When she woke up they were in an uninhabited dirty wooden house with nailed windows. She laid on the floor with her head on Harry's legs. He was taking care of the wound in her arm as well as of another one in her face that she was not aware of yet.

“Thank you.” She whispered.

“Shhhhhhh.”

Harry signaled her to be quiet. Her head and arms were in pain. Her wounds were still bleeding a lot, but Harry cast a counter-spell that temporarily closed the cut.

“I didn’t do anything; the Muggle man attacked me. I didn’t even have my wand with me.” Flora tried to explain herself.

He looked at her:

“Stay calm, I believe you. Later on, you can tell me what happened exactly, but, for now, you need to rest.”

“I can’t! Where is Felipe?”

“Stay calm. Draco and Hermione were with me to calm down people and take care of your family.”

“How did you know what was going on?”

For a moment she thought that she might be getting tracked.

“You will not settle down if I don’t tell you, right?”

Flora shook her head slightly. Harry explained:

“Draco heard a talk in the ministry halls; they were saying that Chris Burbage had commented that he would have the revenge he always wanted. Draco came to me at once, he knew that Chris was watching you, waiting to attack you in case you were at any fault. His mother, who was the teacher of Muggle Studies, was coldly tortured and killed by Voldemort in the dining room of Draco’s house. Damn! I can’t close this cut!” Harry got a little disappointed and furious with himself. “It seems like a spell I casted on Draco in the sixth year of school ... Snape invented it and knew how to cure it, but I think the correct counter-spell died with him. Maybe at St. Mungo's they know what to do, but I can’t take you there. Not yet. I'm waiting for Hermione to send a message saying that everything is under control. If we go back before that, we won’t have any chance.”

“Did you cast this spell on Draco? Was it an accident?” Flora asked carefully.

“No, it wasn’t. I told you: Draco and I were not friends in school days, quite the contrary. Since Voldemort had already returned and was arranging things to take power again, the ministry had finally recognized that he was back.
Before school started I saw Draco and his mother in Diagon Alley acting suspiciously. Lucius was in prison and they blamed me for that (Draco couldn’t see that the error lies in who commits the crime; if his father was in prison it was because he was a Death Eater).” Harry took a deep breath and shook his head sideways. “Definitely Draco and I were never best friends. We started that year with him breaking my nose...” Harry smiled. “I spent that year with an eye on him. I suspected him, I thought that he was a Death Eater. There were several murder attempts at school and I believed he was the criminal.
And he was. One day, I cornered him in the bathroom and tried to force him to tell the truth. That's when we fought. I had no idea of what the spell did. I was a little scared, but Snape came and saved him. Later I learned that Voldemort had threatened him with death in case he didn’t kill Dumbledore, who was the only wizard Voldemort ever feared. I only learned about that after Snape’s death, because he asked me to gather his memories just before it happened. So I finally understood Draco.”

Harry stopped talking, to try and recast the spell that would stop the blood that ran again from her arm.

“Wow! And how come Draco and you ended up working together after so much hostility?”

Harry snorted. She seemed to talk as if nothing was happening.

“After all was finished, I knew that Draco was not so bad. Then, when I became head of the department, I invited him to work with me because his knowledge of black magic would be very useful. He’s always thought that I did so to keep him under my eyes, and that was not entirely wrong. But after all these years, we now can get along reasonably well. We aren’t friends, but we respect each other enough. And he is becoming a better man every day.”

“I see.”

He caressed her face. The day was getting dark, so he turned on the light with his wand. He asked her:

“Why did you think I could kill you?”

“I'm sure you’d do the right thing. I'm afraid one day I can’t stop myself ... I must admit that when I found myself under attack I thought of casting a few death curses. I was cornered ... And I knew exactly how to do them.”

“Why didn’t you do it?” Harry asked curiously.

“Because I’d never kill anyone! What a ridiculous question!” Flora could not believe Harry had asked that.

“Me either.” He said looking in her eyes deeply.

“But you killed my father... I know you would do the right thing. You killed him and would kill me too if I become like him.”

Harry got angry:

“No, I didn’t kill him. His curse hit my disarming spell and rebounded back on him. What I did was to make him vulnerable to it. However, this is a story I want to leave for another day ... You should know I’d never kill you.” Harry sighed and said, his heart pounding: “I love you. It hurts, you know?”

Flora swallowed hard before answering:

“I love you too… And it hurts me too.”

They were silent, listening to the echo of what they had just said. She huddled over in his lap. The weather got cooler, so he lit a flame to warm them. Even so, Flora began to shiver. She had lost too much blood and was having difficulties in keeping her body warm. He unbuttoned his shirt to better warm her with the warmth of his own body. Every ten minutes he needed to recast the healing magic.

“What have you done to your hair?” Harry broke the silence to distract his mind from the touch and feel of her skin against his.

“Oh, I’ve instituted myself a Muggle’s Day. In it I went to the hairdresser; then I had my hair painted, cut, and brushed. Now I'm blonde.” She smiled, but felt uneasy about being in such close contact with him, especially just after they had declared their love for each other. It was hard to pretend that it was all natural and to keep talking as if her face was not pressed against
Harry's naked chest, feeling his heart pounding erratically.

“You’re so beautiful.” He said, a bit uncertainly, wondering if he should say or not, chewing his own lips.

She smiled. She brushed his hair from his forehead, showing the lightning-shaped scar. Then, she said:

“Neither our looks nor our ancestry matter. What matters is who we are. And you're here. You’ve saved me.”

She took off his glasses. She brought her face closer to his, feeling his hot breath penetrating her soul. Green and blue eyes again indulged in a brief kiss. Brief because Flora was in pain and her nose was becoming blue with the cold.
Harry realized it and brought her closer to his body. She wanted to touch him, and almost did with her hand opened close to his chest. However, she ended up shrinking the tips of her fingers and pushed him away instead. Her face contorted in pain; not from the physical pain she felt when they kissed, but rather from the psychic pain of wanting and not wanting something she was not meant to do. She got out from his lap and sat in front of him. Her teeth started to clatter against each other:

“I'm cold.” She said.

He shook his head sideways, with a half smile on his face:

“Come back here. You’re gonna freeze to death. There’s a snow storm on its way.”

She pressed her nose against his chest to warm herself up. He gently held her head and she fell asleep. She was not trembling any more.

The dawn broke. Harry had dozed off. A noise awoke him up. Hermione was standing in front of him. Flora was snuggled up to his bare chest, he was embracing her, and both were under his cloak.

“She is still bleeding; I don’t know how to stop it. I think it was sectumsempra.”

He showed the cut on Flora’s arm. Hermione examined it:

“You'd better take her to St. Mungo’s.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes, sorry, I forgot to tell you. I’ll explain it all later.”

Hermione was bewildered with the picture. She did not want to misjudge her friends. She helped Harry to button his shirt and stand up. He picked Flora still unconscious, and they disapparated to the St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

As soon as they found someone to look after her, Hermione said:

“The maniac that attacked Flora is in jail. Afterwards he also attacked a Muggle woman, who is now dead. Flora was very lucky since she was unarmed. He detailed the chase, the attack and his intentions in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement before they erased his memory. Now everyone understands that she was just defending herself. The ministry found out that Chris Burbage had paid some men to hurt her in Hogsmeade and also to follow her everywhere. He too has been arrested.”

“And her family?”

“They’re with Draco and Ab in the Hog's Head. They had to take the boys from school, since the news that their mother had attacked a Muggle somehow got there, although nobody knows how, and they were being persecuted. But nothing bad happened to anyone. Felipe came to consciousness after a few hours.”

“Good…” Harry replied a bit absent-mindedly. Then he softly muttered
“Hermione?”

“Yes.”

“Please don’t tell Ginny about anything you saw. She wouldn’t understand. Flora would freeze to death if...”

“You needn’t explain anything to me, Harry. I won’t tell her a thing.”

“Thank you.”