Hermione didn't have to argue with herself anymore about whether or not it was a good idea to stay in Leo's bedroom.

With adrenaline now coursing through her body at the sight of the (she was still reluctant to believe her initial assumption had been true) Werewolf fur and the memory it had unfortunately brought forth, she immediately fell back on her hands and scooted away from the closet as quickly as her ankle would allow. She didn't stop pulling herself backwards along the floor until her back hit the wall opposite the closet door. Hard.

She sucked in a shaky breath, unaware that she had even been holding it. What the hell could Leo possibly be doing keeping a Werewolf locked in a trunk, in his closet? Not even Hagrid would be mad enough to keep one as a pet, and that was certainly saying something, considering his habit of keeping three-headed dogs, dragons, and Acromantulas around.

Her stomach twisted uncomfortably and for a brief moment, she thought she might be sick, but the urge was gone as quickly as it had come. She grasped the end of the bed and pulled herself up to standing with great effort. She was on autopilot now, with one prevailing idea in her mind: get the hell out of there.

Hermione was in deeper than she had thought. She had expected a few Dark artifacts, maybe a few poisons or creepy books, but someone who kept a Werewolf was playing dangerous games, and she wasn't sure that they were ones she wanted to play. She had initially held out a small nugget of hope that Leo wasn't as ruthless as her first impression of him had been. I guess you can't have everything, she thought grimly.

Then his broad form filled doorway, and just like that, her day went from wonderful to perfect.

"Something the matter?"

His voice made Hermione's blood run cold. This was that gleefully malicious Leo she remembered from back at the apothecary, that both caused her tears and delighted in them. And as he stepped forward into the room, his smirk was unmistakably predatory.

Hermione fell backwards on the bed and scooted away from him in a futile attempt to put some distance between them. Should she be relieved that he wasn't angry, or more afraid because he was amused? "Stay the fuck away from me," she spat, inching away from him even more to supplement her point.

"Oh?" He raised an eyebrow, but, to Hermione's incredible astonishment, listened. Instead he folded his arms and maintained a rather intimidating stance over the bed to make up for that concession. His voice was softer, but with a more dangerous undertone, the next time he spoke. "Find out something you… didn't like?"

She wanted nothing more than to wipe that self-satisfied smirk from his face, but preservation instinct had far more power over her actions right now than anger did. Hermione was grateful for it.

She decided to avoid his question. Working to keep her voice steady, she asked, "How long have you been here?"

"Long enough."

Well, that certainly cleared things up. Thank you Leo, king of the obvious. She tried again, hoping not to push her luck. "What do you mean?"

"Well," he said slowly, "I never left." His eyes didn't stray from hers. He seemed like he was waiting for some sort of dramatic reaction, and by Merlin, he got one.

She felt a surge of pure anger flow through her at his confession (although she wouldn't really call it a confession, he seemed rather delighted about it) and she sat up, a challenging glare in her eyes. "You WHAT? You mean to tell me you were here, this whole time, and… and…" She couldn't seem to wrap her mind around the fact that she hadn't been observant enough to spot him, and she had even showered… had he…?

"No," he said, annoyed, as if reading her mind. "I can't make myself invisible, for Merlin's sake." Well, that was probably a lie, she thought. If he could keep a pet Werewolf, then he could certainly get a hold of an invisibility cloak made of Demiguise hair. But then she remembered she was supposed to be afraid of him, and decided not to point it out.

"Why did you bother to hide yourself?" She asked warily, still not entirely comfortable with the idea of him having watched her all morning, even if he hadn't seen anything he wasn't supposed to. Well, technically, she assumed she wasn't supposed to have been in his room, and he had seen that, but here he was now, and that wasn't the most pressing issue at the moment anyway. "What could you have possibly gained by watching an invalid hop around your apartment and talk to owls?"

His smirk grew and he stepped closer to the edge of the bed, but Hermione stood (or sat) her ground. It was, after all, a legitimate inquiry.

"I wanted to let you find out the truth for yourself. It seemed like much more fun than just telling you."

He was toying with her, and that made her temper flare. "What do you mean, the truth?" She already had a pretty good idea about what that was, but wanted to hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

Much to her annoyance, though, he asked another question instead of answering hers. "Why are you suddenly so afraid of me, Hermione?" He was still smirking in that way that people do when they already know the answer to what they've asked.

But something in Hermione snapped. This one had been a long time coming.

"Well, let's see," she sighed, putting her finger to her chin as if thinking hard. "First, you show up out of the blue, murder someone, and threaten me. Then, you rifle through my memories, drug me, and kidnap me. You trap me in this nearly uninhabitable flat without food or clothing or necessary items, and disappear for hours at a time!" Her voice was becoming shrill as the list went on, and Leo's eyebrows had shot past his hairline. "Now, my bloody ankle's broken, and that's still your fault by proxy for having kept me in here, you've isolated me from everything I know and my friends and family with little hope for return, and now - " she was nearly in tears, " – I find out your not only a murderer and a kidnapper and an altogether horrible person in general, but you k-keep… y-you fucking keep WEREWOLVES as bloody PETS!"

She tried to blink her tears back, but as her anger began to give way to a suffocating hopelessness and fear once more, she couldn't stop herself… no matter how much she hated that he was seeing her cry. Again.

Leo had resumed his Intimidation stance, but looked down upon her reluctantly sobbing form with an eerie sort of calm. He gave a moment for her words to sink in before speaking again. "Are you quite finished?"

If she had been in any other state of mind, she would have had the overwhelming desire to punch him. But at the moment, that didn't seem like a top priority. She gave in and nodded, wiping the remaining tears from her cheeks and feeling very small.

"Good." And suddenly he was all business. If their exchange had affected him at all, he was doing a wonderful job of not showing it. Hermione was too upset to be irritated with him, at least at the moment. "Compose yourself. You're going to need to listen very carefully to what I'm about to tell you."

Faster than she could blink, he was on the bed with her, holding a fistful the front of her dress in his left hand. His face was very close to hers. He was not being gentle.

"You're stuck here, so deal with it," he hissed. "I don't like it any more than you do, so your complaints are useless. You'll make things a hell of a lot easier for both of us if you quit trying to escape, and just accept the circumstances. This arrangement doesn't have to be permanent, but at the moment I can't see any other way to keep my secret. Obliviation is a lot trickier than you think, and if I even leave so much as a crumb of information about me in that brain of yours, I'm done for. So I'm not willing to risk it."

For a moment Hermione thought she saw a flash of yellow in his eyes, but thankfully he let go of her then, and she was sure she had imagined it.

He didn't move from the bed though. "I've gone to the trouble," he said, his anger curiously dissolving, "of thinking of a way in which we can both be more… ah… comfortable."

It was time for Hermione's eyebrows to shoot upwards. Something about his tone creeped her out a little, but she gave a small nod, for lack of anything else to say.

"What were you doing at the apothecary, the day that we met?"

Well if she'd expected anything, it wasn't that. And "met" was too… nice of a word to describe their encounter, but she was learning when the right time was to keep her mouth shut. Kind of. "I told you, I was buying moonstone powder."

"For what?"

Hermione looked at him sideways. Why should he care? "For a Peace Draught." Then she suddenly realized it was the first time in the past three days that she had even bothered to think about it. Of course, she had other, more pressing things taking up her headspace, but it was a small ray of sunshine to think that she hadn't even wanted one, in all this craziness. She couldn't suppress the small grin that appeared on her face. Maybe there really was hope for her yet.

"How often would you say you make these?"

Her grin vanished. There was no way she could tell Leo that without openly admitting she had an addiction. He was staring at her so intensely though, she hardly felt she had a choice. "As often as I need them," she said ambiguously, looking at her hands.

Leo was a good reader of body language, apparently. He paused thoughtfully, then after a moment, said, "Would you say you're good at making other kinds of potions?"

She looked up again, searching his face with a quizzical expression on her own. "Well, yes, I suppose, as long as I have clear instructions I can make just about anything. But what are you - "

"Wolfsbane potion?" His eyes glinted dangerously. This time, Hermione wasn't so sure she had imagined that flash of yellow in his irises earlier.

And then, she realized that there was something worse than your kidnapper having a pet Werewolf.

It was him being one.

"Oh, no," she breathed, backing up again and panicking as the edge of the bed came in contact with her hands. "Oh, no no no. No. No!"

Leo didn't appear fazed. "Unfortunately, the correct answer would be 'yes'. " Before she nearly lost her balance off the side of the bed in shock, Leo's had snatched up her ankle with lightning-quick reflexes and pulled her back towards him. She shrieked, clawing at the comforter and scrambling to get away, but she only screamed in agony, as his viselike grip was around her broken ankle and not her healthy one.

He quickly let go of her ankle as soon as she was close enough and launched himself forward, pinning her shoulders with his forearms. She struggled underneath him but he was, of course, much larger and stronger. He knelt over her patiently, waiting until she stopped resisting, and looked her dead in the face.

Hermione's eyes were wide, round as saucers, as she stared back up at him. She didn't dare breathe. She had never felt so incredibly vulnerable and helpless in her whole life.

"Here's the deal." His breath tickled her ear. "I'll provide you those… necessary items - "

"Food, clothing, toiletries," she enumerated before she could stop herself, and Leo growled at the interruption. She snapped her mouth shut instantly.

"Right. Whatever. But only under the condition that you brew my Wolfsbane potion every month. Otherwise… I can ensure that your time here will be quite miserable."

How was that negotiation? Being forced to cook a potion she didn't want to cook for a person she didn't like, in exchange for what she needed to live somewhere she didn't want to be in the first place. But she didn't argue, because frankly the best time to make your point was not from underneath a Werewolf. And she assumed that if she didn't make the potion, he would still turn into a Werewolf on the full moon, and that would be the end of her either way.

Her tears had dried on her face now. "Why can't you just make it?" she asked, but not rudely. She genuinely wondered if there was a reason, besides that he just wanted her to pay him back in some way for staying in his flat. It was a bit backwards, of course, but conniving as Leo was, he apparently wanted her to feel like he was the one doing her a favor, and not the other way around.

Much to her relief, he moved off of her and sat back with a sigh. She lifted herself to a sitting position, wary of his gaze on her; he was not going to let her try and get away from him a second time. "I never was gifted in the art of potion-making," he admitted, but he hardly seemed ashamed of it. Too bad; it was something Hermione would've liked to throw in his face later.

"I see." Hermione was skeptical, but he probably wouldn't be revealing a weakness in front of her just for the sake of doing it. He certainly had his pride, after all.

He swung his feet back down to the floor and stood. It relieved her slightly that there was more distance between them now, but he still towered over her, and that didn't give her much more peace of mind. "That," he said, gesturing towards the broken trunk in his closet, "up until recently, is where I used to spend my… ah, nights."

"Up until recently," she repeated slowly. "That thing has some really powerful, ancient magic in it though… and it couldn't contain you?"

He gave her a look that said, 'Obviously.'

"How'd you manage to get your hands on something like that?"

"Stole it."

Well, she wasn't surprised.

"Point is," he continued, rubbing his hands on his stubble, "I've never been able to brew my Wolfsbane quite right. Locking myself in there has been torture, I'll tell you, but better that than Apparate to some forest and run around where I'm more likely to be caught or killed. But my last transformation had some… complications. As you can plainly see."

Hermione was still baffled as to how the magic hadn't held. I guess it just took one beating too many? Trunks like that certainly weren't made to keep Weres.

But then she remembered the story that the runes depicted. Challenges… a shining light coming through the dark… death of a dark period. She nearly expected to see a lightbulb shining above her head when she spotted the silver on the trunk, too. Of course!

Her "Aha!" moment was short-lived, though, when she remembered the punched-out side. Bollocks. She may have been right about the specially-built trunks to contain Weres, but they were apparently unreliable. When she retreated from her thoughts, she realized Leo had been talking.

"… need to find a new place to stow myself, but if I have a satisfactory Wolfsbane potion then I might not need to take as many precautionary measures."

Hermione was all for him taking as many precautionary measures as he could. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck with Lycan Leo in his one-bedroom flat.

She would've giggled if she'd had her wits about her. Lycan Leo. Making jokes was a sign of her mental state improving, right? Or… was that the opposite?

"Is that why you killed that man?" Hermione asked suddenly, surprised by the strength in her voice. Now that she knew Leo needed her for something, as opposed to her simply being a burden upon him, she supposed she could take a few more liberties. "You were stealing Aconite from him." But it was more of a definitive statement than a question, and Leo looked mock- impressed.

He nudged the closet door shut with the toe of his boot, and after a moment, focused back on Hermione. "I'll supply you with whatever is needed to complete your task for me." She didn't really want to know how. His eyes narrowed, glinting dangerously again, and she was alert instantly. "You're an intelligent witch. Don't be stupid enough to try and poison me, Hermione. You could end up with something far worse than an angry Werewolf to deal with."

With that cryptic statement, his chilling smirk returned, and he turned on his heel to go prepare lunch.

And Hermione was left sitting on the bed, dazedly thinking that right now maybe a Peace Draught didn't sound so bad after all.