Sighing, she began collecting her dirty clothes. She'd also survived dinner with the Lestranges. Her Occlumency had worked. Bellatrix had seen only what she wanted her to see, and she hadn't cracked when—

Her hands seized, her shoes tumbling to the carpets. The memory of a scream rising up from below her feet, rattling her, cutting through her mind, slicing her insides. Ron was still there. She sank to her knees, breathing deeply until she managed to slam him back inside his book. When the shelves in her mind were finally still, Hermione crossed to her bathroom, turned on the taps, and sank into a warm bath until her muscles relaxed and her mind was empty.

~*~

The next morning, Hermione was in the library, burying herself in research to keep from fixating on the fact that Draco was not at home.

She'd tried his door when she woke up, but he hadn't answered. The elves had told her he was out, and so was Narcissa. Lucius still hadn't returned from the previous evening.

Hermione had spent half an hour panicking about their absence, and Draco's health, until her guilt found her. Then she'd trudged down to the library, reviewing all the reasons it would have been foolish to try to rescue Ron last night.

Fifteen minutes of meditation later, and she was ready. In a firm voice, she asked the catalog to pull down all the books on Scourers. After some debate, she'd decided to keep them in the library, or else she ran the risk of someone finding out what she was researching.

One of the Scourers, Jeremiah Jones, had written his entire journal in that code she'd found scattered in other journals, amidst torn-out pages. They appeared to be like a cross between runes or hieroglyphics, but the sheer variety of characters was like nothing Hermione had seen before. She'd set Jeremiah Jones's journal aside weeks ago, focusing on the other journals instead, as they at least contained entries in English. But she'd carefully combed through the last of them, and was still no wiser about the magic leading to the tattoos.

So she reopened Jones's journal and studied the strange shapes and lines. Her fingers traced the remnants of a chunk of torn-out pages at the center of its spine, feeling the loss in her bones. It was like trying to translate Russian to English using a dictionary written in Mandarin. If only she could crack the cipher, she could translate the fragments of code in the Scourers' journals. And something told her that this journal was key.

She was so deeply entrenched in her study of the strange runes that she didn't hear the library doors open. A throat cleared near her table and she jolted, nearly upending her inkpot over the centuries-old texts.

Draco stood several feet away, his hands behind his back. She jumped up from her chair to meet him, fingers curling into fists to keep from reaching out.

"How—how are you?"