The shop had been dimly lit, as always, threads of late-afternoon sunlight spilling through the high windows and casting delicate gold over bolts of deep green and velvet black.

Draco stood near the corner display, one gloved hand resting against the back of a chair as his sixteen-year-old-son, Scorpius, half-listened to Madam Malkin’s gentle prattle about growth spurts and sleeve length. He wasn’t paying attention either, not really—his mind was elsewhere. Always elsewhere, these days.

He wasn’t sure when it happened.

A pull, first. Not quite a sound. Not quite a scent. Just—pressure. Atmospheric. Insubstantial and immediate.

His fingers stiffened slightly on the carved wood beneath them. His eyes lifted before he understood why. And then—

Her.

No. You.

It was not attraction. It was not want in any conventional sense. That would have been easy—crude and fleeting and dismissible. This was something deeper, older. Something that uncoiled from the marrow outwards.

Draco inhaled—too sharply. His jaw tightened.

What in Merlin’s—?

You stood at the front counter, oblivious. Laughing softly at something one of Madam Malkin’s workers said as she adjusted the fall of fabric over your arm. It was nothing. You were no one. A stranger.

And yet the floor had shifted beneath his polished boots.

There was heat licking beneath his skin, not the kind that flushed the face or made the ears burn. No. This was a slow, internal combustion—like starlight pushed behind the ribcage. Ancient, impossible heat, and a feeling of home so violent it made him feel unsteady.

Veela.

The word rose unbidden, bile-bitten and unwanted.

He had always dismissed it as diluted myth, family nonsense—some dusty fragment of a bloodline warped by too much aristocratic self-flattery. He had never burned. Never drawn crowds with unnatural allure. Never cast that strange, volatile glamour of the old-world enchantresses his grandmother used to mutter about.

But now—

Draco’s breath hitched as his gaze lingered on your profile. A single thread of your hair caught the light, and his stomach clenched as if he’d been cursed.

She’s nothing to you, he told himself. She’s barely an adult. You don’t even know her name.

He took a step back. The pain was instant. He froze. His spine locked. The air felt thin.

What the fuck is this?

His eyes dropped to his own hand, the left one, where the old wedding ring once was, which still hung hidden beneath his shirt on a fine chain. He could feel it, hot suddenly against his chest like metal fresh from a forge.

Astoria.

Draco’s throat tightened.

I am not ready for this.

You turned slightly. Just your eyes. Met his. His heart stopped. Full stop.

There it was. Recognition—not of the mind, but of something else. Something shared. Something carved in blood, written in bone.

Every Veela has a Mate.

He’d thought it fairy tale drivel. Something meant to soften a predatory truth. But this—this was not a soft thing. It felt like fire stitched through with longing.

Draco swayed where he stood, then straightened. His expression remained unreadable, jaw like stone, shoulders coiled as though for a duel.

But inside, he was a man struck.

His voice, when it came, was gravel-thick and near silent. “…No,” he whispered.

But the lie cracked on his tongue.

And then—he was moving. Past Scorpius. Past the robes. Toward you, drawn as if by wandpoint. His hand reached out—not quite his own—and brushed the back of yours where it rested lightly on the counter.

The moment he touched you, the heat subsided—barely.

Not gone. But anchored.

Draco’s breath left him all at once.

You looked up at him.

He could not look away. Gods help him. He was undone.