Chapter Text
The scent of ink and fresh parchment had always calmed Hermione Granger. She arrived early before the fog of bureaucratic ineptitude could ruin the clarity of morning. Level Four of the Ministry of Magic hummed in subdued silence, too early even for the bustle of interdepartmental owls.
She walked with hard-earned confidence, files cradled in one arm, tea in the other. The DMLE’s Legal Reform Division had taken over her life and she’d never loved anything more.
Her office was cramped, but she'd worked a minor Extension Charm into the corners so she could breathe. Stacks of drafted policy briefs teetered on her desk like ambitious skyscrapers, some annotated in her tiny handwriting, others marked in Ron's scribbled notes.
"Hermione!"
The voice came from behind. Ginny Weasley, radiant and ruddy-cheeked even at this hour, brushing curls out of her face as she hurried up the corridor.
Hermione’s posture softened. "You're early."
Ginny smirked, plucking the tea cup out of her hand and taking a sip before grimacing. "Merlin, how do you drink this? No sugar?"
"Stimulants," Hermione replied primly, snatching it back. "I’ve got three committee meetings today. Two laws under review. One’s the Reform Bill for Business Protections."
Ginny raised a brow. “Ah. The one Amara Selwyn’s fighting tooth and nail.”
Hermione grimaced. Selwyn—a pureblood witch with nebulous ties to the old regime, nothing enough to land her an Azkaban sentence—had made it her mission to cripple every piece of legislation Hermione had helped draft. Her resistance was legal, subtle, dignified and fucking exhausting.
"She’s invited outside consultants today."
"Who?"
"Not all names are released, but Ron pulled some files for me last night. Half-blood business wizard named Keene, econometrist Tom Mullet, and Zabini." She said it casually, trying to pretend it didn’t make her spine tighten.
"Zabini? Blaise Zabini?"
Hermione nodded.
“Wasn’t he the prick who mocked you in the Slug Club for saying your parents were dentists?”
“Yes,” she said tightly.
“Wasn’t he the prick who called me a filthy blood traitor with Malfoy back in school?”
“Also yes.”
“Wasn’t he the prick—”
“We’ve established he’s a prick, Ginny.” Hermione exhaled, running fingers through her curls. “But he owns a quarter of the private transport floo network and controls half the sophophorus bean trade routes from the Continent. Anything that affects tariffs or monopolies, he's involved. Whatever Selwyn’s planning, she wants Zabini on her side. Probably to scare off any fiscal conservative votes.”
Ginny tilted her head. The odd expression meant she was about to say something out of pocket, which Hermione was not fond of at this hour. “Is he an alpha?”
“Ginny!”
“He was fit. Vain, but fit.”
“Not everyone fit is an alpha,” Hermione reminded her, Harry being prime example of that. Besides, Harry and Ron kept her updated on new registrants every so often. Last she knew, only a dozen or so alphas worked at or with the Ministry in some capacity, and none of them were in the same year as her at Hogwarts. She avoided them with obsessive paranoia, memorized scent profiles like it was an exam, scheduled her heat leave a week ahead, and if all else failed, Luna’s black market suppressants were enough to get through a few hours undetected.
That Hermione was unregistered herself, illegally, was besides the point. She was muggle-born and had no more need for attention nor discrimination, nor did she buy into the romantic ideas of primal mating strung by biology. She’d had quite enough of that for one lifetime.
They parted ways at the lift. Hermione entered the main chamber of Committee Room B at precisely eight fifty-nine, settling into the tall-backed chair with parchment fanned out before her like a general surveying the field. The half-blood consultant, Keene, was already there. Tight-lipped and quietly anxious, she noted. Selwyn swept in at nine-ten, her black veil trailing behind her like a crow’s wing. With hardly a glance at the empty seat, they started.
Thirty-Seven-C’s anti-monopoly provision was not the most contentious piece of legislation—she had spent most of the last year on union rights for house-elves that at one point required Auror detailing around her bungalow—but it did impact key players in transportation. She was loathe to admit Selwyn was smart enough to rally enough support by citing profit rather than the typical pro-tradition dogma preferred by members of the Wizengamot to gain support.
Mid-way through her assistant Melody’s reiteration of today’s agenda, without a single knock to forewarn them, the door opened again.
He moved like a languid sort of smoke. He was dressed in black and charcoal layers, shirt an orange silk and inappropriate. Gold glinted on his watch, his cufflinks, his eyes. A small hoop through his left earlobe. He wasn’t aristocratically pointy and polished in the way Draco Malfo was. No, Zabini was sin-drenched, slouching elegance, sharp cheekbones and full lips and a sordid brow.
And gods, he smelled…
Her breath caught.
Cedarwood and crushed bergamot. Molten myrrh. Burnt cinnamon doused in dark rum. She felt it hit her throat first, and then her chest, a flash of something wrong. Her spine locked. Her thighs pressed.
No.
No, no, no.
He hadn't even looked at her. He was reviewing a folded parchment from his coat pocket, smoothing it out with ringed fingers. His mouth curved slightly when Selwyn leaned over to whisper something in his ear. She hadn’t seen him since the war outside the fuzzy edges of distant, grainy photographs on the Prophet’s business pages. Hadn’t been convicted of anything, of course. Hadn’t even been accused, technically, having skimmed by on his mother’s wiles and money and hovering in the shadows.
There was a premonition of something about to go terribly wrong. Hermione always carried a dual edged sword: that of over-preparedness and that of sheer, stubborn impulse that made her more Gryffindor than Ravenclaw.
“Hermione?” said Melody. “Your report?”
“Hermione Granger,” she began, her voice only a hair too tight. “Lead drafter of Provision Thirty-Seven-C and senior legal advisor for Statutory Business Reform under the Magical Law Harmonization Act.” Thankfully, she had hammered this into her memory. The side of her gaze was fixated on Zabini, who didn’t look up, busy (and rudely) murmuring something under his breath to Keene. “Thirty-Seven-C,” she continued tightly, “is a legislative provision intended to enforce a competitive integrity standard across all domestic magical transport networks and international potion import operations. Specifically, it prohibits vertical integration of floo lines and exclusive ingredient rights by conglomerates.”
Zabini still wasn’t paying any attention. Him and Tom Mullet snickered over something while his knuckles tapped over a file she doubted he’d read.
“Mr. Zabini?” Selwyn prompted.
Crossing one ankle lazily over his knee, cuff pulling up slightly to reveal a flash of skin, a line of dark hair, a thin ankle bracelet of gold and obsidian beads. Her eyes caught on the slow movement of his fingers tapping against the edge of his chair. His eyes - lazy, molten-coffee - flicked over the room once, bored and slow, then landed on her. His pupils dilated, it was faint but it was there.
“Curious,” Blaise Zabini started, low and silken. “I wasn’t aware that civil rights advocacy had extended into corporate sabotage.”
Hermione’s mouth went dry.
He was an alpha.
“Miss Granger?” Selwyn asked sweetly.
“I—” she choked, “We’ll resume discussion of Provision Thirty-Seven-C next week. Excuse me.”
In the beat of stunned silence, Hermione gathered her parchment and bolted.
-
She collapsed against her door. She wasn’t one for early leaves, but she was Hermione Granger, War Heroine, the Golden Girl, and deserved a day off.
She buried her face in her hands. Her body was flushed and aching, and heat pulsed in her belly, slick and shameful.
There was nothing quite so embarrassing as losing control. Her entire life were made up of adages— accept who you are, but don’t be too swotty, accept you’re special, but don’t remind others of it too often -but this secret, she wasn’t ashamed of. The problem was the weight of the world and its people depending on her strength, not vulnerability. It was that if caught unaware, she could easily be controlled, manipulated in ways torture couldn’t.
“Why not bond?” Luna had once asked.
“I won’t bond just because I’m desperate. I have agency and choice, and will only be with someone I want to, whether or not he’s an alpha.”
“And if your omega says otherwise?”
“I’ll make her.”
“You can’t force her, as much as she can’t force you.”
That was unfair, Hermione thought. It was like losing all of her senses at once to a haze. Once, before she’d reached the age of maturity, she’d bumped into Charlie Weasley at the Burrow and couldn’t smell anything but him for three days.
She wrote a letter to Luna. A response came hours later containing a small vial and a warning that overdosing could be disastrous.
-
“What do I do? If this gets out—”
Ron’s face shimmied in the fireplace’s flames. “Are you sure he knows?”
She remembered his body tensing. The blacks of his pupils starting to swallow his eyes. Tendons in his wrist flexing.
“Yes,” she said, swallowing.
“This is a war of attrition, Hermione. The longer you keep hiding—”
“I’ve worked too hard to be taken seriously,” she cut in. “You know what happens to most omegas in government. We’ve already lost Clara. You think that’s not going to happen to me?”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. Clara Chambers had been the only other omega working at the Ministry, and her status was widely known. Now she was married to some twice-divorced Greengrass cousin, pregnant, and publicly “stepping back from policy reform to focus on family.” Tabloids and howlers and prejudice had cemented her decision. Hermione hadn’t seen her in months.
“You’re forgetting that he’s not registered either. If he’s not an idiot, in addition to being a git, he won’t say a word. He's got as much to lose as you do.”
“I can’t threaten —” she paused. Actually, she had and she could. “Ron, you genius.”
He smiled crookedly. “Now there’s a sentence I’ll never hear again.”
-
“I assume Miss Granger will stay for the entirety of the meeting today?”
They were in Conference Room B again. Selwyn watched her with a smile plastered on her face.
Hermione didn’t flinch. She tilted her chin instead, spine straight as a wand core.
“I intend to, yes.” Her voice held steady, calm, a touch cool.
Melody cleared her throat and began reviewing the minutes of their last meeting, her quill scratching lightly in the background as she made notations. Hermione folded her hands in front of her, fingers intertwined tightly on the table. If anyone noticed the slight tension in her jaw, the flush beneath her collar, they said nothing. Her suppressants would hold, they would.
The room wasn’t overly warm. The Ministry maintained a steady twenty-two degrees Celsius through complex atmospheric enchantments that hummed faintly in the walls. But Hermione’s skin felt hot.
Because today, Zabini’s attention was fixed. He pinned her in place with his eyes alone, despite not saying a single word. No leaning over to whisper some cutting remark to Keene or pass snide commentary to Selwyn. No. He was silent. He sat three seats down, and she could feel his gaze every few minutes, flitting over her like shadow.
The meeting crawled forward. Discussion turned to subsection (ii) of the anti-monopoly clause, and Keene raised concerns over interpretation bias regarding the term exclusivity. Hermione responded with measured language, citation of prior rulings, the entire foundation of her argument carefully laid in logic and precedent.
But her hands still shook when she set her quill down.
Since her cycles began after graduation, never had a heat arrived early. It wouldn’t break. The suppressants would hold, her brain supplied like a litany.
Every cell in her body whispered one terrible truth: He smells divine. I want to eat him.
She gritted her teeth.
The meeting came to an end. A vote was scheduled for three weeks out. Melody called time at precisely eleven-thirty, and Selwyn gathered her notes with a flourish, pointed teeth gleaming as she offered everyone a perfunctory smile.
Exhaling, she stood, trying not to look too relieved. The cool breeze of movement across the room told her people were filing out. She took one step to follow.
He moved past her.
It was just a flicker of movement in her periphery. A brush of dark fabric. The softest hint of warmth on her right side.
Fingertips. A whisper of skin against the curve of her back, right where the swell of her waist met her spine.
Her parchment slid to the ground, scattering.
He turned.
He looked back.
Only his head moved, chin over shoulder, cheekbone sharp, lashes half-lowered. His mouth curled at one corner, like the edge of a secret. He held her gaze for a moment.
“Granger,” he greeted. “I forget how narrow these corridors are.”
He left with a sly smile.
The scent of him clung to her like smoke on skin.
And, like a tide crashing against a seawall, heat hit.
Fully. Brutally.