Vacivitas

Chapter Nine

Listen...I cannot be trusted to sit on updates. I have all the way to Chapter 12 written already.

Trigger warnings: blood drinking, somewhat of a dub-con. NSFW lol

Chapter Nine

He was right.

The second Hermione wakes up and the memories rush in, she's humiliated. She'd acted so...So wanton. So desperate. She'd pleaded with Malfoy, of all wizards! Draco Malfoy! It's mortifying.

She lays in his bed for a long time in the empty room, staring up at the canopy that drapes above the top of his four-poster bed. Her gratitude is immense, knowing that if Malfoy had let things happen the way she'd wanted them to, she would absolutely regret it. And on top of that, the miniscule amount of trust she had in him would be shattered.

Gods, she can still remember the way it felt—how out of control it made her. And now that she's agreed to be his food source, when's he going to want to feed again? How can she prepare herself? She's not sure if she wants to consent yet. She's got to figure out her feelings first. She needs to do some research.

To the library.

Hermione hurls herself out of bed. Her throat doesn't hurt anymore and there's no headache, so she runs all the way down the hall to her own quarters. Once inside, she bathes and changes into a new dress for the day. She piles her curls on top of her head and then dashes down the stairs to start researching.

She's obsessive as she takes every book on sex that she possibly can. There aren't many, what with the purity culture that has always surrounded Pureblood culture, but she manages to find a few that give a rudimentary education on the topic. She also finds a couple of romance novels that the Malfoys must not have realized had anything untoward within them.

Hours pass by while Hermione reads, absorbing information like a sponge. A lot of things are common sense. A lot of things she knows already. A lot of things are curious. But the one thing these books can't teach is feelings. What does any of this feel like? And what does it mean to a person?

The fact of the matter is that if he keeps her alive, he's going to use her blood as a food source for as long as she breathes. What happened last night is going to keep happening. What she needs to decide is how she wants to handle the biological effects of his saliva, what she thinks about him, and what she's comfortable with.

There's no doubt that Malfoy is attractive. Anyone with eyeballs can see that he's quite possibly one of the most beautiful men to walk the Earth, and she wasn't the only one who saw that at Hogwarts. There were plenty of witches who despised him who admitted that he was attractive physically. And now, with all those tattoos and how in shape he is and...

Does any of this matter?

The world that she grew up in is gone. Forever. It's never coming back. She's spent months running, and months lying in her own filth at the bottom of a pit. Now all she does is read and eat. Once she relaxes and settles into her new life, then what? Are her human needs just going to disappear? Is she going to ignore them because her only choice is Malfoy?

It's not that she hates him. She doesn't trust him, and she doesn't know if he's going to keep his promises. So far he has, but what happens when things get tough? What happens if the Dark Lord discovers her? He's going to turn her over. Say that happens—does she want to be executed knowing she got a little heated with Malfoy? The Dark Lord doesn't know that he's a vampire, either. So she'd die, take his secret to her grave, and he'd move on to the next food source.