Prince of Ruin

Chapter Seventeen: Coco

"Where is it?!" I snapped, digging through my desk drawer, I had basically emptied the damn thing and was now tapping the bottom as if it would pop out and prove to have a secret compartment where all my missing items had collected over the past few weeks, no such luck.

"Cordelia?" I jumped in my seat and turned, Helene was standing over me, her eyes on the piles of stuff on my desk.

"Yes? Sorry, I'll clean it all up, I promise." I started doing just that, putting things back into the drawer.

"What's gone missing?" She asked.

Helene was honestly the best boss I could have asked for. When I finished school I had known right away I wanted to go to work at The Prophet. I wanted to be a journalist and Helene had been the first person I applied with. The interview had gone amazingly well and she did not seem to give a damn that my parents were who they were.

I leaned back against my seat and ran my hands over my hair.

"My bracelet, I had a gold bracelet that I had taken off before going to lunch and now it's gone, I didn't leave it on top- it was in the damn drawer."

"Maybe we should start putting some kind of spell on your desk, an alarm, or something."

"Yeah, I suppose." I glanced around the room as if maybe the culprit would jump up and tell me that it was their doing.

They did not.

"Son of a bitch." I kicked at the legs of the desk and I shoved the rest of the stuff into my desk.

"Was it sentimental?" Helene asked me, in relation to the bracelet, I assumed.

"No, It wasn't even real gold, it was just- something I had been wearing and now it's gone." I let the drawer slide closed and went for the other one. I had taken to locking all my work stuff up after the statement from Calvin had gone missing. I couldn't be sure other things hadn't gone missing as well.

"Go home, Sel- Nott." Helene was still getting used to my married name. To be fair, so was I. I sighed, obviously, I wasn't going to find it tonight so I stood up and gathered my stuff, heading out the door and back home.

I got back to the house and went straight up to the bedroom where I knew Theodore would be waiting. Theodore sometimes met me at the door, but whenever he wasn't there, I knew, it meant Rochester had been out prowling. Making stupid little comments about Theodore and the fact that I was the only one working at the moment. It was ridiculous. Theodore had already sent in his resume to a couple of departments, but he had admitted to me that there was only one he really wanted to hear back from- though he refused to tell me which one it was.

He was there, but he wasn't alone. Theodore sat in one of the chairs by the fire and in the other chair sat Draco. The pair had moved the chairs to either side of the coffee table and were deep into a game of chess.

"Boys." I walked past the pair and into my closet.

"How was work?" Draco called after me.

"Work," I answered, I left the door cracked so I could hear them as I changed out of my skirt and turtle neck into something more comfortable. That done, I walked out, looking between the two of them.

"Have either of you eaten?"

"At some point in our lives, yes, we've both tried it," Theodore asked. I quirked an eyebrow going to the bar cart.

"Draco would you like a drink?"

"I would like one." Theodore requested.

"Suffer. Draco?"