Entranced (Draco Malfoy)

•prologue•

Dove Taylor sat curled in her usual corner of the Hogwarts library, a worn armchair tucked beneath the shadow of a tall stained-glass window. The late afternoon light filtered through in fractured beams of emerald and gold, dancing across the pages of the book cradled in her lap. She didn't notice. Her eyes were locked, spellbound, tracing each line of the chapter on merfolk. Real merfolk, not the sanitized versions children heard about. These were ancient, fierce, unearthly creatures that prowled the depths beneath the Black Lake and far beyond.

Her fingers hovered near the spine, poised to turn the page, yet unwilling to rush. Only six pages remained, and the thought of finishing filled her with both satisfaction and sadness. The familiar ache of knowing something beautiful was about to end.

Non-fiction had never held her interest before. She usually preferred the thrill of imagined worlds, but this book, this account of magical aquatic beings and their tangled place in wizarding history, felt different. It wasn't just a story. It was truth cloaked in wonder. It was real, and she could feel it breathing through the ink.

Time didn't exist in that moment. It never did when Dove read. Hours could slip away like wisps of smoke, unnoticed. The castle might crumble to the ground, and she'd only glance up if a page was torn in the process.

Words had always been her first love. They filled her world with color and meaning. They had since before she could properly hold a quill. She wrote letters she never sent, stories she never finished, journals she kept stacked in lopsided towers beneath her bed. She devoured books like others devoured sweets.

There were no downsides to reading, not really. But words? Words themselves... they could be sharp. They could be cruel. Beautiful things often were.

Dove had learned that lesson more than once. Some words lifted her into the clouds. Others had scraped across her like jagged stone. Insults dressed in eloquence. Lies hidden in polite tones. There was a darkness to language, and she both feared and admired it. What a strange contradiction that the same letters that composed poetry could also carve scars no one else could see.

Perhaps that's why Draco Malfoy fascinated her.

He was the human embodiment of contradiction. Cold, composed, effortlessly sharp-tongued. Yet behind his slate-gray eyes, there was something unreadable, something almost fragile, not that she would ever say that out loud. Not weak. No, never weak. But fractured, as if pieces of him were constantly shifting out of place.

She never excused him. She didn't condone his words or the sneers he cast like spells. But she never condemned him either. Not the way others did. It was as if, instinctively, she understood something about him. Something few others could, let anyone wanted, to see.

Maybe it was because she'd always believed in duality. That nothing, and no one, was ever just one thing. That even the cruelest words could be born of pain. That even a villain could bleed.

But for all her introspection, Dove had missed the most obvious irony.

While she sat, lost in a book about creatures who hid beneath the surface, she never once noticed the boy who watched her with the same devotion she gave her pages. The one whose eyes tracked her movements with quiet hunger. The one who said nothing, but always lingered just long enough to be forgotten until she was alone.

Draco Malfoy had been reading her.

And unlike the books she loved so dearly, he never skipped a single page.