Azael's Chains

Appointed Time

The coin had a new arc of numbers for its serial. Hermione touched the raised gold numerals as though reading them with fingertips, committing them to memory both by touch and eye. She imagined it was still warm from the change, but it was more likely her body heat, having held it for minutes now. Had it been cold when she checked it to find the change? She couldn't remember.

This was it, the day Hermine was expected to act.

Her eyes darted toward the clock, noting that only hours remained. She still had not decided her course of action and it weighed on her like stones in a river. Could she kill the monster that held her captive? The man who held her in his arms and called her his love?

The boy who'd mourned the loss of his unborn siblings with a woman lost to the world. It was no wonder he longed for a family of his own.

Hermione wanted freedom more than the air in her lungs, but she knew she was lying to herself if she thought she was capable of premeditated murder.

As cruel as Antonin might be, he was also a tender lover when the sadistic beast inside him was sated. He enjoyed providing for her, had a quick wit as well. There were days they'd while away reading in companionable silence, hours they'd discuss something one or the other had read. He could be thoughtful, leaving potions at her bedside to ease cramps or setting aside books on topics she'd mentioned previously.

He thought he loved her.

He was a murderer. He'd killed people she knew, cared about. One of Voldemort's lieutenants, he was the first to lead in the fight against insurgents. And he delighted in the pain and death granted at the end of his wand.

She should kill him. Avada him when his back was turned. But a vice tightened around her heart at the thought, a sick feeling stirring in her stomach.

Hermione didn't love him. She was as sure of that as she was of her love for her parents. But he was human to her and it was hard to gun down that which wore a human face, especially when you'd been privy to all the little quirks of their humanity. She was not a snake, had never cast an Unforgivable, and did not think she could begin with that one, not even on him.

Watching Harry cast the Imperius at Gringotts had curdled her stomach, and that was perhaps the gentlest of the three.

That left her with incapacitation.

Antonin would not suspect it. Life had fallen into a disarming pattern since Samhain; even before they'd found a rhythm of a sort. He had his wand on him, of course, but he didn't use it for mundane tasks. It usually remained securely up his sleeve. At times he even set it on a tabletop, content that his charge could not touch the dark handle. As warm and welcoming as hers was, his wand was all piercing thorns and disdain. Worse than ruining her spells, it simply refused to cast at all.

Was it best to disarm him first or attempt to knock him out? On the one hand her disarming charm was among her best, and would surely work whether the other managed or not; on the other, it was not incapacitation. It would leave him with options.

Either might start a duel. She held her head in her hands, the whirlpool of arguments chasing downward in a frenzied ache that threatened to tear apart her mind. Incapacitate. Disarm. Kill. Torture. Incapacitate or disarm.

She had cast so little recently, a few of the weakest, easiest spells sans wand lest Topsy or Antonin come in unexpectedly and see her beloved focus. She couldn't bear to lose it again.

Without it her magic was too wide a net, too flimsy, uncertain and directionless. Hermione's magic had always been a precision tool, but that was honed and trained from the start.