Power Plays Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Harry cringed as the front doors to Greengrass Manor rattled behind him. Daphne was positively fuming at the news that her father and Nerys had somehow escaped Auror custody. When he had told her back at the Ministry, her expression had gone stark and cold, but she hadn’t expressed any of her rage. Foolishly, Harry assumed that she was just taking the news better than he would have, but that clearly wasn’t the case. 

The two of them had immediately returned to Greengrass Manor to update the wards, and Daphne had been frosty throughout the lengthy process that took them over the rolling hills and through the patches of vegetation that surrounded the manor as far as his eyes could see. The buried ward stones had to be dug up and then pressed against the new ring on Daphne’s pinky to properly update them. When they finished, Daphne had quickly grabbed his arm and apparated them to the front door of her manor. They’d barely made it through the doors when she let her fiery anger finally show itself.

Daphne whipped out her wand violently and sharply jerked left and right in broad sweeps. The busts of previous family members sitting atop intricately-carved pedestals on either side of the entry hall were sent careening towards the opposite wall. They exploded in thousands of shards of marble and plaster, spilling all over the floor. Once every single one was destroyed, Daphne gave a deft twirl of her wand, and all of the busts started to magically repair themselves and return to their pedestals.

When Daphne looked ready to blow them to bits again, Harry put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Daphne, it’s going to be—” he began to speak, but Daphne’s look of malevolent fury shut him up.

“Let’s go get this over with,” she grumbled. “You can get your documents and be on your way.”

“Hang on,” Harry called after her as she started to walk away from him. He could see just how angry Daphne was, and it didn’t sit right with him to just leave it like this. “We need to talk first.”

“What’s there to talk about?” Daphne replied evenly as she continued to walk towards the back of the manor, forcing Harry to chase after her. “I’m the head of my family and I’ll get you the documents you want. Everything worked out.”

“I want to talk about you,” Harry explained as he caught up to her. “You don’t seem to be taking this well.”

“I think I’m remarkably calm given the circumstances.”

Relatively speaking, perhaps. “Even so,” he replied, not wanting to start a fight over a definition of calmness, “you seem really upset.”

“How would you know?” Daphne snapped. “You’ve known me for what, a few days now? Believe me, you haven’t seen me when I’m really upset.”

“I’m not trying to fight with you, Daphne,” Harry said as compassionately as he could. He reached out for her hand, but she yanked it away from him. “This can’t be easy for you, and I want to help.”

“Oh, you want to help,” Daphne chuckled darkly. “Of course you do.”

Harry was taken aback by her tone. “I don’t know what I’ve done to make you treat me like this—”

Daphne rounded on him then, staring at him with unbridled fury. “I’ll tell you what you’ve done, Potter,” she jabbed her finger against his chest. “First, I meet you, and you’re less of a piece of shit than I thought. Hell, I even thought that this whole ‘Saint Potter’ routine might be genuine. Then, we talk, and I find out that you’ve actually got a brain in that thick skull of yours. I opened up to you, and I started to think that maybe there might be something real between us.”

“There is,” Harry said. He knew there was; since the night he spent at Greengrass Manor, he couldn’t get Daphne off of his mind. She was brilliant, cunning, and brave. He liked her and she liked him.

“And yet, you fucked Bones,” Daphne shouted accusingly at him. “And she had the gall to rub it in my face!”

Countless excuses came to mind: they weren’t exclusive yet, Susan and him had a history, it was a spur of the moment thing; Harry knew that none of them would offer Daphne any relief. It wasn’t as though Harry hadn’t laid the exact same accusation against himself in his mind. One night stands with girls like Pavarti were one thing, but Daphne was special. 

“I don’t care if you fuck girls that don’t matter that much to you,” Daphne continued to shout. “But I do care if you’re fucking someone you had feelings for! I’m not going to share your heart with anyone else; it’s all or nothing with me! And that’s why you’re so damn pathetic, just like all of the pure-blood tossers I’ve dealt with all my life!”

Regret bubbled up in Harry’s gut. Regret for not being clearer with Daphne from the start, regret for sleeping with Susan. It felt like his heart was caught in Daphne’s furious grip.

“Everything’s gone to shit,” Daphne spat. “How am I going to explain to my mum and sister that dad is loose in Britain helping Death Eaters? Who knows what he’ll do to us over this? I’ll be looking over my shoulder until he’s found and captured again—not that I trust your pathetic Auror Department to keep him contained for long—and now I have my family’s safety to worry about too. It’s fucking ridiculous!”

Daphne whipped around and fired off a jet of flames down the corridor. The walls, floor, and ceiling darkened as the flames licked at them, but none of them caught ablaze. When Daphne cancelled the spell, the surfaces were left with dark scorch marks. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry murmured.

“Oh great, you’re sorry, that’s going to fix—”

“I care about you, Daphne,” Harry admitted. He didn’t want to leave her in the dark about anything anymore. Daphne was a politician through and through; she was always looking for ulterior motives. She could see through calculated ploys, and she knew how to concoct her own when she needed to. “And I’m sorry that I slept with Susan. I didn’t . . . look, I never expected to fall for you like this. At first, I thought we were just going to be a one-time thing, but I’m falling for you, just like you are for me.”

A look crossed Daphne’s face, but Harry couldn’t quite decipher it. She almost seemed surprised or happy, but the look faded from her face as she blocked off any emotions from coming to the fore. She just stared at him with that neutral mask of mild annoyance.

“I’m not going to leave you to deal with this mess on your own,” he said sincerely. “I’ll keep your family safe and stop your dad before he can do anything bad to you. I want to be by your side, Daphne; I want to give us a real shot.”

Harry couldn’t tell if Daphne wanted to curse him or kiss him. He supposed that was part of what made her so intriguing to him. 

Harry hadn’t been in a stable, long-term relationship since he’d been with Ginny back in his sixth year. Well, technically he was with Tonks, but their relationship wasn’t quite a romantic one. They slept with each other and comforted each other when they needed to, but Harry knew that they’d never enter into anything serious. Other than Tonks, all he’d had was a series of flings and one night stands.

Maybe it was time to change that.

Daphne’s eyes were searching his face for any sign of deceit, but there was none. “You’ll end things with Bones?” She asked.

“There was nothing there to begin with,” Harry answered. “There had been a chance for something more once, but nothing came of it. I promise you that I’ll talk to her and tell her that we’re through for good.”

“Alright,” Daphne said with a tentative nod. The anger seemed to fade from her posture as she cooled off a bit. “Well, let’s go get the documents from my father’s . . . my office.”

They’d barely taken two steps before Daphne rounded on Harry again and shoved him back against a wall. Her soft lips captured his in a searing kiss.

“I swear, if I find out that you’re having me on,” she warned him with a frown.

Harry held his hands up and offered her a light smile. “I promise that I’ll be yours alone, Daphne.”

“Good.”

They continued walking towards the back of the manor. Daphne brought him to that same staircase that he had carried up her that night they had been together. Rather than reach the top level, they stopped on the floor below and started down the orderly corridors until they reached a set of double wooden doors. They were intricately carved with vines and ivy on the front, and they had a small indent where the doors met that the Greengrass family signet ring could be pressed against. Daphne adjusted the ring on her pinky and pressed it against the indent.

A flowery scent wafted out of the office as the doors swung open. The room looked like a garden. Thick vines and flowering plants grew out hundreds of cracks in the walls, giving the room an interesting aesthetic. Harry had expected the room to be warm so that it could accommodate the plants, but it was surprisingly cool inside. There was a large wooden desk in the centre of the room with a pair of high-backed chairs on either side of it. Several short cabinets rested up against the back wall right beneath a series of windows that overlooked the gardens below. 

Daphne was the first one to walk inside, but she froze once she was in there. Her hand trailed along a red petal of a flower Harry didn’t recognise. She almost seemed sad to be in here, but Harry couldn’t quite say why.

“Are—”

“I’m fine,” Daphne interrupted quickly. She gave him an apologetic glance. “Really, I am. I just never expected this to be mine so soon. I used to spend all day in here when my grandparents were alive—they died when I was nine. I learnt everything I could about every plant in here, and I’d make them quiz me on them just so that I could prove how smart I was.” Daphne laughed, but Harry spotted the unshed tear in her eye before she wiped it away. “Sorry. It’s been an emotional day.”

“You don’t have to apologise to me over that,” Harry said as he came up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her midsection and hugged her tightly. “You don’t have to hide your emotions from me.”

“Force of habit,” Daphne replied with a weak smile. “Come on; let’s get your documents.”

Harry let her go, and Daphne walked behind the desk and pulled out her wand. “They ought to be . . .” Daphne murmured to herself as her eyes scanned the small cabinets. Eventually, they settled on the second from the right. With a flick of her wand, the cabinet opened, revealing a large pile of neatly-stacked, bound scrolls. Another flick sent a large number of them flying out of the cabinet. The remaining scrolls rearranged themselves automatically to reform their neat stack before the cabinet door closed on them.

“This should be everything,” Daphne explained, gesturing to the twenty or so scrolls on her desk. 

The scrolls were all tightly bound with verdant ribbon. The parchments were all uniform with an embossed ‘G’ on them beside the bow, just like Daphne’s signet ring. However, a few of them had other embossed letters on the other side of the bow. There was a single ‘M’, a few ‘O’s, and even more ‘R’s. 

Harry recognised them all. While the letters represented the family name, the real clue to differentiate between the families was in the outline around the letters. For example, the box-like lines that formed around the Greengrass ‘G’ looked like ivy with flowers sprouting out of them. These distinctions made it easy for Harry to identify the names, which he was familiar with due to his experience dealing with those families in the Auror Department. There were the Malfoys, the Orpingtons, and the Rowles.

The Malfoys had been clean since the war—Harry had made sure himself. The Orpingtons were obviously trouble given Nerys and Rhys’s involvements in this entire situation. The Rowles, however, were more surprising. When he and Susan had initially been investigating this case, they had examined a number of dark-aligned, pure-blood families to see if they had any connections to Bellatrix. The Rowles had been on their list of suspects, but they hadn’t managed to investigate them before they caught Cyrus and Nerys. Harry hadn’t thought to investigate any of the remaining families after he had those two in custody.

There were six scrolls bound with both the Greengrass and Rowle imprint on them, so Harry grabbed the first one and undid the fine ribbon on it. Neatly-written text covered the parchment from edge to edge, top to bottom. 

“It’s a receipt,” Harry frowned. There was an extensive detailing of various herbs and potion ingredients that were sold to Euphemia Rowle. He knew the woman; she was the widow of Thorfinn Rowle, a notorious Death Eater who died at the Battle of Hogwarts. She was a part of the dark-aligned faction of the Wizengamot, supporting measures that lessened the restrictions on dark artefacts and promoted leniency towards imprisoned Death Eaters. “Your father was selling potion ingredients at a discounted rate to something called the Rainfall House, and he had a schedule where he’d make ‘donations’ to it.”

“That’s the Rowle family’s charitable organisation. Donating to it rather than to the family is a way to get around some of the financial reporting requirements to the Ministry,” Daphne explained easily. “Private deals between Wizengamot families normally have to be carefully outlined, delivered to the Ministry, and reviewed before they can be officially approved, but donating to a charitable organisation like this removes a lot of the requirements. All you need to do is outline what you’re giving and how much of it and nothing else.”

Harry scanned down the document further. “He gave more back than the profits he gained from the potion ingredients.”

Daphne gestured down to the other scrolls of parchment. “Maybe one of them can explain it better. I wasn’t a part of any of these dealings.”

The next three were much of the same: bland record-keeping of transactions over the last several years. However, what was interesting was that these transactions only began in September 1998, just a few months after the Battle of Hogwarts. What was it that sparked this sudden burst of generosity?

The next scroll answered that question. Upon unfurling the parchment, Harry immediately recognised that this was a letter and not a ledger. It was written from Euphemia Rowle directly to Cyrus Greengrass.

Lord Cyrus Greengrass,

Once again, I must assure you that I have everything well in hand. The donations are not being ‘frivolously spent’ as you suggested; they have been spent wisely, and I will continue to spend them wisely. I certainly do not need to remind you as to just how significant these funds are to achieving our mutual goals, so I would ask that you place a modicum of trust in me that I will act in our mutual interests.

Onto more pressing matters; Europe is a dead end. My employees have not been able to find what we have been looking for there. I will proceed with the Americas next, as we previously agreed, and begin preparations for Oceania should it come to that.

Despite my best efforts, our new Minister remains resistant to my efforts to fund the new magical prison that you and I previously discussed. With the Dementors all gone, I believed he would be more receptive to this proposition, but he fears that it would be too costly a measure to garner broader public support. I will have a few of my allies within the Wizengamot press the matter with him, and I would be most grateful if you could do the same.

I must request that you send some additional potion ingredients this month. With this recent growth spurt, the girl’s magic is already starting to develop tremendously. I require Flobberworm Mucus and Valerian for Sleeping Draughts to calm the girl at night and Hiccoughing Solution, as she tends to get the hiccoughs during her bouts of accidental magic. Additionally, I require some ground Unicorn Horn and Stewed Mandrake to prepare an Oculus Potion—somehow, the girl managed to blind my poor Augurey when she was upset that it was crying, and none of my spells have had any luck in resolving the effects.

Finally, I shall be returning to England next week, so our next meeting can take place in the usual spot rather than through the post.

I look forward to speaking to you further,

Lady Euphemia Rowle

This was it! Daphne must have seen his eyes light up as he read the letter because she had hurried to his side and started reading over her shoulder.

“Euphemia Rowle must have been the third person in the meeting at the White Wyvern,” Harry grinned. Finally, everything was becoming clearer! Euphemia Rowle must be the one coordinating with other dark families to keep the Wizengamot in chaos and helping Bellatrix in secret! 

The clue was right there: Euphemia owned an Augurey! The person her ‘employees’ were looking for could have been Bellatrix since the letter was dated from last year. The funding she was receiving could have been used to organise the Death Eaters again—she may have even been the one behind the attack on Harry and Susan at the Ministry when they visited Amos. The only missing piece was who this unnamed girl was, but it didn’t seem particularly connected to his investigation so he just left it in the back of his mind for now.

“I need to get this back to the Ministry now,” Harry told Daphne. Feeling a burst of jubilation, he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her in for a deep kiss. She kissed him back with just as much passion.

Daphne had an amused smirk on her lips as they pulled back. “I presume you’re going to raid Rowle Manor then?”

That would be Harry’s choice, but it was ultimately up to Amelia. “I hope so,” Harry answered.

“Good,” Daphne said. “I hope so too.” Her face turned dark for a moment. “I know that we already spoke about what you’d do to Bellatrix when you see her . . .”

Indeed, Harry had agreed to kill her in order to free Daphne’s best friend, Tracey Davis, from the curse Bellatrix had placed on her. Though it had weighed on his mind heavily at the time, he had come to see her reasoning that it was a necessity. Bellatrix wouldn’t turn her life around, even if Harry tried to help her. Maybe Dumbledore would have tried regardless, and maybe Harry would have tried too if this had all happened at the end of the war, but Harry was different now. The lessons he’d learnt in his five years at the Ministry had taught him that it was sometimes necessary to make difficult choices to get the best results. 

“I haven’t changed my mind on the matter; I’ll stay true to my word,” Harry assured her.

Daphne nodded, but she still had an anxious look on her face. “I trust you too, but there’s something else.”

“Another person you want me to kill?” Harry joked lightly, trying to help reduce her anxiety, but his words seemed to have the opposite effect.

“My father,” Daphne blurted out. “If you see him, please kill him. If the Death Eaters helped him escape a cell once, they can do it again, and I don’t want my mother or sister to have to fear for their lives. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt them, maybe he’d try to keep them safe or, Merlin forbid, recruit them to his side, but I just can’t take that chance.”

“Daphne,” Harry said sympathetically. “He’s still your father . . .”

“I know,” Daphne gulped. “And I know what I’m asking of you, but I’m asking because of my family. Surely you can understand that, can’t you?”

He could, but it seemed extreme. They didn’t even know if Cyrus was a threat to his family or not; it was all speculation on Daphne’s part.

“I can’t promise you that,” Harry told her carefully, trying to sound as sincere as possible. “I’d only kill him if he was putting my or other people’s lives in direct danger.”

Daphne deflated a bit at his words but didn’t fight any further.

“Look,” Harry said as he pulled Daphne into a hug. Her arms hesitated for a moment before they wrapped around his back. “I’ll do whatever I can to keep you and your family safe, but I won’t kill everyone you want dead. I think we’ve both had a long, stressful day. Take some time to yourself to relax; I’ll come by sometime once I figure out whatever Amelia’s plan is and we can talk more then, okay?”

“Okay,” Daphne replied quietly.