“The withdrawal leaves something to be desired though,” she added.
He laughed and his eyes finally left her face. “If I didn't leave you on the floor retching you might make the mistake of thinking I care,” he said in a dismissive voice.
Hermione looked at him.
“You seem surprisingly concerned about my thinking such a thing,” she said coolly.
Malfoy paused and stared at her again for a moment before a slow cat-like smile graced his lips.
“Are we moving on with the agenda then?” he drawled.
Hermione's eyes narrowed.
“What was it again? Explore the South Wing, try to find the kitchens, look for a garden shed or stables, find Malfoy and try to find a weakness to exploit? Are we that far down already? You're quite efficient.”
Hermione stared at him. She wanted to be angry but the potion had such a reaction carefully stifled.
“You were in my head last night,” she said at last.
“I was trying to sleep but you were thinking rather loudly,” he said in a bland tone, picking a nonexistent piece of lint from his robes and surveying his foyer as though he were an interior decorator.
“Well, have fun,” he said after a moment. “The stables are beyond the rose gardens on the south side of the manor. And the garden shed is on the far side of the hedge maze. I have it on good authority that you cannot touch pruning shears or pitchforks. You might be able to try strangling me with a bridle, but somehow I doubt you could bring yourself to actually do it.”
He smirked down at her wrists before turning and ascending the staircase without another word. Hermione stood and watched him disappear down a hallway and then glanced around, mulling him over as she calculated her next move.
He had been reading her mind the night before. She wasn't surprised but it made anything she did feel horrendously futile. He didn't even need to wait to perform legilimency on her; he could just glean her schemes from the forefront of her mind.
She went back to her room and put on her cloak and changed into her boots. As she exited the manor at the veranda she began mentally counting upward by two.
Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve…
As she counted, she let her mind meander, thinking lazily.
Draco Malfoy was an enigma. There were so many contradictions swirling beneath his cold facade. What were his ambitions?
Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-eight...
He seemed to be accumulating power without having any specific purpose for it.
He knew he was shackled by orders he couldn't disobey. Marry Astoria, sully his bloodline with half-bloods, keep Hermione under constant supervision…
He followed Voldemort's commands with devotion despite having no apparent taste for them.
What did he get from it? What was it that drove him? His power and status seemed pointless. He didn't seem to be getting anything from it that he wouldn't have as a mid-tier Death Eater.
Sixty-six, sixty-eight, seventy, seventy-two...
Of course Hermione might be missing something. He spent days away during which she had no idea what he did. There could be countless things he was doing that she had no knowledge of.
There was something she was overlooking. A detail she felt she knew subconsciously but couldn't place. Something… something. Like a puzzle she was piecing together, built from all the contradictory information she had been accumulating in her mind.
One hundred and thirty-two. One hundred and thirty-four. One hundred and thirty-six.
She felt something in the back of her mind crack and a page of a well-worn notebook filled with her handwriting swam before her eyes.