The Fifth
POV: Draco Malfoy
The fog in Chelsea did not belong to the Ministry.
Draco Malfoy stepped from the alley, his boots silent against slick cobblestone, and paused just before the edge of the containment barrier. The morning had arrived soft and grey, all sound absorbed by the mist curling thick around the townhouse’s perimeter—enchanted fog, perhaps, but not by their hands. He could taste the difference in the air.
The perimeter wards hummed faintly under his skin as he approached, a sign of good calibration—or Ministry-standard laziness. He flicked his identification against the glyph on the wardstone and stepped through without speaking. The young Auror posted at the barrier stiffened.
“Sir,” the boy started, voice tight with recognition.
Draco didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His presence was permission enough.
Rosier's townhouse loomed ahead, four stories of faded elegance, its charm dulled by years of inherited decay. Ivy clung stubbornly to the brick. The front door, wide open, yawned into darkness. The house seemed to resist occupancy. Even the mist hovered just short of the threshold, as if unsure it wanted to follow.
He paused just before crossing into the entryway, letting the quiet settle into his chest. Fifth murder. No magical trace. No witness. No pattern that anyone else could see.
And yet.
The moment he stepped through the threshold, something shifted—subtly, but unmistakably. Like the house had taken a breath and recognized him.
Inside, the air was wrong. Not cursed, not hexed—just… altered. As if someone had scraped the magic thin across the walls and left it threadbare. His fingers twitched near the wand at his wrist.
He scanned the corridor—no signs of struggle, no scorch marks or lingering spell shadows. Clean. Too clean. Which, at this point, was its own kind of violence.
The staircase to the right creaked under invisible pressure. Old wood, old secrets. A shattered teacup lay by the hearth, a bloom of dark liquid staining the rug beneath it. The bitter scent rose above the usual death-tinged stillness—sharper than poison, not quite floral. He breathed it in once. Acid and roots. Alchemical. Familiar, but not his familiar.
Draco crouched, gloved fingers skimming just above the rug’s edge. He didn’t touch the stain. He didn’t need to. Whatever had happened here had been permitted —not forced. The wards hadn’t failed. They’d shifted, momentarily and deliberately, to allow someone inside.
He straightened slowly. No glamour remained. No glamour had ever been cast.
Elspeth Rosier had let her killer in.
Outside, the fog curled tighter around the building’s bones.
Draco narrowed his eyes.
Something was wrong.
Not magically. Not mechanically.
Something older . Something missing .
He turned back toward the body.
His jaw tightened.
Five dead. No trace.
The parlor was still dressed in the remnants of a morning unfinished.
A pot of tea, now cold and steeped to bitterness, sat on a silver tray beside two cups—one shattered on the floor, its dark contents bleeding into the edge of an antique rug. The second cup remained untouched, balanced with an old woman’s fastidiousness at the corner of a polished table.
Elspeth Rosier was slumped in her armchair, posture collapsed but not fallen. One arm hung limply over the side, palm down, fingers curled as if she'd meant to reach for something but changed her mind. Her eyes were open. Not wide with fear or pain—but with a kind of puzzled detachment, as if the moment of death had come before she had the chance to name it.
Draco stepped further into the room.
He didn’t call for a field mage or summon the mediwizards who would soon descend on the scene with their cataloging charms and sealing spells. He didn’t need the noise.
He needed the silence.
The hearth had long gone cold. No magical fire flickering low, no ember with memory. Just stone, soot, and the steady scent of something acrid that clung to the room like a second skin. Not rot. Not blood. Bitter. Rooted. Wrong.
He crouched, slowly, beside the shattered cup.
No signs of defensive magic. No wand burns or dueling residue. No curses splintered into the floorboards. He cast a detection charm, wordless and clean. The spell passed through the room like a whisper and came back still.
Nothing.
Too clean.
Draco frowned. Even the most precise dark magic left residue—an emotional heat, the phantom echo of a violent rupture. But this? This felt like someone had wiped the slate not just clean, but deliberately empty . As though the room had been scrubbed of intention.
He studied her face. Rosier had been old—mid-fifties but preserved with the kind of magic that made age pause at the door. Her hair was coiled neatly. Her robes pressed. Her lips tinged ever so slightly darker than they should have been, as if the last breath she drew had soured the blood beneath her skin.
He stepped closer. Breathed in once, shallow.
The air tasted metallic.
No—it was something beneath the metal. Alkaline. Sharp. A layered kind of scent, the kind that didn't belong in a sitting room or on tea leaves. Something added . Something built .
He knelt near the rug, leaned close to the damp patch where the tea had spilled. The odor was stronger there: earthy, bitter, threaded with something chemical. Stabilized. Bound.
Draco sat back on his heels.
This wasn’t poison in the usual sense. This was an agent . Constructed. Released. And whatever it was, it hadn’t been designed to kill through violence.
It had been designed to enter without resistance. To leave no trace. To make it all look like nothing at all.
Which, of course, was the point.
He stood again, slow and thoughtful. His gaze returned to Rosier’s open eyes—eyes that did not scream, did not plead, but stared through him like a woman who had opened a door she thought was safe.
Draco stepped back into the stillness of the room and let it speak to him.
Five victims. No spellfire. No struggle.
Just the eerie quiet of permission. And a teacup no one would ever finish.
The outer protections had held.
That was the first thing he confirmed when he stepped back through the entryway and reapproached the perimeter glyphs etched into the doorframe. The base wards—Ministry-standard containment protocols—were still humming, faint and dutiful. Not degraded. Not disturbed.
To most investigators, that would have been enough. Wards intact meant no forced entry. No external breach.
But Draco knew better.
He raised his wand and traced the boundary lines again, this time slower, skimming along the seams where spell-layer met foundation. The magic responded—obedient, familiar. It opened to him like a well-trained hound.
That was the problem.
He pivoted to the interior wall just left of the entry—where the personal ward signature should have pulsed strongest. This kind of enchantment wasn’t installed by the Ministry. It was custom: older, more intimate. Rosier’s own magic, bound into the wood grain, designed to resist all but those she had chosen.
Draco had seen this configuration before. He recognized the signature glyph—the looping curve of the 'Ouro Reseo', a blood-bound perimeter lock. He had studied it in warding theory at sixteen, then re-learned it after the war when half the homes he entered bore its remnants.
It wasn’t broken.
It was misaligned.
He narrowed his eyes.
The glyph had restructured itself—barely perceptible, just a fractional tilt in the resonance pattern, like a locket clasped out of rhythm. It had reset. Not cracked, not shattered.
Invited. Briefly. And then sealed again, as if nothing had passed through at all.
Draco exhaled slowly. A chill rose at the back of his neck, nothing magical—just instinct.
This wasn’t brute force. This was precision . Someone who knew not how to destroy magic, but how to disarm it from the inside out . A ghost in the wards.
He returned to the parlor, walked the perimeter again, slower this time. No breach in the floo. No trace of Apparition. No shimmer of masking spells or Disillusionment residue.
But the smell—that peculiar, bitter undercurrent—was stronger now. It clung to the hearthstone, soaked into the grain of the floorboard, like something that had never been meant to belong there but refused to leave. It wasn’t rot. It wasn’t potion. Not exactly.
It was a trace left behind not by magic, but in the absence of it.
His fingers twitched.
He turned again to Rosier’s body, still seated like she might rise if the light caught her right. He wondered, briefly, what she had felt in the last moment—whether it had been pain, or simply the recognition that something had been allowed in.
No ward failed.
But something passed through.
And it had known exactly how to ask permission.
He was still standing near the hearth, examining the arc of soot where the stone curved into the baseboard, when the footsteps came.
Measured. Unhurried. No wasted movement.
Draco didn’t turn. He didn’t have to. Only one man walked like the floor belonged to him and yet resented having to touch it.
“Malfoy.”
He looked up. Director Selwyn stood in the doorway, framed in morning fog and Ministry authority, his robes crisp, his expression cut from cold iron. The badge on his shoulder caught the low light and shimmered faintly—Director of Magical Crimes, Office of Internal Affairs. It was a title he wore like a weapon.
Draco straightened, but did not salute.
“Sir.”
Selwyn’s eyes swept the room with the indifference of a man used to murder. He didn’t look at the body. He looked at the absence of evidence—at the cold hearth, the polished floors, the spill that had already dried into memory.
“You’re getting outside support,” he said.
The words landed like a dropped file—flat, expected, unwelcome.
Draco’s mouth tightened. “Respectfully, I’m handling it.”
“Clearly.” Selwyn’s gaze didn’t flinch. “Five bodies. No trail. And no trace of spellwork.”
Draco stepped away from the hearth, spine locked, voice quiet. “This isn’t a case for theorists. We don’t need someone from Mysteries guessing at shadows and trying to reinvent the crime scene from a desk.”
“She won’t be at a desk.”
That was the first hint. Draco caught it. Selwyn didn’t say an Unspeakable. He said she.
Selwyn reached into his robes and withdrew a sealed file, thick with annotations. The parchment looked older than it should, as if it had been pulled from the bottom drawer of something people didn’t open unless they had no other choice.
He handed it over without ceremony.
“Brief her when she arrives. Department of Mysteries flagged a connection to a closed case in their archive. She’s cleared.”
Draco didn’t reach for it immediately. When he did, the wax seal broke beneath his thumb with a soft crack, like a bone snapping in a quiet room.
The name inside was printed in clean, impersonal script.
Granger, Hermione.
His jaw went still.
Selwyn adjusted the cuffs of his sleeve, already preparing to turn away.
“You’ll coordinate starting at nine.”
“That’s in—” Draco checked the wall clock. “Twenty-one minutes.”
“Then I suggest you start cleaning up.”
Selwyn didn’t wait for agreement. He didn’t need to. He was already walking away by the time Draco folded the file shut and slipped it into his coat. The sound of his boots on the tile echoed down the corridor like punctuation.
Draco stared at the door for a long moment after it closed.
Granger.
Of course it was.
He exhaled once through his nose—sharp, silent—and turned back toward the room. His eyes drifted again to the tea stain on the floor, the odd, bitter scent still clinging to the air.
Everything about this case had been quiet. Surgical. Controlled.
And now they were bringing her in.
He didn’t say it aloud, but the words were there, flat and undeniable.
Everything was about to get loud.
The room hadn’t changed, but something in it had shifted.
Draco moved back toward the hearth in measured silence, his boots making no sound on the rug that had once been expensive. Elspeth Rosier’s body remained exactly where he’d left it—folded delicately in death, as if she’d simply failed to finish her sentence. No signs of violence, no scars of magic. Just a stillness that felt like a hand pressed gently over a mouth.
He crouched again, closer this time. The tea stain had spread, bleeding into the weave of the rug in slow, spiraling threads. The color had darkened—too deep for tannin alone. It had settled into the floor like a warning written in past tense.
He narrowed his eyes.
There was something about it. Not the stain itself, but the shape it made. The way it curled, as if drawn by a hand that had once known ritual. Or grief.
It reminded him of something he couldn’t name.
Not a crime scene. Not a pattern.
Something old.
He stayed like that for a moment—still, crouched, silent. Letting the room speak, even if it had already said too much.
A soft tap echoed against the windowpane. Delicate. Precise.
He rose, stepped across the room, and unlatched the glass. The owl waiting outside was standard Ministry issue—identification charm glowing faintly beneath its feathers. It blinked once, held out its leg, and dropped the scroll into his hand without ceremony.
Draco closed the window before the cold could follow him in.
The parchment was embossed with the Department of Mysteries seal—old, raised, and charmed to vanish the moment it was read. No flourish. Just a single line of text in a handwriting that was too elegant to be official:
Hermione Granger. Department of Mysteries. Arrival: 09:00 sharp.
He stared at it. Not long. Just long enough.
The scroll ignited in his palm with a nonverbal flick of his wand, curling into ash that dissolved before it touched the rug. He didn’t watch it disappear.
Instead, he turned back once more to the room—its quiet corners, its bitter air, the body that hadn’t been surprised by death. Then he stepped out without a word, the echo of the door closing behind him far too soft for how loud the morning had become.