through the tendons and she crumpled to the ground in a crashing of yew branches. Lucius whirled on his heel. Draco stood over her, an alien gleam in his eye. His voice was eerily calm. "Here she is, Father."

Pat.

Pat. Dribble.

Pat. Patter. Splash.

Hermione's eyes shot open as a sprinkling of water hit her in the face. She may as well not have bothered. Wherever she was, it was completely black, the kind of blackness that disorients people and takes the breath from them. The rest of her senses sharpened in response. A few feet away, water dripped from somewhere and patted onto the floor. Sprinkles of it hit her face and she recoiled. Sensation was flooding back to her. Her leg. Oh, Merlin, how her leg hurt. She tried to run her fingers over the wound, but only found her jeans crusted in a thick layer of dried blood. It smelled sharply moldy, wet and acrid like stale human waste.

She searched in vain for her wand. She patted around the floor for her beaded bag. Her little bag of tricks. Gone. All gone.

The rumble of someone talking in unintelligible fits and starts hit her ears. Somewhere outside her door there was a scream. It was high, thin and prolonged. It was Draco's scream. Lucius let loose a thundering roar. Oh, Gods. Draco.

So, she'd been right. Lucius was torturing him right now. Think, Hermione. Think. Think. Think.

Another scream, a grunted laugh and an echoing wail. "Father!" was the only word she could make out.

She had no idea if it would work, but she didn't have a lot of options. Locked in some sort of dungeon and unable to walk, her beaded bag gone and Draco being tortured... It was the first thing she thought of. "Dobby!" She whispered urgently. "Oh, please, Dobby!"

There was a crack. "Mistress?" his voice echoed loudly in the stone room. She could feel his little hands brushing over her. "Mistress is hurt!" he squeaked, obviously in distress.

"Shhhh! Dobby, bring help. We've been captured by Lucius Malfoy. Quickly!" She heard another crack.

Down the hall, Draco screamed again, weaker this time and it ended in a sob. How long had she been out? How long had he been enduring his father's attentions? Merlin only knew what Lucius was doing to him. She had to distract him. Without pausing to think, she began to scream. "Lucius, you pustular excuse for a wizard, get in here! You're nothing more than the slime off a flobberworm's shit! You son of a squib! You're not fit to lick my muggle father's ass!"

She hurled every sorry excuse for an insult she could think of at the top of her lungs, knowing if she could hear Draco scream, they could hear her. It echoed in the stone room, bouncing around deafening her.

Abruptly, Draco's screaming stopped and the slamming of a heavy door could be heard. Oh, Gods. Now what? Her breath was loud in her ears, her heart thumped in her throat.

Footsteps. He was coming.

The little pill! Of course.

Without preamble, the door to her cell slammed open and the room flooded with blinding light from the hall. "So, our guest is finally awake. I have waited a long time for this, Mudblood! Crucio!"

To be sure, Hermione had read about the Cruciatus curse. She'd read about the laws punishing those who used it, medical articles dealing with those who had died from it, first hand accounts of how to cast it. She'd read as much – if not more- than any other witch she knew, but nothing, nothing prepared her for the cascading avalanche of pain slicing through her nerves.

She was on fire, being flayed and electrocuted all at once, even as her bones were being crushed ever so slowly. Painful wasn't in the same postal code. Excruciating didn't come close. It was pain the likes of which would stop a person's heart for their sheer inability to process it. She writhed on the floor, screaming, her face and palms scraping mercilessly against the stone floor.

"And this, Miss Granger, is what mudbloods are for," Lucius said smoothly as he lifted the curse with a smirk. "Just a small taste for your first time. I intend to savor you before I turn you over to the Dark Lord. If I were you, I'd settle in for a long day."

She gulped in air. Slowly, on shaking arms she pressed herself up off the floor and stared defiantly into his eyes. "I don't take advice from men who torture their own family." She balled up the blood in her mouth and spit it on his shiny boots and the hem of his spotless robes. The blood glistened in the light from the hall.

He backhanded her and she saw stars. As the room stopped whirling, she gave a chuckling hiss between her split lip, "I took her from you, Lucius. A little mudblood took away your favorite toy." She swiped the blood away from her chin with the cuff of her jumper, still chuckling defiantly. "I saved Narcissa. And whatever you do to me, you can't touch her ever again." She had to keep him here. She had to keep him away from Draco.

If she thought the last round of Cruciatus curse was hell, this one went many, many levels below that, although, she was well beyond screaming now. Somehow, somehow she could only laugh, and her laughter only increased his fury and the intensity of the spell.

When he finally dropped it, she could see her face was lying in a pool of her own blood. She could feel it running out of her mouth, ears and nose, even trickling from her eyes. She gasped to get her breath, still chuckling involuntarily and choking on the blood.

Lucius's face was a mask of hatred and vengeance. "I can see I am not getting my point across." He whirled on his heel and with a swish of robes was gone.

Her hearing was going, she was losing touch with reality, but somewhere beyond the tunnel her mind was falling through she heard, "Imperio!"It was no use trying to see through the blood in her eyes. She let her eyes fall blissfully shut, panting on the floor.

A moment later, she could tell the light from the doorway was obscured. She fought to open her eyes, to meet her fate head on. She didn't have the strength of will left to command her body any longer. With one last hard won effort, she moved her tongue over to the tiny, hard pebble of poison between her cheek and her tooth. With a little swish of her tongue, it fell into place between her molars.

"Have you ever been flayed alive, my pet? I assure you it is one of the most painful things I have ever had the good fortune to do to a mudblood. But you aren't listening to me. Perhaps you'll listen to my son. Teach her a lesson, Draco! Flay her!"

"No." Draco's voice was a strangled whisper, it was obvious he was fighting the curse like Harry could. But Draco wasn't Harry. He yelped, but with her eyes closed, she couldn't tell the reason. "No, I won't!" His voice was getting stronger, but he panted with the effort.

"I command you to flay her! Obey me!" Lucius screamed.

"No. Nononono." Even as he fought the curse, her skin was sliced open. With the first split of her skin – a piece from her forearm, all she could feel was relief. This didn't hurt anywhere near as badly as the Cruciatus curse. She could feel a flap of skin being peeled away from her arm, like shucking a piece of corn. The blood pouring off the fresh wound mingled with the already cooling blood on the stones under her face. It felt vaguely warm and oddly comforting under her ear.

A large crack split the dungeon air. Two jets of red light soared true and hit both of the men standing over her between his shoulder blades. Lucius Malfoy crumpled over on top of her, knocking the last of the wind from her.

"Dobby! Bring Draco!" She wanted to yell it, but the weight of Lucius's body was crushing her lungs, and all she could manage was a ragged whisper.

"Merlin's hairy toes! What have they done to her?" Even though it was whispering, it was a familiar voice, and somehow it comforted her. She drifted further from reality.

"Get him off her. We have no idea how many more there are. Let's move!" She wanted to tell them they had to obliviate Lucius into infancy. It was the only way Narcissa Malfoy would live through the war. But the blackness was surrounding her like a comforting cloak. She was swimming in it.

She only had the presence of mind to grab Dobby's jumper with her bloody hand and drag him to her, "Draco. Don't let them hurt him." She felt the owners of the voices heaving Lucius's from her, but by the time they rolled Lucius Malfoy's limp body from hers and tipped her onto her back, she'd lost too much blood and the blackness had claimed her.

When she awoke next she was in a wide fresh bed with pristine white linens in a sunny room. The windows were thrown open and sun streamed across her knees. To her left a straight backed wooden chair had been drawn up and a mess of black hair was flopped onto the edge of the bed. Gentle snores emanated from him.

She tried to clear her throat and wound up coughing. The head shot up at once. Round wire-rimmed glasses sat askew her best friend's face as he beamed up at her. "'Mione! You're awake!" he grasped her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

"Water?" She could only manage a rasp.

Harry jumped up from the chair and conjured a glass, filling it with cool water. "Here," Harry said, tipping the glass gently to her lips. "Let me help you."

As she sipped, something niggled at her unfocused mind, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. It wasn't much help to her fuzzy brain that Harry was nattering on, "So glad to see you're awake! Merlin's beard you had us scared! And then when the healer had the bleeding under control, you nearly poisoned yourself!"

Then it hit her like a brick. She tried to raise herself up on her elbows, but her head felt like it was splitting open. "Oh Gods! Draco!"

He set the glass on the bedside table and smoothed back her hair. "Don't worry about Malfoy, 'Mione. The Order's on their way to pick him up. Dobby wouldn't let us get close to him, said something about not hurting him. We've got him chained up downstairs."

"No! Harry Potter, you let him go right this instant! Has he seen a healer?" Her anger with him lost some of its edge as her voice came out in a disused squeak.

He blinked. "But, 'Mione, he was flaying you alive!"

"He was under the Imperius curse, Harry! And he's not going anywhere with the Order! Bring him here, right this instant!" She struggled against his hands pinning her to the bed. She struggled against the wave of pain and dizziness from sitting up and swiveling her feet to the edge of the bed. "If you're not going to bring him to me, I'm going to him. Of all the pixie-brained," She winced as she placed her feet on the floor, "Flobberworm infested," She wobbled on her feet. "Werewolf kissing ideas to get into your head!"

"Alright! Okay! Let me go get him. You stay in bed." Harry crossed to the door, scratching his head, then called down the stairs, "Oi! Ron! Hermione's awake and she wants to see Malfoy. Bring him up!"

A jangle of chains limped up unseen steps. Draco, wearing heavy hand and foot manacles and bloody robes appeared in the doorway, never lifting his face from his feet. She could see a streak of dried blood running from his left ear down into his collar.

"Draco? Are you alright?" She asked softly.

"I am so sorry," he managed to whisper. "Gods, Hermione, can you ever forgive me?" Ron peeked around Draco in the door frame, his eyebrows flying into his hairline at Draco's words. He exchanged a puzzled look with Harry, who was just as taken aback. They shrugged at one another.

"Draco, there's nothing to forgive, luv." With those words he launched himself across the room and into her arms.

Both her best friends' faces twisted in horrified shock.

"Oi!" Ron bellowed, "Is somebody gonna tell us what the hell is going on?"