Captured

Chapter Seventeen: Apprehension

A/N: You're gonna love this chapter. Happy reading!!

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What was his problem?

Why did she feel like she was suddenly fourteen again, walking in on a couple snogging between the shelves in the Hogwarts Library?

Her cheeks were permanently flushed now, she was sure, from the near constant embarrassment she'd been subjected to over the previous week.

How had he found a way to embarrass her when he wasn't even here?

She glared at the stack of novels for a good minute, feeling decidedly wrong about the whole situation.

She was trading smut with Draco Malfoy, while kidnapped, in the middle of a war. And yet a part of the sheer absurdity was so unexpected it bordered on funny. She was trading smut, with Draco Malfoy, her schoolyard bully. In the middle of a war. The jarring mesh of juvenile taunting with the seriousness of her situation was almost too much for her to wrap her brain around, and a laugh verging on hysterical bubbled out of her before she could stop it.

While she didn't enjoy the idea of being locked in a room in Malfoy Manor alone, she was grateful at that moment that there was no chance Malfoy or anyone else would walk in on her, because she was absolutely sure she looked and sounded like she was having a breakdown just then. It took at least five minutes for her crazed laughter to slowly stop until she was once again staring at the books before her.

She stood there for a moment longer, before resolutely deciding to ignore them. She turned back to her bed, slipping out A Collection of Short Stories from underneath her pillow, hoping it would pass the time. She grimaced as she realized that there was absolutely no point in her hiding it under her pillow any longer, though a part of her wondered why he hadn't taken it from her once he realized there was no one in the house other than the two of them, and it was still missing from the library. Her brows furrowed as she mentally added yet another thing to the ever-growing pile of Malfoy puzzle pieces, frustrated that instead of figuring him out, he was simply becoming more of an enigma the longer she had to interact with him. She sighed, shaking herself slightly to lessen the tension singing through her, as she sat cross-legged on the bed and dove into the Arcturus Flinton collection in her lap.

She found that it was hard for her to focus, however, when she felt as though the romance books were glaring at her. She couldn't help her furtive glances to them every few minutes, as though they were waiting to jumper her at any moment.

Huffing her annoyance, she finally got up to throw one of the plush blankets from her bed over the books to hide them from her sight, hoping this would help.

It did for a small while, but unfortunately the Arcturus Flinton volume she was reading, while lovely, was about as short as The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

It took her all of half a day to finish it.

She hadn't realized how hard it would be to be locked solely in this room again after having been able to leave, until she was stuck in her prison once again.

Despite Malfoy's warning, she decided to tentatively try the door after finishing A Collection of Short Stories, hovering her hand a few centimeters above the handle. She glared at it as she felt a faint heat from where she held her hand and knew that whatever charm was on the handle would likely burn her if she even tried to escape it. She wondered if it was just as much to prevent access to wayward Death Eaters who may get ideas to pop back in with her in the house by herself, as it was to keep her in. Or Malfoy may have just wanted to see her ignore his warning and karmically hurt herself in the process.