Draco learned Daphne Greengrass's secret the way he learned most things: by accident, and a little too late to be graceful about it.
It was a Tuesday, and he was returning from the library after hours, cutting through the quieter corridors the way he always did, when he heard her voice. It was not the voice he knew. The Daphne Greengrass who had said "No, thank you" with that cool, dismissive smile was gone. This voice was low, and fierce, and shaking at the edges.
Draco stopped. He pressed himself into the shadow of a doorway, as he had done outside Potter's corridor months ago, and he listened.
"There has to be something," Daphne was saying. "A healer. A potion. A treatment. Anything. You can't simply stand there and tell me there's nothing, because I will not accept that, do you understand me? She's my sister."
Draco risked a look. Daphne stood a few feet down the corridor, and she was not alone. Facing her was an older man in fine grey robes, a man with the same fair colouring, and he wore the particular exhaustion of a person who had been having this argument for a long time.
"Daphne." The man's voice was tired. "We have spent the Greengrass fortune twice over. St Mungo's has nothing left to offer. There is no cure. There is only managing it, and hoping, and buying her whatever time the curse allows."
"The curse," Daphne said, and her voice cracked on the word, "is killing her a little more every day. And you want me to hope?"
"I want you to stop torturing yourself over something none of us can change."
Daphne said something then that Draco did not catch, something raw and broken, and she turned away, and the man put a hand on her shoulder, and she shook it off, and for one unguarded second Draco saw her face.
It was the same face that had dismissed him in the common room, cool and composed. And it was not the same face at all.
Draco did not announce himself. He slipped back the way he'd come, and he told himself it was none of his business, and he knew it was a lie.
Because the knowledge had settled into him like a splinter, and he couldn't pull it out.
A sister. Daphne Greengrass had a younger sister, and the sister was dying, slowly, of a blood curse, and the Greengrass fortune, which was very nearly as old and very nearly as deep as the Malfoy fortune, had failed to save her.
Here, then, was the thing that made Daphne Greengrass's spine so straight, her eyes so cool, her refusal so final. She wasn't unimpressed by the world. She was armoured against it, because the world had already done its worst, and the one thing she wanted, the only thing that mattered, was the thing no one could give her.
It was, Draco understood with a cold little shock, the same armour he wore.
And the sister. The sister was younger than Daphne, which meant younger than Draco, and the thought of it sat wrong in his chest. A girl his own age, standing in a corridor at midnight, fierce and broken over a child's slow dying. He had spent the whole year pricing everyone he met, and he found, to his discomfort, that he could not make himself think of the sister as a number, as a debt, as anything but a girl who was running out of time.
He did not know what to do with that. He did not know what to do with any of it.
He saw her the next day, across the common room, and he looked at her for a moment too long, and she looked up and caught him.
Something passed between them then. Not a bargain. Not a price. Just a look, held a beat too long, and in it Draco knew she knew he had seen something, and she knew he had not told anyone, and she knew he would not.
She held his gaze, cool and level, and then she went back to her book.
And Draco understood, with a certainty he could not have explained, that something had shifted between them, and that he had not priced it, and that he did not want to.
That night, alone, he asked the Ledger about the curse.
It was a stupid thing to do, and he knew it was stupid, and he did it anyway. Not to help her. He told himself that, firmly. He did it because the question itched, because here was a problem his fortune could not solve, and he needed to see it fail with his own eyes, to believe it.
Can you cure a blood curse? he asked.
The copperplate was silent for a long moment. Then, in letters that seemed somehow colder than usual:
NOT FOR SALE.
He tried again, differently. Can you buy time for someone under a blood curse?
NOT FOR SALE.
He sat very still in the dark, with the green light moving on the ceiling, and he understood that this was the same wall, the same door, the same refusal he'd run into a dozen times before. Courage. Loyalty. Charm. Potter's secret. And now this.
But it was different, this time. It was not abstract. It was not a question about a rival or a strategy or a puzzle. It was a girl in a corridor, fierce and broken, and a sister she was going to lose, and a fortune that had failed, and for the first time the "not for sale" felt less like a wall and more like a fact, like gravity, like the one thing in the world that money genuinely could not touch.
The Malfoys had always believed gold could fix anything. It was the family's oldest article of faith, older than the house, older than the name.
Draco sat in the dark, holding the first problem his gold couldn't touch, and found he had no idea at all what to do with it.