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The attic wasn’t that bad. It was what Hermione told herself when she collapsed onto the thin mattress and shivered against the cold. She had a window, and, yes, it whistled on nights when the wind was bad, but she had light and air and there was a grate to light a fire. If she’d had any wood. Which she didn’t. And she could have used magic, but if she’d done that, the gig would be up.
Honestly, being a spy was bad in really annoying and unexpected ways.
She closed her eyes and tried to count her various blessings. She still had plenty of polyjuice left. She’d weaseled her way into this Alecto Carrow’s house. And the Carrows were far far too stupid to figure out their impoverished staff was anything other than very grateful for the chance to have a job.
She’d say, “eat the rich” but the Carrows would probably be stringy and there wasn’t enough garlic in all the world. Plus, all that evil from being Death Eaters might make them toxic.
Back to her blessings. Yes, Voldemort had won, but she was alive. They were picking away at the structure of his rotten empire day by day, and it would collapse soon.
Very soon.
Not. Soon. Enough.
Because she was really bloody cold.
“I hate this,” she muttered.
The grate of her ice-cold fireplace flared into life with a burst of green flame, and Draco Malfoy stumbled out as if on cue. Impossibly – or at least improbably – he’d get tallied up in the blessings column these days. Sharp-jawed, grey-eyed, and a traitor to his team, he’d spent his first three months in the Order of the Phoenix glaring at her, a full day dodging the stream of invective she hurled at him, and now four weeks bringing her reports of what the team outside lodge-du-carrow was doing.
Well, that and dinner. The Carrows didn’t feed their staff well.
He also brought the occasional bout of what she’d decided she would call ‘recreation’.
“Bloody hell,” he said as he shook dust from his black sweater. “Are they stacking ice cubes in the corners of this garret to make it even more miserable?”
Hermione sat up. “Don’t give them any ideas.”
“When this is over, I’m taking you to someplace warm,” he said. “Ibiza, maybe.”
Hermione would like Ibiza. She spent a moment imagining herself in a bikini on the beach – something cute and black and indecently small – and smiled. The smile got bigger as she considered Draco at the same beach. He probably had to stay under an umbrella lest his skin become more lobster-red than lily-white, but, as she’d come to know in some detail, he was quite pleasingly muscled under that sweater. Watching him sit in the sun – well, in the shade – topless, drink in hand, sounded like a good time. “That hinges on things being over,” she said.
Draco smirked. “I come bearing glad tidings. It’s done. They’re falling. I know you’re attached to this place, but it’s time to go.”
Hermione pulled herself off the bed. “We’ve won?” she asked just to be sure.
“I believe your boss should be getting the news as we speak.”
Alecto Carrow’s scream of rage could be heard all the way in the furthest reaches of her attic. Definitely a thing to add to the blessings list. Hermione permitted herself a small, mean hope that the prison waiting for Alecto – or the hell -- would be very cold indeed. Then she took Draco’s hand and committed herself to researching magical sunscreen and what restaurants had the best sangria in Ibiza.