when they became villains [draco malfoy] {book 2}

210

It was one of those nights again. Her neighbours wouldn't hear because she had put an everlasting silencing charm over her tiny flat, though she could hear the music alright. The newest record of Marie Madeleine played over her vintage auctioned record player - one of those with a metal horn on top. She drank red wine from a glass that the previous owner had left there, spinning around the room. 

It was a celebration, one that she had taken upon having every 15th of every month ever since she had gotten off probation. Although she stayed in the city, saving up the last of the money she needed to move to the silent foreign countryside, she had quit her for-show pawnshop job and hid from the public's sight completely. It had been 9 celebrations since she had first found herself at peace.

Astrid's long, light, dirty-blonde locks danced around her as she moved her head along the rhythm. The freckles she charmed onto her face every morning were a little smudged in the late of the evening and her dark brown eyes were closed. It was only behind the locked doors of her studio apartment that she had taken off her leather gloves, though the long-sleeved turtleneck, long sweatpants and socks still remained. The glasses she had finally gotten herself and usually wore to work had been discarded too and now stood on the kitchen table toward the edge, threatening to fall off.

The girl had gotten no tidier than she had been before, a heap of clothes stood on her unmade bed and beside it. A stack of empty take-out food packs littered the middle of her kitchen table. Astrid rarely cooked, mostly because she was too afraid to go grocery shopping and be seen, so she always saved a part of whatever her employee brought her for lunch and then finished that in the evening. There were books - actual, real books that Astrid read - by the side of her bed and piled up randomly in the small bookcase that she owned. Being in that apartment 90 per cent of her leisure time didn't leave her with many other hobbies to explore. Besides, she had never imagined studying the human psyche could've been so interesting. Or reading books on how to climb the steps of your career. Those were the things Astrid risked going in public to get. Food was secondary.

It was rare, actually, that she returned to her flat. Most days, she stayed at the office at the back of the perfume shop late into the night until she blacked out right there by her desk from sheer exhaustion. It was as simple as using the Floo Network to get to her flat from the office, but even that she was sometimes too lazy to use. Or, most of the time, she had other things she needed to figure out before she could have some rest. Sleep was secondary in her life. Working more than anybody else did had been the way she had even gotten her merchant position fully in control of that one store in Mayfair, London, and she intended to keep her position until she herself decided to quit. That and she wanted expansion - it wasn't enough to have just two stores.

Astrid had gotten the idea of expanding the actual perfume business as well, not just the drug one, and she had been trying to pitch it to her bosses. She thought that if their perfume gained popularity, the big sums of money that rolled into their shop wouldn't look as suspicious. If they expanded to other places more, they would also gain more customers, even more money, even more popularity, and even sooner she would reach her goal. All of her ideas were still in the process of consideration and Astrid presumed nothing had been greenlit because her boss liked the simplicity of their business.

Mr Willkins' brother had owned the perfume store for years. They were very few people involved in it. There were his suppliers, ones with which Astrid was now tasked to meet, bargaining, getting more for cheaper. There were people, who she had once worked as, before getting a promotion after the old merchant disappeared: people who were in charge of making the delivery of potions from the labs or warehouses of the supplier. Some people worked in those labs or warehouses but Astrid didn't know much about them. And then there were the six employees of the actual store that brought Astrid lunch and breakfast coffee every day and sold perfume and potions alike to customers, if only they knew the password of the week.