More Than Neighbors - |Dramione/Blinny|

XXXII

Hermione's P.O.V. :

As soon as we exited the doors of the lobby, Draco grabbed my hand and disapperated. We appeared at the same cafe that he offered me my job at. Funny how if someone would have told me that I would be working with Draco Malfoy a month or two ago, I would have laughed in their face.

"I'll have a tea and the number three," he told the waitress. He looked up at me to see what I was ordering.

"I'll have the same thing," I answered.

She wrote it down and headed towards the kitchens. I turned to Draco as he pulled the paper out of his coat pocket before handing it to me.

My lips pursed more and more as I read through the letter. By the time I finished it, I was livid.

"They can't do that!"

He shrugged sadly. "They're the Ministry. They can do whatever they want."

"Not this time," I insisted strongly. "If you'd let me, Draco, I'd like to find a loophole in this blackmail business."

He smiled at me before letting out a short laugh, running his hand over his face.

"You can try, but I've had plenty of people trying to find a loophole in it for two years and they've all come up empty handed."

"There is no need for you to have to pay that many gallons per month. I refuse to give up," I told him. I smiled slightly when I saw some of the stress come off of his shoulders. "When is your payment due?"

"At the end of the month," he replied.

"Okay, so that gives me roughly fifteen days, seeing as today is Thursday, the fifteenth of September."

"Well, I hope that's enough time to find that loophole, Hermione."

Soon the waitress comes out with our tea and fish and chips a couple of minutes later.

I set the letter to the side and begin eating while we discussed different things such as Ginny's quidditch match that they won yesterday and the upcoming Wizards and Witches Carnaval that's happening Saturday.

I begin drinking some of the tea to push down the fish and chips when I happened to glance over at the bottom of the letter. I gasped.

Unfortunately, I was still drinking my tea. I hacked and coughed, feeling my face go read. Draco stood up to help me somehow, but I gestured for him to sit back down. Once I calmed down, I snatched the letter and gestured at the signature near the bottom.

"Tabitha Greengrass!"

"Well yeah, who else would be horrid enough to blackmail be into paying the Ministry money?"

"Well, she's not smart enough to come up with this on her own. Someone else has to be helping her," I suggested, taking a bite of my food. "I honestly thing that the money is not actually going to the Ministry. She's too greedy to not keep it between her and her partener, and I've never heard of the Ministry doing something like this to anyone else. It's just so unjust!"

"We'll figure it out," he assured me before changing the topic and finishing our food.

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