The heavy parchment arrived on a Tuesday morning, carried by a sleek, silver owl that looked far too dignified for the messy state of the Slytherin dormitory. Draconia sat on the edge of her bed, her fingers tracing the thick grain of the paper before she even broke the wax seal. The air in the room felt stagnant, though the windows were cracked open to the damp Scottish breeze. She had spent the morning staring at the ink on her fingernails, wondering if the stains would ever truly come off. Greta sat across the room, pretending to tie her shoes, but Draconia knew she was watching.
"Is it from your father?" Greta asked, her voice low and careful.
Draconia did not answer immediately because she was busy trying to ignore the way her stomach tightened. She pulled the parchment from the envelope and smoothed it against her thighs. It was not a casual letter or a note about the summer holidays; it was a formal document, heavy and smelling of old wood and expensive ink. The handwriting at the top was unmistakately Lucius Malfoy's, sharp and aggressive, as if he had been carving the letters into the page. Draconia felt a sense of dread pooling in her gut as she read the first few lines of the preamble.
"It is a contract," Draconia said, her voice sounding thinner than she wanted it to.
Greta moved closer, sitting on the edge of the next bed, her eyes scanning the page. "A contract for what? A business merger?"
"It is about a marriage," Draconia stated, her eyes catching on a specific clause that mentioned the consolidation of certain properties and bloodlines.
The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago. Draconia thought of Harry Potter and the way he had looked at her in the corridor, the way he never seemed to demand anything but gave everything away for free. She wondered if Harry would even know what to do with a contract like this. To her, everything was a transaction, a way to balance a ledger that never seemed to stay level. Her father did not send documents like this unless a decision had already been made in a room she was not invited to.
"Does it say who it is?" Greta asked, leaning in until her shoulder brushed Draconia's arm.
Draconia looked down at the page and felt a sudden, sharp irritation. The text was dense, full of legal jargon and ancient magical stipulations that made her head ache. The middle of the document was a mess of dark, smudged ink-blots where names should have been. The names are redacted and the signature line is not.
"It is a secret," Draconia said, lashing the parchment shut with a crisp, decisive snap.
She stood up and walked toward the window, looking out at the grey expanse of the lake. She needed to move, to do something other than sit and let the weight of the ink crush her. Her mind drifted back to the way Snape had spoken to her, the warning about paying in the wrong currency. She wondered if this was the currency her father expected. Was she to be sold for a handful of gold and a prestige that no one actually valued anymore?
"You look like you've seen a ghost, Draconia," Greta said, standing up to follow her.
"I have seen a cage," Draconia replied, turning to face her friend.
"Is it a bad one?" Greta asked, her expression softening into something that looked dangerously like pity.
Draconia hated the pity most of all. She wanted to hex the feeling out of the room, to burn the parchment and let the ashes fly out the window. "It is a well-built cage, Greta. That is the problem."
She thought of the way Harry Potter had shrugged at her in the Great Hall, a gesture that felt more substantial than any formal contract. He had not asked for her name or her lineage; he had simply looked at her as if she were a person. If she signed this, she would be a person of record, a name on a ledger, a piece of a larger whole. She wondered if Harry would look at her differently if he knew she was being traded like a prize broomstick.
"You should go to breakfast," Greta suggested, though she did not move to leave the room.
"I am not hungry," Draconia said, though her stomach was actually quite empty.
She began to pace the small area of the floor between her bed and the washstand. The rhythm of her footsteps helped her think, a steady beat against the stone floor. She needed to find a way to read the names, to find the man who was supposed to be her future. But the ink was thick and deliberate, a wall of blackness that blocked her sight.
"Is there a way to see the names?" Greta asked, her voice drifting from the corner of the room.
"Not unless we find a reveal charm or a very clever thief," Draconia answered, stopping her pace.
She felt a sudden urge to run, to find a corridor and scream until the walls turned red like the magic she had thrown at that boy. But she was a Malfoy, and Malfoys did not scream in dormitories; they kept their composure and their secrets. She picked up the parchment again, feeling the texture of the expensive vellum. It felt cold, almost lifeless, in her hands.
"My father does not send these for fun," Draconia said, her voice barely a whisper.
"He sends them to remind you who you are," Greta said, her eyes fixed on the floor.
Draconia nodded, the realization sinking in with a dull thud. This was not a suggestion; it was an instruction. The contract was a tool, a way to ensure that the Malfoy name remained untarned and profitable. She looked at the signature line at the bottom, where her father's name was written in a bold, sweeping hand. It was the only part of the document that was clear, a stark reminder of who held the pen.
"If you sign it, does it become permanent?" Greta asked, stepping closer to the bed.
"Magic has a way of making things permanent," Draconia said, her thumb pressing into the heavy paper.
She thought about the way Harry would react if she told him. He would probably say something simple, something that lacked the complexity of her life. He would not understand the politics of a redacted name or the weight of a signature. He lived in a world of light and dark, of clear enemies and clear allies. She lived in the grey, in the spaces between the lines of a contract.
"You have to sign it, don't you?" Greta asked, her voice reaching a pitch of genuine concern.
"I have to do what is expected," Draconia said, her jaw tightening.
She walked back to her desk and sat down, the chair scraping loudly against the stone. The ink on the desk seemed to mock her, a dark stain on a clean surface. She picked up her quill, the feather soft against her palm, and felt the urge to sign it immediately just to get it over with. The uncertainty was worse than the obligation. If she knew the name, she could fight it, or she could learn to hate it. Without the name, she was just a woman waiting for a ghost to appear.
"What if the name is someone you actually know?" Greta suggested, her eyes wide.
Draconia felt a flicker of something—fear, or perhaps hope—but she smothered it quickly. To know the name was to lose the power of the unknown. As long as the names were redacted, she could pretend the contract was a fiction, a piece of paper meant to frighten her into submission. But the signature line was a solid, unyielding thing at the bottom of the page.
"It doesn't matter who it is," Draconia said, her voice firming. "The names are redacted and the signature line is not."