A moment later, she felt him prod and slide into her, and she immediately canted her hips forward to take him deeper.
She buried her face in her hands and tried to tear her mind away while she gasped against her palms and felt ruined.
She was shaking.
All she could think of was how much she wanted him to move. Hard and fast.
Whimpers kept forming in her throat and she couldn't smother them. She held herself so rigidly her entire body shuddered as she tried not to allow any kind of reaction.
The coil of want was drawing up tighter and tighter inside of her. She bit her lips together. She wouldn't give in.
She just needed to hold out. He'd come soon and it would be over. Then she could leave the potion to burn itself out of her system. His thrusts were becoming longer and harsher the way they did as he reached the end. He sped up slightly and she bit down hard on her tongue as she tried to keep hold.
And then—
She broke with a despairing sob.
Her whole body spasmed around him. She could feel herself clenching and seizing as he thrust into her a few more times, and then he shuddered with a tortured groan.
After a moment he jerked away, and she barely opened her eyes in time to see him snatch his robes off the bed and then apparate straight out of the room. She caught a glimpse of his face before he vanished; he looked grey, as though he were going to faint.
She lay there on the bed and cried as her head slowly cleared. Reality, bitter as poison, started slowly bleeding into her as she absorbed what had happened.
She had just had the first orgasm she had any memory of.
She didn't know if she'd been a virgin before she was sent to Malfoy. If she hadn't been, the loss of it was one of the many details that had vanished from her mind. It seemed like an odd thing to have chosen to protect. So most likely she hadn't had sex during the war.
Everything felt foreign. Nothing had given her any indication that such things were something her body had been familiar with.
The lust potion had altered things. Permanently, she feared. Awakened her body to a new aspect of these physical invasions that had previously lain dormant.
Hermione lay unmoving for ten minutes.
When the time finally elapsed she got up and went into the bathroom. She pulled out every remaining vial of potion and poured them down the sink before dropping the vials into the bin.
When she looked up the portrait was there, watching her in the mirror. Always watching. Always silent.
Hermione gave her a bitter smile and then slumped to the ground.
The pale young witch stared at Hermione.
Hermione felt cold, as though she were going into shock. She curled up into a tight ball, hugging her knees and trying to breathe.
She was going to go mad.
She was going to go mad.
She couldn't keep holding on. She didn't even know why she was holding on. Why she hadn't just let herself go while she was locked under Hogwarts.
Malfoy Manor was worse.
She buried her face in her hands. She could feel the fluids from herself and Malfoy on her thighs.
She fell asleep on the floor.
Chapter 23
Hermione was standing in the kitchen of Spinner's End. She turned slowly, looking over the surfaces covered with notebooks, prepared ingredients and bubbling potions.
Hermione paused as she noticed one potion shimmering in the corner. She stepped over and watched the spiraling steam rising from the surface. She sniffed it surreptitiously. The spicy, earthy scent of oak moss, smoky undertones of cedar, the bruised scent of oxidizing leaves, and parchment — no. She sniffed again. Papyrus.
She stepped abruptly away and glanced at the other surrounding cauldrons.
"This is quite a variety of love potions you're brewing," she said, looking over to where Severus was stooped over a simmering cauldron.
"A new project for the Dark Lord. He's suddenly developed an interest in trying to weaponise it," Severus said, sneering down at the murky, lumescent liquid he was working over.
Hermione felt her blood run cold. "Is that a possibility?"
Severus shrugged with a faint smile. "I am both skeptical and unmotivated, so most likely not. I believe it was more of a passing notion than anything he has a sincere interest in. I'm drawing up a comprehensive report to present in case he asks about it. And I'm doing it in my home rather than in the lab to ensure no one offers any groundbreaking ideas."
Hermione surveyed the room. There were ten varieties of love potion and a few aphrodisiacs she recognised, as well as an additional fifteen that appeared experimental.
"What would constitute as a weaponised love potion?"
"Something of exceptional power that doesn't require redosage. I believe he images himself using it for interrogations."
"That's — obscene," Hermione finally said.
"Indeed. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he has other matters he regards as more urgent for Sussex to focus on."
Hermione woke, still lying on the cold floor of the bathroom. She continued to lie there; if there were an upside to her depression it was that it made sleeping easier. It was as though her body had given up. The rage she'd spent months cultivating had melted away and she was left tired and listless, as though her body weighed too much to even carry across the floor.
She could sleep and sleep in a state of despair for most of the day.
She pushed herself off the floor, went to her room, and climbed under the covers of her bed; burrowing into them and hugging them around herself.
Even her brain felt tired and listless. As though even thinking took too much out of her.
She glanced over at the clock. It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening. There was a tray with dinner on it beside the chair, but Hermione had no appetite.
She wondered why Malfoy was in France; presumably it was to kill more people.
Would he still be masked, or would he do it openly? She wondered what he looked like when he cast the killing curse. Most people's faces screwed up in a revolting grimace when they cast the Killing Curse. Even Voldemort. But Malfoy's hatred and fury was so cold. Perhaps he looked the way he had when he was killing Montague.
Hermione wondered if getting exposed as High Reeve were intentional.
If Malfoy were moving to seize power from Voldemort, he'd need to be known. Known and feared. Being revealed had been a calculated risk perhaps; banking on Voldemort's need for a public figure to spare his life. If things in Romania were as unstable as had been implied, Voldemort couldn't kill Malfoy now — even if he wanted to. It would leave a power vacuum, destabilise the entire Death Eater army, and give Europe the opportunity to break free.
There were no other figures in Voldemort's army that were even vaguely comparable. Voldemort had local government figures, but Malfoy was Voldemort's only visible crutch on a continental level
The most powerful General in the Dark Lord's army was what Astoria had said. A General for years; that was what Malfoy had said about himself.
Hermione paused puzzled. Malfoy had been a General during the war?
She didn't remember Malfoy being a General. She didn't remember much of anything about him after Dumbledore died. She had assumed his ascendance in rank had occurred at the end of the war, but perhaps that had been wrong. It had been hard to get good information toward the end of the war. Hermione hadn't been included in most of the specifically strategic Order meetings. It must have been a detail she'd missed.