Enough

Pansy Parkinson will never be beautiful.

She is rich enough, pureblooded enough for Draco Malfoy to want to marry her. Even though she knows he will close his eyes in the dark and pretend she is fairer of face, pretend she has the angelic features of the truly beautiful—like his—she will be his wife without complaint. Her body is as close to perfection as she can possibly attain, and that will have to be enough for him in the moments they will fumble in the bed, nothing but the darkness between them.

Pansy once heard her mother tell her father she hoped Pansy and Draco's children would take after the Malfoys or the Blacks. "At least," her father joked, "we can hope they have Draco's nose." They had not known she was there, pressed against the library door, and they did not hear her running away to weep in private. She found afterwards, as she'd splashed water on her face and stared in her gilded mirror, that she was not beautiful when she cried, eyes reddened and swollen, face splotchy. Tears did not become her, it appeared.

Her parents are having a party downstairs and she waits before joining them. She stands in front of the full-length mirror in her elegantly appointed suite, running her hands down her perfect yellow silk dress and hating it for being more beautiful than she is. Diamonds encircle her neck and dangle from her ears, but her ring finger remains bare, waiting for Draco's ring.

When he comes in, she does not turn or speak a word. He comes behind her, hands on her nipped and perfect waist, and pulls her back against his tall, muscled frame. She can feel that he is hard and firm, and she trembles and shakes in his arms, head going back to rest against his chest. He drops his head to kiss her neck, and he leaves bites that redden her skin. She watches them in the mirror and sees how wrong it is, that they are together, that his rough and calloused hands are moving over her body with violent urgency.

Now he is pressing a cold, sharp knife at her back, tearing at the laces of her dress. He's telling her things—depraved, wonderful things—and she is panting like a bitch in heat, which is what he calls her, which is how he makes her feel. She knows she will be in trouble when she shows up late for the party, wearing a different dress, as this one will be utterly destroyed when he is finished. He says he likes to destroy her fine things, likes to see her expensive dresses in tatters at his feet.

Her smile shines with feral delight and she pushes back into him, eager and aroused. His goatee scratches at her insistently, and she likes that there will be thin little whippet lashes on her fair skin to attest to his possession.

A husky, masculine laugh answers her movement. He raises his head to meet her eyes in the mirror with his mean, ice-cold blue stare. He starts to pull the dress away from her, and she thinks he will probably take her standing up, right here, with her parents and the crème-de-la-crème of Wizarding society waltzing in the ballroom below.

She can almost hear the music from the band her parents hired, lilting up and lending a surreal symphonic accompaniment to their mad, frantic dance. Pansy imagines Draco standing on the side of the ballroom floor, tapping his foot impatiently and looking skyward as he waits for her.

He thinks he owns her, Draco, and he treats her as casually as he does anything else he possesses. With indifference and the surety that she will be there when he wants her. She will be, because it is what has always been expected of her. When she joins Draco tonight, places her hand in his, there will be the secret knowledge in her eyes of what she has done upstairs, what she has before and what she will do again with the murderer in her bedroom. This secret will sparkle in her eyes and make her smile in genuine delight; this secret will make her beautiful.

Draco Malfoy might be the last man she ever sleeps with, but he will never be her first. That she gave to someone else, someone utterly inappropriate for her to even know, much less….A man with a rough accent and a way of making her legs to turn to jelly when he stares at her, all the lust in the world written plainly on his hawk-like face, an expression she will never see from the man she will marry.

Draco thinks he can have her whenever he wants her but he can't.

But he can.

To the executioner, Walden Macnair, she is more than just enough.