He looked away again. “Severus and I did everything we could think of but bring you up as a person of interest to the Dark Lord himself. I thought as long as the Dark Lord was preoccupied with his obsession with immortality, I'd have a better chance of finding you and getting you away. Then, when there was talk of using the prisoners as surrogates for a breeding program, Montague went to the Dark Lord and proposed that you be the face of the repopulation program, bait for any remaining Resistance allies, and a final mockery of Potter all in one. He'd been looking for you ever since he'd gotten his mark, and I'd — left him be; I thought at some point he might find something I was overlooking. However you still didn't exist within the prison system. It wasn't until the Dark Lord personally demanded you by name that Umbridge admitted she'd had you the whole time.”
Hermione didn't know what there was to say.
“I—” Draco started to speak again. His jaw shook visibly and then locked, and he didn't say anything else.
There was a long silence.
“Why didn't you assume I was dead?” Hermione finally managed to ask.
The corner of his mouth twitched, and Draco raised his right hand into her line of sight. The onyx ring showed dimly in the low light.
Hermione stared for several seconds before looking in confusion at her own hands. There was nothing there, but she felt a sense of certainty that there somehow should be. As she stared, her index finger on her left hand distorted and shimmered, the black ring suddenly visible.
Her throat felt thick, and she swallowed several times before she could speak. “I–I forgot it was there.”
“After you were cursed and nearly died going to Surrey, I added a life signature monitor to your ring. I'd wanted to add a trace, but they're detectable, and could have been intercepted. I thought, with a basic charm, at least I'd know if you died. So — I knew you were alive.” He dropped his hand out of sight once again. “Although it did stop at one point, immediately after I'd sent a signal. I thought I may have caused whomever was keeping you to notice it. When it reactivated several days later, I didn't think I could risk signaling again. I wasn't certain whether it was still you wearing it, but I thought it meant you might still be alive. So I kept looking.”
He looked away, and the movement drew Hermione's gaze from the ring on her hand.
He looked ground down, like a weapon that had been honed in excess. There was a deadly over-precision about him that she could suddenly see.
His fingers twitched, and he closed them. “I would have gotten you out sooner, but Severus was already in Romania when you were transferred to the manor. It was supposed to be only three months, but the Dark Lord keeps extending the assignation there. As long as you were being brought in to have your memories examined by the Dark Lord — there were — I couldn't do anything that would have indicated — anything.”
Hermione's stomach dropped as though the bed had vanished beneath her. Of course. Voldemort had watched everything. Her every interaction with Draco. He'd been overtly, sadistically curious in his brutal bi-monthly examinations of her mind.
Draco had been performing for Voldemort through Hermione's eyes.
The realisation felt like her tenuous hold on reality was abruptly inverted, and she was free falling.
What was real then? Any of it? None of it.
She tried to think, but it was still difficult to focus through the pain in her mind. She could barely keep her eyes open. She was exhausted and so hungry. She couldn't remember when she'd last eaten. Her head hurt with such intense pressure she expected to find blood seeping from her eyes and nose.
She wanted to close her eyes, but she was terrified that if she lost consciousness, it would all slip away, and she'd forget. The past would vanish into the darkness, Draco would fade away, and when she woke, it would be Malfoy again.
But there weren't two people. There had only ever been the one. Draco was buried somewhere under all the layers of cold.
She didn't know what was supposed to happen. She didn't know what any of it meant. Even if he'd been acting, not everyone else had been. All the stories about him in The Daily Prophet, and from the other women in the breeding program before Hermione was sent to Malfoy Manor.
“Hannah said you hung Ginny's body in the Great Hall—”
“It wasn't Ginny.” His voice was flat. “When I couldn't find you at Hogwarts — I initially thought there may have been a mistake and it wasn't you caught and transferred. I looked for you in the rubble at Sussex.” He looked down. “There was witch who'd survived the explosion. She'd made it beyond the wards and into the Ashdown Forest, one of the only survivors. She was nearly dead from the experimentation and the explosion. But she had red hair. When I brought the body with me to Hogwarts, the prisoners assumed it was Ginny with Spattergroit. No one had seen her in months, they assumed the disfigurement was due to the disease.”