{ Chapter Two }
Three months later
Draco sat at his desk going through old case files that needed to be closed out and filed. He had been at it for several hours now. His head and his shoulders were aching and he wanted nothing more than to take a break, walk away from his desk for a few hours and stop thinking so damn hard.
He dramatically threw the file he was working on into the 'completed' pile and picked up the last file sitting on his desk.
"Last one, Potter!" he practically shouted in triumph.
Harry still had several files sitting in front of him, and he groaned in frustration. Draco smirked in his general direction and opened his last file.
"Damn," he muttered to himself. "It's the file on Hermione's attack."
Harry stopped what he was doing and looked up.
"No luck figuring out who did it?" he asked, even though he knew the answer. No one had been charged and the investigation had stopped almost as soon as it started.
"Just the opposite, actually." He flipped through the pictures inside the file. A little reminder of what that asshole had done to her. "I know exactly who did it, but I don't have any substantial proof. Even if I could prove it, it wouldn't do any good."
That was true. His suspicions had been strengthened in the weeks following the attack.
"What? Who?" Harry looked at him in surprise, not knowing before that moment that Malfoy even had a suspect in the case.
Draco considered him for only a moment before turning back to the file in front of him.
"Don't worry about it, Potter. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong anyway."
He debated long and hard on whether to include his suspicions in the report. Technically he was supposed to record everything in case new evidence came to light later on, his insights could be helpful. He had already written out his statement months ago, right after the attack while the events were still fresh in his mind. With a resigned sigh he added his statement to the report and magically sealed it so that only himself or the Minister of Magic himself would be able to open it.
As he dropped the file into the 'complete' pile, the office door flew open, banging loudly into the wall. Harry and Draco both looked up in alarm as Ron Weasley came barreling through the door.
"Harry! She's gone! Someone's taken her!" The redhead had panic written all over his face. Pure panic.
"Who's gone?" Harry asked, though it was obvious to both of the men who he was referring to.
"Hermione! I went home for lunch and she's not there. She's gone!"
Harry sat frozen in his seat as the words sank in. His best friend was missing. The panic that Ron was exhibiting was contagious and Harry started to feel it as well.
"I thought she worked at the library? Shouldn't she be hard at work translating some thousand year old tome or something equally as boring?" Draco sat back in his chair and watched Weasley carefully.
"No one asked your opinion, ferret!" The two glared at each other for a long moment before Harry cleared his throat.
"He has a point, Ron. Why would she be at home instead of at work?"
Ron's eyes darted back and forth between Draco and Harry. Finally he took a deep breath and turned to Harry, ignoring Draco completely.
"She quit her job months ago. She hasn't left the house since the attack."
Draco immediately remembered the night three months ago when he sat next to her in the hospital room and listened as she told him all about her job and how much she loved it. He remembered the light in her eyes when she figured out a rune she had been stuck on, or when she talked of the ciphers that were used to make sure only the intended recipient could read the message. She gave that up? Just like that, she up and quit? It wasn't possible.
"Ron! I have asked you every single day for the last three months how Hermione is doing and you never once told me that she's scared to leave the house! What the hell!"
"She didn't want anyone to worry about her, alright! I've been taking care of her. She's fine, okay? Or she has been. Now she's just gone!"
"Maybe she just decided today was a good day to take a walk. You think?" Draco was already grabbing his cloak and his badge, but he couldn't resist the opportunity to poke at the Weasel some more.
Ron watched his movements carefully, his face already reddened with anger actually deepened in color when he realized Malfoy's intention.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?"
"The attack on Hermione is my case. If someone has taken her, it's probably the same person that assaulted her. That would make her disappearance my case as well."
Ron was still seething, but Draco made it clear that he was coming along. Harry didn't argue the point, thinking that Malfoy was probably right. It would stand to reason that maybe whoever hurt her had also been the one to kidnap her. After a bit of a standoff, the three men finally floo-ed one by one to Ron and Hermione's house.
As Draco stepped into the parlor, the first thing he noticed was how immaculately clean everything was. It surpassed clean to almost sterile. There was no 'lived in' homely feel to it. It reminded him of the Manor, and that thought alone sent cold chills down his spine.
"There's no sign of a struggle." Harry noted as they entered the bedroom. Everything was in its proper place. "Maybe Malfoy's right. She decided she had let her fear rule her long enough and it was time to leave the house. I don't see her wand anywhere, so she must have it with her."
"Harry, you don't understand! She can't leave the house! She should be here!" Ron was pacing agitatedly across the bedroom floor.
"Relax, Weasel. She's probably at the bookstore. She'll be home by dinner." Draco walked around the bedroom and noted that there seemed to be a few things missing. It looked like a couple of pictures should have been hanging on the wall, but instead there were only empty hooks. Next he went into the bathroom and started looking through the cabinets. Everything was neatly organized, but on closer inspection there were things missing there also.
"Is this the bathroom that Hermione uses to get ready in the mornings?"
"Of course it is." Weasley and Harry both joined him in the small room. "Why?"
"Her personal effects are gone. There's no makeup in here. No hairbrush, either. I hate to say it, Weasley, but I don't think she was taken. I think she left on her own free will."
The color drained out of Ron's face.
"That's impossible! She can't leave!"
"The pictures of her and her parents are gone also. I'm sorry, Ron, but I think Malfoy's right."
They walked back into the bedroom where Ron sat heavily on the bed, muttering to himself about it being impossible. Harry and Draco continued to look around, searching through drawers and closets, looking for other things that could be missing. They discovered some of her clothes were gone, as well as her beaded bag with the undetectable expansion charm.
Harry opened her bedside table drawer and pulled out a leather bound journal.
"Look Ron, it's her journal. Maybe there's a clue in here as to where she went?" He tossed the book on the bed and Ron picked it up and started flipping through it.
"What the hell is this? Leave it to Hermione to write her journal in some foreign language!" He tossed the book back on the bed and threw his hands in the air.
Harry picked up the journal and flipped through the pages the same way Ron had.
"It's not. It's written in ancient runes. Malfoy, you took ancient runes in school, didn't you? Do you think you could read it?"
Draco took the book from his hands and looked at it skeptically.
"I can try, but it could take some time. I'm not fluent like she is."
He opened the book to a random page and his eyes skimmed across the symbols. One particular rune caught his eye, there in the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Her words came back to him.
"The location of the rune tells you which direction to read. This system was used to code important messages. It was like an ancient cipher. Only the person that knew the code would be able to read it. To anyone else it would not make any sense at all."
He flipped the book closed and looked at the front cover. The rune she had pointed out to him that night was emblazoned into the leather.
"It means roughly 'begin here'."
He swallowed thickly as the implication hit him. Hermione had written her journal in a secret code, and she had given him the key to decipher it.
"How? How in Merlin's name could she leave without me knowing it?" Ron stood abruptly and grabbed a candle off the dresser. He threw it across the room, and it smashed through a window, shattering the glass into a million pieces.
"Calm down Ron. I'm sure she had her reasons." Harry was watching his friend wearily. It was no secret that Ron Weasley had a bit of a temper. Harry had learned how to deal with him long ago.
"You don't understand, Harry. I'm her husband. She can't just leave! She needs to come back home where she belongs right fucking now!"
Harry and Draco both stared at him in shock.
"Ron, mate, if you talk to Hermione like that, it's no wonder she left." Harry could have been joking with those words, but his tone was completely serious. He didn't like the way Ron was talking about Hermione, almost like she was his property or something. "Have you two been fighting again? Maybe she just needs to cool off. You know how she gets when she's angry or upset. She just wants to be left alone until she can collect herself again. That's how she's always been."
Ron's blue eyes narrowed and he took three steps across the room to stand right in front of Harry. His hand gripped Harry's shirt in a tight fist.
"Don't you dare try to tell me about Hermione. I know her better than anyone. I will find her, and I will bring her home where she belongs." His words were spoken in low, threatening tones and he shoved Harry away when he was finished.
Draco listened intently and watched every move, his wand at the ready just in case things got out of hand. The behavior that he was witnessing only supported his earlier suspicions.
"You're dealing with the brightest witch of our age, Weasel. Trust me when I say if she doesn't want you to find her, you won't." Draco didn't wait for a response. He walked out of the bedroom and stormed down the hallway to the fireplace.
Several hours later Draco and Harry were finishing up for the day and preparing to go home for the evening when Draco placed a hand on Harry's arm to get his attention.
"Can I ask you a question?" he asked in a tone so low no one else in the office could hear him. "Maybe over a drink?"
Harry looked at him, puzzled, for a long moment before nodding his ascent and following the blonde out of the Ministry. They went to a muggle pub that was off the beaten path and slid into a corner booth.
"This is a little too cozy for my tastes, Malfoy. In case you've forgotten I'm a happily married man."
Draco rolled his eyes at the implication and took a long swig of the muggle beer sitting in front of him.
"Speaking of happy marriages, Potter, how 'happy' would you say the Weasley's are in their marriage?"
Harry studied him from across the table, wondering if his interest was purely from the assault case, or if there was something else motivating him.
"Apparently not very happy, I would say." He sighed and ran his hand through his thick brown hair, causing it to stick up in random places. "Honestly I hardly ever see Hermione anymore. I probably haven't spent more than six hours with her in the last two years or so."
That was surprising news to Draco. He had just assumed that the Golden Trio had remained inseparable after the war.
"She works so much, you know? She's at the library fifty or sixty hours a week, and she's working on some kind of research project, but I have no idea what it is. She would only tell me it was confidential. It took up all of her spare time, though. Hell, maybe she just needed a break, yeah?"
"That can't be right. She supposedly quit her job and hasn't left her house in three months. She's already had a break." Draco took another drink before continuing. "Hell, she was probably going stir crazy stuck in the house and left just to have something to do. I mean, did you see how clean everything was? Has she spent the last three months doing nothing but cleaning?"
They sat in silence for several long minutes, listening to the music play, drinking beer, and contemplating the disappearance of Hermione Weasley.
"Maybe she was having an affair, ran off with another man?"
"You think Hermione could have an affair?" Harry's laughter rang out sharply against the din of the pub. "No way in hell."
"It wouldn't be the first time. Witches have affairs all the time."
"Not Hermione. She has the strongest moral or ethical code I've ever seen. She wouldn't even sleep with Ron until their wedding night, if you can believe that. She would never sleep with someone else while she was married to Ron."
Draco contemplated his words carefully. The alcohol in his brain was slowing down some of the normal functions, but for some reason he still thought that was important information, so he filed it away for future use.
"You think it was Ron, don't you." Harry had only a small amount of beer left in his bottle and he stared intently at it as he swirled it around and around, waiting for the man across the table to answer his question. Once again, it was a question he already knew the answer to.
Draco studied him for a moment before deciding that he might as well be honest about it. He inhaled deeply and ran his fingers through his hair before speaking.
"If you received word that Luna had been brutally attacked, raped, and her unborn child murdered, would you simply go home because you hate hospitals?"
Green eyes snapped up to meet the gray eyes that were now staring at him intently.
"No, I wouldn't."
"Would you insist that she not have any kind of added protection, refuse the twenty four hour guard that the Ministry was offering?"
Harry swallowed thickly as he shook his head 'no'.
"Would you insist that the investigation be stopped when no suspects had even been named yet?"
"No." The word was barely a whisper.
"Hell no, you wouldn't. You would be inconsolable. You would be pissed off, and you wouldn't rest until the asshole responsible was either caught or dead." Draco's bottle slammed to the table with a loud thump, making Harry flinch almost imperceptibly in surprise.
"Put that with the fact that by your own admission the last time anyone saw Hermione before the attack he was yelling at her, making a scene, and then they went out back for some air. Thirty minutes later she's hanging on to life by a thread and Weasley's on the dance floor with another witch. So yeah, Potter, I think he's guilty as hell."
Draco downed the rest of his beer and through a few muggle bills on the table.
"I'll tell you this, though. I hope she knows what she's doing. The consequences could cost nothing less than her life." He had no doubt, none whatsoever, that if Ron were to find her now, not even the fine Healers at St. Mungo's would be able to help her.