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Hermione Granger is across the table that sits between them. Theo Nott enjoys the way her lips flatten out as she eyes him, arms crossed over her chest. In the middle of the table is a substantial file with his name printed on the front.
“So, we meet again.” He muses, leaning back in his seat. His fingers drum a steady beat over the metallic surface of the table.
Resting her elbows onto the table, she props her chin onto her clasped hands. “I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what you want.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Oh?”
Hermione sighs and lowers her hands onto the table. “Do you know how many times you have been questioned in the last two years, Nott?”
“Please,” Theo scoffs. “I think we’re familiar enough for you to call me Theo.” She purses her lips, waiting for him to answer her question. He shrugs. “I’ve lost count.”
Hermione opens the file and rifles through several pages before she replies. “Thirty two,” she closes the folder. “Not including today.”
His brows shoot up as he tilts his head, appearing to roll the number around between his teeth. “That does seem like a lot. I can’t help noticing, however,” there’s a smile. “That it is always you who invites me in. Perhaps I am detecting a pattern?”
Hermione presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and lets loose an exasperated exhale. “Because you are somehow always linked to a crime, Theo.”
He bites down on his lip, an attempt to quell the smile that surges forth when she hisses his name. “But I have never been charged with a crime.” He points out.
Her face smooths out. “Until today.”
“Until today.” He nods once in assent.
“Why?”
“Why what?” He shifts in his chair, when her eyes begin to implore.
“You wanted to get caught,” she suggests. “Why?”
Theo takes a minute to consider her question. Letting his eyes drift up and around the face he's become so familiar with. As an Auror, she was easily accessible to someone like him. Crime was in his blood, coming from a family bred to break the law. He was strategic of course, committing crimes that would have her look into his whereabouts, only to come up empty handed. Theo never left any evidence behind.
They regularly met in this room inside of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Year after year, he’d lured her in, only to leave her grasping at straws, forced to let him walk and the crimes to go unsolved.
After every interrogation, Theo was left buzzing with energy that only lasted until he was reeling from despair. She didn’t seem to notice that he had been working his way into her life, in the only way he knew how.
“Are we being recorded?” He finally asked.
Hermione blinks at him before she leans back. Shaking her head, she pulls her wand out from the holster wrapped around her torso. She lays it on the table, showing him that it was dormant, her magic not currently being fed through it. His wand lay beside it, having had it confiscated from him upon his arrest.
With a nod, he relaxes into his chair. “Two years ago,” he begins. “I was hired to assassinate you.”
Her big brown eyes widen, but she doesn’t interrupt him.
“I fell in love with you, instead.” He offers her a wry smile, and all she can do is stare back at him while her lips part in a silent O. He shrugs, continuing. “Death Eaters who were at large after the war still held a grudge.” His eyebrows knit together as he recalls the days of reconnaissance in order to execute the order.
He had trailed her, observing her every move, memorizing her routine. Admiring the curve of her lips, offering easy smiles to those around her. The way she crinkled her nose when she was amused, or the sound of her voice when she was lecturing her fellow Aurors after they bumbled the evidence left after the Malfoy’s reported a break in at one of their properties just outside of London.
By the time Theo realized he had fallen for her, the Carrows – who had hired him – had grown impatient and had told him that they were going to take care of it themselves. He took care of them, instead.
“I wanted to become acquainted with you.” He confesses.
She shakes her head, dismayed. “So you orchestrated a string of crimes that forced us into some sort of relationship.”
His grin is wide, knowing. “I never said that. But I do feel like we’ve really grown to know each other. Don’t you?”
Hermione bites down on her lip, unable to disagree. There were times when the interrogations eventually gave way to conversational exchanges. She knew when his father had remarried their old school mate, Pansy Parkinson. They both had a good laugh when Hermione pointed out that Pansy was now his step mother and asked if he ever called her ‘mum.’
Before that, he had inquired after her well being when the news of her and Weasley’s breakup had been all over the Prophet. Hermione had shrugged it off and admitted that she had already started to see someone else.
Over the past two years, Theo had watched her fall in and out of relationships. All he ever had was a handful of one night stands that failed to fulfill him when all he could do was think of her.
Now, Theo is tired of going unnoticed. He’s tired of being unfulfilled.
She finally nods. “We could have been friends.”
He lets out a humorless laugh. “I liked to imagine that we were friends.”
“Maybe we were.” She leans forward. He can see the twitch in her fingers, like she considered taking his hand into hers. “Maybe we are.”
“Hermione,” He sighs, scrubbing a hand over his tired face. “I think your friendship would kill me.” She looks saddened by his words. “As it is, every time you fall in love, I lose another year of my life.”
The truth pulls the air taught between them. His eyes are unrelenting as she shifts in her chair. He can see the weight of his confession pressing in on her. How she worries her lip, her eyes darting around his face like she is trying to solve a riddle. Maybe she is. And maybe he is that riddle.
“If all of that is true,” her words are pulled out, slowly and carefully. “Then why are you here?”
He exhales. “I didn’t know how else to get your attention.”
Theo had entered the DMLE no less than forty-five minutes prior and walked directly up to her desk. “I have placed a bomb somewhere in the city,” he had told her, checking the watch around his wrist. “It is set to detonate in exactly one hour.”
Now, nestled into the small interrogation room together, Hermione glances up at the clock. “But you didn’t really set up a bomb.” She’s leaning forward and Theo mirrors her. Their faces are inches apart, her eyes wide and hopeful. “Did you?” Even with his feelings laid out, she was still interrogating him.
“If I did,” he mused. “Would you hold it against me?” She shivers when his breath coasts across her lips. He tastes hers when she sighs.
“Theo,” he loves the look of her tongue between her teeth when she says his name. The cadence of that voice as those lips wrap around the last syllable. “You could have just asked me out on a date.”
“Oh?” He feels the croon deep in his throat. "Would you have preferred coffee or dinner?”
Her lips twitch, her eyes spark and widen with wild intrigue. “Coffee.”
Theo nods, considering. “You think I’m crazy.”
She finally laughs, the sound of it incredulous, somehow wholesome. “How could I not?” Abruptly, the laugh dies, her face quickly arranged into something very serious. “I’m still going to have to charge you.”
Her face is coming closer to his.
“Oh?”
She’s nodding but her stare has ventured away from his eyes, settling on the part of his lips, the gleam of his teeth. “Yes, for making false statements, at the very least.”
The tip of his nose brushes against hers. Her breath catches, she shivers. The tremble, an uncontrollable response to his touch.
“Oh, love.” He mutters but the kiss is unstoppable. It had been set into motion when he realized his feelings two years ago.
He never expected her to reciprocate it. Never noticed the heat in her gaze, the clench of a lip between her teeth. He feels it, now. In the desperate exploration of his mouth, hears it in the gasps between deep and hurried kisses.
The warmth of her mouth, the soft brush of her tongue whispers the secret of her truth beneath his skin as electricity travels down and settles into his cock. It fills him with a heavy, aching need that he has little time to explore.
He pulls away, just enough to take hold of her chin and look her in the eye. “Who ever said the statements were false?”
Her brows knit together but before she can question him, the building shakes violently. The sound of the explosion is deafening, the building rattles so hard, pieces of the ceiling are dislodged, shaken loose from the ceiling. Hermione is thrown over the table, right into his arms.
The door flies off its hinges, but before it can reach them, Theo casts a shield with the two wands he lifted while she was too distracted devouring his mouth with her own.
A second explosion echoes, running through the entire department when the wards snap and fall. The shiver is palpable more than it is visible.
“Theo!” She wiggles against him, dust and bits of plaster fall from her riotous curls.
She’s livid. She’s terrified. She’s worried for her co-workers. But Theo is a professional.
Everything has gone according to his plan. Well, almost everything. His hold around her tightens as he looks up into her beautiful face.
“Coffee?”
Her answering reply is lost beneath the crack of apparition as he whisks her away.