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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Five—At the Turning Point

            “I know you’re in there, Draco.”

            The assured voice came from right beside his bed, which ruled out Blaise, whom his wards didn’t admit. And the soft, amused tone in the back of it ruled out Astoria. She rarely showed amusement when she was with him; it was assumed that he knew her well enough to know what she was feeling from slighter clues than that.

            “Good morning, Daphne,” Draco muttered into his pillow, and let himself turn over slowly. It wouldn’t do to hurry and confirm Daphne’s delusion that she was the center of the universe, or important in any other way.

            She smiled at him when his eyes met hers. She looked as she always did, good enough to touch but not to fuck, sitting demurely on the edge of his bed in jeans and a red shirt that did interesting things for the shade of her skin and the curves of her breasts. Casual clothes, clothes that would let her move fast, which was so often an asset in her job. She wore her blonde hair clipped short, unlike Astoria’s, and it had soft edges that Draco had wanted to run his hands through more than once. Her fingers had a few odd calluses and scars on them, but not ones the Ministry would notice unless it was specifically looking for her. And as Daphne had told him more than once, if they were specifically looking for her, than she had already fouled up the game beyond repair.

            “How is La Vie Dangereuse, then?” he muttered.

            “In hiding at the moment,” Daphne said, and her smile widened a touch. “Of course, that only convinces the Ministry that she’s planning something even more dastardly.”

            Draco laughed. Daphne swung one leg and reached out to squeeze his shoulder in response. “You’re the only one who really understands,” she said softly. “I did try to tell Astoria once, but she wouldn’t believe it, and she certainly wouldn’t have thought through the psychology behind it. It’s better to let her believe that I’m her slightly dotty sister, and that’s all.”

            Instead of the thief who’s stolen more money and artifacts from private owners than most of the others in the Continent and England combined, Draco thought, and sat up. “Astoria got word to you about Potter?”

            “She did.” Daphne drew back from the bed so that he could reach his dressing gown and stand, and watched him with open appreciation as he did so. Draco preened a little under the attention. Daphne could have her pick of partners from all over the world, and Draco had never really wanted to sleep with her, but he knew how to be flattered that she would consider him worth a second look. “I thought I could use my unique talents to help him, perhaps.”

            “You’d have to be careful.” Draco tied the dressing gown off and called a house-elf with a small tip of his hand. “Prepare a breakfast for me and my guest,” he said. “Fresh fruit and bread only. I know that you have to watch your figure,” he added, catching Daphne’s gaze. “Those drainpipes can be tricky to negotiate.”

            “Well, I can be content if the Ministry comes asking you about me now, because it’s completely obvious that you don’t have a clue how I work,” Daphne said, and looped her arm through his. “Is Potter still as glorious as he was in school?”

            “Still just as much of a self-righteous prig, oh yes,” Draco said, rolling his eyes as he led her to the table on the far side of his bedroom. “That’s why I told you to be careful. He’ll probably send the help back if he learns what you do.”

            “That would only happen if he’s better than all the other Aurors who’ve chased and not caught me.” Daphne took her seat on the edge of the chair, keeping her legs and hands in constant motion; from nowhere, she’d produced a ball and set it to spinning between her fingers, flexing them and curving them in new shapes. “But point taken. I reckon that I can think of something that will keep me busy helping him and yet not in any area where he could connect me with La Vie Dangereuse.”

            Draco nodded. “Good. We still need to work out a plan to preserve our freedom. Our money is one thing, and Pansy is working on a plan to stop Potter’s marriage, but what will actually keep us out of Azkaban if he breaks the contract with Sandborn? I have to admit that that one has me puzzled.”

            Daphne paused, cocking her head. The ball fell unnoticed to the ground. Draco blinked. He’d never seen her do that before.

            “Do you know many copies of the contract Potter keeps about him?” Daphne asked softly.

            “I don’t think he keeps any,” Draco said, watching her raptly. Daphne had one of the more open faces among his friends, one that even someone like Potter might be able to read. He could see the thoughts traveling from one eye to the other like clouds on a swift wind. “Sandborn was the one who brought the pages he signed.”

            “Ummm.” Daphne bent down and picked up the ball. “And I suspect that Sandborn protects the copies he does have carefully.”

            “Carefully enough?” Draco reached out and picked up the bowl of strawberries and chocolate that had just arrived on the table, munching his way delicately through the fresh, juicy ones on the top.

            Daphne gave him a bright smile. “There’s no such thing as carefully enough, not when someone’s decided to steal something.”

            “Someone?”

            Daphne clapped her hand to her chest and bowed over it. “Of course, one must give the commission to a person of some obvious talent.”

*

            “Are you all right, Harry? You look terrible.”

            He hadn’t got much sleep last night, but he didn’t show the signs of such things from his home to his friends. They got the second soul, not the third. Harry made himself look up at normal speed instead of showing how he really wanted to react to Ron’s question. “Oh? What? Yes, I’m fine. A brief bout of vomiting last night. I shouldn’t have eaten that last sandwich that Tom wanted to foist on me.”

            “Oh.” Ron relaxed and leaned back on the desk, shaking his head. “I’m amazed that you had the energy to go on to the Leaky Cauldron after yesterday!”

            “Oi! I was hungry.” Harry noted that Ron was clutching the Daily Prophet and seized the chance. “You heard about the investigation that Rettern wants to launch into Sandborn?”

            Ron snorted and threw the paper at him. Harry caught it and smoothed it out, reading snatches of the article from the corner of his eye, much as he had last night. It was a different article this time, but it didn’t say anything new. Harry relaxed. He would have to keep up with them anyway, of course, to make sure that they got no real leads, but—

            Is that what you want?

            Malfoy’s voice, which had been with him too much lately, hammered against the sides of his head. Harry swallowed and held the paper up in front of his face so that Ron wouldn’t notice. Of course he didn’t want Rettern’s investigation into Sandborn to succeed. That would expose the contract, and expose him.

            Of course he wanted the contract to last, and his association with Sandborn to last. It was unpleasant, but anything else would be worse.

            Of course he did.

            Hope didn’t taste any better than the imaginary sandwich that had made him vomit.

            “She’s not going to find anything,” Ron said matter-of-factly, standing up and pounding a fist into the small of his back to work out some kink. “Everyone knows that Sandborn’s clean. He wouldn’t have got this far if he’d been doing something shady.”

            Unless he took precautions to keep anyone from finding out, Harry thought. It sometimes made him impatient with his friends, they thought Sandborn was so pure and good. Didn’t they recognize that that “purity” could also be the product of a good liar?

            Well, no. They didn’t. And their lack of suspicion was the greatest protection that Harry had, so he shouldn’t be wishing they had more.

            Unless he had decided that he wanted to fight alongside Malfoy and he should wish that Sandborn was less powerful and his friends more suspicious so that they could get ready to fight beside him, too.

            Harry sighed and listened to Ron talk about Rettern’s investigation. It was the received wisdom about Sandborn: that he had disdained corruption and graft because he had more efficient ways to get things done. Harry didn’t disagree, but knowing how much he was the source of those “more efficient ways” somewhat tarnished them in his eyes.

            “Harry? You paying attention, mate?”

            Harry let his second soul take over so that he could make the right responses while he thought about Malfoy. How long would this obsession last? That was another question Harry should have asked last night and hadn’t. Did Malfoy really think that he wanted to help enough to keep it going through the first obstacles? The longer the task took, Harry thought, the more likely the Slytherins were to fuck off and find something else to do.

            He noticed abruptly that Ron had fallen silent, and looked up with a blink. Sandborn’s personal secretary, Jade Kilworth, stood at his door. She looked at him with solemn dark eyes and raised one finger in a beckoning motion.

            “Minister wants to see you,” she said.

*

            The problem with the protections that people put on their personal items, in Daphne’s experience, was that they never considered a serious attempt to break in. They thought as far as locking charms and wards and then stopped.

            But what if someone got past the charms and wards? Well, then some of them would have stationary hexes and bloodline locks and magical creatures as guards. But only some of them, and Daphne had learned how to deal with those, too.

            Currently, she was hanging upside-down outside the window of Sandborn’s home, waving her wand and chanting the spell that bored a small hole through the wards, all the while convincing them that she was supposed to be there. They could look through a dozen books and never find that charm, all the Aurors and Hit Wizards who had spent years trying to track her. It was one she had invented.

            If you wanted something done right, in Daphne’s experience, you had to do it yourself. In the most intimate of ways.

            The wards finally sparked and fizzled in front of her, melting away enough that she could see the house’s stone walls without their slight gauzy fuzz across her vision, and Daphne pushed her wand hand through the hole. Once the wand was inside them, beyond the fragile barrier, it was child’s play to cast Finite. Daphne pushed her hair away from her face, let herself exhale once, and then swung upright on the rope holding her before all the blood rushing to her head could knock her unconscious.

            She could have dangled upright before the window, perhaps, but she needed to avoid any damage to her hands, and she had found that it was ridiculously easy to disarm wards from this angle. Once again, no one thought seriously enough.

            Sandborn had one of the popular personal complexes of wards, the kind that all hooked inwards to a central trigger. Daphne grunted to herself and shook her head. You’d think that a Minister who had managed wizarding England for this many years would be a serious thinker if anyone was.

            Then she remembered what Draco had told her, and smiled. If that was true, then perhaps Sandborn had learned to depend too much on Potter’s strength, and hadn’t thought enough about maintaining his own. Anyone could get lazy.

            The rope bounced. Daphne looked thoughtfully upwards. It shouldn’t have done that. Perhaps Sandborn was smarter than he looked.

            In one way, yes, she learned a minute later, as the silvery figure of a rat appeared on the edge of the roof, gnawing determinedly on her rope, its movements too fast and agile to be quite natural. In another way, no. The rat wasn’t meant to check for intruders. Instead, it was the kind of magical construct that gnawed ivy and vines for people who wanted clean walls on their house.

            It had nearly finished the rope. Daphne smiled, counted three under her breath, and then turned and cast the next spell as the rope dropped past her in heavy coils.

            The air beneath her coalesced into a thick blue cushion and bore her up. Daphne crossed her legs and studied the charms that glittered around the window, incinerating the rope with a nonverbal spell as she thought about it.

            Now, this was clever.

            The window catch was sharp with silver spikes of power. Daphne whistled, and listened to the echoes that bounced back, nodding when they sounded like they were coming from the heavy walls of a round stone chamber. Yes, it was a spell that detected magical signatures. Someone might get away with opening the window, but they would carry away an invisible tracer with them. The spell even looked like an ordinary charm to prevent the window catch from lifting too easily, either because of opportunistic fingers or because of opportunistic winds.

            Only the echo revealed its nature. Daphne nodded. The Minister was clever, yes.

            Too bad for him that she was cleverer.

            She hummed under her breath as she took out the ivory comb from her hair and held it towards the window. It glowed once, twice, and a sharp curl of blue flame came out of it. The flame slowly shaped itself into a reverse image of the silver spikes that the signature-tracking spell produced, as if it were a puzzle piece and Daphne was holding the one that locked into place with it.

            She leaned forwards and swept the comb’s flame down in a strong, precise motion. She had learned the hard way what happened when one hesitated too long with these.

            The flames and the spikes of the spell coiled and locked together. The window buzzed and flared, a sound like mosquitoes beating themselves to death on the glass assaulting Daphne’s ears. She reminded herself no one else could hear it and remained still, balancing on her air. A single glance down was enough to reassure her that the rope had completely burned and would leave no trace of her behind.

            The flames buzzed one more time, and then the comb vanished, phasing out of existence quite quietly, compared to all the noise before. Daphne smiled as she watched it take the tracking spell with it. The rest of the magic on the window was ordinary, and she dealt with it quickly, then swung the window open and rearranged the cushion of air with her wand so that she could turn sideways and float in.

            The room revealed was a study. Daphne looked around thoughtfully, noticing the charms that gleamed on every surface. Protection charms, tracking charms, copying charms, vision charms that would give the Minister the face of someone stepping into the room unexpectedly. Those only focused on the desk, however, and couldn’t reach him at his office. Daphne discounted them and moved forwards, her eyelids fluttering shut.

            This was the most exacting part of the business, at least when she went into the situation without knowing her client personally. Where would someone like Sandborn hide something like the contract? She wished she had taken the time to talk with Draco and spy on Potter, though that might have told her nothing.

            Her fingers flexed as she thought of Sandborn’s speeches, his infrequent smiles, and the way that he looked at Potter when the Gryffindor made speeches himself. She understood the pride and the anger behind his eyes now. Sandborn was someone who wouldn’t like depending on another person to hold onto his power, however much he might acknowledge that it was a practical necessity.

            Consumed with pride. Someone who didn’t like Potter really, although he pretended to friendship on the surface. Someone whom vanity might whisper to, that he could have got that far on his own, if only the voters had seen him for who he really was.

            Pride. Dislike. Vanity.

            Daphne’s eyes snapped open, and she moved with assured grace to the mirror on the far wall, a plain one in a gold frame that showed an eagle pinning a lion above the glass.

            And yes, it opened when she tapped with her wand, in the fourth sequence she tried, and the compartment behind it was filled with the parchment sheets she had expected. Daphne smiled, collected them, rolled them neatly into a smaller packet that she could bind with a ribbon, and then cast a charm that would remove any traces she had left behind on the shelves of the compartment, including dead skin cells. She wouldn’t take any chances. Sandborn had Muggle relatives; he might know about fingerprints.

            She did leave something in the compartment, of course: the scroll of blank parchment that she had brought along with her in return. It would do no good if Sandborn didn’t know.

            Leaving the house was an adventure, too, but one that was less challenging than the one she’d had so far, so Daphne didn’t see a reason to include it in her report to Draco.

*



            “You wanted to see me, sir?”

            Harry kept his voice calm and low as he stepped through the door of Sandborn’s office. It was palatial, the space, but Harry knew that Sandborn kept it that way because it would impress the fuck out of people who thought they could intimidate him, such as reporters. Harry let his first soul hover behind his eyes as he gave his employer a meaningless smile.

            “Yes,” Sandborn said, and rose to his feet. As always when Harry was in the room, Sandborn’s attention was focused on him and not anything else. “Please shut the door. We should have some privacy for our discussions.”

            Harry had no objection to that. He didn’t exactly want anyone else intruding, either. But for long moments after the door had shut, he and Sandborn faced each other in silence. Harry regulated his breathing and waited for Sandborn to begin. This meeting could concern any number of things. Harry got his revenge where he could, in petty measures like waiting for Sandborn to begin something he wanted Harry’s cooperation on.

            Sandborn gave that little flick of his chin that he had when forced to yield and said, “Very well. I assume that you didn’t encourage the investigation Rettern is making into the foundations of our financial system.”

            Harry could let his eyes widen and say with perfect truth, “Is she pushing it that far? I had thought she was only going to investigate the people who would have benefited from Death Eater money immediately after the war.”

            Sandborn started to answer, and then shut his mouth and studied Harry. A moment later, he said, “You didn’t answer the question.”

            “Was there a question?”

            Sandborn’s eyes were bright and chill at the same time, but he wore his usual smile, one that shone so much most people didn’t notice the eyes. “You know bloody well there was one implied, Potter. Answer it.”

            Harry shook his head. “No. I haven’t had any contact with Rettern for years. She’s despised me since she saw me following you, because she hates you.”

            Sandborn watched him with more questions in his face, but Harry stood his ground. Sandborn kept closer track of his movements than anyone else. He would have realized that the time for Harry to have a private interview with Rettern was nonexistent, unless he did it out of his home, and Harry never let work follow him there.

            That gave him an unpleasant jolt when he thought about Malfoy. If my conversation with him wasn’t work, what was it?

            “That’s true, at least,” Sandborn said. He turned away and tapped a finger against the desk for a moment. Harry watched the reflection of the finger bobbing up and down. The desk was either made of obsidian or something close to it, since it reflected their faces so well.

            “Does it matter?” Harry asked. His voice was his politician’s voice, polite and calm. “She can’t bring us down. She can’t find all the secrets that you may have laid away. It’s nothing.”

            “It’s—a bad time,” Sandborn said, his shoulders dropping a little. Harry still didn’t think he could read people well, but Sandborn was a special exception, since he had so often depended on the Minister for so many things. “The investigation won’t find anything, but it could stir up the water, and people could start asking other questions.”

            Which meant he hadn’t relaxed because the investigation was nothing, but because of the pleasure he felt whenever Harry showed interest in their business dealings beyond what the contract demanded of him.

            Harry had offered emotional closeness before, mostly in public, when Sandborn requested it of him. He felt for the Minister, in reality, a great and churning mixture of hatred and indifference that wouldn’t cool down into liking, although Sandborn sure wished it would. If Harry liked him, then he could pretend they had something like friendship between them, instead of just the contract.

            But this was different. Sandborn had never seemed relieved because of it.

            Something about this was new. Rettern’s investigation would change things, if Harry could find the weak point and apply leverage. He didn’t know how he would do that yet, but he did know that it was possible.

            His belly tightened. He thought of Malfoy’s face floating in fire, the certainty in his voice when he said that the Slytherins owed Harry a debt and they would find some way to pay it.

            No, they wouldn’t. That reverse certainty had kept Harry from rebelling, that and the conviction that he couldn’t break his word without worse consequences following. And Sandborn trusted him because he trusted Harry’s word. It was all part of a long, complicated chain of emotions and vows and conditions that bound Harry to the Minister.

            But if Sandborn was concentrating on something other than watching Harry at the moment, then it might be possible—

            It might be—

            Harry hadn’t realized how intense his longing for freedom had grown until he thought of his own pledged word with a cool, impatient contempt.

            He would break for freedom if he had the chance. And he would use the Slytherins’ help, because he knew he couldn’t outface Sandborn by himself. The moment the man offered a threat to one of his friends, then Harry would fold. That was the way it was.

            “All right,” he said aloud. “What do you want me to do towards countering the investigation, sir?”

            Sandborn started talking about public speeches, mentions of confidence in the Ministry, interviews he wanted Harry to give. Harry listened more closely to the instructions than he ever had before. They had been part of his life up to that point, something hateful but inevitable, rather like Potions homework.

            Now…

            Now they were the possible clues to figuring out what was troubling Sandborn and using that to his own advantage.

            Hope breathed through him, and spoke in Malfoy’s voice.

*

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