THE EMPRESS.

Additional tags: fem!read; no use of Y/N; power imbalance; possessive behavior; obsessive behavior; dubious content; dead dove: do not eat; claustrophobia/forced proximity; emotional manipulation; slow burn; +18; MDNI

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The wine had tasted slightly bitter at the bottom of the cup.

Baelor noticed it too late. By the time the first wave of pain hit, the small council session had already dissolved into noise. He remembered the edge of the table cutting into his palm as he tried to stay upright, the scrape of chairs, someone shouting for the maesters. Then the world narrowed to fire under his ribs and a darkness that kept pulling him under.

When he surfaced properly, it was night and the only person in the chamber was you.

He was soaked in sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs, every breath a careful negotiation with the pain that still lived in his gut and blood. The maesters had done what they could. The worst of the poison had been purged. What remained was weakness, spasms that came without warning, and a residual fever that made the edges of the room soft.

He turned his head on the pillow and found you sitting in the chair beside the bed, hands folded, face pale in the candlelight. A lady-in-waiting. Quiet. Useful. Already too often in his thoughts before this night.

“Everyone else,” he said, voice scraped raw, “gets out.”

You started to rise, to call for a servant.

“Not you.” The order landed harder than his body could currently enforce. “You stay.”

Something in his eyes made the protest die in your throat. You sat back down.

The days that followed were measured in pain and proximity.

Baelor refused almost every attendant the maesters tried to assign. He would accept medicine, water, the emptying of basins, the changing of cloths — but only if you were the one handling it or standing close enough to watch. When the spasms hit he locked his jaw and stared at the canopy until they passed, then reached for your wrist as if the contact itself were a tether.

“Look at me,” he would say when the fever rose. “Not the door. Me.”

You looked.

The court noticed. Of course it did. A Hand of the King did not spend a week and more alone with one lady-in-waiting without talk. Messages came requesting your presence elsewhere — from other ladies, from a cousin who had always been kind to you. Baelor read none of them. He simply had the messages burned and told the servants that you were not to be disturbed in your duties to him.

One afternoon a young knight who had once spoken to you with interest at a feast tried to gain entry, claiming a message from your family. Baelor, still too weak to stand unaided, still ordered him turned away with language cold enough to freeze the corridor. Later, when the fever dipped, he had the man’s name written down.

“You will not see him again,” he said. It was not a request.

You felt the walls of the Tower of the Hand grow thicker around you. The visits that might have given you air or counsel simply stopped arriving. Baelor never raised his voice about it. He simply removed the exits one by one while his body forced him to remain in the bed and chairs of these rooms.

And still he needed you closer.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The first time the restraint truly broke, the fever was high and the pain had been relentless for hours.

He had pulled you onto the edge of the mattress so he could grip your arm while the latest spasm passed. When it eased, his hand did not. His thumb pressed into the soft inside of your wrist hard enough to leave a mark. His eyes were glassy but fixed on your face with an intensity that had nothing to do with medicine.

“I could have died,” he said. “On the floor of the council chamber. Poisoned by one of the men who sit at my own table. And the last coherent thought I had was that I had never taken what I wanted from you.”

Your pulse jumped under his thumb.

He used the grip to pull you down until your face was close to his. The kiss was clumsy with fever and need, all teeth and heat. When you made a sound against his mouth he rolled, slower than he would have if his body still obeyed him, but with enough force to put you beneath him on the wide bed. The effort cost him. Sweat broke across his back. He snarled at the weakness even as he shoved your skirts up and settled between your thighs.

“Stay still,” he ordered, voice rough. “If I cannot stand long enough to fuck you properly, you will at least take what I can give.”

He pushed into you in one long, imperfect thrust that made both of you choke on the sensation. The rhythm that followed was driven as much by anger at his own body as by lust. He kept his weight braced on shaking arms, eyes locked on yours, refusing to look away even when the residual poison made his vision swim. Every time you tried to moderate the pace or ease him he only gripped harder and drove deeper, as if the act itself could force strength back into his limbs.

When he came it was with a low, broken sound that was almost a growl, face buried against your throat, body trembling from more than release. He did not pull away. He stayed inside you, breathing hard, and muttered against your skin:

“You do not leave these rooms. Not tonight. Not until I decide otherwise.”

You felt the truth of the isolation settle over you then. There was no one left close enough to question it.

After that night the pattern was set.

On the days the pain receded, Baelor was almost himself — sharp, calculating, already dictating letters about the investigation into the poisoning. He made it clear the culprit would be found among the small council. He spoke of the man in cold, precise terms, the way he might discuss a military objective.

On the days the weakness returned, the other version of him surfaced: possessive, demanding, intolerant of any distance. He fucked you through the worst of the residual fevers, using your body to prove he still had power over something. He kept you in the bed even when you might have slept in the chair. He watched the door as if expecting someone to try to take you away.

You began to understand the danger from the other direction.

One evening, after a particularly bad bout of pain, he was left exhausted and half-asleep, one hand still tangled in your shift. You sat beside him and realised, with a slow, cold clarity, that in this state you could do almost anything. You could press a pillow down. You could walk out and carry every private word he had spoken to the king. You could withhold the water or the medicine or the quiet presence he had come to need so badly. The Hand of the King was, for these hours, dependent on a single lady-in-waiting in a way he had never been dependent on anyone.

The power of it sat in your chest like a live coal. He had isolated you from every other ally and protector, and in doing so he had also placed a knife in your hand. The fact that he seemed not to fear it only made the realisation more dangerous. He trusted the bond he was forging more than he feared the vulnerability.

You did not use the knife.

You stayed.

That, too, became part of the new shape of things.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The poisoner was uncovered in the third week — a lesser member of the small council who had taken gold from a coalition of houses that preferred a more pliable Hand. Baelor received the confirmation while still confined to a chair by the fire, a blanket over his legs that he clearly resented. He listened to the report without expression, then ordered the man’s arrest and questioning with the same calm he might have used before the attempt on his life.

Only when the messenger left did he look at you.

“Come here.”

You went. He pulled you down into his lap with careful, deliberate strength — the first clear sign that his body was beginning to return to him. His hand settled at the back of your neck, possessive and heavy.

“When I walk out of these rooms,” he said, “you walk with me. Not behind me as a lady-in-waiting. Beside me, in whatever form I decide that takes. The court already believes you are my weakness. We will teach them you are something else.”

His thumb stroked once over the pulse in your throat.

“You saw me when I could barely stand. You held power over me while I slept. Most men would kill for less certainty than that. I am not most men. I am keeping you.”

The hand at your throat did not leave.

It began to move instead — slowly, with clear intent. From the side of your neck down to the hollow of your throat, then lower, tracing the line of your collarbone through the thin fabric of your dress. Your breath caught. Baelor watched your face as his palm continued its path, settling over your breast, the heat of his hand seeping through the cloth. His thumb brushed once across the peak, deliberate and unhurried.

Your breathing grew heavier. The air between you thickened. A sudden, carnal hunger rose so sharply it almost hurt — urgent and physical. You needed him in your mouth. You needed the weight and the taste and the proof that the man who had just claimed you was still flesh under your hands.

You slid from his lap to the floor between his knees.

Baelor’s eyes darkened, but he did not stop you. He only leaned back in the chair, the blanket shifting, and watched as you freed him from his breeches. He was already hard. You wrapped your fingers around the base and took him into your mouth in one slow, wet sink, eyes closing as the thick length filled your throat.

Above you, the Hand of the King exhaled a low, rough sound and rested his hand in your hair, holding, while you sucked him with the same desperate focus the last weeks had taught you.

Outside, the Tower continued its careful business.

Additional tags: fem!read; no use of Y/N; age gap; pregnancy; adultery; war of succession; rebellion; +18; MDNI

A/N: shamelessly stole the title from soap&skin’s gorgeous song of the same name, which also inspired this fic 🩶

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Baelor had always wanted you.

Not as a niece. Not as a political piece. As a wife. As the mother of his true heirs. The fact that he was already married to Jena Dondarrion, that he already had children by her, that his father still sat the Iron Throne and named him Hand — none of it changed the wanting. It only forced the wanting into the dark.

The night it happened, the doors were barred and the rest of the keep felt far away.

Baelor had you on your back in his bed, one of your legs hooked over his shoulder, driving into you with deep, deliberate strokes. You moaned freely against his mouth, the sound wet and broken every time he bottomed out.

“Fuck— listen to you,” he growled, voice rough with pleasure. “Taking me so well. This cunt was made to be filled with my seed.”

You dragged your nails down his back and lifted your hips to meet him. “Then fill me. Do it. I want it.”

He groaned and thrust harder, the rhythm turning filthy and purposeful. “I’m going to put a child in you tonight. A son. My heir. Say it.”

“Yes— gods, yes— give me your child, Baelor—”

“My boy. Growing in this belly while the court thinks I’m loyal to my wife.” He kissed you hard, almost punishing. “When he’s born I’ll make him my heir. I’ll set the others aside. I’ll marry you in front of the whole fucking realm.”

You came with a sharp cry at the words, clenching around him. Baelor followed with a long, guttural moan, burying himself to the hilt and spilling deep inside you while he kept whispering against your ear that you would give him the only heir that mattered.

Afterward he stayed inside you, hand spread possessively over your stomach, already imagining it.

The pregnancy remained hidden longer than it should have. Loose gowns. Careful posture. The excuse of illness. It could not last forever.

Dyanna Dayne, your mother, came to your chambers one evening without warning. She had only meant to speak with her daughter. Instead she found you half-undressed, the swell of your belly unmistakable in the candlelight. The colour left her face.

“Seven save us,” she whispered.

Maekar arrived within the hour. The argument that followed was brutal.

“How long!?” Maekar demanded, voice shaking with rage. “How long have you been spreading your legs for my own brother!?”

You stood your ground even as your voice cracked. “I love him! We love each other! This child is his and I am keeping it!”

Dyanna’s eyes filled with tears of pure fury. “You have destroyed yourself! You have destroyed this family!”

“I have done nothing except take what was always mine to take,” you shot back. “He should have been my husband! Not Jena, me!”

Maekar looked as if he had been struck. “You will end this. You will drink the tea and you will never speak of this again!”

“I will not.”

The words hung in the air like a drawn blade. Maekar’s face twisted.

“Then you are no longer my daughter.”

The knowledge reached the King and Jena by morning. The scandal that followed was absolute.

Jena’s voice carried down the corridor outside Baelor’s chambers, sharp and venomous.

“Where is the whore? I want to see the whore who thinks she can take my place and put a bastard above my children.”

Maekar found Baelor in the Tower of the Hand. The door had barely closed before Maekar’s fist connected with his brother’s jaw.

“You ruined her!” Maekar roared as they crashed into the table. “My young daughter! Your own blood! You put your cock in her and now she carries your shame—”

Baelor fought like a man who had already decided the world could burn. “She is mine! The child is mine! I will not give them up!”

“You sick fuck—”

At some point the Valyrian steel dagger at Baelor’s belt came free. There was a flash of dark metal, a wet sound, and Maekar reeled back with a long, deep cut opening across his cheek and down toward his jaw. Blood poured between his fingers.

Baelor stood over him, chest heaving, the dagger still in his hand, dark eyes bright with something close to madness.

“He will be my heir,” he said, voice raw. “When I am king I will set Jena’s children aside and name him before the court. I will marry his mother. You will not take them from me.”

Guards dragged Baelor back to his chambers in the Tower of the Hand before he could finish what he had started. They barred the door. They left him with his sword. That was their first mistake.

For a long time the only sounds that came through the wood were the crash of furniture and a raw, animal screaming that barely seemed human. Cups shattered against the walls. The cyvasse table split under the force of a Valyrian steel blade driven into it again and again. Baelor raged until his voice broke, until his hands bled, until the room looked as if a storm had been locked inside it.

When the fit finally exhausted itself he stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, and listened to the silence that followed.

A knight of the Kingsguard opened the door long enough to deliver the only message that mattered.

“The girl is being sent to Dragonstone at first light. She will remain there under guard until the child is born. After that the child will be taken into the crown’s keeping. You will stay here. The King has commanded it.”

The door closed again.

Baelor stood very still.

He could submit. He could remain in this wrecked room, stripped of the Handship, while you were carried across the sea and the boy was cut out of both your lives. He could accept the containment his father had designed and spend whatever years remained to him as a dangerous, watched, defeated man.

He thought of your belly.

He thought of the night you had decided to keep the child.

He thought of the future he had promised you — the one in which the boy was his heir and you were his wife and the rest of the realm simply learned to live with it.

Something cold and final settled in him.

He cleaned the blood from his dagger. He found a cloak dark enough for the passages. He took the purse of coin he kept for emergencies and the small cache of letters that still carried weight with certain captains and household knights. Then he went to the door and spoke through it in a voice that was almost calm.

“Tell my father I will not be held.”

The guards on the other side made the second mistake of the night. They opened the door to argue.

Baelor moved.

Steel flashed in the dim corridor. One man went down hard. The second managed a shout before the pommel of the sword took him across the temple. Baelor did not stay to finish them. He was already running the back ways of the Tower, the routes he had known since boyhood, the ones that led toward the postern gates and the black water beyond.

By the time the alarm truly rose, he was on the river.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dragonstone rose out of the sea like a black fist.

Baelor reached it ahead of the official party, using a fishing vessel and the last of the old loyalties that still answered to his name rather than the Hand’s title he no longer held. The garrison on the island was thin and uncertain. When he walked into the Stone Drum and told the castellan that the Hand of the King — the true Hand, the king’s own blood — would be taking command of the island for the safety of the pregnant lady now en route, enough men hesitated long enough for his will to become fact.

When your ship arrived two days later, Baelor was waiting on the dock.

You were pale, guarded, already showing in a way that no cloak could fully hide. The knights who had escorted you froze when they saw him. Baelor did not give them time to decide where their duty lay.

“She stays with me,” he said. His voice carried across the stones without needing to be raised. “Any man who tries to take her or the child from this island will answer to me. Go back to my father and tell him the Tower of the Hand is empty. Tell him his heir is on Dragonstone. Tell him the boy will be born here, under his father’s protection, and that I will name him what he is.”

He looked at you then, properly, for the first time since the scandal broke. The rage was still in him, banked but alive. Beneath it was the same absolute certainty that had made him put a child in you in the first place.

“I will not let them take this from us,” he said, quieter, only for you. “I am done asking.”

Behind him the black walls of Dragonstone stood hard against the sky. Ahead of him lay the open break with everything his father had ordered — and the war that would have to follow once the realm understood he meant every word.

Baelor closed his hand around yours and led you up from the dock.

He did not look back.

Baelor held the island with a mix of old loyalty, fear, and the sheer force of his presence. When ravens came from King’s Landing demanding his return and your surrender, he burned them. When a small royal squadron appeared off the coast weeks later, he stood on the battlements in full view and sent word that any attempt to land would be answered with fire and steel. The ships eventually turned back. Daeron II, still trying to contain rather than explode the crisis, did not yet order a full assault. That hesitation bought you time.

You gave birth in the Sea Dragon Tower on a storm-lashed night. Baelor was there the entire time — sleeve rolled up, your hand crushed in his, refusing every suggestion that he leave the room. When the boy finally came, dark-haired and screaming, Baelor took him with shaking hands and held him as if the whole island might try to tear the child away.

“My son,” he said, voice raw. “My heir.”

No midwife was allowed to carry the boy out of the chamber. No silent sister was permitted to take him for “safekeeping.” The child stayed with you. Baelor slept across the doorway with his sword within reach.

You named him in private. You raised him in the black halls of Dragonstone while the realm held its breath and tried to decide how much force it was willing to use against the king’s own blood. For a short while — months that felt both stolen and absolute — the three of you were a family inside the stone walls. Baelor taught the boy nothing of the scandal and everything of his own certainty: that this child was trueborn in the only way that mattered, that his mother was the only wife Baelor would ever again acknowledge, and that the world outside would one day be made to accept it.

The declarations came on a clear morning when the boy was still only a few months old.

Baelor summoned every man of rank on the island to the Stone Drum. He stood with you at his side and the child in your arms, and he spoke without ornament.

“I take this woman as my wife in the sight of gods and men. The marriage forced upon me with Lady Dondarrion is void. The children of that union are hereby set aside. This boy — my blood, my son — is my true and only heir. When I sit the Iron Throne he will follow me. Any who deny this deny me.”

The words left no room for negotiation. Ravens flew within the hour. By the time they reached King’s Landing the shock had already begun to turn into motion.

Maekar, scarred face white with fury, called it treason and incestuous madness. Jena’s kin demanded justice and the protection of her children’s rights. The small council fractured. Daeron, older and more tired than he had ever looked, finally accepted that containment had failed. What he had tried to treat as a family disgrace had become an open attempt to rewrite the succession.

The war that followed was compared, almost at once, to the Blackfyre Rebellion — and in some ways it was worse. This time the challenger was not a legitimised bastard with a popular claim, it was the former Hand, the king’s own heir, refusing the order of things from inside the bloodline itself and demanding the realm accept an incest-born son as the future of the dynasty.

Houses chose sides with grim reluctance. Some went to Daeron and Maekar out of loyalty to stability and the last war’s lessons. A smaller number went to Baelor — some from old personal loyalty, some from ambition, some from the cold calculation that a man willing to burn everything for his will might reward those who helped him. Sellswords gathered where the coin was. The realm braced for another round of killing.

Baelor did not flinch.

He fought like a man who had already decided that the only acceptable future was the one in which you and the boy were safe and recognized. He was protective to the point of ferocity and vengeful without apology. Villages that sheltered men sent against Dragonstone learned the cost. Lords who called his son a bastard in public found their holdings under threat. The unhinged edge that had once made him cut his own brother’s face open now directed itself outward, toward anyone who tried to take his family from him again.

On Dragonstone, between campaigns, he would still walk the boy along the gallery above the sea and speak to him with the same absolute certainty as the night of his birth.

“You are my heir. Your mother is my wife. The rest of them will learn to live with it, or they will die against it.”

The war did not care about the tenderness in those words. It only fed on the fact that he meant them.

And somewhere in the Red Keep, the King looked at the maps of a realm that had only just begun to recover from one succession war and now faced another — this one started by the son he had once trusted most — and understood that the peace he had spent his life building was not strong enough to survive the wanting that lived inside Baelor Targaryen.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Maekar came himself.

He brought a mixed fleet — royal war galleys, hired Lysene galleys, and a handful of smaller vessels packed with men who had been told they were putting down a treasonous revolt by the former Hand. The order was simple: take the island, seize the woman and the child, and bring Baelor back in chains or in pieces. Daeron, still hoping for a decisive end rather than an endless war, had given his consent.

They attempted the landing at dawn under a low grey sky.

Baelor had been expecting them for weeks. The watchers on the Dragonmont and the coastal towers lit the signal fires as soon as the sails were counted. By the time the first ships entered the narrow approach to the main harbour, the defenders were ready.

The initial exchange was arrows and scorpion bolts. Then Baelor ordered the fire.

They had prepared for it: pots of pitch, wildfire carefully measured and kept in the old cellars, oil-soaked arrows, and the fishing boats they had converted into fire ships. When the wind shifted in their favour, Baelor gave the word. Burning vessels were cut loose and driven toward the densest part of the royal line. Arrows trailing flame followed. One of the larger galleys caught first — a whoosh of pitch and then the terrible green-tinged flare of wildfire that made men scream in a different register.

The fire spread faster than the attackers could push away from each other. Ropes and sails went up. Men on fire leapt into the water and found no safety there. The sea near the mouth of the harbour turned into a floating chaos of burning timber, thrashing bodies, and the thick black smoke of tarred wood. A second galley, trying to turn, collided with a smaller vessel already ablaze; both were lost. The air filled with the smell of pitch, salt, and burned flesh.

Maekar’s flagship tried to press the landing anyway. Boats were lowered. Men rowed for the shingle under covering fire. Baelor’s household knights and the hardened core of the garrison met them at the water’s edge. The fighting there was short and ugly — men slipping on wet rock and blood, being driven back into the surf, bodies washing to and fro in the shallows. A few attackers made it far enough up the strand to die on the black sand. Most did not.

By midday the assault had broken. The surviving ships were pulling away, several of them still trailing smoke. The water was littered with wreckage and the dead. Baelor stood on the battlements above the harbour and watched them go, face set, the boy held by a nurse somewhere deep inside the Stone Drum. He had given the order that no ships were to be pursued beyond the range of the island’s engines. He would not risk his limited fleet. It was enough that the attack had been broken and that the men who had come to take his family had been sent back burned and diminished.

When the count was made, hundreds were dead or missing — drowned, burned, or cut down at the waterline. The survivors carried the story back to the mainland: Dragonstone under Baelor was not a desperate refuge waiting to fall. It was a fortress willing to set the sea itself on fire to keep what it held.

Maekar, scarred face further blackened by smoke, stared at the island as the fleet limped away and understood that this would not be a swift end. The war had just become longer, costlier, and more personal than even he had expected.

Baelor did not celebrate. He walked the harbour after the fires were out, looked at the bodies that had washed in with the tide, and then went back up to the tower where you and the boy waited. The message to the realm was already clear: anyone who came for you again would find the same welcome.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The war lasted four years.

By the end, entire districts of the riverlands and the crownlands had been burned twice over. Harvests failed. Sellswords switched sides so often that no one kept reliable counts of the dead. Several lesser houses were extinguished completely. Dragonstone itself remained unbroken, a black tooth in the narrow sea, but the cost of holding it and projecting power from it had hollowed out everything Baelor still possessed except will.

The final campaign was aimed straight at King’s Landing.

When the city fell, it fell hard. Fires took the lower streets. There was street fighting in the shadow of the Red Keep before the gates were finally forced. Baelor entered the fortress with his remaining household knights and the hardest of the men who had stayed loyal through the long, ugly years. He was thinner, older, the dark of his eyes somehow colder. The boy — now five, dark-haired, kept carefully away from the worst of the blood — waited on a ship in the Blackwater with you under heavy guard. Baelor had refused to bring either of you into the city until the Keep itself was secure.

Daeron and Maekar were taken alive.

Baelor had given specific orders on that point. He wanted them breathing.

They put Daeron in one of the lower cells of the Red Keep, the same level that had once held men the old Hand had sentenced. The former king looked smaller without the crown and the careful dignity of office. Age and the war had worn him down. When Baelor entered the cell, two knights waited outside the open door.

Daeron studied his son for a long moment.

“So it is done,” he said. His voice was quiet. “You have your city. You have your war. How many had to die for you to stand where you are standing?”

Baelor did not answer the question. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking at the man who had once trusted him with the Handship.

“You should have left us alone on Dragonstone,” Baelor said. “You should have let me keep my wife and my son. Everything after that was your choice as much as mine.”

Daeron’s mouth tightened. “You broke the succession. You broke your brother. You broke the peace I spent my life building. And now you will break the realm further by putting that boy in line for the throne.”

“That boy is my heir.” Baelor’s voice remained even. “The only one I will acknowledge. You taught me the weight of the realm. You never taught me how to accept the theft of my own blood.”

Daeron looked at him with something that was no longer quite paternal and no longer quite royal, only exhausted and final.

“You are lost,” he said.

Baelor drew the Valyrian steel dagger — the same one that had marked Maekar years before — and stepped forward.

“I am what you left me,” he answered, and drove the blade in cleanly.

He stayed only long enough to be certain.

Maekar was held in a different cell, higher, with a narrow window that let in a strip of grey light. The long scar Baelor had given him years earlier pulled tight when he turned his head. He did not rise when his brother entered. He only looked at him with open, undiminished hatred.

“Come to finish it?” Maekar asked.

“Yes.”

Maekar laughed once, a short, harsh sound. “You always did take what you wanted and call it necessity. First my daughter. Then the realm. Now this.” He leaned forward, chains shifting. “Does she know what you’ve become for her? Does the boy?”

Baelor’s jaw tightened. “They know I kept them. They know I will not let the rest of you take them again.”

“You kept them by drowning the kingdom in blood.” Maekar’s eyes were bright with fever and fury. “I should have killed you in the Tower when I had the chance. I should have put that dagger through your throat instead of letting you mark me with it.”

“You should have let me be,” Baelor said. “She was never yours to dispose of. The child was never yours to erase. Everything you and Father did after that only proved I was right to take them and hold them.”

Maekar stared at him.

“There is nothing left of the brother I knew,” he said finally.

Baelor stepped closer, the dagger already in his hand.

“Good,” he replied, and ended it.

When both cells were quiet, Baelor walked back up through the Red Keep alone. The corridors still smelled of smoke and blood. Outside, the city smouldered. The war was won. The cost stood in every blackened street and every empty place where a house or a field or a family had been.

He gave orders for the bodies to be handled with the minimum of ceremony. Then he sent word to the ship in the Blackwater that it was safe to bring you and the boy ashore.

That evening, in the same solar where Daeron had once tried to contain the original scandal, Baelor stood with his hand on the dark head of his son and looked out over the city he had broken to keep them.

The Iron Throne was his. The succession would be rewritten by force. The realm would learn to live with it, or it would learn to fear the consequences of refusing.

He had won.

Additional tags: fem!read; no use of Y/N; adultery; age gap; abortion; +18; MDNI

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summons came as it often did — polite, official, and entirely false.

A page delivered the message that the Hand of the King requested your presence in the Tower of the Hand to discuss matters of governance. No one questioned it. You had been called for counsel more than once. Jena, heavy with child, remained in her own apartments. The king was occupied elsewhere. The corridors of the Red Keep carried you upward without comment.

Baelor was waiting when you entered his private chambers.

He closed the door behind you and slid the heavy iron bar into place. The sound was soft, final. Only then did he turn fully toward you. The careful mask he wore in the halls was gone. What remained was hunger, tightly held.

“Come here.”

You went to him. He kissed you once, deeply, then began to undress you with deliberate patience. Laces. Ties. The weight of fabric leaving your shoulders, your hips, until you stood bare in the centre of the room. He stripped himself with the same unhurried focus. When he was naked he guided you across the chamber to the tall looking glass that stood against the far wall — polished silver, large enough to show you both from head to thigh.

He positioned you in front of it.

“Watch.”

He stood behind you, one arm banding around your waist, the other hand coming up to cover your mouth. His palm was warm and firm, sealing in sound. You felt the thick head of his cock nudge between your thighs, then press slowly into you from behind. The stretch was familiar and still overwhelming. He sank deeper in one long, controlled thrust until his hips were flush against your ass.

Your eyes fluttered. In the mirror you saw everything: your own flushed face above his hand, the way your breasts moved with each careful roll of his hips, the place where his body disappeared into yours. Baelor’s violet eyes met yours in the glass and held them.

He fucked you slowly.

Deep, measured strokes that dragged every inch of him along your walls. The hand over your mouth kept every moan trapped between his palm and your lips. Your breath came hot and quick against his skin. He kept the pace ruthless in its restraint — no rush, no mercy, only the steady claim of his cock filling you again and again while he made you watch.

Your knees weakened. He adjusted his grip, holding you more firmly against him so you could not sink or look away. The mirror showed the tremor in your thighs, the way your stomach tensed each time he bottomed out, the glazed look that overtook your eyes as pleasure built in heavy, helpless waves.

You lost yourself in him.

Thought narrowed to the slide of his cock, the press of his hand, the sight of your own body accepting him. The world beyond the barred door — the pregnant wife, the court, the king, the danger — fell away. There was only the slow, devastating rhythm and the way he watched you come apart in the glass.

When the orgasm finally took you it was silent, your cry muffled hard against his palm, your body tightening around him in long, shaking pulses. Baelor followed soon after with a low, controlled groan against your ear, burying himself deep and spilling into you while his eyes stayed locked on yours in the mirror.

He did not move away at once.

His hand remained over your mouth a moment longer, as if even the quiet of the room could not be trusted. He was still half-hard when you turned in his arms.

You sank to your knees on the cool stone in front of the mirror. Baelor looked down at you, one hand resting lightly on the top of your head, the other braced on the wall. You leaned in and pressed a slow, open-mouthed kiss to the head of his cock, tasting yourself on him. Then you licked a long, deliberate stripe from base to tip, swirling your tongue around the flushed head before taking just the tip between your lips and sucking gently.

You played with him.

Soft kisses along the shaft. The flat of your tongue under the sensitive ridge. Your hand cupping and rolling his balls while you nuzzled the base of his cock, breathing him in. You ran the thick length along your lips, painting them with the wetness already gathering there, teasing him until his breath left him in a low, rough sound.

Only then did you take him properly.

You opened your mouth and sank down, eyes closing as you let him fill you. Inch by inch, until your nose brushed the dark hair at his base and his cock was lodged deep in your throat. You stayed there for a heartbeat, throat working around him, then drew back and began to move — slow, deep strokes that fucked your own mouth on his cock. You savoured the weight of him, the taste of salt and skin and the faint trace of your own ass still on him.

You were dripping onto the stone between your knees.

Baelor’s hand left your hair, found your wrist, and guided your fingers between your own legs. He pressed your hand against your soaked cunt and made you touch yourself while you sucked him — two fingers sliding into your heat, your thumb circling your clit, all of it timed to the rhythm of your mouth on his cock. Your moans grew louder, wet and muffled around him, vibrating up his shaft.

He watched you in the mirror and through half-lidded eyes, voice dropping into something dark and filthy.

“Look at you. On your knees in your uncle’s chambers with my cock down your throat and your fingers buried in that greedy cunt. My brother’s 15-year-old pretty daughter. My secret little whore. You love this, don’t you? Love choking on me. Love the way I use your mouth when the rest of the keep thinks you’re here to discuss taxes and grain.”

Your eyes fluttered. A broken, needy sound escaped around his cock as you fucked your throat harder onto him and rubbed yourself faster under his guiding hand.

“That’s it. Take it deeper. Let me feel that throat work. You’re going to make me come, and when I do you’re going to hold my cock and paint yourself with it. I want to see my seed on your tongue and your tits. I want you marked before you put that pretty dress back on and walk back through my father’s halls.”

His breathing roughened. His hips began to meet your mouth in short, controlled thrusts. You hollowed your cheeks and sucked harder, moaning freely now, fingers working desperately between your legs.

“Fuck— now.”

He pulled free of your mouth with a wet sound. You immediately wrapped your fist around his cock and stroked him through it as he came. Thick, hot ropes of cum striped across your breasts, your collarbone, your open mouth and tongue. You kept him in your hand, milking every pulse, letting him paint you while your own orgasm rolled through you in shaking waves, cunt clenching around your fingers.

When it was over you stayed on your knees, breathing hard, his spend cooling on your skin and the taste of him heavy on your tongue.

Baelor looked down at you — flushed, filthy, still trembling — and brushed his thumb across your lower lip, gathering a streak of his own cum and pressing it back into your mouth.

“Swallow.”

You did.

He then hauled you up from the floor by your arms and spun you, pressing your back hard against the cold stone wall. One of his hands hooked under your thigh and lifted, spreading you open; the other braced beside your head. He drove into you in a single brutal thrust that forced a raw scream from your throat.

You bit down on the side of his neck to muffle the sound, teeth sinking into muscle as he fucked you against the wall with short, savage snaps of his hips. The impact of his body into yours was relentless. Every stroke punched the air from your lungs in hot, broken bursts against his skin. Your nails raked his shoulders. Your free leg locked around his waist, trying to pull him even deeper.

He growled low in your ear, the sound vibrating through the place where your teeth were still buried in him.

“That’s it— take it. Take every fucking inch.”

He didn’t slow. The wet, filthy slap of skin on skin filled the chamber. Your back scraped against the stone. The hand over your mouth was gone; the only thing keeping your screams from carrying was the desperate way you kept your face pressed to his neck, biting and gasping and biting again.

When your legs began to shake too hard to hold you, Baelor simply lifted you fully, still buried inside you, and carried you the short distance to the great bed. He dropped you onto the furs and followed without ever pulling out. Then he really took you apart.

He hooked your knees over his elbows and folded you nearly in half, driving down into you with long, punishing strokes that made the heavy wooden frame creak. You arched and thrashed beneath him, no longer able to stay quiet. Broken, high cries spilled from your mouth with every thrust. He kissed them away, swallowed them, cursed against your lips.

“Fuck— you feel too good. This cunt was made for me. Should have been mine in the eyes of gods and men.”

The rhythm turned savage. The bed slammed against the wall. You clawed at his back, his hair, the sheets, anything you could reach as the pleasure coiled tighter and tighter, almost unbearable. Baelor’s control frayed at the edges; his thrusts grew erratic, deeper, desperate.

“Gods damn it—” he snarled, forehead pressed to yours. “Gods damn my brother for keeping you from me. I should have been the one to marry you. I should have been filling you with my heirs instead of sneaking into locked rooms like a fucking thief.”

The words and the relentless drive of his cock pushed you over the edge. You came with a shattered cry, cunt spasming hard around him, vision whiting out. Baelor followed with a guttural, broken curse of his own, burying himself to the hilt and spilling into you in thick, pulsing waves while his whole body shuddered.

For a long moment the only sounds were the two of you gasping, the distant noise of the keep beyond the barred door, and the quiet drip of sweat and spend onto the sheets.

Baelor stayed deep inside you, chest heaving, mouth against your temple.

“You are mine, you belong to me” he whispered, the words half oath, half lament. “Even if the whole fucking realm says otherwise.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Morning light filtered weakly through the shutters of your chambers.

You had sent for the maester at first light. The request was quiet, carefully phrased: moon tea for one of your serving women who had been careless. The old man asked no further questions. He left the steaming cup on the table and departed with a polite bow, the door closing softly behind him.

You sat on the edge of the bed in a thin shift, the cup warm between your palms. The bitter scent of it rose with the steam. You had done this before. You would do it again. The alternative was unthinkable within these walls.

You raised the cup to your lips and drank.

The door to the servants’ passage opened without a sound.

Baelor stepped inside, already closing it behind him. He wore a simple dark tunic, hair still damp from a morning wash, the silver brooch of the Hand pinned at his breast. He did not speak. He only watched as you finished the last of the tea, throat working with each swallow.

When the cup was empty he crossed the room, took it gently from your hands, and set it aside on the table.

Then he knelt in front of you.

His hands settled on your thighs, warm and steady. He looked up at you for a long moment before rising just enough to kiss you. The kiss was slow, deep, and aching with everything the night had not allowed them to say aloud. No hunger this time. No frantic claiming. Only the quiet, devastating tenderness of a man who knew exactly what the bitter liquid in that cup had cost them both.

When he drew back, one of his hands slid up under the hem of your shift and came to rest, open and careful, over the soft plane of your belly.

His voice was barely more than a breath against your mouth.

“One day.” His thumb stroked once, lightly. “Soon. You’ll carry my children. I’ll put them in you myself, and no one will be able to take that from us. Not my father. Not my wife. Not the court. Not the gods.”