The candle on the vanity had burned nearly halfway down when the knock came.
Adrastia didn't look up from the letter she was composing. "Enter."
Daphne Greengrass stepped in through the private door, or rather, someone who looked remarkably like her. The high cheekbones, the cool blue eyes, the particular way she held herself that spoke of aristocratic breeding and quiet disdain. She wore a travelling cloak, its hem slightly damp from the night air outside. Late arrivals were always cause for careful scrutiny, but this particular visitor had been granted direct access to these quarters, which was a privilege Adrastia had extended to precisely three people in the world.
"You're later than I expected," Adrastia said, setting down her quill.
"The wards on your outer perimeter took longer to navigate than last time," the woman replied, pulling back her hood. "You've changed the sequence."
"Twice a month, always have." Adrastia leaned back in her chair and appraised the woman before her. "Drop it, Vinda. I'd rather look at your actual face."
A beat of stillness, and then the glamour dissolved like morning frost. The woman standing in its place was altogether different, though no less striking. Dark hair that fell in thick waves, a mouth that seemed permanently arranged into something between a smirk and a threat, and eyes the color of old amber that caught the candlelight and held it. Vinda Rosier was a beautiful woman and she knew it well, which was part of what made her so effective and so exhausting.
She pulled the cloak from her shoulders and draped it over the back of a chair without being invited to sit. "Your French perfume has gotten worse. What is that?"
"A gift from a contact in Lyon. Don't touch it." Adrastia rose from the writing desk and moved to the sideboard, where a decanter of red wine sat beside two glasses. She poured without asking. "You look tired."
"I've been impersonating a twenty-three year old pureblood socialite for Morgana knows how long now. Of course I'm tired." Vinda accepted the glass and dropped into the chair properly now, crossing her legs. "Smiling at tedious people is exhausting work."
"And yet you've always been suited to it." Adrastia settled opposite her. "So. The ICW session."
Vinda's expression shifted from languid to sharp with the ease of someone who had worn different faces for so long she could switch between them like garments. "I had three people inside the chamber. Good positions. Two in the press gallery, one attached to the Portuguese delegation."
"And?"
"And it went much as we expected in the broad strokes, less so in the details." Vinda swirled her wine. "The refugee question dominated the session. Spain led the charge on restrictive measures, France appeared to support it, Britain's boy wonder opposed it with his usual righteous fervour, and then the whole thing collapsed into a committee compromise that nobody was satisfied with."
Adrastia nodded slowly. This broadly matched what her own contacts had reported. "The compromise. What were the terms exactly?"
"Protection for three categories of refugees. Children, elderly practitioners of rare magical disciplines, and those with specialist knowledge. Wandmakers, certain healers, that sort of thing. Registration requirements remain for the broader population but with considerably less invasive provisions than Spain originally proposed." Vinda paused. "What interested me was how quickly it came together. Spain pulled back at exactly the right moment. France enthusiastically endorsed a compromise that looked rather better for the refugees than their morning position suggested they'd accept. It had the fingerprints of something choreographed."
"Someone had a deal before they walked into the chamber," Adrastia agreed.
"That's my read. Britain, Spain, France, all performing different parts of an agreed script." Vinda's eyes narrowed. "Which means whatever happens next in terms of refugee policy has already been decided in private. The official session was theatre."
Adrastia considered this. It had implications worth thinking through carefully. Their work across the continent depended in part on the movement of displaced wizarding populations, the chaos and uncertainty that kept people desperate and authorities overwhelmed. Desperate people were manageable. Coordinated international policy, even imperfect policy, was a different matter.
"How does this affect our existing operations?" she asked.
"In the short term, minimally." Vinda set her glass on the side table. "The compromise resolution still needs implementation frameworks, ratification by individual ministries, actual resources allocated. That's months of wrangling at minimum. Eastern Europe in particular will drag its feet. I have good contacts in Hungary and Bulgaria who are already preparing objections on sovereignty grounds." She smiled thinly. "The Bulgarians are especially motivated given their position on Dark Arts traditions. They'll never agree to the kind of monitoring the Spanish wanted."
"So we have breathing room."
"We have breathing room," Vinda confirmed. "Though I'd rather use it properly than waste it being complacent." She picked up her wine again. "The underground networks are the real concern. Someone is running refugee rescue operations through unofficial channels. My people in France have tracked three separate instances in the past six weeks of groups disappearing before Ministry officials could process them. Clean movements, no magical trace signatures. Whoever is doing it knows what they're doing."
"Does it concern our plans directly?"
"Not yet. But if the network grows and starts getting official protection under this new compromise framework, that changes things. Right now the underground is illegal and we can use that. Once it has state backing, it becomes a much more complicated problem." Vinda's gaze turned thoughtful. "Still. People are suffering magnificently. I saw three separate reports of families choosing starvation over registration because they didn't trust what registration meant. Isn't that lovely? Fear of bureaucracy proving more effective than anything we'd have done directly."
Adrastia allowed herself a cold smile. "People always find new ways to be their own worst enemies."
"It's the one trait they have that I genuinely admire." Vinda raised her glass in a small salute. "Our work in the eastern territories is rather responsible for some of that fear, incidentally. The whispers we've planted about what registration databases are really for have spread beautifully. I had our people in Prague posing as former Ministry insiders. The stories they've been telling in refugee camps are wonderfully specific and impossible to disprove." She paused. "The Dark Lord would have appreciated the efficiency of it, I think."
There it was. The subject that always surfaced eventually when Vinda was in the room long enough. Adrastia had long since stopped trying to redirect her. Better to let it run its course.
"He'd have found a more explosive approach," Adrastia said neutrally.
"He was always better at spectacle than subtlety," Vinda conceded. "That was his weakness, in the end, I think. Too much reliance on fear as a blunt instrument. A finer touch might have prevented what happened." She paused, her amber eyes distant. "I don't believe he's gone. Not truly. He came back once from conditions that should have been impossible. The precedent has been set."
"Vinda."
"I know what you think."
"I think it's been years and hope is not intelligence."
"Hope is the only sensible position when the alternative is accepting permanent defeat." Vinda's voice carried no defensiveness, only the steady certainty of someone who had simply decided something and would not be argued out of it. "But even if I'm wrong, even if he doesn't return, then what we're building stands on its own. The network is real. The operations are real. The reach we've developed is real. Whether he returns to lead it or not, the work matters."
Adrastia let the silence sit for a moment. This was the nature of every conversation they had on the subject. Vinda was immovable, but she wasn't irrational about it. She didn't let her certainty of his return make her slack. If anything it made her more rigorous, because she was building something she intended to present as a going concern, not a charitable wreck.
"The southern Mediterranean routes," Adrastia said, shifting the topic. "I need to discuss my position there."
"Problems?"
"Complications." She stood and moved to refill her glass. "The Italian ministry has appointed a new task force specifically targeting smuggling routes. Two of my people in Naples had to go to ground last month. I've lost visibility on three operations that were running smoothly since last year."
Vinda made an irritated sound. "Italian bureaucracy moves at geological pace. How did they manage an effective task force?"
"Someone outside Italy provided them with very specific intelligence about entry points. Not general intelligence. Specific routes, specific timing windows, specific contact names." Adrastia turned back from the sideboard. "Someone who knew the internal structure of my Mediterranean operations fed them that information. Which means either I have an informant I haven't identified, or one of my contacts was turned."
"Either way, a problem that needs resolving." Vinda was alert now, the laziness gone entirely. "How much damage?"
"Contained, for now. I've rerouted through the Adriatic and taken the Maltese corridor offline entirely. But it's cost me three months of progress and I'm running blind on the Italian end until I find the source." Adrastia sat back down. "This is why I need the French routes stable. If Italy stays compromised much longer I'll need to push more through your territory."
"The French routes can absorb more traffic," Vinda said. "I have the capacity. But you'll need to accept my terms on cost and I'll need more notice than last time when volumes shift." She paused. "And you still haven't told me whether you think the Italian compromise was a one-off or whether someone has been building a picture of your operations over time."
"I think someone has been building a picture." Adrastia's voice was flat. "It's too precise for a lucky intercept. Someone patient has been watching."
"Then you have a more serious problem than a task force."
"I know." A moment of silence set in. "How did the ICW session land, in terms of what it means for our work going forward? The official position, I mean. Not the behind-the-scenes arrangement you suspect."
"Officially, the compromise creates a two-tier system," Vinda said analytically. "Vulnerable categories with specific protections, everyone else with lighter-touch registration than Spain wanted but more oversight than Britain argued for. In practice, it means the legitimate pathway becomes slightly more appealing to refugees who qualify, which reduces the pool of desperate people we can work with. The criminal economy around refugees becomes harder to sustain when the legal option seems viable."
"Slightly harder," Adrastia said.
"Slightly harder," Vinda agreed. "Not catastrophically. But it's a trend in the wrong direction. And if the underground networks grow and gain cover under this framework, the trend accelerates." She swirled her glass thoughtfully. "The frustrating part is that the policy is genuinely helpful to the people it protects. I hate giving credit where it isn't wanted but I can recognize effective work."
"Credit where it's due brings us to the name you've been avoiding," Adrastia said.
Vinda made a small sound, halfway between a scoff and a laugh. "Has he been dominating your thoughts too? I'd have thought that was beneath you."
"He put three of my operatives under his thumb. It's not beneath me to think about the person who managed that."
"Fair enough." Vinda stretched, apparently at ease, but there was an edge under it. "Harry Potter. The great inconvenience of our generation."
"You have thoughts."
"I always have thoughts about Harry Potter." The smile that crossed Vinda's face was complicated in ways that Adrastia found faintly distasteful. "He's maddening. Everything he touches seems to somehow end up working in his favor. The war should have broken him. He was a teenager with a target on his back and he outlasted the most dangerous dark wizard in a century. The aftermath should have finished what the war started. Instead he builds himself into one of the most politically connected and magically formidable people in Britain." She paused. "I find him irritating beyond all reasonable measure."
"And?"
"And I also find him rather interesting to think about." The smile turned wicked. "He's not bad to look at, from the photographs I've seen. Those green eyes. That jaw. He carries himself like someone who knows exactly how much room he's allowed to take up and has decided to take up more." She paused. "I wonder what he's like when he's not in politician mode. Whether all that control holds or whether there's something messier underneath when you actually get him in a room alone."
"Vinda."
"I'm not apologizing for having a pulse." She settled deeper into the chair with a kind of shameless comfort. "He's an enemy, yes, absolutely. I'd like to see him removed from the board permanently, of course. But before that happened, if circumstances had been different, I think I'd quite like to sit across from him at dinner and find out what it takes to make him lose his composure. Or find some other way of occupying his attention entirely." The amber eyes glinted. "He seems like someone who'd be very thorough about it."
Adrastia looked at her with the expression of a woman who had long ago accepted that certain aspects of Vinda Rosier simply could not be corrected. "You're discussing dismantling a man's composure in your spare fantasy time and you want me to take your strategic analysis seriously."
"The two aren't mutually exclusive. I can want him politically destroyed and personally wrecked in an entirely different sense. In fact there's something poetic about it. What better way to diminish someone than to make them completely lose their head over you?" She tilted her head. "The great Harry Potter, hero of the wizarding world, not sure which way is up because Vinda Rosier decided to make a project of him. I find that image rather satisfying."
"The great Harry Potter would have you in Azkaban before your second glass of wine," Adrastia said coolly.
"Details." Vinda waved a hand. "I'd be out again quickly enough."
"I'm sure you believe that."
"You're no fun about this."
"I'm fun about nothing right now," Adrastia said, and there was enough edge in it that Vinda finally shifted her expression from amusement to something more attentive.
"What's that tone for? What's he done to you specifically?"
Adrastia stood and moved to the window. Outside, the night was clear, a scatter of stars visible above the city. She found the view useful sometimes. It helped her frame things. "He has three assassins I sent after him. They've been completely neutralized. Whatever they know about our French-side operations, he probably knows as well."
Vinda went very still. "How completely neutralized?"
"They're not dead. He chose not to kill them, which is arguably worse. They're probably under his control now. They probably believe they're better off serving him than answering to me, which tells me whatever he did to turn them was thorough enough that they've genuinely converted." Adrastia paused. "All three were good. All three are now, to whatever extent they remain functional, his."
"That's three people who know your face and your methods."
"Yes."
"And he's using them as leverage?"
"He's not made that outright clear yet. But he doesn't need to." Adrastia turned from the window. "The threat is structural. He holds them, so I can't move on him directly without wondering what information he'll release or how he'll use them against me. He's patient. He'll wait until the optimal moment."
Vinda was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke she was all business. "You said yet. He hasn't made contact?"
"Not directly. But I've made moves that will ensure he comes to me eventually." A pause. "I have the Weasley girl."
That got a different kind of attention from Vinda. She sat forward slightly. "The ex-girlfriend? That Weasley?"
"I had her collected." Adrastia kept her voice level. "She's comfortable, she's unharmed, and she's an invitation for negotiation."
The silence from Vinda was speculative. "You think Potter will come for her."
"I think Potter is precisely stubborn and proud enough that the idea of me holding someone connected to him is personally offensive to him, which means he'll act. And when he does, I'll have the leverage I need to get my operatives back."
Vinda leaned back again, and the speculative expression deepened. "Will he though? Care enough, I mean. The two of them ended badly from what I understand. And now you've gotten her involved in his affairs without invitation. He might decide he just doesn't care enough."
"He went to considerable lengths to ensure my son ended up in Azkaban," Adrastia said, and there was something controlled but absolutely cold in her voice. "More than considerable. He was vehement about it. He was thorough about it. He was vindictive about it in ways that went well beyond professional obligation." She held Vinda's gaze. "A man doesn't invest that kind of energy in destroying something unless he has feelings about it. His pride, his sense of possession, whatever it is. The Weasley girl was his, once. He takes that kind of thing personally."
Vinda considered this for a long moment. "He might still choose not to come for her."
"Perhaps." Adrastia moved back toward her chair. "But I'd rather bet on human predictability than on Harry Potter being immune to it. Let's see what he does."
Vinda nodded slowly. "And if he does come? What are your terms?"
"My three operatives, returned in the same condition I sent them into the field, if they can be recovered with their loyalties intact, though I have less hope for that. And his assurance that this line of interference stops. He stays out of my work, I stay out of his."
"You think he'll agree to that?"
"I think he'll agree to something. The precise terms, we'll negotiate." Adrastia settled into her chair again. "He's a pragmatist. That's something we can actually work with. Idealists are useless to negotiate with. Pragmatists bargain."
Vinda seemed to accept this. She reached for her wine and turned the glass in her hands, thoughtful now. "It's a reasonable approach. Though I'll say I'm slightly skeptical of the leverage point. The Weasley girl complicates it because if Potter decides she's not worth the price, you're left with a hostage you can't do anything useful with."
"Then I'll find something else to offer or demand. One way or another, I'll get what I'm owed." Adrastia smiled thinly. "He made an enemy when he moved against my son. I haven't forgotten that and I won't."
"Good." Vinda raised her glass. "Though I still maintain he'd be more interesting as a temporary captive than a permanent enemy."
"Vinda."
"I'm joking. Mostly." She didn't look apologetic at all.
"Onto other business. The Greengrass sisters."
The shift in Vinda's expression was immediate and she didn't bother to hide it. The amusement of a moment ago vanished, replaced by something sharp-edged and irritated. She set her glass down with slightly more force than necessary. "I don't want to talk about the Greengrass sisters."
"Nevertheless."
A long exhale through her nose. "They've been infuriatingly difficult to find. Months of effort, multiple search lines, contacts across France and into the Low Countries, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Not a sighting, not a magical trace, not a whisper from anyone in any circle who might plausibly have encountered them." Her jaw tightened. "I'd have given them more credit as fugitives if I'd known in advance. I thought recovering a bloodcursed girl and her sister would take a few weeks."
"They've been running for years," Adrastia pointed out. "People who survive that long know how."
"They know how in the muggle world, which is where the problem lies." Vinda's irritation was fully visible now. "They've clearly been living almost entirely without magic. There's no signature to trace because there's nothing to trace. Every lead I've had comes back to someone who might have seen someone who vaguely matched descriptions, and when we press further, it falls apart." She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "The glamour has been worse than useless. I'd thought that parading around as Daphne Greengrass in pureblood-adjacent social circles would flush someone out. An old family contact, a school acquaintance, a business connection from before the war. The Greengrasses were a significant name in British circles and they had European connections too."
"And nothing."
"And absolutely nothing. Not a single person has approached me as Daphne Greengrass with any useful information or connection. Either everyone who knew her is dead or in hiding themselves, or they know perfectly well she's been missing too long for this to be the real thing, or the sisters have burned every bridge they had." Another exhale. "I've been wasting considerable energy on a dead lead."
Adrastia watched her steadily. "How much longer do you intend to continue the impersonation?"
Vinda was quiet for a moment. "I've been asking myself the same question." She picked up her wine again and looked at it rather than drinking. "The honest answer is I'm not sure there's any point any more. If the presence of Daphne Greengrass in public hasn't produced a lead by now, extending it further seems like diminishing returns." She paused. "And I'm beginning to wonder whether the girls are even alive."
The words came out with a flatness that might have looked like calm from a distance. Adrastia, who knew Vinda well enough, recognized it for what it actually was.
"The blood curse," Adrastia said.
"The younger one." Vinda set the glass down. "I always knew she was likely already gone. The blood curse in the Greengrass line was well-documented, early onset, no effective treatment. If the girl made it past last year, she was luckier than the healers her family consulted ever expected." She looked at her hand on the stem of the glass. "Which means the elder sister was caring for a dying girl with limited resources in an unfamiliar world. People in that situation either make desperate moves that expose them, or they break completely and stop running. We've had neither." A bitter pause. "If Astoria died, Daphne may have simply stopped. Grief does that. People lose their reason to keep going."
"Or she found a new reason," Adrastia said.
"Possibly." Vinda didn't sound as though she believed it. "Either way." She lifted her glass and held it out in a toast that went to nobody in the room. "To the Greengrass girls, wherever they ended up." The amber eyes were sharp above the rim. "Dead or alive, you made this harder than you had any right to. I'll give you that. And I'll curse the day whoever actually gets to finish the job isn't me." She drank before setting the glass down and looked directly at Adrastia. "If I find out they're alive I'll resume. If I don't find evidence either way within the next month, I'm pulling the glamour operation entirely and refocusing resources on Hungary. The ICW result makes that front more pressing anyway."
"Agreed," Adrastia said. "Don't chase ghosts when there's live work to do."
Vinda nodded and reached for her cloak. "I should get back across the border before the morning wards on the Alsace checkpoints rotate. They've been unpredictable lately." She stood, shaking out the heavy fabric. "One thing before I go."
"Mm?"
"Be careful with the Weasley girl as leverage." Vinda's voice was matter-of-fact, no warmth to it but no malice either. "Harry Potter makes enemies rarely and thoroughly. If he concludes you're not someone he can negotiate with, he'll simply dismantle you instead of dealing. I'd rather you were around and useful than a cautionary tale." A pause. "Besides, I need the Mediterranean routes stable."
Adrastia's smile was thin. "Concern for my wellbeing, Vinda. I'm touched."
"Concern for my logistics," Vinda corrected, and the glamour slid back into place, and it was Daphne Greengrass who walked to the private door and let herself out into the night.
Adrastia sat alone with the candle burning lower, the wine untouched in her glass, and thought about green eyes and the thought of being underestimated.
She could afford to be patient. She'd been patient for a very long time.
-Break-
The restaurant occupied the top floor of a building on the edge of the 8th arrondissement, the kind of place that didn't advertise itself and didn't need to. The tables were spaced far enough apart that conversation remained private by default, the lighting was warm without being dim, and the menu existed in that refined territory where the dishes were named for their components rather than for any fanciful invention of the chef.
When Daphne stepped out of the small lift and saw Harry already at the table, she paused for just a moment.
He'd worn dark navy, no tie, and he'd done something with his hair that looked like not doing anything with it but probably wasn't. He stood when he saw her, which was the sort of gesture that would have seemed theatrical from anyone else but somehow landed differently when it came from him. His eyes moved over her when she approached and something shifted in them, quickly enough that she might have missed it if she hadn't been looking.
She hadn't missed it.
"You look," he started, then reconsidered the word he'd been reaching for. "The dress works."
Daphne sat down across from him. The dress was deep green, silk, and had arrived at the suite in a box she hadn't opened until an hour ago. She'd looked at it for rather a long time before putting it on. "It fits perfectly," she said. "How did you know my size?"
"I guessed." A pause. "And I asked Bella."
"Of course you did." But there wasn't any real sharpness in it. She set the small clutch she'd brought on the table and looked at him properly. "Shall I tell you what you're doing?"
"Tell me."
"You're making this feel like something it isn't by starting it with something generous," she said. "The dress. The restaurant. It's the sort of thing you do when you want a person to feel good so they let their guard down. Which is an extremely Slytherin opening move for a Gryffindor."
Harry's mouth curved. "And yet you're here."
"I'm here," she agreed. "Because I decided it was worth finding out whether the gesture was strategic or whether it was just how you actually behave." She picked up the menu. "I haven't decided which it is yet."
"Fair enough." He picked up his own menu. "For what it's worth, the dress was just because I thought you'd like it. But I'm not going to pretend the evening isn't deliberate. It is."
That, somehow, was more disarming than if he'd denied the strategy entirely. Daphne studied the menu and decided on something with salmon because it gave her something to do while she recalibrated. "What's good here?"
"The duck confit was excellent when I came here previously. The sommelier here is French and has opinions, which means she'll steer you right if you let her."
"You've been before?"
"Once. Briefly." His expression didn't change but she had the impression there was more to that sentence than he was offering.
"With someone."
"Does it matter for tonight?"
Daphne looked up at him. The light caught the angles of his face in a way she was trying not to notice and not entirely succeeding. "We said we'd dedicate this evening to each other. I'd rather know what that means to you before I decide how much it means to me."
Harry set the menu down and looked at her steadily. "It means exactly what it sounds like. Tonight, it's just us. Whatever comes before or after doesn't belong at this table."
She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded once and returned to the menu. "Salmon, I think. And yes to letting the sommelier have her opinions."
The sommelier did indeed have opinions. She was a small, immensely self-possessed woman in her fifties who listened to what they were having and returned with a Burgundy that she presented with the exact confidence of someone who had made this decision once and would stand by it completely. She was right. It was excellent.
The first part of the evening found its shape gradually. Harry asked about Monaco, which she hadn't expected, and Daphne realized he must have done some background before this evening because he asked specific questions about the circuits and the viewing points that a person would only know if they'd actually looked into it.
"You researched my hobby," she said.
"I was curious," Harry said simply. "You were at a race when I found you. I wanted to understand what draws you to it."
"Speed," Daphne said, then paused because that wasn't quite the whole of it. "No. Not just speed. Precision. There's something about watching someone operate exactly at the edge of what's possible, where any adjustment is the difference between control and catastrophe. It's very honest. You can't fake your way around a corner at three hundred kilometres an hour."
Harry looked at her with an attention she found slightly uncomfortable because it was clearly genuine. "You like things that can't be faked."
"I've spent most of my life around things that could be and were," she said. "Pureblood society, my family's social face, the performance of status and breeding. Everything was curated. Racing is one of the very few things I've encountered that simply is what it is."
"And you found it by accident?"
"I found it because Astoria was having a good day and I was trying to keep her occupied and someone near where we were staying had a television. It was a qualifying session for a race in Italy. I couldn't stop watching." A small pause. "It's strange to have discovered a passion via borrowed television in a rented room, but there it is."
"Everything worthwhile starts awkwardly," Harry said, and there was something slightly wry in it that made her want to ask what he meant. She chose to let it sit.
The food arrived. The salmon was, as promised, excellent. They ate for a while in comfortable enough silence, which surprised her. She'd expected to feel the pressure of the occasion more heavily than she did. She'd come prepared to be formal and careful, and found instead that the evening had settled into something that didn't require that from her.
"Can I ask you something?" Harry said.
"You can ask."
"What did you expect to do with your life, before everything went wrong?"
The question was blunter than she'd anticipated, which she appreciated. "Law," she said. "Wizarding law, specifically the area of international property rights. The wizarding world has a catastrophic relationship with inherited property disputes across borders. It's a genuine mess and nobody was fixing it." She paused. "I had planned for two years at a training program in Edinburgh before the war made everything impossible."
"That's very specific."
"I'm a specific person. What did you want before everything went wrong for you?"
Harry seemed briefly surprised to have the question turned back. "Before Hogwarts? I didn't really want anything. I didn't know wanting things was available to me." He considered. "At Hogwarts, I mostly wanted people to stop expecting things from me that I hadn't agreed to. I wanted to play Quidditch and be mostly left alone. By the time the war started I stopped thinking about what I wanted for the future because the future felt like a very uncertain proposition."
"And now?" Daphne asked. "You have more power than most people twice your age and more complexity in your personal life than I can quite get my head around. What are you actually building toward?"
Harry was quiet for a moment. A couple at a table across the room laughed quietly at something, and the sommelier glided past with a bottle for someone else, and outside the windows Paris glittered with its usual elegance.
"Stability," he said finally. "Real stability, not just the appearance of it. Wizarding Britain is held together with good intentions and post-war exhaustion right now. That's not enough. There are people who'd happily pull it apart and I'm not willing to let them." He picked up his wine. "The political work matters. The ICW matters. Getting the right people in the right positions and making sure the institutions actually function matters. It's not exciting. It's just necessary."
"And the rest of it?" she asked carefully. "The women, the network you've built around yourself. Where does that fit in the picture you're describing?"
"People I trust," he said, meeting her eyes. "Trust is genuinely rare. When you find it, you don't let it go."
"That's a very minimal answer."
"It's the honest one." He held her gaze. "I'm not going to dress it up as something different to what it is."
Daphne thought about this for a while. The wine was very good and she was on her second glass and the evening had that particular quality of an occasion that was both real and slightly elevated above ordinary life, and she found herself saying something she hadn't planned to say.
"My mother used to tell me that a Greengrass woman always knew exactly what she was worth and never sold herself for less." She set down her glass. "I spent years thinking she was talking about not accepting bad marriage offers. I think she actually meant something broader. Don't let yourself be smaller than you are to fit into a space someone else designed."
"And are you?" Harry asked. "Selling yourself for less."
"I'm still working that out," Daphne said honestly. "Ask me again in a year."
Something in Harry's expression shifted. "Fair answer."
"What I can tell you is that I'm not here tonight because I feel obligated," she said. "I'm here because when I thought about whether I wanted to be here, the answer was yes. Which surprised me a little."
"Why?"
"Because you're not what I expected." She looked at him directly. "I had a picture of who Harry Potter was. Everyone had a picture. The righteous hero, the Gryffindor golden boy. The person who saved the world by being brave and good and moral. And then I met you and you're none of that. You're something I don't have a category for yet." She tilted her head slightly. "I find that more interesting, not less. But it takes adjustment."
"I stopped being that picture a long time ago," Harry said. "If I was ever actually that picture."
"I think you were, once. And then circumstances changed you and you changed yourself." She studied him. "I don't think you regret it."
"I don't."
"That's either a sign of excellent judgment or a sign of a concerning lack of self-reflection," Daphne said, and was rewarded with an actual laugh from him, not the polite social kind but something that looked like it surprised him slightly.
"You're very blunt," he said.
"I've spent years being careful about every word I said and where I said it and who was listening. I'm done with careful." She smiled, and it felt unexpectedly easy. "You already know the worst of my situation. There's no tactical advantage to being guarded with you."
"There's a kind of freedom in that," Harry said.
"There is." She picked up her wine again. "Tell me something you don't tell people."
He raised an eyebrow.
"Not a secret," she clarified. "Just something real. Since we're doing this properly."
Harry considered. "I love flying," he said. "Not metaphorically. Just flying. I haven't done it enough in the last few years because there's always something more pressing and it feels indulgent. But being up there, properly up, where the air is cold and you can see everything below and nothing can reach you. I miss it."
"When did you last go?"
"Four months ago. Dawn, over the South of England, because I'd had a particularly awful night in the Ministry and needed to be somewhere nothing could follow me." He paused. "Three hours. It was the best three hours I'd had in months."
Daphne looked at him and thought about a seventeen-year-old on a broomstick who didn't know wanting things was available to him, and a grown man who had built considerable power and still sometimes needed to go somewhere nothing could reach him, and found herself thinking they were not entirely separate pictures.
"I want to try that," she said. "Not tonight. But at some point."
"I'll take you," he said, simply and without ceremony, and something about the matter-of-fact quality of it settled warmly in her chest.
The dessert menu arrived and she chose something with dark chocolate because she was not in the mood to be sensible about everything. Harry ordered the same, which she noted and found herself thinking was not accidental.
"The political work," she said, returning to something earlier. "What role do you actually see for me in that? Concretely. Not the general picture, the specific."
"Pureblood families who won't engage with my office will engage with you," he said. "Not because you're my wife, but because you're Greengrass. That name still carries weight in certain circles even after everything. The families who stayed neutral during the war, the ones who were neither Death Eaters nor Order, they respect old blood. You give me access to a conversation I currently can't have."
"And the women who serve you," she said carefully. "Bella, Narcissa. Pansy. They can't fill that role?"
"Different circles," Harry said with a chuckle. "Bella is Bellatrix Lestrange. Her name has weight but not the kind that opens drawing room doors. Narcissa is Malfoy's mother and she carries that association. You're something else. A survivor who chose to disappear rather than collaborate. There's a story there that matters to certain people."
"So I'm a bridge," Daphne said. Not with resentment, just with clarity.
"You're my wife," Harry said. "The bridge is a function of that, not the definition of it."
She looked at him. The candlelight between them did things to his face that she was quite consciously not thinking about in detail. "You said earlier that you hoped over time I'd find value in what we're building. That you weren't asking me to love you."
"I remember."
"That was very careful phrasing."
"It was honest phrasing."
"What does it leave open?" she asked. Not with coyness. Genuinely asking.
Harry met her eyes. "Whatever we make of it," he said. "I'm not assuming anything. Neither should you. But I'm not ruling anything out either."
The dessert arrived and they ate it in a silence that was, she reflected, remarkably comfortable for two people who had known each other for less than a week. At some point she noticed that she'd stopped analyzing the evening and had started simply being in it, which was either a sign that she was relaxing or a sign that the wine had done its work. She decided it was probably both and didn't particularly mind.
"The dress," she said, as they were finishing.
Harry looked up.
"You were right that I'd like it," she said. "That's slightly annoying."
"Why?"
"Because it means you're good at reading people and I should be more guarded, but we already established I'm done with careful." She looked at him across the table. "You picked green."
"It suits you."
"You picked green," she said again, more slowly, and watched his expression.
He held her gaze for a moment without looking away, and didn't say anything, and the fact that he didn't say anything was somehow more answer than anything he might have said.
The walk to the lift, the brief descent, the emergence into the street. He'd conjured a light jacket at some point and offered it without ceremony when the night air proved colder than anticipated, which she took without ceremony and was quietly grateful for. They walked for a little while because it was Paris and the night was clear and it seemed like a waste not to.
"Thank you," she said, when they'd walked in comfortable enough silence for a few minutes.
"For dinner?"
"For tonight," she said. "For doing it properly. You didn't have to."
"I wanted to." He glanced at her sideways. "For what it's worth, I think you're going to be good at this."
"This being?"
"Whatever this is," he said. "The arrangement. The life. The part where you have to walk into rooms and know exactly what you're doing and why." He paused. "You think on your feet and you're honest about it. That's rarer than you'd think."
Daphne considered telling him that was a very clinical compliment and decided instead that it was accurate, and accurate was what she'd asked for tonight. "Ask me again in a year," she said, for the second time that evening.
He smiled, and she thought again that it was a different kind of smile than the ones he probably showed most people, and chose not to think too carefully about what that meant.
For now, it was enough.
TBC.
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