"Give me a chance," he said quietly, all traces of teasing gone. "A real chance. That's all I'm asking."

You traced the line of his jaw with your fingertip, feeling the rasp of stubble, the warmth of his skin. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Physically."

"Daemon."

"I know. I know you're still thinking about it. I know nothing is settled." He caught your hand and pressed a kiss to your palm. "But you're still here. In our bed. Letting me touch you. That's more than I deserve."

"It really is."

"I know." Another kiss, this time to your wrist. "I'm going to earn it. Every day. I'm going to earn you back."

The sincerity in his voice made your eyes sting. You blinked rapidly and pulled your hand free, swatting his shoulder with more affection than force. "You're getting sentimental in your old age."

"I'm getting smart in my old age. There's a difference."

"Is that what we're calling forty-three now? Old age?"

"Ancient. Decrepit. Practically in my dotage." He rolled on top of you, pinning you to the mattress with his weight, and grinned down at you with all the charm that had made you say yes to a second date years ago. "You'll have to take care of me in my declining years. Push my wheelchair. Feed me soup."

"I'll hire someone to do it."

"Wicked woman." He kissed you. "My wicked woman."

The days slipped by like beads on a string. Mornings at the beach, the boys shrieking with delight as Daemon tossed them into the waves, his laughter carrying across the water. Afternoons by the pool, Viserys napping in the shade while Aegon practiced his swimming with determination he inherited from both his parents. Evenings on the terrace, watching the sun sink in a blaze of orange and gold while the boys ate gelato and Daemon's hand rested on your thigh beneath the table.

It was, you had to admit, the closest thing to a real family vacation you'd had in years. Maybe ever. Daemon's feud with Alicent simmered on the back burner, contained to occasional sharp glances across the dinner table and one tense exchange about the resort's wine selection that was so aggressively polite it made Rhaenyra choke on her water.

Viserys the elder was in his element, presiding over meals like a benevolent king surveying his domain. Rhaenyra's boys ran wild with Aegon and little Viserys, a pack of children terrorizing the resort staff with the impunity of the very rich and very cute. Even Laenor seemed more relaxed, spending long hours on the water with the resort's sailing instructor while Rhaenyra read novels under an umbrella and pretended not to notice.

"See?" Daemon murmured in your ear on the sixth night, as you walked back to your suite with a sleeping Viserys drooping against his shoulder. "This is what it could be like. All the time."

"You mean you not picking fights with your sister-in-law?"

"I mean us. Together. A family."

You looked at Aegon, walking ahead of you with the particular swagger he'd picked up from his father, his silver hair still damp. "It's been a good week."

"It's been a perfect week."

"Perfect is a strong word."

"Perfect for us." He shifted Viserys to his other shoulder, freeing his hand to reach for yours. "I know we still have things to work through. I know I have a lot to make up for. But this..." He squeezed your fingers. "This is real. This is what I want. What I've always wanted, even when I was too much of an idiot to show it."

You didn't answer. You couldn't. Because he was right, it had been a good week, maybe even a perfect one, but you'd been here before. The cycle of tension and release, distance and reconciliation. Daemon's charm was a powerful force, and you'd spent years learning to be skeptical of it.

But you were still here. Still in his bed. Still letting him hold your hand.

What did that say about you?

The seventh day dawned bright and cloudless. You woke to find Daemon already awake, propped against the headboard with his tablet, scrolling through emails with a faint frown.

"Work?" you asked, your voice still thick with sleep.

"The Ashford deal. Viserys wants me to present to the board when we get back." He set the tablet aside and turned to you, his frown dissolving into something softer. "Good morning."

"Morning." You stretched, feeling the pleasant ache in your muscles from the previous night's activities. "What time is it?"

"Early. The boys are still asleep." His hand found your hip beneath the sheets. "We have time."

"We have time for what, exactly?"

His smile was answer enough.

Later, you joined the rest of the family for brunch on the terrace. The long table was laden with fresh fruit, pastries, silver chafing dishes full of eggs, smoked fish and other delicacies you'd learned to take for granted during your marriage to a Targaryen.

Rhaenyra was already seated, nursing a mimosa with the air of a woman who had been up since dawn with three energetic children. Laenor was beside her, looking slightly greenish. Too much port the night before, if you had to guess. Viserys was at the head of the table, deep in conversation with one of his advisors who had flown in for some reason you couldn't be bothered to inquire about.

And Alicent was watching you.

You felt her gaze before you saw it, that particular prickling awareness of being observed. She was seated at Viserys' right hand, her posture impeccable, her auburn hair swept back in an elegant chignon. Her dress was pale green. Her expression was pleasant, perfectly composed, the mask of a woman who had spent years learning to hide her true feelings behind a veneer of graciousness.

But her eyes were cold.

You'd grown accustomed to Alicent's subtle hostility over the years. It was one of the constants of Targaryen family gatherings, like Viserys' long-winded toasts or the way Rhaenyra's children always managed to break something valuable. Alicent had never liked you, you'd accepted that early on, but her dislike had always been of the passive-aggressive variety. Pointed questions about your career that were really comments about your lack of family connections. Compliments that were actually insults, delivered with such sweetness that you couldn't call them out without looking paranoid and rude. The kind of low-grade, deniable hostility that wore you down over time without ever giving you a clear target to push back against.

So when you took your seat and Alicent smiled at you with that particular tightness around her eyes, you braced yourself for whatever was coming.

"Good morning," Alicent said, her voice as smooth as honey. "You look well-rested. I'm glad someone is sleeping well on this trip."

"Thank you," you said cautiously. "The beds are very comfortable."

"I wouldn't know. I've been up since five dealing with a situation in the Hong Kong office." She sighed delicately, as if the weight of international business was a personal cross she bore with saintly patience. "But I suppose you wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing, would you? Daemon handles all the difficult matters, I'm sure."

It was a small barb, almost invisible. You felt it prick anyway.

"Daemon handles the business side of things," you agreed, keeping your voice even. "I have my own work to keep me busy."

"Of course. Your little consultancy. How is that going, by the way? I remember you had some difficulties last year with funding."

The difficulties she was referring to had been a temporary cash flow issue, resolved within a month, that you'd mentioned in passing at a family dinner nearly eighteen months ago. That she remembered it now, and chose to bring it up, was not an accident.

"It's going very well, thank you," you said. "We've expanded the team and taken on several new clients. I'm actually considering opening a second office."

"How ambitious." Alicent's smile didn't waver. "It must be nice, having the freedom to pursue your own interests. Some of us have to devote ourselves to family obligations."

The implication was clear: you were selfish. Neglectful. A mother who prioritized her career over her children, her independence over her husband's needs. Never mind that Daemon had always supported your work, that he'd been the one to encourage you to start your consultancy in the first place. Never mind that Alicent herself had built a career out of managing her husband's business interests, that she spent more time in boardrooms than you ever had. The rules were different for her, apparently.

Or maybe the rules were different because she resented the choice she'd made or been forced to make, and couldn't stand to see you thriving outside the gilded cage she'd been locked into.

"Family obligations are important," you said, reaching for a pastry with a steadiness you didn't quite feel. "But I've always believed that children benefit from seeing their parents pursue their passions. Aegon and Viserys know that their mother values her work. I think that's a good thing."

"Mm." Alicent's hum was noncommittal. "Although I imagine it's easier to pursue one's passions when one has the Targaryen name and resources to fall back on. Your consultancy doesn't have to succeed, does it? It's more of a...hobby. A charming little project."

The word 'hobby' landed like a slap. You felt heat rise to your cheeks and forced yourself to take a slow breath before responding.

"My consultancy supports employees and their families," you said, your voice cooler now. "It generates significant revenue. It's hardly a hobby."

"Oh, I didn't mean to offend." Alicent's eyes widened with practiced innocence. "I only meant that you have the luxury of taking risks. Not all of us are so fortunate. Some of us have to think about the family's reputation, the family's legacy. We can't all afford to be so...independent."

The word hung in the air, dripping with disdain. Independent. As if your autonomy was a character flaw. As if the fact that you'd built something of your own, outside the Targaryen empire, was somehow shameful.

You opened your mouth to respond. to say what, you weren't sure, but Daemon's hand closed over yours beneath the table, stopping you.

"Speaking of the family's reputation," he said, his voice carrying that particular edge that always preceded blood in the water, "I heard the most interesting thing about your father's latest venture, Alicent. The shipping company? The one that just happened to receive a very generous contract from Targaryen Holdings?"

Alicent's mask flickered, just for a moment. "My father's business dealings are hardly appropriate brunch conversation."

"No? I find them fascinating. The timing, especially. How long was it between Otto acquiring his stake and the contract being awarded? Three weeks? Four?" Daemon smiled maliciously. "You must be very proud. It's not every day a minor shipping concern gets that kind of opportunity. Nepotism is such an ugly word, but in this case, one might argue it's the only word that fits."

"Daemon," Viserys said warningly from the head of the table.

"I'm just making conversation, brother. Alicent was so interested in my wife's work, I thought she might want to discuss her own family's business practices." He picked up his coffee cup with the air of a man without a care in the world. "Fair's fair, after all."

The silence that followed was thick enough to cut with a knife. Rhaenyra was studying the bottom of her mimosa glass with intense concentration. Laenor had suddenly discovered a fascinating cloud formation on the horizon. Even the children, sensing the tension, had gone quiet.

Alicent's gaze flicked from Daemon to you, and hatred passed behind her eyes.

"Of course," she said, her voice so tight it was nearly a whisper. "Fair is fair."

She didn't speak to you for the rest of brunch.

"You didn't have to do that," you said later, when you were back in the suite, the boys occupied with their tablets, the door to the bedroom closed. "I can fight my own battles."

Daemon was standing by the window, his back to you, his shoulders tense. "I know you can."

"Then why did you?"

He turned. The mask was gone now and what remained was a fury so pure it was almost beautiful. "Because she had no right. No right to speak to you that way. To dismiss your work, your accomplishments, as if they meant nothing. As if you were nothing."

"She's been doing it for years. It's nothing new."

"Then I should have stopped her years ago." He crossed the room, his hands coming up to cup your face, his thumbs brushing your cheekbones with a gentleness that belied the fire in his eyes. "I've let too many things slide. I've been too wrapped up in my own battles to notice the ones you've been fighting alone. But I notice now. And I'm not going to let anyone...anyone...treat you with disrespect. Not Alicent. Not my brother. Not the whole bloody board of directors."

"Daemon..."

"She called your work a hobby. A hobby." He spat the word like a curse. "You have a doctorate. You built a business from the ground up. You've published papers in journals she couldn't even spell the names of. And she sits there with her stolen influence and her father's schemes and dares to condescend to you?"

"I'm used to it."

"You shouldn't have to be." His forehead pressed against yours, his breath warm on your lips. "You are worth ten of her. A hundred. You are brilliant and fierce and so bloody stubborn it drives me mad, and I will not stand by while some social-climbing hypocrite tries to make you feel small."

Your throat was tight. "I thought we agreed you weren't going to antagonize her."

"That was before she came after you." His eyes were blazing. "The truce extends to business. It does not extend to my wife's dignity. Or my children's mother. Or my family's honor." He kissed you hard and fast. "She wants to play these games, she can play them with me. But she will not use you as her punching bag. Not anymore."

You should have argued. You should have reminded him that making enemies of Alicent would only make things harder, that the family politics were already precarious enough, that you didn't need him fighting your battles for you.

But he was looking at you with such fierce, protective devotion, and you were so tired of being the bigger person, of swallowing insults and smiling through passive-aggressive digs.

"Fine," you said. "But if you're going to defend my honor, at least try not to start a corporate civil war in the process."

"I make no promises."

"Daemon."

"I make limited promises. Very limited. Barely any promises at all." He pulled back, his expression shifting from fury to calculating. "Besides, she started it. I'm just...finishing it."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be." He kissed your forehead. "Now. I believe we have a few hours before dinner, the boys are occupied, and I seem to recall making you a promise this morning about what I was going to do to you the moment we had privacy."

"You're trying to distract me."

"Is it working?"

Against your better judgment, you felt your lips twitch toward a smile. "Maybe."

"Good." His hands slid down to your hips, pulling you against him. "Because I meant what I said. Every word. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I've been an idiot not to show it. But that changes now. Starting with Alicent, and continuing with anyone else who thinks they can treat you as less than what you are."

"And what am I?"

"Magnificent," he murmured against your lips. "Absolutely bloody magnificent."

The eighth day brought tension.

You noticed it first at breakfast, when Alicent's eyes swept over you with a new expression, not the usual cold disdain but calculating. As if yesterday's exchange had shifted something fundamental, and she was reassessing her approach.

You braced yourself for more passive-aggressive comments, more honeyed insults dressed up as concern. But Alicent was perfectly polite. Almost too polite. She asked about the boys, complimented your sundress, even inquired about your consultancy with what appeared to be genuine interest.

It was unsettling.

"She's plotting something," Rhaenyra murmured, appearing at your elbow as you watched the children splash in the pool. "I know that look. She gets it right before she makes a move."

"What kind of move?"

"I don't know. But be careful." Rhaenyra's violet eyes, so like Daemon's, were serious. "Alicent doesn't lose gracefully. And Daemon humiliated her at brunch. She won't forget that."

"I didn't ask him to do that."

"I know. But it doesn't matter. In her mind, you're a package deal." Rhaenyra sighed. "It's exhausting, isn't it? The constant maneuvering. The endless drama. Sometimes I think I should just take the boys and Laenor and move to a remote island somewhere. No Targaryens allowed."

"Would Harwin be allowed?"

"He's an honorary Targaryen by now. He's earned it. But he'd also be the first to agree to the no-Targaryens rule." She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Be careful," she repeated. "And tell Daemon to be careful too. He thinks he's untouchable, but Alicent has been building her power base for years. She's not as weak as he wants to believe."

The storm broke on the ninth day.

You'd known it was coming but you hadn't expected it to happen at a family luncheon, in front of a dozen people, with the sunlight streaming through the windows and the sound of the ocean in the background.

It started innocently enough. Viserys made some comment about the family's legacy, about the importance of unity and tradition. Alicent had nodded along, her expression one of perfect wifely agreement.

"Of course, legacy means different things to different people," she said, her voice carrying that particular sweetness that always preceded something unpleasant. "For some of us, it's about duty and sacrifice. For others..." She let the sentence trail off, her gaze flicking to you.

Daemon's hand tightened on his wine glass. "For others?"

"Oh, I don't mean anything by it. Only that some people come to this family with a different understanding of what it means to be a Targaryen." She smiled at you. "No offense, my dear. I'm sure your background has given you a unique perspective. Your parents were hard workers, weren't they? So admirable. So...humble."

The word 'humble' was delivered with the same inflection she might have used for 'contagious.'

"It's true," you said, keeping your voice level. "They valued education and hard work. I'm very proud of them."

"Oh, as you should be. It's just that some families have a different kind of history. The Hightowers, for instance, have been serving the realm, metaphorically speaking, for generations. It's a different kind of upbringing. A different set of expectations."

Daemon opened his mouth, but you put your hand on his arm, stopping him. This was your battle. You'd let him fight it yesterday, but today was different. Today, Alicent had crossed a line she didn't even seem to realize was there.

"You're right," you said, and something in your tone made the entire table go quiet. "Our upbringings were different. My parents taught me that a person's worth comes from their character and their actions, not from their name or their ancestors. They taught me to judge people by what they do, not by what family they were born into."

Alicent's smile flickered. "I didn't mean..."

"And you're also right that I came to this family as an outsider. I didn't grow up with wealth or privilege. Everything I have, I earned. My education, my career, my reputation." You leaned forward slightly, holding her gaze. "So when I speak about legacy, I'm not talking about inheriting something from people who died centuries ago. I'm talking about building something. Creating something. Leaving something behind that's actually yours."

The silence that followed was deafening.

Alicent's face had gone very still. You'd hit a nerve, maybe the nerve. Because for all her talk of legacy and tradition, what had Alicent actually built? She'd married into power. She'd leveraged her father's connections. She'd maneuvered and schemed and positioned herself, but at the end of the day, her influence was borrowed. Secondhand. Dependent entirely on her husband's willingness to indulge her.

You, on the other hand, had built something real. Something that would exist even if you walked away from the Targaryen name tomorrow.

And she knew it.

"Well," Viserys said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I think we can all agree that family is important, in all its forms. Perhaps we should move on to dessert."

Daemon cornered you in the hallway outside the restroom ten minutes later.

"That," he said, backing you against the wall with a look that was equal parts pride and hunger, "was the most attractive thing I have ever seen."

"I probably shouldn't have said it."

"You absolutely should have said it. You should say it again. Louder. I want to record it and play it at the next board meeting." His hands were on your waist, his body pressing against yours in a way that was decidedly inappropriate for a public hallway. "The look on her face. Gods. I'm going to remember that look for the rest of my life."

"Daemon, someone could walk by."

"Let them." He kissed your neck. "Let them see. Let them all see. My wife, the Hightower-slayer. My brilliant, terrifying, magnificent wife."

"I didn't slay her. I just pointed out the obvious."

"You gutted her. With words. In front of everyone." He pulled back, his eyes gleaming with awe. "Do you know how long I've been trying to do that? Years. Decades. And you managed it in thirty seconds."

"She started it."

"She did. And you finished it." He kissed you properly then, deep and thorough, his hands tightening on your waist. "I have never wanted you more than I do right now."

"Daemon!"

"Say we'll leave early. Say we'll go back to the room and I can show you exactly how much I appreciate you."

"People are waiting for dessert."

"Sod dessert." His voice dropped to a murmur against your ear. "Come with me. Please."

The 'please' did it. it was the last day of the vacation anyway.

The realtor, a nervous woman named Patricia with a helmet of honey-blonde hair, fumbled with the lockbox on the iron gate. You watched her with the placid, predatory patience of a well-fed cat, your arm linked through Daemon’s. His bespoke charcoal suit was a bastion of brutalist elegance against the quaint, tree-lined street of Queen Visenya's Hill. He had promised you he'd agree to moving away from Targaryen ancestral manor and now he was fulfilling it.

“Now, this is a classic Federal-style townhouse,” Patricia chirped, finally conquering the lock. “Original crown moldings, a chef’s kitchen, and four bedrooms on the upper floors. The lower level has a separate entrance, perfect for live-in staff, a nanny suite, or a very private home office.”

Daemon hummed. “A very private home office,” he murmured, his lips near your temple. “Think of the nefarious plotting I could get up to.”

“You can plot nefariously in any room, darling. You once orchestrated a hostile takeover of a biotech firm from our en-suite water closet,” you reminded him, your tone one of fond reminiscence.

The interior was a study in desperate neutrality; walls painted a shade of beige so profoundly bland it felt aggressive. “Kill-me-now greige,” you diagnosed quietly. Patricia’s smile tightened, but she soldiered on, leading you through a parlor with a fireplace that she promised was “original to the 1840s.”

Daemon ran a finger over the mantle, inspected the pad of his fingertip for dust, and found none. He gave a single, slow blink of approval. “Acceptable bone structure,” he declared. “Nothing a therapeutic dose of color and the removal of that light fixture couldn’t cure.” He gestured with his chin toward a chandelier that looked like a tumbleweed had gotten into a fight with a box of crystals. “It looks like something Alicent Hightower would choose if she was suddenly possessed by the spirit of a disco ball.”

A snort escaped you before you could stop it. “Don’t be so unkind to disco balls. They, at least, have a purpose. I heard she’s redoing the Hightower’s vacation house in the Summer Isles using only shades of ‘seafoam’ and ‘driftwood.’ The entire place will look like a memorial for a dead mermaid.”

“A tacky dead mermaid,” Daemon amended. “With a penchant for jute rugs.”

Patricia, wisely, said nothing, just gestured toward the grand staircase. As you ascended, you continued your post-mortem of your social circle. The realtor’s hushed commentary about “natural light” and “updated plumbing” was just the backing track to your own, far more entertaining conversation.

“I think the Laenor situation is settled, by the way,” Daemon said as he opened a closet door on the landing, peered inside, and shut it. “He’s bought a villa, as far from Corlys’ shipping empire as physically possible.”

“Good for him,” you said, and meant it. “The only interesting thing about the Velaryons was always their money, and even that’s managed with a kind of tedious nobility. Speaking of tedious nobility, did you see the engagement announcement from Jason Lannister? Fifth time’s the charm, apparently. The fiancée’s photo looked like a hostage situation.”

“Every photo with a Lannister is a hostage situation,” Daemon replied smoothly, his hand finding the small of your back and guiding you into the primary suite. It was a grand room with a bow window overlooking a walled garden. “Better,” he stated. It was the highest praise he’d given a room all week.

“And…the children?” Patricia finally ventured, sensing an opening. “The two secondary bedrooms on this floor are wonderfully proportioned for young boys. Lots of closet space.”

You exchanged a look with Daemon, a silent, private conversation spoken in the minute language of long-term, slightly-bitchy intimacy. He raised an eyebrow; you gave a microscopic shrug. It was your call.

“Toys,” you said, turning back to Patricia, your diamonds flashing in the afternoon sun. “Not children. The bedrooms will be for their toys.”

Patricia’s mouth opened and closed. “I…toys?”

“Yes. Our sons, Aegon and Viserys, have a very serious collection of miniature dragon figurines that require their own climate-controlled habitat,” you explained, as if discussing a minor Picasso collection. “And the younger one has developed an obsession with building train sets that, according to our current nanny, are achieving ‘sentience.’ They need space to sprawl. The children merely camp out with them.”

Daemon drifted toward the window, looking down at the garden, but you knew he was listening, a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. The memory of your early, more volatile days was an old, familiar ghost. He’d proposed after three months, a fierce, sudden, and wholly terrifying event involving a vintage ring, his grandmother’s, not the one from the Royce fiasco, and a declaration that you’d “ruined him for sensible conversation.” You’d made him wait three years, a purgatory he’d endured with ill grace and extravagant, guilt-inducing gifts. You’d needed proof that the Daemon Targaryen who was a walking PR disaster, with one annulment for “unconsummated barrenness” and a broken-off engagement to a girl barely out of college, was not the same man who now looked at you like you’d personally hung the moon beside his credit rating. The birth of Aegon, and then Viserys eleven months later, had been your final, non-negotiable statement.

“This is a separate floor for staff, you said?” you called to Patricia, already gliding out of the room to inspect the lower level. Daemon followed, a silent, supportive storm cloud at your shoulder. The stairs led to a compact, smartly designed apartment with its own kitchenette, a bedroom, a small living area, and a private street entrance.

“Perfect for a maid and Carwyn,” Daemon murmured, referring to his ancient, ill-tempered butler who had been with the family since before his birth, or at least since Jaehaerys' administration. “He can polish the silver and plot my brother’s ruin in total isolation.”

You walked through the small, empty rooms, your heels clicking a decisive rhythm on the hardwood. No more penthouse you were currently staying at after hastily moving out of the manor. No more elevator rides with the tiresome Mrs. Redwyne from 14B, who wanted to circulate yet another petition about the contentious football field. No more forced pleasantries with the HOA president whose name you refused to learn. Here, you could have Greta, your terrifying maid, ensconced on the ground floor, a silent guardian against intruders and door-to-door solicitors. Here, your world would be self-contained, vertical, and utterly under your own control.

You stopped in the center of the empty living area and turned to face your husband. The afternoon light caught the silver-gold of his hair, the sharp, aristocratic planes of his face that time and fatherhood had only made more severe and, annoyingly, more attractive.

“Well?” he asked.

You looked from the polished nickel of the kitchen faucet to the clean, unblemished lines of the walls. It was a blank canvas, a fortress of potential. You thought of Alicent’s doomed seafoam nightmare. You thought of the Velaryons’ gilded, boring perfection. This could be yours, a monument to your own exacting, impeccable taste.

“We’ll gut the kitchen, of course,” you said, a slow, razor-sharp smile spreading across your face. “And I want the entire primary suite soundproofed. For Aegon’s violin practice.”

Daemon’s answering smile was a flash of pure, wicked delight. He turned to the realtor, who had clearly witnessed more than she’d bargained for. “Patricia, darling,” he purred, pulling his checkbook from his inside pocket with a practiced flourish. “Let’s not be tedious about the asking price. We have a football-field-free future to secure, and I’m suddenly desperate to get home and make a generous donation to the local homeowners’ association that strictly forbids recreational centers.”

Patricia, to her credit, had the good sense to look mildly terrified when Daemon produced his checkbook. It was leather-bound, monogrammed with his initials in silver, and it had the same effect on real estate agents that a bloodied steak had on a shark. Her pupils dilated. Her breathing shallowed. She was already calculating her commission, mentally redecorating her own little condo in a palette that wasn't "despair and deferred maintenance."

You, however, placed a perfectly manicured hand on your husband's wrist. The hand that held the checkbook. The hand that was attached to the man who had, on your third date, tried to buy you a minor league baseball team because you'd offhandedly mentioned the mascot was "marginally amusing."

"Darling," you said, your voice a silk-wrapped ice pick. "We are not making an offer on the first acceptable property. What would that say about us?"

Daemon paused, his pen hovering over the check. "That we are decisive, impeccably tasteful, and terrifyingly efficient?"

"That we're desperate," you corrected, plucking the pen from his fingers. "And we are never desperate. We are the opposite of desperate. We are the people other people are desperate to impress. Patricia," you added, turning to the realtor, who flinched as if you'd pointed a weapon at her, "we'll be in touch. We have others to see."

"Others?" Patricia's voice cracked. "I wasn't aware there were others on the schedule."

"There are now," Daemon said, tucking his checkbook back into his jacket with the air of a man who had just been denied a small but satisfying murder. "We'll require something with more…character. This has good bones, but it's been sanitized within an inch of its life. I felt like I was touring a mausoleum designed by a committee of accountants."

"A mausoleum with excellent natural light," you added, because you were not a monster. "Thank you for that. Do send us the updated listings by end of day. And Patricia? The next property we see should not look as though it's been staged by someone whose only reference for interior design is a catalog for people who've given up on joy."

Patricia nodded, a jerky, marionette-like motion, and you swept out of the townhouse with Daemon's hand resting on the small of your back, his thumb tracing small circles against the silk of your blouse. Behind you, you heard her exhale for what sounded like the first time in an hour.

"That was cruel," Daemon murmured as you descended the front steps to the waiting car, a sleek black Mercedes that your younger son had christened "the Batmobile" and which Carwyn, Daemon's butler, maintained with a religious fervor usually reserved for holy relics. "I liked it very much. You're magnificent when you're withholding."

"I'm always magnificent," you said, sliding into the leather interior. "Sometimes I'm just magnificent in more obvious ways."

The partition between the front and back seats was already raised. By the time Daemon settled beside you, Carwyn was pulling smoothly into traffic, his ancient, liver-spotted hands steady on the wheel. He had been with the Targaryen family since before Daemon was born, a cadaverous Welshman with the disposition of a rainy funeral and the unshakeable loyalty of a man who had seen everything and judged all of it harshly.

"Home, sir? Madam?" Carwyn's voice crackled through the intercom.

"For now," Daemon said. "We'll be going out again. My wife has decided we need to see 'others.'"

A pause. Then: "Very good, sir. Shall I prepare a list of suitable alternatives, or will Madam be handling the selection personally?"

"The latter, Carwyn," you said. "But your discretion is, as always, appreciated."

"Of course, Madam." The intercom clicked off, and you could practically hear the old man's silent approval. Carwyn had been skeptical of you at first, back when you were merely the woman who had somehow convinced the most notoriously unmarriageable Targaryen to wait three years for an answer. He had watched you with the gimlet eye of a palace guard assessing a potential assassin. But you had won him over eventually, partly through your treatment of Daemon, which was affectionate but never indulgent, and partly through your treatment of the household staff, which was demanding but never cruel. The maid, Greta, had once confided that Carwyn considered you "the best of the lot," which, given that the previous contenders included a woman Daemon had literally fled on horseback during their wedding night (or so family legend claimed) and a university student he'd been engaged to for approximately fifteen minutes before she came to her senses, was not as high a bar as it sounded.

"Tell me about the others," Daemon said, his hand finding your knee. His wedding band glinted in the afternoon light, a simple platinum circle.

You pulled out your phone, scrolling through the listings Patricia had sent over the previous week. The townhouse on Queen Visenya's Hill had been promising. Secluded entrance, staff quarters on a separate floor, no shared walls with neighbors who wanted to discuss "community initiatives" and "resident input." But it had been too…finished. Too eager to please. You wanted a project, something you could shape into a weapon pointed directly at the heart of everyone who had ever doubted you.

"There's a converted carriage house near Baelor's Sept," you said, reading off your phone. "Four bedrooms, original exposed brick, a courtyard garden that's completely invisible from the street."

"Too small," Daemon said immediately. "Where would we put the dragons? The collection. Aegon's figurines. Viserys' trains. They need space to breathe. The nanny says the train set has started developing a rudimentary signaling system. She's afraid it'll unionise."

You snorted, a most unladylike sound that you would never have permitted in front of anyone but Daemon. "The day Viserys' trains unionise is the day we're officially failing as parents. He's four. He should be teaching them the value of hierarchical authority, not collective bargaining."

"I'll have a word with him. 'Son,'" Daemon intoned, deepening his voice to a parody of paternal gravitas, "'while I applaud your initiative in creating a miniature worker's cooperative, I must remind you that the Targaryens have always been management, never labour. Your great-great-grandfather didn't conquer seven kingdoms just so you could negotiate with a Thomas the Tank Engine.'"

"Thomas is management," you pointed out. "He's the face of the operation. Sir Topham Hatt is clearly the owner of the means of production."

"Gods, I love you." Daemon said it the way other people commented on the weather: matter-of-fact, slightly bored, utterly sincere. "You're the only person I've ever met who can make Marxist analysis of children's television sound like pillow talk."

"Flatterer." You leaned into him, your shoulder pressing against his. The car hummed beneath you, carrying you through streets lined with cherry trees that were just beginning to think about blooming. Spring in the capital was tentative, suspicious, winter always threatening to come roaring back like an unwelcome relative who'd forgotten their medication. But today was warm enough, bright enough, that you could almost believe the season was sincere.

"What about the other Federal-style?" Daemon asked. "The one with the ballroom?"

"The ballroom that the previous owners converted into a home theater," you said, making a face. "With reclining seats upholstered in what appeared to be the skin of a murdered Muppet. No. I refuse to inherit someone else's crimes against taste."

"It could be restored."

"It could be exorcised, which is what it would require. I'm fairly certain the ghost of Jim Henson would haunt us. And he'd be right to."

The car slowed, turning into the underground garage of the building. The penthouse took up an entire floor, a sprawling glass-and-steel aerie with views and the sort of security that required retinal scans and a man named Dimitri who had, according to Daemon, "a very particular set of skills." You had loved it once, had reveled in the sheer improbable luxury of it, the way you could stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows and feel like you owned the city. But that was before Mrs. Redwyne. Before the football field debate. Before you'd realized that living in a building with other people meant occasionally having to acknowledge that other people existed.

Carwyn parked the Mercedes in its designated spot, next to Daemon's Aston Martin (weekend car) and your Range Rover (mom car, though you refused to call it that, preferring "tactical transport for the heirs"). The elevator ride to the penthouse was swift and silent.

"We're home!" Daemon called out, his voice echoing through the open-plan living space. "Alert the media. Prepare the fatted calf."

There was a patter of small feet, and then a blur of silver-blond hair launched itself at Daemon's legs. "Daddy!" Aegon, already possessed of his father's talent for dramatic entrances, wrapped himself around Daemon's knees with the tenacity of a barnacle. "Did you buy a house? Did you buy a house with a pool? Viserys said you wouldn't buy a house with a pool because pools are 'an insurance nightmare,' but I told him he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's only four."

"Viserys said what?" You exchanged a look with Daemon over Aegon's head. "Who taught him the phrase 'insurance nightmare'?"

"Carwyn," Aegon said promptly, betraying the butler without a second thought. "He said it when I asked if we could get a trampoline. He said trampolines are an insurance nightmare and also an orthopedic one, and then he said something in Welsh that I'm pretty sure was a swear."

"Carwyn!" Daemon bellowed, but there was no heat in it. "Stop teaching our children to be risk-averse!"

From somewhere deeper in the penthouse, a dry voice drifted back: "Someone must, sir. It certainly won't be you."

"What does that mean?" Aegon asked.

"Nothing you need to repeat in front of your grandmother," Daemon said.

You left them to their father-son bonding and went in search of your younger child, finding Viserys in the playroom, surrounded by what could only be described as a transportation infrastructure project of staggering ambition. Train tracks looped and spiraled across every available surface, climbing over furniture and disappearing into tunnels made of picture books. In the center of it all sat Viserys, a chubby four-year-old with the concentrated frown of a dictator reviewing his five-year plan.

"Mama," he said, not looking up from the complicated switching mechanism he was manipulating. "The Number 7 express is running behind schedule. There's been a derailment near the crayon box."

"Casualties?" you asked, stepping carefully over a bridge that appeared to be constructed from Duplo blocks and sheer willpower.

"Minimal. But the passengers are becoming restless." He finally looked up, his violet eyes, Daemon's eyes, exactly Daemon's eyes, solemn and slightly accusatory. "You were gone a long time. Did you buy a house?"

"We're considering our options," you said, lowering yourself onto a tufted ottoman that had somehow escaped the train takeover. "There was a promising townhouse, but it wasn't quite right."

"Did it have a yard?"

"A small garden. And a separate floor for Greta and Carwyn."

Viserys considered this. "So they wouldn't have to ride in the elevator with the football lady anymore?"

"The football lady," you repeated, making a mental note to have another conversation with Carwyn about appropriate topics of discussion with preschoolers. "Yes, that was part of the appeal."

"Good," Viserys said, with the finality of a judge handing down a verdict. "She was very loud. She said the football field would 'build community,' but I don't want community. I want trains."

"My sweet boy," you said, reaching out to smooth his silver-blond hair. "You have no idea how much I agree with you."

An hour later, the children had been bathed (by Greta, who accomplished this task with the efficiency of a military operation and the warmth of a glacier), fed (by Carwyn, who believed that children's palates should be educated early and who had taught both boys to appreciate a proper Welsh rarebit), and tucked into their respective beds with their respective menageries of stuffed animals. You had changed out of your house-hunting ensemble, a Dior blazer, tailored trousers, the pearls Daemon had given you on your wedding day, and into softer clothes, a cashmere lounge set that made your skin look luminous. Daemon, similarly divested of his armor, was sprawled on the sectional in the living room, a glass of whiskey in his hand and a tablet in the other.

"Patricia sent more listings," he said as you settled beside him. "She's very eager. It's slightly pathetic."

"It's entirely pathetic but I respect the hustle." You took the tablet from him, scrolling through the properties. They all blurred together after a while: red brick, white columns, gourmet kitchens with islands the size of small countries, primary suites with walk-in closets that could house a family of four. You'd seen so many versions of the same house that they'd started to feel interchangeable, like a chorus line of acceptable-but-uninspiring options. "Nothing," you said after a moment, setting the tablet aside. "They're all so…done. Finished. Ready for someone to move in and immediately start planning their next dinner party for people they secretly hate."

"That's exactly what we would do," Daemon pointed out.

"Yes, but we'd do it in a space we'd made our own. These houses belong to other people's taste. Other people's choices. I don't want to live in someone else's mistake."

Daemon was silent for a moment, swirling the whiskey in his glass. The ice clinked softly, the only sound besides the distant hum of the city outside. "You know," he said finally, "when you talk about other people's mistakes, you get a particular look. It's the same look you got when we first met. At that party. Do you remember?"

Of course you remembered. The party had been hosted by a friend of a friend of a lab partner, someone whose name you'd forgotten before the evening was over, a blur of expensive canapés and people with their noses turned up. You'd been invited as a congratulatory gesture, a nod to your recent defense, a chance to "network" in a world so far removed from academia that it might as well have been another planet. You'd worn a dress you'd bought on clearance and shoes that pinched, and you'd spent the first hour hovering near the bar, nursing a glass of wine and wondering how quickly you could escape without seeming rude.

And then Daemon Targaryen had materialized at your elbow, fresh from the wreckage of his engagement to Laena Velaryon, a scandal that had been dissected in every society page and gossip blog for months. He'd looked like a portrait of aristocratic ruin: devastatingly handsome, impeccably dressed, and radiating the kind of danger that sensible women spent their lives learning to avoid.

"You're the only person here who looks as miserable as I feel," he'd said. "Shall we be miserable together, or would you prefer to maintain a respectful distance from the evening's designated pariah?"

"I don't know," you'd said, surprising yourself with your own audacity. "Are you actually a pariah, or are you just playing one for the attention?"

He'd laughed, a sound that seemed to catch him off guard as much as it did you. "Both, probably. I excel at both."

"I've heard that about you."

"All terrible things, I hope."

"Terrible and numerous." You'd taken a sip of your wine, regarding him over the rim of the glass. "They say you left your first wife on your wedding night. Fled on horseback. Very gothic."

"An exaggeration. I left the morning after. And it was a motorcycle, not a horse. More modern. More dignified."

"And the fiancée? Laena Velaryon?"

Pain had flickered behind his eyes, either out of anger or damage, not shame. "Laena," he'd said carefully, "is a lovely girl who realized, about six weeks into our engagement, that she didn't actually want to marry a decade older man who was still technically married to someone else. It was a moment of clarity that I wish I'd had first. It would have saved us both a great deal of trouble."

"How magnanimous of you."

"Is it? I thought I was being honest. I'm told that's not my strong suit."

"It's not," you'd agreed. "But you're doing all right so far."

He'd looked at you then carefully. "You just finished your doctorate, I've heard," he'd said.

"Last week. Hence the party. Hence the wine. Hence my imminent escape."

"Don't escape yet," he'd said, and his voice had dropped, lower and more intimate, the voice of a man who was used to getting what he wanted but who, in this moment, was asking rather than demanding. "Stay. Be miserable with me. I promise I'll make it worth your while."

And he had. Not that night, you'd excused yourself after another hour, refusing his offer of a ride home, refusing his offer of dinner the following evening, refusing everything until you'd had time to look him up properly and catalogue every single one of his romantic disasters.

A quick annulment from a wife he'd barely touched. A string of affairs with women whose names you recognized from magazine covers. An engagement to a twenty-year-old that had imploded so spectacularly that the tabloids were still running retrospectives. By any rational measure, Daemon Targaryen was the worst possible choice for a woman who had just spent years earning a degree that proved she was excellent at making good decisions.

But he'd called. And texted. And sent flowers, not the generic roses you'd expected, but a bizarre and charming arrangement of succulents and air plants that had arrived with a card reading, "These seemed more your speed. Low-maintenance. Self-sufficient. Impossible to kill. -D." You'd put them on your desk and found yourself smiling every time you looked at them.

He'd taken you to dinner three weeks later to an exclusive restaurant. You'd ordered the tasting menu and argued about politics, and he'd listened when you talked about your research, asking questions that proved he'd actually been paying attention. By the end of the night, you'd revised your assessment of him from "dangerous" to "dangerous but interesting," which was, you realized in retrospect, the first step on a very slippery slope.

"Of course I remember," you said now, in the living room of the penthouse you were preparing to leave. "You were wearing a Tom Ford suit and an expression of existential ennui. I thought you were the most ridiculous person I'd ever met."

"Really?"

"Now I know for a fact you're the most ridiculous person I've ever met. I have more evidence."

He set his whiskey down on the side table, turning to face you with the focus that had, over the years, become as familiar as your own heartbeat. "What was it?" he asked. "What finally convinced you? Three years is a long time to keep a man waiting. I'm not complaining," he added quickly. "I'm curious. I've always been curious."

You considered the question. There were a dozen answers you could give: the way he'd shown up at your apartment at 3 AM when you'd texted him about a breakthrough in your research, bearing champagne and a remarkably coherent understanding of the topic. The way he'd defended you against a condescending colleague at a university function, his voice so cold and cutting that the man had actually backed away. The way he'd introduced you to his family, with the words, "This is the woman I'm going to marry. Try not to be an arse about it." (Viserys Sr., to his credit, had not been an arse, though he had asked you some pointed questions about your intentions toward his "disastrous brother.")

But the truth was simpler, stranger, and harder to explain.

"It was the succulents," you said.

Daemon blinked. "The succulents."

"The ones you sent after we met. The ones with the card that said I was impossible to kill." You smiled and bumped his shoulder with your forehead. "Everyone else who'd ever pursued me had treated me like something fragile. A hothouse flower that needed to be handled with care. You were the first person who looked at me and saw someone who could survive just about anything. Including you."

Daemon reached for your hand, his fingers intertwining with yours. His palm was warm, his grip firm but gentle. "You were right," he said. "You did survive me. You survived my family, my reputation, my first marriage, my disastrous engagement, three years of me asking you to marry me at increasingly inconvenient moments..."

"The proposal after my first conference was a low point."

"I stand by it. You were brilliant. I was overwhelmed. It seemed like the appropriate response."

"My committee didn't think so."

"Your committee was composed of small-minded academics who wouldn't know a grand romantic gesture if it bit them on their collective tenure." He lifted your hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to your knuckles.

"You were trying to make a point."

"The point was that I was losing my mind," Daemon said. "The point was that I had never, in my entire life, wanted anything the way I wanted you. Not the company, not the money, not the respect of my family, none of it. I would have burned it all down if you'd asked me to. I still would."

"I know," you said softly. "That's why I married you. Not because of the rings, the proposals or the dramatic declarations."

The next morning was gray and drizzly, the cherry blossoms drooping under the weight of the rain. You woke to the sound of Aegon singing, loudly and off-key, what appeared to be a song about dragons and pancakes, and to the sight of Daemon sprawled beside you, his hair mussed against the pillowcase, his face softer in sleep than it ever was in waking. You allowed yourself a moment to look at him. Then you prodded him in the ribs.

"Wake up. We have another house to see at ten."

He groaned, rolling away from you. "Cancel it. I've decided we're living here forever. We'll soundproof the walls, barricade the doors, and pretend the rest of humanity doesn't exist."

"We can't. Mrs. Redwyne is circulating another petition. This time it's about the recycling bins."

"Those recycling bins are the bane of my existence," Daemon muttered into his pillow. "Last week she cornered me in the lobby to discuss whether we should switch to a single-stream system. I've never been so bored in my life. I've been to tax seminars that were more engaging."

"Which is exactly why we're looking at townhouses. If we have our own property, the only person we have to discuss recycling with is Carwyn, and he's already made his position clear."

"What is his position?"

"He believes that anyone who can't be bothered to separate their glass from their plastic deserves the societal collapse that will inevitably follow."

Daemon lifted his head from the pillow, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "You know, when I hired him, I thought I was getting a butler. I didn't realize I was getting a Welsh prophet of environmental doom."

"You got both. It was a two-for-one deal." You swung your legs out of bed, your feet finding the heated floor, a luxury you would miss, you had to admit, when you finally left the penthouse. "Get up. Get dressed. We're meeting Patricia at ten, and I refuse to be late. It makes us seem pompous."

By the time you descended to the garage, you were dressed and armored in a forest green coat, your hair swept back in a low knot that had taken Greta exactly four minutes to execute but looked like it had required a team of professionals. Daemon had chosen a slate gray suit with a vest, because he believed that real estate agents, like opposing counsel and minor nobility, should be intimidated by one's tailoring choices.

Carwyn had the Mercedes idling at the entrance, his face as expressionless as ever but his eyes alert. "Good morning, Madam. Sir. The young masters are with Greta, learning writing grammar. She believes they should be able to conjugate verbs already."

"Northern efficiency," Daemon said, sliding into the backseat. "It's terrifying and I respect it."

The drive was uneventful, the rain washing out the city. Patricia was waiting outside the property, a townhouse on a quiet street lined with magnolias just beginning to bud. She had traded her helmet-like hairstyle for an updo that looked slightly less lacquered, and she was clutching a tablet.

"Good morning!" she chirped, her professional cheerfulness strained at the edges. "This is a unique property. It's been on the market for a few months because the owners did a very… specific renovation. But I think it might suit your needs perfectly."

"Specific?" you repeated, one eyebrow rising. "Define specific."

Patricia's smile flickered. "Perhaps it's best if I let you see for yourself."

The interior of the townhouse was, you had to admit, unlike anything you'd seen in your weeks of searching. The previous owners had apparently decided that what a historic property needed was a complete transformation into what you could only describe as "Tuscan villa meets nightclub." The walls were covered in Venetian plaster in shades of gold and terracotta. The floors were a dizzying pattern of marble tiles. And the light fixtures, dear Gods, the light fixtures, were wrought iron monstrosities that looked like they'd been salvaged from a medieval dungeon and then bedazzled by a particularly aggressive craft enthusiast.

"Oh my," Daemon breathed. "It's like someone weaponized bad taste."

"The kitchen," Patricia said weakly, "has been featured in several design magazines."

"For what?" you asked. "As a cautionary tale?"

The kitchen, when you reached it, was somehow worse than you'd imagined. The cabinets were a distressed orange that reminded you of nothing so much as a decaying pumpkin. The backsplash was a mosaic of tiny tiles in colors that had no business being adjacent to one another. And the center island, a massive slab of what appeared to be actual boulders mortared together, looked less like a cooking surface and more like an altar where ancient civilizations had performed unspeakable rituals.

"At least the appliances are new," Patricia offered, her voice small.

"The appliances," Daemon said, opening the refrigerator, "are the only things in this room that don't make me want to file a police report. What were the owners thinking? What were their influences? Was it a dare?"

"The owners," you said, tapping at your phone, "appear to be a couple who met while working on a reality television show about home renovations. They started their own design firm. Their motto is 'Your Home, Unleashed.'"

"I don't want my home unleashed. I want my home leashed. Muzzled. Possibly sedated."

But as you moved through the rest of the house, something strange began to happen. Beneath the truly horrific decorating choices, you started to see the bones of the property. The layout was excellent: a formal living room and dining room on the main floor, a library and family room on the second, bedrooms on the third and fourth, and crucially, a full basement apartment with its own entrance that could easily be converted into quarters for Greta and Carwyn. The windows were original and beautifully maintained. The floors, hidden under mosaic tile, were solid hardwood. And there was a roof deck with views that would be absolutely stunning if you were standing on something other than what appeared to be a shade of green that didn't exist in nature.

"We'd have to gut the entire thing," you said, standing in the primary suite, which was painted a shade of purple so aggressive it seemed to vibrate. "Every surface. Every fixture. Every single trace of the previous owners removed and exorcised."

Daemon, who had been inspecting a closet that was lined with leopard-print wallpaper, turned to look at you. "You're interested."

"I'm intrigued. There's a difference."

"There's always a difference with you." He crossed the room to stand beside you, his shoulder brushing yours. "But you see it, don't you? What it could be."

You did. Stripped of its faux nightmare, the house would be glorious: a showcase of restrained elegance, a monument to good taste, a private enclave where no neighbor could ever ask you about football fields or recycling protocols or community initiatives. You could already picture the library, walls lined with built-in shelves, a fireplace that actually worked, comfortable chairs that didn't look like they'd been stolen from a Cheesecake Factory. You could picture the children's rooms, the train tracks spreading across hardwood floors, the dragon figurines arrayed on custom shelving. You could picture the staff quarters, Greta's austere efficiency and Carwyn's dry disapproval contained on their own floor, close enough to summon but separate enough to ignore.

"The asking price is too high," you said, your voice cool and businesslike. "It's been on the market for months. The renovation costs alone would be astronomical. No one in their right mind would pay what they're asking."

Patricia, who had been hovering in the doorway with the air of a witness to a car crash, perked up. "The sellers are…motivated. They've already purchased a property in Lys. Something about wanting to be closer to a 'creative community' that 'embraces their vision.'"

"I'm sure they'll find the brothel architectures very welcoming," Daemon said. "Make an offer. Ten percent below asking, with a sixty-day close and a contingency that they take every single light fixture with them."

"Every single one?" Patricia asked, looking at the wrought iron-and-crystal monstrosity dangling from the ceiling. "What about the one in the foyer? It's…it's a statement piece."

"It's a statement that should never have been made," you said. "They can take the furniture, too. And the mosaic backsplash. And whatever that thing is in the powder room." You'd found a sculpture in the downstairs bathroom that you were fairly certain was meant to be a mermaid. "In fact, add a clause that any surface that can't be painted over must be removed at their expense. We're buying the bones, not the butchery."

That evening, you gathered the family in the penthouse's formal dining room, which, despite its name, was used primarily for pizza and negotiations, to discuss the potential move. Aegon and Viserys sat in their booster seats, their hair still damp from their baths, their faces attentive in the way of children who sensed that important things were being discussed and might, if they played their cards right, result in presents.

"We found a house," Daemon announced, his tone the same one he used for board meetings. "It needs a lot of work, but it has good bones and a garden and a separate apartment for Carwyn."

"Will the apartment have a kitchen?" Viserys asked, because of course that was his first question. "Carwyn says he misses cooking on a real stove. He says the induction cooktop in the penthouse is 'an abomination before Gods and men.'"

"I'm sure he did," you said. "And yes, the apartment will have a gas range and a full kitchen and a door that locks so Carwyn has somewhere to escape from all of you."

"He doesn't want to escape from us," Aegon said, with the wounded dignity of a child who considered himself universally beloved. "He said we're the least terrible children he's ever worked for."

"That's the nicest thing Carwyn has ever said about anyone," Daemon observed. "When I was your age, he called me a 'malevolent imp' and told my father I needed to be sent to military school."

"Would you have liked military school?" Aegon asked, his eyes wide.

"Absolutely not. I would have been expelled within a week. Probably for insubordination. Possibly for arson." Daemon's expression grew misty. "It would have been fun."

The children, sensing that the conversation was veering into territory that might result in them being sent to bed without dessert, refocused their attention on the more practical aspects of the move. Would they have to share a room? (No. And in fact, the new house would have a special room for the dragons and a special room for the trains, which sent Viserys into a state of such profound joy that he actually stopped moving for a full thirty seconds.) Would they still have a park nearby? (Yes, but a private garden that was more selective about its visitors, which made perfect sense to both children.) Would Mrs. Redwyne be there?

"No," you said with quiet ferocity. "Mrs. Redwyne will not be there. There will be no Mrs. Redwyne. There will be no petitions, no HOA meetings, no one who wants to discuss the relative merits of turf versus natural grass. There will only be us, in our townhouse, with our staff, our possessions and our absolute refusal to engage with anyone who doesn't meet our exacting standards."

The children exchanged a look. Then Aegon shrugged. "Okay," he said. "Can we have dessert now?"

Once the children were asleep and the penthouse was quiet, you stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the city. It glittered in the darkness, a constellation of lights and lives and people who were not you, who did not share your taste or your standards or your profound desire to be left alone with the family you had chosen and the man you had, against all odds and better judgment, decided to trust.

Daemon's arms wrapped around you from behind, his chin resting on your shoulder. "Silver for your thoughts," he murmured.

"They're worth considerably more than a silver."

"A thousand silver, then. A million. My entire liquid net worth and the Aston Martin."

You leaned back against him, allowing yourself the rare luxury of relaxation. "Nothing. I was thinking about the party again. The night we met."

Part 3: coming soon...

a/n: Comment if you'd like to be added to the taglist. Also, I lowkey hate the title of this fic, so if anyone has a better idea, let me know.

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You shake your head as you sit alone by the tiny oasis, a reflective puddle in a sand ocean. You hiked south at dusk for water and to put more distance between you and the remaining tributes, but now you’re wondering how you’re going to keep warm with no fresh bloody camel skin and no friend to huddle against for warmth. Dimly—not daring to hope for it too much—you had wondered if Roosevelt might meet you here again, but there’s no sign of him.

Aemond can’t be wrong. Aemond is never wrong.

He’s right about the curse of the pharaohs, and he’s right about the strategy for you to win, and he’s right about the fact that there’s another world out there beyond Panem and he’s going to find it. And maybe…if you win…in a decade you’ll have your own glass tomb of treasures piled up to the ceiling, and the Capitol will have rubbed off every sparkling fleck of you, and you can flee and cross the ocean and meet Aemond someplace where you can both be free.

You put on poor long-dead Calico’s sweatshirt and shiver under the moonlight as the pyramid calls to you from across the desert, promising you obvious things—warmth, shelter, food, survival—but also riches that cannot be put into words. It is bewitching. It is hungry.

Because of what Aemond once told you, you know that burrowing under the sand will only make you colder. Instead, you rip branches from the low scraggly shrubs that surround the oasis and make a crude cot to sleep on, then stuff a layer of parched greenery into the space between your two sweatshirts for more insulation.

You curl up and tremble as the night wind blows over you, and after a while a vulture delivers you a blanket, thick fleece, blue like a sapphire.

Here’s who is still alive: Brookite from District 1, Roosevelt from District 2, Tendo from District 3, both tributes from District 4, Gotha from District 9, and Montgomery and Isla from District 11. One third of the field is left, but that number will fall precipitously now.

“Get some sleep, Aemond,” Aegon says, yawning. He just woke up from another nap, snoring with a throw blanket covering him up to his chin and his sandals kicked up onto the back of the chair in front of him. “I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

Aemond ignores this and stares intently at the screen, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his long, interlaced fingers.

“It’s going very quickly,” Charm muses as she sips champagne. With her other hand, she twists absentmindedly at the silver Loch Ness Monster pin fastened to her dress. She’s had a few outfit changes; she is currently wearing a short gown made of gold lace starfish, glittering fabric, large cutouts revealing perfectly tanned skin. Her earrings are fishhooks speared through live brittle stars that wriggle and slap at her throat with their skinny arms. Charm pretends not to notice. It’s the only way to survive here; learn how to sparkle, and do it without complaint. She always gives the District 4 tributes the same advice: You could waste your time being bitter about the cards you’ve been dealt. Or you could have a good attitude about it. Work hard. Be productive. Be grateful.

“Aemond, go to sleep!” Aegon says again. He waves for a servant to bring him dinner. A young man approaches with two plates to choose from: prime rib and a potato or a whole lobster and a corncob, served with a ramekin of melted butter. “None of the other kids are anywhere near her, she’s fine!”

“They won’t let her stay there,” Aemond murmurs, still gazing at the screen as it rotates between the remaining tributes. Presently, Isla is stalking the slight District 9 girl, Gotha, as they both approach the pyramid. If any of the other mentors have realized that it’s the tomb that is killing those who enter—the black marks that appear on a victim’s fingertips and slowly spread upwards, the rot, the curse—they haven’t figured out how to communicate that to their tributes in a way they can understand.

Aegon has opted for the prime rib; he gets lobster at home. The servant begins to leave when Charm calls out: “I’ll take the lobster, boy. Yes, thank you. And another round of champagne for everybody, please. And more popcorn. And napkins. And do I see that Citadella has lovely plump maraschino cherries bobbing around in her champagne? Why does she get those and not us? Fetch me some too...”

“I think she’s okay until morning,” Aegon tells Aemond, his meat bleeding as he cuts it.

“They need to force her towards the pyramid. They need a show. She’s made herself a main character, the audience will expect a full arc. And they need to do it while there are still competitors alive for her to fight. So they’ll do it soon. I’m just trying to figure out how.”

The cannon fires; Isla has caught Gotha and slit her throat with her short curved sword. Under the moonlight of the arena, the blood is black instead of red as it soaks into the sand. Across the Amphitheater, the District 9 team rises from their chairs, sighing and somber. They leave in defeat, taking their plates of lobster and prime rib with them. Briefly, Aemond scans the rest of the seats; Jack catches his gaze and grins, cold eyes and shark teeth. Commodore is still alive, and healthy, and he has a spear. Aemond turns away.

“You’re lucky that Roosevelt kid isn’t still hanging around her,” Aegon says. “Or she’d be spilling all your secrets again.”

Aemond shakes his head. “No. Not now. Not anymore.” The end is near, and she wants to live.

Charm says brightly: “I’m just relieved Hawk finally dropped dead. Thank God for his lousy kidneys. I was worried Commodore was going to carry him all the way to the finish line, and then play rock paper scissors to decide who gets to win.”

On the green display screen mounted beneath the landline phone that connects each team to the Control Center, Aemond observes that her funds are running low. He was too generous with the gifts, probably. He couldn’t help it; he couldn’t stand to see her suffer. “I need to get her more money,” Aemond says.

“Do you?” Charm replies, her voice slurred with champagne and soft with sympathy.

“Yes.” He takes the red mobile phone out of the pocket hidden inside his black suit jacket. He begins scrolling through his contacts, deciding who to ask first. He does not consider the debt that will be incurred, the cost that will come due later, flesh and moans instead of gems and gold. He’ll pay anything.

“The blanket was a bit extravagant,” Charm mutters. A servant brings a fresh round of champagne—Aemond does not partake, but Charm and Aegon always drink his share without complaint—and she fishes out two glistening cherries from the gilded carbonated sea. She eats them, delicately dabs red juice from her lips with a napkin, tugs at her Loch Ness Monster pin again. Charm notices that Aemond is watching and smiles ruefully. “I always say I won’t get attached.”

“I know the feeling,” he replies, and begins making calls.

Through thin shivering dreams of the rumbling of the ocean and the gentle bobbing of fishing boats, you hear the cannon and know that now there are seven tributes left. You clutch the blanket around you and think, only half-conscious: How did I get here? Why can’t I go home?

Something thumps against your hip, and you startle awake. The vulture is already vanishing into the starlit indigo sky, its parcel delivered. You open the burlap sack to find not food or water or pineapple juice, which was both your expectation and your preference, but swim goggles.

You stretch the thick rubber strap and peer through the small transparent lenses, bewildered. “Aemond, why goggles?” you whisper.

You won’t be doing any swimming here, which means he must think you’ll need eye protection.

You stare out into the barren expanse to the south, flat and endless. You look back to the pyramid that beckons you with a radiant silver beam that streaks across the sky like the tail of a comet. The Gamemakers won’t let you stay here, not until the very end. What kind of a finale would that be? Six more booms of the cannon and then you are triumphant, sitting beside your miniscule oasis or cowering within the ruins? No, there must be a show. They are offering a mirage, the same sold to countless children before and after you: wealth, fame, safety, freedom, power, love. You won’t get it for free. You have to sparkle for them. You have to kill for them.

Jack killed many tributes in his arena, and he did it gladly. Sirena had to kill a Career. Aemond had to kill Sapphire. And you will have to kill whoever is left at the end.

Roosevelt? you think, heartsick, horrified. Brookie? Commodore?

The breeze is frigid as you stay cocooned in the blue fleece blanket Aemond sent you, shivering, bits of dust and sand stinging in your eyes.

How will they force me north towards the pyramid?

You contemplate the goggles, and you think you know.

I can’t escape the pyramid. But however it devours people, it must do it slowly. I don’t have to resist it forever. I just have to be the last one inside.

The cannon booms through the night. Six tributes left. At the very edge of the horizon, the sky is just beginning to lighten to lilac. You hang the goggles around your neck like the chain that holds your filleting knife. You drink as much water as you can from the oasis, scooping it up to your lips with cupped hands; the rubber band is still knotted around your ring finger. You go to roll it off, then decide not to. It might be the closest thing to a wedding ring you ever get. You begin to trek northeast towards the ruins, where there will be shade.

As you walk, the sky turning from hues of wildflowers to shades of blood, still clutching the blanket around your shoulders until the air is again stifling and golden, you hear voices following you like a shadow across the bluffs.

Baby screaming as he lunges with his hammer: I have to, or I can’t leave!

Monty asking: Will you stay with him?

Roosevelt shaking you awake beside the oasis: Don’t fall back asleep. I won’t be here.

Isla smiling: Good luck.

Pluto clasping your hand as he hemorrhages from his lungs flayed raw by underworlds of coal and sand: I won?

But no one ever really wins. They survive, they don’t win.

“That’s enough for me,” you pant as the heat makes you wilt and sweat, as you leave the blanket to the wilderness because you’re too weak to keep dragging it.

The first words you ever said to Aemond: How do I win? I don’t want to die. How do I win?

Roosevelt’s voice again, sly and grinning: You have to want to live more than you want anything else.

You pass a cactus, and you know you can’t cut it open and drink its noxious juice, but there is a hole in it with dry sprigs of shrubs sticking out. You check the hollow and find three eggs, each a little smaller than your palm. With the hilt of your knife, you crack an egg open and lift away the top of the shell to find a quivering lake of white albumen and a lush yellow yolk. You slurp it down—thick and warm and mineral-tasting—and force yourself not to lose it, digging your fingernails into your forearm to distract your brain from the slime that clings stubbornly to your tongue and your throat. You do the same with the second egg, and while your stomach is nauseous your mind is sharper, and you feel less afraid, and your muscles are withstanding the punishing heat.

You tap the last egg with the mother of pearl hilt of your knife. Instead of opening neatly, it shatters and fills your hand with its grisly cache: clotted blood, tiny dismembered bones and feathers and eyeballs. You yelp and fling it away, wipe your skin as clean as you can with the dead girl Calico’s sweatshirt that is knotted around your waist, resume your expedition towards the ruins.

You have just stumbled into the shade of the columns when the cannon blasts, and the ground beneath your bare feet quakes, and the dust is shaken from the mud bricks and the hieroglyphics and the crouching statues of Anubis.

Five tributes left, you think, leaning against a crumbling column to catch your breath, scanning the sky in vain for the sweeping black wingspan of a vulture. You know you’ve used up a lot of the sponsors’ money, but you can’t silence the fantasy of a bottle of pineapple juice, sweet and ice-cold and slick with condensation.

The reverberation of the cannon fire doesn’t dissolve away but seems to warp, rumble, transform into the baritone growl of ocean waves. Your brow furrows; there are no tides here, no surf, no ships. Still breathing laboredly, you look towards the pyramid and see nothing unusual: only the ever-present silhouette of the structure, the cloudless cerulean sky. You glance back towards the oasis. The sky there is no longer blue but filling up with churning, suffocating sand, a wall that rises through the atmosphere, a monstrous impurity as hostile to your lungs as water or coal.

Sandstorm.

“Please no.” You put on your goggles, still watching the southern horizon, still hoping Aemond might be wrong. The wind is picking up. Shards of sand begin to pelt your face. You spin towards the pyramid and start running.

I’m not going to make it, it’s too far—

You have to make it, you HAVE to.

I don’t want to die. How do I win?

The gales grow stronger, tearing your hair loose from Salem’s handiwork, clawing at your sweatsuit. You careen through the rubble, break out of the shadows and into the sun glare, slide down a shallow embankment and then find your footing again. The roar of the sandstorm is deafening now, swallowing you like the viscera of an egg; it’s getting difficult to see. Without the goggles, you’d be blind. You rip Calico’s sweatshirt off your waist and press the bloodstained cotton to your face to shield your nose and mouth; you gasp through the fabric as you sprint across the desert. You taste copper and salt and decay. You breathe threadbare life and certain death.

It’s too far, it’s too far—

The cannon explodes, so loudly you stagger and almost fall into the dry shifting sand.

Four tributes left.

You regain your balance and chase the ghost of the pyramid, skirting just east of the immense dunes that surround the obsidian obelisk where the Games began. The air is thicker, hotter, an oven, an ocean, and if you don’t reach the shore you will be drowned. There are gusts like riptides, threatening to drag you into a grave, a tomb. In the fierce wind, walls of sand roil and collapse, flooding dune slacks and burying anyone who sought shelter there. The cannon bangs like a drum.

Three tributes left!!!

Who is still alive? Who will you have to fight, who will you have to kill?

Your bare feet slide in sand so dry and so fine it’s like the powder Charm keeps behind the mirror in her glittering gold compact. You swipe manically at your goggles to keep the lenses clear. Even with Calico’s sweatshirt thrust against your face, you are hacking up the sand that steals into your lungs like seawater into the breached hull of a ship. You are dizzy, you are choking—

The soles of your feet hit stone, and you stop for only a second to see where you are, to make sure the next requiem of cannon fire won’t be for you. You are on a long straight walkway of bricks, alternating tan limestone and red clay. The path is perhaps three feet wide; on either side is a drop down into something that is golden like sand but rippling like water. In it, you can just barely glimpse a tangle of human limbs.

Quicksand.

Coughing, gasping, you follow the walkway towards the pyramid. The phantom of it fills your vision now, a dark shadow beyond the spiraling wind and sand. The storm is still strengthening. Squalls yank and shove at you, threatening to wrench you off the path. You think of the walkway in Aemond’s arena, tiles that sank into depths until the water was red with tributes’ blood. You think of narrow aisles of land through the bayou; you think of jetties that stretch out into the sea. You hit steps and crumple down onto them, crawl skyward on your palms and knees, drag yourself like a dying animal into the black mouth of the pyramid.

You leave the sandstorm behind you. The howling of the wind fades away. You pass through a narrow dark tunnel and then you are inside, and you take your first deep unobstructed breath of air that tastes stale and cold, and the clock has started.

You snap off the goggles and drop Calico’s sweatshirt, press your spine to the wall so no one can sneak up on you, look and listen with instinctive prey-animal focus. The pyramid is hollow inside, well-lit by golden luminance like sunlight. In the center is a lake of quicksand. To your right is a high wall made of limestone bricks; to your left is a footpath, following the perimeter of the interior of the pyramid, gradually climbing upwards via ramps and staircases, perhaps all the way to the capstone. You can see the underside of the path when you peer up into the structure. You can hear strange noises: stones shifting, metal clanking, thumps and squeals, inanimate machinery, meatgrinders and war hammers.

You don’t see anyone alive, but there is a body sprawled on the platform where you stand, right at the edge where the currents of quicksand lap at the stone. Cautiously, you step towards her, blonde and broken. It’s Brookie, her hair streaked with blood, her eyes glazed, her head twisted nearly all the way around. One of her axes rests by her outstretched hand, still embossed with her initials: B.B. She appears to have fallen from a great height, but you remember how she and Roosevelt raced effortlessly past you on the obstacle course in the gymnasium, always nimble and lightning-swift, never losing their balance.

Again, you scrutinize the pathway that snakes around the inner wall of the pyramid, like how muscles hinge to bones. How’d you fall, Brookie? you think to her ghost. Again, you notice the sounds of stones scraping against each other. Or were you pushed? By someone or something?

Your eyes return to Brookie, one last parting glance, and you see that she’s been cursed. She wears only her sports bra, and so the stripes of rot are stark like the bloodline of a fish. Her hands are black with gangrene, all the way up to her wrists; ropes of decomposition were climbing her like ivy when she died, circling her toned upper arms, scaling her shoulders to strangle her throat. You stare down at your own hands. It’s begun, just barely: the tips of your fingers are dyed pitch black like the meticulous jots of ink in Aemond’s notebook.

Only the Capitol can save me now. The only antidote is to win.

You grip the hilt of your knife and start up the path. You step lightly, cautiously, silently. You stay close to the wall, skimming your empty palm across it. You twirl your knife, making sure your fingers remember how to gut, how to flay. Your bare feet ascend the first set of steps, hesitating on each to test it for a trap of some sort. There is a long level stretch of a pathway, then another staircase, a ramp, a flat section, a third set of steps. You remember Brookie lying broken on the platform below, and you examine the limestone bricks of the wall and the floor, searching for cracks. Somewhere above, rocks are grinding and hissing. Someplace close, you hear a moan.

You crouch low and creep towards the sound, still clutching your knife. The path gapes like a wound—a trapdoor that was triggered, a hatch that sprung open—and had he been healthy, he could have leapt out of the way, you’re sure, because he was always so fast. But he wasn’t healthy. He was already dying. When you peek over the ledge, you see Roosevelt lying on his back, three metal barbs impaled through his belly, each perhaps two feet in length. They are serrated and painted with gore, muscles, blood clots, organs. You climb down to him.

“Don’t come down here, idiot,” Roosevelt rasps, blood on his lips, freckles dark from the sun. His red hair is matted with blood and bleak, futile sweat, the salt of the dead. “Keep the high ground.”

Nonetheless, you kneel beside him in the shadows, examining his injuries. You can’t move him. The barbs will rip him up all over again, but worse from that direction. You smooth back his damp hair from his forehead, touch his cheek. Needle-thin threads of black rot are spreading there. He gazes up at you with his murky eyes, not sharp or cunning but only in pain.

I hate them, you think with fanged viciousness. I hate what they’ve done to my friends. I hate what they’ve done to Aemond. I hate what they’re doing to me.

“There’s something wrong in here,” Roosevelt says. “I think they’re poisoning us.”

“I know.”

His eyebrows go up, just a little bit. “Aemond is good at this.” Then he gets a better look at you. “Aw. You sweated off all your sparkles.”

You manage a smile. “They’ll have to call me something else now.”

“Like your real name? No fucking way. Too normal, too boring. I have a winner’s name.”

“Who’s left?”

“Your monster. Commodore.” He nods towards where the path continues skywards, into the highest point of the pyramid. “Up there somewhere. He went by me, I didn’t see him come back down.” He coughs, spews up crimson and decaying black ruin, moans again.

“He left you like this?”

Roosevelt barks a weak laugh. “What was he gonna do? First aid?”

You ask gently: “How can I help?”

He sighs, then his eyes drift to where your filleting knife swings by its silver chain, flashing blade, iridescent mother of pearl hilt. “You’re still good with that knife, ain’t you?”

“Yeah,” you answer, your voice strangled, tears burning in your eyes.

“Oh, stop,” he scolds you; but he’s smiling, blood on his teeth. “I got it for you, remember? You owe me.”

“Okay,” you whisper.

“I assume Aemond taught you how to find the carotid.”

“He did.”

“Good. I don’t think I could manage that under the present circumstances, being as unfortunate as they are.”

You pick up your knife, but you can’t fathom using it this way. You press your fingers to the putrefying flesh of his throat and locate the spot that is rigid, throbbing, flush with septic blood.

“I can’t believe I chose to volunteer,” Roosevelt says, and he’s not smiling anymore. His eyes are bloodshot and faraway. “I can’t believe I could be at home right now. I should have known my place. I should have known it was too good to be true.”

“You were brave,” you insist.

“Tell my mom she was right. This was a stupid idea.”

You shake your head, and although he said not to you’re crying again, and your lungs are full of blood and death and misery and youth that will never grow content and wise, love that will never be felt, children that will never be born, worlds that will never be marked by the imprints of their footsteps, beautiful things that will never be written or spoken or carved.

“And tell her I love her, okay?”

“I will,” you swear.

“I hope you win, Sparkles.” Roosevelt grins, crooked and clever, and in his last moments he is himself again. “We’ll always be friends.”

You blink your tears away so you can see well enough to place the blade against his throat, but you can’t bring your hands to exert the required pressure.

He closes his eyes and murmurs, like he’s falling asleep: “Do it before I get scared.”

You think of goliath groupers and fillets and bloodlines and scales and bones, and you cut deep and sure. It’s not instant, and it’s not painless; but as Aemond once promised you, it is very quick. You hold Roosevelt as he convulses, drenched in his blood, and within thirty seconds the cannon booms and the pyramid shudders. And then the only sounds are the mechanical entrails of this stone tomb, gnashing and crushing, digesting your skeletons, etching your doomed names into the hieroglyphics.

You look up into the pyramid, your skin covered with blood and dust and sand, your fingers turning rot-black, and you can tell that you’re beginning to lose feeling in them. And you have been infected, but not just by the curse of the pharaohs. There is rage like you’ve never known before in your veins. Your arteries carry vivid oxygenated wrath. And you are certain that you can kill, not just in self-defense, not just by omission, not just as an act of mercy, but cruelly like an animal: you can cut your fangs on flesh, you can put your blade through the vulnerable places Aemond showed you.

Solar plexus. Achilles tendon. Knee. Temple. Zygomatic arch. Eyes. Carotid artery.

You climb out of the pit and follow the stone path. Your deadening fingers probe the wall for cracks; your eyes scan the floor. You stop when you see a small dark crevice in the stone, just a few inches in front of your feet. You go down to the ground, lift the silver chain holding your knife from your neck, and toss the knife like you’re casting a fishing line. As soon as the hilt bangs against false floor, the trapdoor opens, revealing a bed of razor blades underneath.

I hate them, you think, you seethe, seeing faces in your skull like a mirage: Roosevelt, Brookie, Isla, Pluto, Monty, little Babylon forever trapped at twelve years old, Commodore who volunteered so someday people might love him, Jack in the mountains, Sirena in the trees, Aemond stalking Sapphire under rippling blue light that floods red. And I won’t let them kill me.

Just like Roosevelt’s trap, there is a narrow aisle of the walkway still intact, right at the edge. You put your chain back on and balance on the shelf, pressing forward, coasting like a shark. As you leave, the trapdoor closes again to await its next victim.

You go up a staircase on all fours, blood drying on your skin, blood coming from somewhere inside as the curse takes hold. You taste metal and salt and catastrophe. Your mind shifts into something animal and innate, but you hold the leash, you can’t let go completely. You have to remember what Aemond taught you so you can win.

You have to want to live more than you want anything else.

And you do.

You find a crack in the wall and stand back, watching. So much time passes—blood running into your eyes, ink-black poison nipping at your palms—that you begin to suspect you’re wrong; then a portion of the wall juts out, sudden enough to knock even an athlete as adept as Brookie off the walkway and down to the death waiting below, pulverized against the platform or drowned in quicksand. You stay where you are so you can count how often the trap springs, and sure enough it’s a set interval, once every 210 seconds. When it recedes again, you steal past it and the demise it had designed for you like a phantom.

There is a ramp, a wall trap timed to strike every 35 seconds, another set for 90 seconds, a staircase, a floor trap filled with whirling hammers, a ramp, a wall trap, a staircase, a hallway, a ramp so steep you couldn’t climb it if not for the metal rungs hammered into the stone. When you glance down at the base of the pyramid now, the ocean of quicksand looks like a puddle. When you gaze up, you can see the individual bricks that form the apex of the tomb. You’re so close. There are ropes of rot ascending your forearms, black pooling in the scar tissue that sealed the wound from Kista’s crossbow. Your lungs fill with thick maroon fluid and ache like you’re dying, because you are.

What if he’s not here, what if Roosevelt was mistaken, what if Commodore is safe and I’m poisoned, I’m cursed, I’ll never leave this place—?

You claw your way up a staircase and there he is, collapsed against the wall with his spear still clutched in his gargantuan, gangrenous fist. He must have been here for a while, because the rot is very bad: up to his face, dark vines and weeping sores, his eyes bleeding, his short flaxen hair falling out.

“Did I count right?” Commodore wheezes when he turns to see you. “Are we the only ones left?”

You don’t know how to answer. He lurches to his feet with a groan rattling with viscid poison, and he’s so big he fills up the earth and the sky, and even if he can barely feel his hands anymore he can still use them well enough to keep hold of the spear.

He jabs at you once—halfheartedly, like he’s warming up—and you duck out of the way, clinging to the wall. You tiptoe backwards down the steps. You are clutching the handle of your knife, but how can you get close enough to use it?

Commodore stabs again, more confidently this time, and you scream as you lunge out of his reach; but he’s approaching rapidly, gaining momentum, pursuing you down the narrow walkway. If he knocks you off the ledge, you’ll die at the base like Brookie.

How did I think I could kill him? I always knew I couldn’t kill him—!

“Only the Capitol can fix me,” he says, low and choked and guttural.

One monstrous sneaker takes a step down the stairs, and you are back in the elevator at the Tribute Center, and Aemond is touching you tenderly, kindly as he teaches you how to win.

Solar plexus. Achilles tendon. Knee. Temple. Zygomatic arch. Eyes. Carotid artery.

You plunge forward and bury your blade in Commodore’s right knee. He roars—thunderous, furious—and grabs the back of your sweatshirt with his free hand. You rip the knife from his muscles and ligaments, slash his Achilles tendon through his clothes, twist out of your sweatshirt as you retreat and leave him holding only the thin bloodstained cotton. Then you understand how to get close enough.

Commodore bellows, looking brainlessly—childishly, helplessly—down at his hemorrhaging wounds as if even now he still can’t believe he’s here, and in the few seconds this takes you yank off your sweatpants and ball them up as tightly as you can, stuffing the legs through the halo of the elastic waistband. Crippled and savage, Commodore reels forward and thrusts his spear at you, his mutilated leg buckling under his weight. You impale your sweatpants on the point, dulling it, gelding it. You follow the length of the spear like the spine of a fish when you’re cutting out the bloodline. Commodore’s massive fingers close around your empty decaying hand, and only an instant before he can break your wrist you bang the mother of pearl hilt against his temple. He is stunned, and then he is spurting blood that bathes you like a hot red surf because your blade slices through his carotid artery. You know exactly where it is. You’ve had practice.

You stagger backwards until you hit the wall and watch him bleed out. You gasp for air as your dying lungs rattle, still gripping your knife. There’s blood pouring down your face, soaking your bra, painting your belly and your thighs, defiling all the places people will pay to touch you.

Good, you think. Let them see what they’ll buy. Not lust, not love. Death and violence and gore.

The cannon booms one last time. You drop your knife and it swings from its long silver chain. Then you realize what you’ve done, and what you’ll spend the rest of your life sending children into, and you cover your mouth with your bloodstained hands and wail into the empty pyramid, where your voice echoes and multiplies, and scalding tears wash the blood from your eyes.

A great creak like unoiled hinges, an apocalyptic thunderclap, and white light cascades in from above as the capstone of the pyramid is lifted away. You huddle against the wall, nearly naked, drenched in blood, thinking: They can’t be gone. I can’t have done this.

A craft descending into the pyramid in a gale of cold wind, metallic doors opening, people in guiltless white dragging you through the threshold. The doors close with a hiss and a puff of cool fog, scented like vanilla and coconut, perfumes to cover the blood and the rot. Someone drapes a small blanket across your shoulders. Another jams the needle of a syringe into your thigh, and pushes down the plunger, and instantaneously your lungs are clear again and the ink-stain infection vanishes from your skin. People keep touching you—asking you questions, trying to give you something to drink, turning your face towards a camera—and you scream and push them away. They do not relent.

“Stop touching me!” you shriek, you snarl. You’re a killer now, and they shrink away from you because they know it. You try to cover yourself with the blanket, but it’s not big enough. You sob and know the families of those twenty-three other tributes are watching you, that sponsors are toasting champagne, that an auction is being arranged and men are preparing to place their bids. There’s blood in your hair and under your fingernails. There’s blood on your lips, salt and copper, and you know you’ll be bleeding forever.

The craft docks and the doors sigh open, and Peacekeepers seize you like they once did on Reaping Day in District 4 by the seaside. You try to rip your arms free, you try to brace your bare, sand-coated feet against the frigid tile floor. If people don’t stop touching you, your mind will break like glass; but your body isn’t yours anymore, and it never will be again.

The Peacekeepers shove you roughly into a room, and you realize it’s your pod, and the prep team is here with beaming smiles and raucous applause to welcome you back from the valley of death. They haul you onto the table and ignore you when you try to stop them from scrubbing the grime and gore from your skin, and so you’re fighting them and screaming when Aemond comes in wearing his black suit, breathing heavily like he ran here.

“Out,” he commands the prep team, and they hesitate. “Get out!” he roars, and then they disperse, chattering conspiratorially amongst themselves, casting him resentful glares. He comes to where you are trembling on the high metal table, and he grabs the showerhead and tests the water until it’s hot and then begins to clean the ruin from you, and he says in a whisper as he smooths back your hair from your face: “Shh, shh.”

Charm appears in the doorway, her ankles quivering in her gold heels and winded from her sprint through the corridor. She is crying; her left hand clasps at the silver Loch Ness Monster pin affixed to her dress, as if reaching for something she can’t get a grip on. She says, hushed and with great pity: “Aemond, you can’t be alone with her.”

He pitches back: “Then stand in the fucking corner!”

And Charm does, covering her face and weeping softly. The partition stays open, and you see white glimpses of Peacekeepers lurking outside, but now you aren’t thinking about them.

Aemond cuts away your rubber band of a wedding ring, tacky with blood. He rinses the red from your hair, carefully, making sure not to snag his nimble fingers on the knots. He lathers your skin with pearlescent soap, and you watch a river of sand and blood disappear down the drain. He takes off your knife and sets it on the rim of the table, and you begin to sob again, and Aemond stops so he can hold you.

Supper in the Hightower might have been the worst part of your day.

Not the petitions, with their endless parades of merchants and smallfolk, each weaving their troubles into tapestries of breathless appeal.

Not the household accounts, those dry ledgers where every copper was a stone upon your chest. Not even the ceaseless procession of men who seemed to believe that speaking slowly to you would make their concerns sound more urgent, as though your sex rendered you incapable of understanding plain Common Tongue.

No. It was supper.

The one ritual your husband insisted upon every evening, without fail.

A small table in his solar, always laid for the family. It might have been intimate, had your husband been a different sort of man.

Had he been the sort who reached for your hand beneath the cloth, or who paused to ask after your day with genuine curiosity, or who smiled at his son as though the boy were something more than an heir-in-training.

Instead, it was merely another chamber in which Lord Hightower could hear himself speak. Mostly, you suspected, it pleased him to look upon the arrangement; his wife, his son, his young ward, his table, his tower.

His life. Neatly arranged around him.

At present, Ormund was speaking at length about some new philosophical revelation that had apparently seized him during the afternoon. Something about the necessary refinement of taste, the vulgarity of spectacle, and the slow degradation of noble discernment among lesser houses.

You had ceased properly listening somewhere between the second and third mention of “cultural decay.”

Daeron, sweet boy that he was, was making a valiant effort to appear attentive. He sat very straight, hands properly placed, eyes politely fixed upon Ormund whenever your husband’s gaze passed over him.

But you noticed the way his shoulders had drawn in, the slight hunch he could not quite suppress. He always grew smaller under Ormund’s attention.

Olyvar, mercifully, was too occupied with his supper to care.

You drew his plate a little closer and began cutting his meat and vegetables into smaller pieces, careful and automatic, the way you had done since he was old enough to chew solid foods.

Ormund’s voice stopped.

The silence was so abrupt that even Daeron glanced up, his blue eyes widening like a startled deer.

“Do not help him, wife.”

You stilled. The knife hovered above the last piece of carrot, frozen mid-stroke. For a brief moment, only the fire spoke, crackling softly in the hearth behind you.

Then you lifted your eyes to your husband with great care, forcing your expression into something that might, from a charitable distance, resemble patience.

“Ormund,” you said evenly, “he is five.”

“And yet you insist on keeping him helpless.” Ormund leaned back in his chair, the wood groaning beneath his weight. His expression was one of mild disapproval, as though you were not his wife but a poorly argued treatise placed before him for correction. “Let the boy do it himself.”

Olyvar looked between you both, his little mouth parting, the spoon forgotten in his grip.

“He is learning,” you replied. The words came out softer than you intended, but there was a blade hidden beneath the velvet.

“Then permit him to learn.” Ormund reached for his wine, his fingers curling around the stem of the goblet with practiced ease. “You cannot expect him to become capable while forever placing your hands over his.”

Your fingers tightened around the knife. The handle bit into your palm.

For one small, ugly moment, you wanted very badly to ask him whether he had formed that opinion before or after spending all of ten minutes a day in his son’s presence.

Whether he had ever watched the boy wake from a nightmare, or taught him to hold a quill, or kissed the crown of his head when he was too tired to speak.

Then Daeron shifted slightly in his chair, eyes lowering to his own plate. And your son’s brows began to pull together in the way they did when he sensed discord but could not yet name it.

So instead, you inhaled through your nose and set the knife down. “Very well,” you murmured.

Olyvar’s lower lip wobbled with concentration as you placed the cutlery into his small hands. You adjusted his grip carefully, turning the knife so he would not nick himself, then brushed your thumb once over his knuckles.

“There,” you said softly. “Slowly, sweetling. No need to rush.”

Ormund gave a faint sound of approval which irritated you more than an outright insult might have done. And then, having successfully corrected the household to his satisfaction, he resumed speaking as though nothing had occurred.

“As I was saying, the issue is not merely taste, but the absence of discipline required to cultivate taste. Any merchant with coin may commission a fresco. That does not make him a patron. It makes him a purchaser with delusions of refinement.”

Daeron nodded because he was kind. Because he had been raised to nod. Because he was a prince far from his mother’s court, and he had learned that it was easier to agree than to not.

You lowered your eyes to your plate because you were not. A good example, you reminded yourself. For your son. For poor Daeron.

Your gaze drifted across the room, seeking any surface less tedious than the sight of Ormund’s mouth shaping another sermon. And snagged on a pair of blue eyes already fixed upon you.

Ser Gwayne sat near the far end of the table, newly returned to Oldtown after several months in King’s Landing. He had arrived that morning, travel-worn, but smiling.

He was your husband’s cousin. A familiar figure in the household whenever duty dragged him home. Handsome, yes, but handsome men were hardly rare among noble families.

The Hightower’s bred for it, it seemed. Generations of careful marriages filtering their blood until only the finest thread remained. You had never been a woman easily made foolish by a pretty face.

And yet he was looking at you now. His expression held some faint, mistaken softness that took you a moment to place.

Sympathy.

You scowled before you could stop yourself. Sympathy. From him. What in the seven hells had you done to earn pity from your husband’s cousin?

Gwayne seemed to recognise his error at once. The soft line of his mouth flattened, and he lowered his gaze in retreat. Then he reached for his cup with unhurried care, letting the movement shield whatever might have lingered in his face.

You turned deliberately to Olyvar, who had managed a crooked little piece of meat and was staring at it with triumph.

“Well done, sweetling,” you whispered.

He beamed.

Across the table, Ormund continued speaking as though the air had never been disturbed. “The tragedy, of course, is that most men mistake abundance for beauty.”

You nearly laughed aloud. From a man whose entire household was a monument to excess, the observation was either profound hypocrisy or staggering self-unawareness.

You let your eyes drift back to Ser Gwayne as though pulled by an invisible thread.

He had lifted his wine cup and was listening to Ormund with the practiced patience of a man who had spent his youth in this very hall. There was nothing remarkable in that. All men of Ormund’s blood learned eventually how to sit through him.

Yet now, under the softening candlelight, you found your attention catching on details you had never bothered to catalogue.

The leather jerkin he still wore, unbuttoned at the collar. The breadth of his shoulders, which seemed more pronounced than when you had last seen him.

Perhaps it was the riding leathers. Perhaps it was the way he had broadened through the chest. Perhaps it was only that you were desperate for a distraction.

Then Gwayne looked back.

A brief flicker. Questioning. His eyes met yours across your husband’s table, and after a breath of hesitation, he offered a small smile. Tentative. Cautious.

You did not return it. You merely watched him, as though he were a puzzle placed before you without warning.

The smile faltered. His fingers shifted once against the stem of his cup.

“You are very quiet,” Ormund said.

You turned your head slowly, feeling the weight of every gaze at the table now that his attention had shifted to you. “Would you prefer I interrupt?”

“No,” he said, his mouth curving with something that was not quite warmth. “I merely find the novelty... distracting.”

“I was listening.”

“Were you?” He tilted his head, a gesture of delicate disbelief. “To which part, precisely?”

“To the grand thesis on cultural decay,” you replied, letting a pleasant smile settle over your features. “I am saving my objections for the inevitable conclusion.”

A beat of silence. Ormund’s smile sharpened with genuine pleasure. He did enjoy this, the cut and thrust of a wife who refused to bend entirely. “How wise of you.”

“I’m aware.”

For a heartbeat, the table held itself very still. Daeron’s eyes flickered between you and Ormund before dropping to his plate.

You looked away first. Your gaze slid back towards the far end of the table, almost of its own accord. Ser Gwayne had not looked away. Your eyes met. He dropped his gaze at once, a trained movement, but not quickly enough.

There had been something in his face. Curiosity, stripped of its careful neutrality. The faintest glimmer of admiration before he remembered himself.

And for the first time that evening, supper became tolerable.

You had no clear notion of where your sudden interest in your husband’s cousin had seeded itself.

Desire, perhaps. Boredom, more likely.

The inevitable consequence of a life measured out in quiet afternoons and colder nights, spent beside a man who possessed the rare talent of making even fine Dornish red taste flat, simply by talking over it long enough.

Perhaps you ought to have felt guilt. There were, after all, several forms of guilt readily available to a woman of your station. The heavy, familiar drape of religious shame, if you had been feeling devout.

The colder weight of marital duty, if you had wished to pretend your union had ever been built on anything warmer than alliance and accommodation.

The quiet voice of conscience, urging you to remember your vows and the solemn weight of your name. No such voice came. And if it had, you suspected you would have silenced it without ceremony.

Instead, you had chosen to pursue the matter.

No… pursue implied a peasant greed, a grasping hunger unbecoming of your station.

You had always been a woman of refined taste, one who savoured rather than devoured. You had chosen to investigate. You sought only to determine whether the pious, honourable Ser Gwayne Hightower desired his cousin’s wife.

Which was how, two days later, you found yourself taking luncheon in the training yard. You had expressed a wish for fresh air, and the household had obliged.

Beneath the shaded arcade that overlooked the yard, a small table had appeared, dressed in linen and laden with the afternoon’s bounty. Your ladies had lingered only long enough to exchange pleasantries before you dismissed them with a soft word, granting yourself solitude.

Olyvar alone remained, settled on a cushion near your feet, his painted wooden knights drawn up in opposing armies across the stone. The fate of a dozen imaginary houses rested on his small hands.

The yard below was alive with the familiar music of men at practice, the crisp ring of blunted steel, the scuff of boots on packed earth, and the occasional burst of low laughter when some young squire overreached and paid for his ambition with a mouthful of dust.

Ser Gwayne was not difficult to find among the men. He stood out as a flame stands out among dying embers. You told yourself this was mere practical observation.

He was paired with a knight of your husband’s household guard, a seasoned man who was beginning to look profoundly dissatisfied with the shape of the lesson.

Gwayne fought with a clean grace that bordered on maddening. No wasted theatrics, no brute display of strength simply to intimidate.

He was quick when speed was demanded, firm when force was required, his sword flashing in the high sun before turning aside another blow with that maddening elegance.

You leaned back, your head tilting as you considered him. It was not simply that he was handsome. Many men were handsome from a suitable distance, and considerably less so once they opened their mouths. Gwayne was something altogether rarer.

He was pretty.

The word felt almost improper for a knight wearing spurs, a man of proven steel and honourable name. Yet it was the truth of him. The fine structure of his face. The blue of his eyes like a shard of summer sky, vivid even from this distance. The colour that exertion had painted high on his cheekbones.

The damp strands of fair hair that had pulled loose near his temple, clinging to the skin there. A knight, yes. Unmistakably a man, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped and capable.

But a pretty one, all the same.

“Mother?”

Olyvar’s voice cut cleanly through your reverie. You looked down. He was holding up a wooden knight, its red paint chipped from a hundred imagined battles.

“Ser Redwyne has fallen,” he announced.

“A tragedy,” you said, your voice softening. “Was he taken honourably?”

“In the head,” Olyvar said, frowning at the knight’s fate. “He did not see the blow.”

“Then he ought to have worn a better helm,” you replied, a faint smile touching your mouth. “A commander must learn from his defeats.”

Olyvar considered this with the grave deliberation, then nodded once, satisfied with your counsel, before returning to his campaign.

Below, Gwayne turned to receive some remark from a man at the edge of the yard. And then, with the casual lift of a man stretching his neck, his gaze swept the arcade.

He found you. You marked the instant awareness passed through him, a micro-shift in his posture, a pause barely long enough to measure. His eyes traced the table, the wine, the figs. Olyvar at your feet. Then you. After a beat, Gwayne inclined his head with the precise measure of courtesy owed to his cousin’s lady.

“My lady,” he called, his voice carrying cleanly across the stones, polite and proper for all the yard to witness.

“Ser Gwayne,” you returned.

And from that moment onward, his composure became a thinner thing.

He continued to fight well, beautifully even, but his attention had frayed at the edges. Every few passes, his eyes flickered up towards the arcade. Fleeting glances, brief enough that he must have believed them subtle.

They were not subtle.

You watched, unhurried, savouring the small triumph of observation. You reached for a fig, and brought it to your lips. The skin split beneath your teeth, the flesh yielding sweet and crimson. A small, private indulgence.

Olyvar made a small sound of triumph as one wooden knight toppled another.

“Was that Ser Redwyne avenged?” you asked, though your eyes remained on the yard.

“No,” Olyvar said. “That was Lord Costayne. He is dead now too.”

“How grim.”

Below, Gwayne’s gaze lifted again. His eyes met yours across the dust and sunlight, and this time you allowed yourself a smile. A small curve of your lips, intended for him alone.

A promise held out like a flower, waiting to see if he would reach for it.

The effect was immediate. His gaze dropped as though the weight of your attention had physically pressed him down. His jaw tightened. He faltered, just slightly, and the other knight pressed his advantage, almost landing a blow along his ribs.

Gwayne turned it aside at the last breath, an elegant recovery.

Then he answered. A counter-strike that rang through the yard, a perfect connection that forced his partner back several steps. The watching squires let out a low murmur of approval.

A few minutes later, the bout drew to its close. Gwayne stepped back, breathing a little harder, and clasped forearms with his opponent A servant appeared with water. Gwayne took the cup, raised it, and drank. Then, in a gesture so casual it felt almost on purpose, he tipped the remainder over the back of his neck.

You watched the water trace a silver path along his skin, disappear into the dark collar of his tunic, darken the fabric where it clung. Gwayne looked up once more, his gaze finding the arcade as though drawn there by a thread you had already begun to wind.

To your surprise, he passed his practice sword to one of the waiting squires and began walking towards the shaded arcade.

You watched him approach, your brow lifting a fraction.

He looked good like this, you thought with some irritation.

Flushed from exertion. His fair hair damp at the temples, darkened to auburn. The open collar of his tunic showing the hollow of his throat, the skin there still gleaming from the water he had poured.

He reached the shade of the arcade and bowed his head with dutiful courtesy.

“My lady,” he said. His voice was perfectly polite, though the breathlessness still clung to it, “I confess, I had not thought to find you watching over the yard.”

“Have I no right to observe the men of my own household?”

“You have every right. It is simply a pleasure I had not anticipated.”

That was well said. You let the words settle, then smiled. “I thought it would be good for Olyvar to observe the training yard. The discipline. The instruction. The camaraderie of men.”

You lied easily enough.

Gwayne’s eyes shifted past you. Olyvar, at your feet, had not looked up once throughout the entire exchange. His wooden knights lay in a violent little heap, and he was currently engaged in the solemn work of making one dead man stab another dead man.

Gwayne was quiet for half a second. Then his gaze returned to you.

“Ah,” he said.

You felt your mouth curve. “You seem unconvinced, Ser.”

“I should never presume to question a mother’s judgement.”

“A wise answer.”

“I try to give those when I can.”

That made you smile properly, a genuine warmth that you could not quite suppress.

Gwayne noticed it. You saw the flicker of his attention, the way his gaze touched your lips, fleeting as a blink, then returned at once to your eyes.

You leaned back slightly in your chair, considering him.

“You fight well,” you said.

His expression settled into modest courtesy at once. “You are kind to say so.”

“I did not say it to be kind.”

His eyes held yours a moment too long before he inclined his head again. “Then I thank you for your honesty.”

“How formal you are.”

“I am speaking with my lord cousin’s wife.”

“Yes,” you said mildly. “I am well aware of the relation.”

The air between you shifted. Gwayne seemed to feel it too, because whatever brief warmth had touched his face retreated behind the careful architecture of his courtesy.

He bowed once more. “I shall leave you to your luncheon, my lady.”

“So soon?”

His eyes caught yours. The question had been plain enough to be heard, innocent enough to be denied.

“The men will be waiting,” he said.

“Of course.”

Another pause.

Then he gave you a small, dutiful smile, the sort of smile a man offers when he wishes to close a door without seeming to slam it. “Enjoy the rest of your day, my lady. I shall see you at supper.”

And then he left.

You watched him descend the shallow steps, noting the deliberate length of his stride. He did not glance back. Did not slow. He returned to the training yard as though the shade beneath the arcade had held no temptation at all.

You frowned. Was that all?

How vexing. Perhaps Ser Gwayne Hightower was too pious for implication. Or perhaps he simply needed a sharper provocation.

Very well, then.

You would need to be plainer.

“May I speak plainly, my lady?”

Daeron’s voice came from beside you, pitched low enough that the question might have been lost beneath the murmur of the fountain.

Your arm was hooked through his as the two of you walked slowly through the Hightower gardens, the gravel crunching beneath your slippers.

You turned your head towards him, noting the slight furrow between his brows, the way his gaze remained fixed on the path ahead rather than meeting yours. “With me, sweet prince? Always.”

He smiled faintly at that, though it did not quite reach his eyes.

You let your gaze drift ahead again, momentarily distracted by the peonies along the eastern walk. They were not blooming as they ought. Too sparse near the roots, too heavy in some places, and the colour had come in weaker than you had requested. A small irritation, perhaps, but one nonetheless.

You made a silent note to speak with the gardeners before the week’s end. Such neglect was unbecoming of a household of Oldtown’s standing.

Daeron walked quietly beside you for another few paces.

“I have missed our talks,” he admitted at last.

There was something almost shamefaced in the confession, as though he had failed at some duty by desiring a little ordinary companionship.

You looked at him more fully then, taking in the slight hunch of his shoulders, the way his hands clasped together behind his back as though he were still a boy being chastised by a maester.

He was no longer the shy ten-year-old you had met when you first came to Oldtown as Ormund’s bride. That boy had been all wide eyes and careful manners, quick to blush and quicker to apologise.

Daeron glanced down at the gravel path, his jaw working for a moment before he spoke again.

“The maesters have kept me very occupied,” he continued, his voice taking on a rehearsed quality. “Lord Ormund wished my lessons expanded. Histories of the Reach, the foundations of the Hightower, the genealogies of its principal bannermen, matters of law and patronage…”

His mouth twisted slightly before he corrected it. “It is a great honour, of course.”

“Of course,” you said, the words dry as dust.

“And important,” Daeron added quickly, as though fearing you might mistake him for ungrateful. “It is important to venerate the history of House Hightower. Lord Ormund says a prince fostered here ought not leave Oldtown ignorant of the house that shaped him.”

You hummed softly. “That sounds very much like something Lord Ormund would say.”

Daeron looked at you, uncertain whether he was permitted to laugh.

You saved him the trouble by squeezing his arm lightly. “You need not perform gratitude for me, sweet prince.”

His shoulders eased a fraction, the tension draining from his frame as though a knot had been loosened. “I am grateful,” he said, but more honestly this time. “Only… tired.”

“Those two things are allowed to exist in the same body.”

He breathed out, a long, slow exhale, and there it was, the quiet relief of a boy who had been granted permission to be less than perfectly composed. The breeze stirred the auburn hair at his temples, and for a moment, he looked younger than his years.

“I know the lessons matter,” Daeron murmured, his gaze fixed on the path ahead. “But sometimes it feels as though every hour must improve me somehow. If I read, it must be the correct book. If I ride, my seat must be assessed. If I speak, I must consider whether my thought is worth saying aloud.”

“Ah,” you hummed. “A particular cruelty. Being made to weigh every word before speaking.”

He gave you a small, knowing look, a flicker of something wry in his eyes. “You do not seem to suffer from it.”

“No,” you replied pleasantly. “Marriage cured me of that.”

Daeron’s lips parted in surprised amusement, and then he looked quickly ahead, as though worried someone might have heard him almost laugh.

Your gaze drifted past Daeron’s shoulder then, moving idly over the garden path, the sunlit hedges, the distant figures gathered near the cypress walk.

And caught on one figure in particular.

Ser Gwayne stood a little way off, conversing with some lord whose name you could not immediately recall and had no great desire to.

He was dressed for court rather than the yard today, a tunic of deep green, the Hightower sigil embroidered at the breast in silver thread, his hair neatly combed, his posture impeccable.

One hand rested at his belt as he listened with a look of courteous endurance, the expression of a man who had heard this particular speech before and was merely waiting for it to conclude.

Before good sense could advise you otherwise you lifted your voice.

“Ser Gwayne.”

The name carried cleanly through the garden air, clear as a bell tolling in still weather. You did not raise it unduly, but there was a specific clarity to it, a refusal to be ignored.

His head turned almost at once.

The very instant your voice crossed the gravel and the hedges and the soft murmur of the fountain, his attention came to you, direct and unguarded.

You noticed. You tucked the knowledge away like a coin slipped into a pocket.

So did Daeron, judging by the quick, sideways glance he gave you.

“Perhaps you might come and soothe your favourite nephew’s spirits,” you continued, letting amusement thread through your voice, “The maesters have made a martyr of him.”

Daeron straightened beside you, a flush rising to his cheeks. “My lady—”

“Oh, hush. I said martyr, not rebel. There is dignity in martyrdom. Surely they have taught you that much.”

He closed his mouth, half-protesting and half-pleased.

Gwayne said something brief and polite to the lord before him and bowed his head in farewell with the easy grace of a man accustomed to extricating himself from tedious conversations.

You watched him approach with an expression of mild innocence, as though you had merely done him a kindness by providing an excuse to withdraw. He stopped at a perfectly respectable distance. Far enough to satisfy propriety.

He inclined his head.

“My lady. My prince.”

Perhaps it was inconsequential. Perhaps it meant nothing at all. Still, you noted that he addressed you first.

Daeron brightened at once, some of the earlier tension easing from his face. “Uncle.”

“Have your lessons grown so unbearable already?” Gwayne asked, his mouth curving faintly. His expression was warm, genuinely fond, “I had thought you more resilient than that.”

“I did not say unbearable,” Daeron protested.

“No,” you said, before he could gather a proper defence. “He merely looked as though he might fling himself into the Honeywine.”

Daeron turned to you in open horror. “I did not.”

“You did a little.”

Gwayne’s eyes flicked to you then. There was caution there now. A guardedness that had not been present before supper, before the training yard, before he had learned that your attention was not always accidental.

“I am certain the prince suffers nobly,” Gwayne said, his voice even.

“Thank you, uncle,” Daeron replied, gathering what dignity he could manage.

“And if your tutors become too terrible,” Gwayne added, “you may always inform them that your uncle has recommended idleness as an essential part of princely education.”

Daeron blinked, then smiled. “Would you truly?”

“No,” Gwayne said. “But you may imagine it with comfort.”

You laughed softly despite yourself.

Gwayne looked at you again.

“You see?” you said, glancing between them, “Ser Gwayne understands you. He has spent a lifetime surviving Lord Ormund’s instruction.”

The change in Gwayne was slight. Almost nothing. A tightening around the eyes. A subtle stillness in his shoulders, as though he had braced himself against something unexpected.

But you saw it.

Daeron, sweet enough to miss the sharper thing beneath your words, only looked between you and his uncle with polite interest.

“My cousin has always been generous with his wisdom,” Gwayne said carefully.

“How delicately put.”

“It is a delicate subject.”

“Is it?”

“With you, my lady, I suspect most subjects may become so.”

There was no impropriety in the words. None that could be named. You smiled at him, slow and without hurry.

Daeron glanced between you both again, visibly uncertain whether he had missed some small jest. “You are both speaking strangely,” he said slowly.

“Are we?” you asked, still smiling.

“Yes.”

Gwayne’s mouth softened. “Then it must be your lessons, nephew. They have made you too perceptive.”

Daeron accepted that with a faintly pleased look, though he tried not to show it. The boy’s hunger for approval was a tender thing, easily assuaged by a scrap of recognition.

You let your hand rest lightly over the prince’s arm, “Come,” you said. “Walk with us, Ser Gwayne. Unless the nameless lord we stole you from was saying something terribly important.”

Gwayne glanced back once towards the man he had abandoned, still standing alone near the cypress walk, looking vaguely confused.

“He was explaining the superiority of his family’s kennels.”

“Then we have rescued you.”

“So it would seem.”

He fell into step on Daeron’s other side, close enough that the three of you moved together like a single, unhurried current beneath the long shade of the garden walk.

Daeron began asking him some earnest question about training yard drills and Gwayne answered with patient attention, his tone easing as he spoke to the boy, the guarded edges softening into something simpler.

You listened in silence for a few moments, allowing the rhythm of their voices to wash over you, the low murmur of his explanations blending with the fountain and the bees.

Then, without turning your head, you let your gaze drift towards Ser Gwayne from the corner of your eye.

He was already looking at you.

This time, he did not look away quickly enough.

You allowed yourself to notice it with only the faintest turn of your mouth, careful not to give him the satisfaction of being caught too plainly.

Gwayne, for his part, seemed to realise his mistake a breath too late. His attention shifted towards the hedges, then towards Daeron, as though the garden had suddenly become full of urgent things to observe.

Fortunately, the fates proved generous. Only a few minutes later, one of Ormund’s guards appeared at the end of the walk.

“My prince. Lord Ormund requests your attendance. The maester is waiting.”

The small measure of ease Daeron had gathered vanished at once, dissolving like frost touched by sun. He did not complain. He was too well-bred for that, too accustomed to obedience. But the look he gave you was helpless enough to make your heart pinch.

You squeezed his hand where it rested against your arm. “Courage,” you murmured.

Daeron attempted a smile. It was a brave attempt, if not entirely convincing.

Gwayne’s expression softened as he looked at him. “Farewell, nephew. I shall see you after, should you survive.”

It was a small jest, dryly delivered, but it did what it was meant to do. Daeron’s mouth curved, and some of the dread left his face before he inclined his head to you both and followed the guard back along the path.

You watched him go until the turn of the hedge took him from sight.

Then there was only Gwayne. Perfect. For a long, suspended moment, neither of you moved. The garden seemed to hold its breath without Daeron between you, the air growing heavier, warmer, as though the afternoon had drawn closer to listen.

You turned to him with a slow, playful smile, letting it unfurl across your lips like a secret shared too late to recall.

“So,” you said, your voice carrying the lightness of discovery, “you can be amusing.”

Gwayne’s eyes dropped for the briefest fraction of a heartbeat to your mouth before returning to meet yours. The movement was subtle, almost imperceptible, but you caught it.

“Does that surprise you, my lady?” he asked.

His voice remained courteous, polished to a fine, untouchable sheen. But something in it had changed. Only slightly. Enough.

“Indeed it does,” you said, and began to walk again.

You did not ask him to follow. He did anyway. Gwayne kept to your side, not too close, not distant enough to be rude. Every inch of him arranged according to propriety, every muscle held in careful alignment.

How tiresome. How interesting.

“You are always so formal with me,” you said, looking ahead rather than at him, “One begins to wonder whether you have any other manner at all.”

There was a pause before he answered, as though he was choosing each word with care. “You are my cousin’s wife,” Gwayne said. “And Lady Hightower of Oldtown.”

You gave a quiet sigh. “Yes. You do enjoy reminding me.”

“I would not presume you had forgotten.”

“No?” You glanced at him then, turning your head just enough to catch his profile. “How generous. For a moment, I feared you thought I required instruction in the shape of my own life.”

Gwayne’s jaw shifted, a muscle tensing along its edge, but he said nothing.

“I am aware I am Lord Ormund’s wife,” you continued, your voice mild, unhurried, as though you were discussing the weather. “I have borne the man a son. I sit at his table. I listen to his thoughts on taste and virtue and the failings of lesser men, night after night, until the candles gutter and the wine runs dry. Believe me, Ser Gwayne, I have not misplaced the fact of my marriage.”

His steps slowed by the smallest measure, a falter in the rhythm of his stride. You did not slow with him. After a moment, he caught up, his boots crunching against the gravel as he fell back into step beside you.

“That was not my meaning,” he said.

“Was it not?”

“No.”

You looked at him again, long enough to make him feel the full weight of your attention. There was discipline in him, certainly. Faith too, perhaps. Honour arranged about him so tightly that you wondered how often it chafed against his skin, how often he wished to loosen the bindings.

“Then what was your meaning?” you asked.

Gwayne’s eyes moved once across your face, and again they paused too near your mouth. The moment stretched, before he pulled his gaze away.

“My meaning,” he said at last, “is that respect is owed to you.”

Respect. A pretty word. A useless one, in that moment. You smiled as though pleased by the answer, and turned your attention back to the path ahead. “How very dutiful of you, Ser Gwayne.”

He did not answer immediately. But beside you, his hand flexed once, the fingers tightening briefly before releasing.

You allowed him the mercy of another subject, though not entirely out of kindness. The game required patience, and you had learned long ago that too much pressure would cause a man like Gwayne to retreat entirely.

“Was King’s Landing much changed?” you asked, your tone light, conversational. “You have been away long enough that we nearly began to forget you.”

“Nearly?”

“You must not ask for too much flattery. It becomes unbecoming.”

The corner of his mouth moved, a ghost of a smile that seemed determined not to fully form. “King’s Landing is as it ever was. Loud. Crowded. Restless.”

“Vile, then.”

That drew his attention more cleanly. He turned his head to look at you, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. “You dislike the city?”

“I dislike most cities that mistake stench for importance.” You brushed your fingertips along the head of a rose as you passed, careful not to catch your fingers on the thorns hidden beneath the leaves. “My father thought the Red Keep a wretched place. A painted skull upon a hill, I believe he once called it.”

“A severe judgement.”

“He had a gift for those.”

“And do you share it?”

“For severity? Frequently.” You glanced at him, your eyes meeting his. “For judgement? I suppose that depends on the object.”

Gwayne’s eyes narrowed faintly, not in displeasure but in caution, as though he had heard the soft shift beneath your words and did not yet know whether he was meant to step over it or step around it.

You continued before he could decide.

“I have always thought the Red Keep must be suffocating,” you said, your voice thoughtful. “All those ambitious men pressed together in one place, each certain his own desires are better hidden than they are, each watching the others for signs of weakness. A city built on whispers and half-truths.”

Gwayne looked ahead, his gaze fixed on the path before you. “Men at court are not known for modest ambition.”

The garden path narrowed, forcing him closer beside you as you moved beneath the arbour. The space did the work for you, his sleeve brushing near yours, the warmth of him briefly more present than it had any right to be.

“Did you enjoy it?” you asked.

Gwayne inhaled quietly. You had the impression of a man choosing between several safe answers and finding all of them insufficient. He settled, eventually, on honesty trimmed to an acceptable shape.

“There are moments of honour to be found there,” he said. “And many more moments of inconvenience.”

“How diplomatic.”

“It is often safer than truth.”

You looked at him then, and this time he did not immediately look away. The sunlight shifted through the leaves overhead, breaking across his face in brief gold fragments.

He really was irritatingly pretty. The kind of beauty that seemed almost unfair, a face that belonged in a tapestry or a song.

“Do you prefer safety, Ser Gwayne?”

His gaze held yours.

For a moment, the garden seemed to contract around you, the air thickening with the scent of lavender and heated stone.

Then his jaw tightened, just slightly. “When it is wise.”

You did not let the silence sit for too long. You paused near a low wall where the roses climbed thickly over pale stone, their blossoms heavy and overripe in the afternoon heat.

One had drooped beneath its own weight, petals dark at the edges, bruised almost purple where the sun had touched it too long.

“This one has spent itself,” you murmured, touching the bloom with the pad of your thumb. The petal was soft, the velvet surface dimpling beneath your pressure. “It has given everything to the sun without thought for the consequence. Now it hangs there, open and past its prime, waiting for someone to notice it before it falls.”

Gwayne’s eyes followed your hand.

“Do you know much of roses, Ser Gwayne?”

His expression had gone very still.

“No, my lady.”

“No?” You let your thumb trace the edge of the petal, dragging slow and idle across the bruised flesh. “A pity. They are not unlike women in that regard. They require a firm hand, not rough, but certain. They must be guided, or they climb wild, tangling with whatever brushes against them. And if handled carelessly…”

You pressed until the petal dimpled deeper beneath your thumb, the bruise spreading like an ink stain in water. “They bruise so easily.”

You looked up at him then, your lashes low. “The secret is knowing exactly how much strength a stem can bear before it breaks.”

Gwayne’s throat moved as he swallowed.

“Perhaps I should ask the gardeners instead,” you said, letting your hand fall from the rose. “They seem to understand the practical application of pressure.”

“That would be wise.”

His answer was controlled, but thinner than before, as though the words had to press past something tight to reach the air. He looked at you as though you had at last said something plainly enough to leave him no comfortable place to stand.

You waited. His hand flexed once at his side.

“You should take more care with your words,” he said. The voice was stripped bare, scraped of all the courtly veneer he had worn so carefully all afternoon.

You felt your smile soften into something far less polite. “Should I, Ser? How considerate of you to advise me.”

“This is not advice.”

“No?” You tilted your head, letting your gaze trail down his form with slow, appreciative leisure, then back to his eyes. “What is it, then? A plea? A prayer?”

Gwayne’s mouth parted, then closed again. You watched the truth he wanted to speak rise to his tongue, watched him force it back down. At last, he managed, “You know very well what you are doing.”

For one brief, clean moment, satisfaction moved through you like honey.

“I know many things, Ser Gwayne.” Your voice lowered, soft as a touch against his skin. “You will have to be plainer with me.”

The muscle in his jaw jumped. A vein pulsed at his temple beneath the pale auburn of his hair.

A distant laugh rose from somewhere beyond the hedge, bright and careless, a sharp reminder of the world that existed outside this charged pocket of air.

Gwayne blinked once, as if waking from a fever dream. He stepped back with the abrupt control of a man yanking his hand from an open flame. “I should return.”

“To what?”

“To anything else.”

You laughed then, the sound escaping before you could temper it. It was absolute delight. His eyes snapped to yours. For the first time, you saw irritation there. Not the measured discomfort of a man offended for honour’s sake. It was irritation at you.

It suited him. It made him human.

“Of course,” you said, smoothing one hand over your sleeve. “I would not keep you from your many duties.”

Gwayne bowed his head, but the gesture was stiff, a jerk of the chin rather than a fluid courtesy.

“My lady.”

“Ser Gwayne.”

He turned to leave. Then stopped. You watched his spine stiffen as he fought with himself. When he looked back, his face had recovered its composure.

“You should not seek to provoke what you would not wish answered.”

The warning slid through you like a blade wrapped in silk.

“Then perhaps you should take care with your answers.”

You were irritated. Unbelievably, utterly, exhaustingly so.

Ser Gwayne Hightower had taken to avoiding you now. Not merely keeping a respectful distance, no, that would have been proper, expected, even comfortable.

He had begun avoiding you with the single-minded dedication of a man preserving himself from a plague he had already seen ravage whole cities.

His gaze would slide over you, past you, around you, as if your presence were a piece of light too bright to be borne. It would have been a rich jest, a game to be savoured, if the sting of it had not run so deep.

In the last several days, you had seen him only at supper, and even then it took Ormund’s rigid insistence upon family ritual to trap him in the same room as you.

He kept his gaze fixed on his plate, the fine silver catching the candlelight, or on Daeron, or on Ormund whenever your husband felt compelled to expound on whatever subject had presently devoured his interest.

Never you. Not a single glance. The first night, you had nearly laughed at the absurdity of it.

By the third, you had found your fingers tight around the stem of your wine cup, an image of the dark red liquid arcing across the table to splatter against his chest blooming so vividly in your mind that you had to set the cup down entirely to resist the urge.

He would converse with Daeron gently enough, turning towards the boy with a soft curve to his mouth, asking after his lessons in a voice that held none of the clipped edge he reserved for the world.

He would answer Ormund with his usual, weary patience, enduring long-winded correction, tedious commentary, and the occasional thinly disguised insult without so much as a flicker of his composure.

But you might as well have been an empty chair at the far end of a long, abandoned hall.

At one point, during the fourth course, you had reached for the salt at the same moment he had. Your fingers had not touched. They had only approached the same small silver dish, drawn by the same need.

Gwayne had seen your hand coming and had withdrawn his own as though the metal had glowed red-hot.

Across the table, Daeron’s eyes flickered between you both, swift and confused, before dropping to his plate.

Ormund, naturally, had observed nothing.

When the meal finally, blessedly ended, Gwayne rose from his chair with a controlled haste that it became a spectacle in itself. His bow to Ormund was a little too stiff.

He murmured some careful excuse about the early hour required of him in the training yard, and was gone before you had even finished setting your cup down upon the linen.

You said nothing. You pressed your tongue against the inside of your cheek, tasting the faint, and decided that Ser Gwayne Hightower had become far, far too pleased with his own suffering.

He was preening in his little cage of honour. It was time to rattle the bars.

The following afternoon, the insult remained with you, a stone lodged beneath your ribs. You stood in the watery light of your solar while you fastened a narrow chain of delicate silver around your throat. Letters laid open on your desk went unread; the words blurred and swam before your eyes.

The Hightower moved around you as it always did, breathing and turning and obeying the immutable currents of its own existence.

Servants passed through the corridors with soft footsteps. A steward waited just beyond the solar door, his ledger tucked under his arm, patient for your attention. Somewhere below, Olyvar’s septa was drilling him in his letters. The whole of Oldtown lay at your fingertips, a stone-and-wood body waiting for your will.

Your Hightower. And Ser Gwayne thought he could hide from you inside it.

Did the man truly not understand who you were? Did he imagine that blood alone made a fortress? Yes, he was a Hightower by birth, carried the name like a shield. Yes, his position in this house was not insignificant, second-in-line after your son.

But you, at present, were Lady of Oldtown. Wife to its lord. Mother to its heir. Mistress of its pantries, its keys, its schedules, its gardens, its chambers, its wine cellars, its very breath.

There were very few doors in this tower that would dare remain closed to you. There were even fewer people inside it willing to deny you anything you might ask of them.

If Ser Gwayne wished to truly and irrevocably escape you, he would need to leave Oldtown entirely. Better still, the Reach altogether. He would need to put the whole of the realm between his conscience and your smile, if he wanted any real and lasting certainty.

You took your seat behind the desk, arranging your skirts with a practised hand, and waited. The knock came a short while later, two crisp raps against the oak door.

You let the silence stretch, counting the seconds, letting the weight of it settle into the space between you. Only when the pause had grown long enough to become a small, pointed statement did you speak.

“Enter.”

The door swung open. Ser Gwayne Hightower stepped inside, and the quality of the light in the room seemed to shift.

He looked, unfortunately, as handsome as ever. More so, perhaps, because irritation sharpened your appreciation rather than dulled it.

His eyes found you. For a heartbeat, they rested on your face, on the length of your throat where the silver chain lay.

Then, with an effort you could almost feel in your own chest, he moved his gaze to some respectful, neutral point near your shoulder, fixing it there as though the stone of the wall behind you held absorbing interest.

“My lady,” he said, his voice low and even. He bowed his head. “You sent for me.”

“So you do remember how to come when called.” Your words came out silken, touched with just enough of a serrated edge to catch.

You sat behind your desk, one hand resting lightly over the stack of unread letters, the other lying palm-down on the polished wood. You did not invite him to sit. You did not gesture towards the chair that stood opposite.

The door, you noted, had been left ajar behind him, wide enough to preserve propriety, narrow enough to feel like a cage. You had already ensured that your maid had departed on some errand that would keep her away for the better part of the hour.

“I was not aware I had given offence,” he said carefully, each word chosen with care.

“No?”

His mouth tightened

You leaned back in your chair, the wood creaking softly beneath you, as you studied him. If he wished to behave as though you were invisible then you would make a generous, thorough effort to correct that misapprehension.

You traced the line of his brow, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw that suggested he had not shaved as closely that morning as he usually did.

“For several days now,” you said, letting the words fall slowly, “you have looked at everyone in this household except me.”

Gwayne grew very still. The stillness of a man who has been caught in a trap and is calculating whether there is any graceful way to extricate himself. He lowered his eyes, in a retreat from the challenge of your gaze. “I meant no disrespect,” he said, his voice quieter now.

“Of course not. Men rarely do when they are being insulting.”

His jaw shifted once. A quick, involuntary clench, quickly released.

You smiled faintly, letting the expression touch only your lips, not your eyes. “Tell me, Ser Gwayne. Have I become difficult to look upon, or have you merely developed some sudden, consuming fear of my face?”

“My lady—”

“You may answer plainly. I assure you, I will survive the blow.”

For a long moment, he said nothing. His hand rested at his side, the fingers perfectly still, but you had begun to recognise the effort it cost him to keep them so. At last, he looked at you properly.

“My conduct has been improper,” he said.

You lifted your brows, letting the silence draw the words out of him.

“My attention,” he said, and the word came out halting, “has been improper.”

Ah.

You let the words settle between you, turning them over, tasting them. When you looked up again, his expression was taut.

“How pious,” you said softly.

You rose from your chair. The wood of the desk was warm beneath your fingertips as you pushed yourself upright, and you saw the change in him at once.

Gwayne’s posture shifted. Almost imperceptibly, a knight bracing himself for movement, for danger. His gaze tracked you, as you came around the corner of the desk.

You moved slowly, your steps unhurried. You stopped at a proper distance. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, to catch the faint, clean scent of him.

“You are in my husband’s house,” you said, your voice pitched low. “At my husband’s table. Beneath my husband’s roof. If you are determined to behave as though that makes me impossible to see, then I must warn you, Ser Gwayne, you have chosen a very poor place in which to be blind.”

His eyes snapped to yours.

And there, beneath all that honour, all that careful, excruciating virtue, you saw it. Irritation. It warmed his face, brought a flush to his cheekbones, made his eyes glitter with something that was not quite anger and not quite desire. 

Beautiful, you thought, with a flicker of cruel delight.

“You should not have sent for me,” he said. The words were ground out through clenched teeth.

You smiled. “And yet you came.”

His mouth pressed into a hard, flat line. “You must cease this.”

Your hand stilled over the correspondence. Slowly, you turned your head back towards him. “Cease what, Ser Gwayne?” Your voice was soft, almost curious.

His eyes sharpened. The green in them caught the light, flinty and hot. You watched the calculation flicker behind them, the risk of naming what he dared not name.

You let your face arrange itself into mild confusion. A little concern, even. It cost you nearly nothing, and the effect on him was immediate. His nostrils flared once. “You know very well.”

“I assure you, I do not.”

Gwayne looked towards the open door, then back to you.

The gesture was brief, but you caught it. He was measuring propriety, servants, the thin safety of appearances. He could not raise his voice. He could not accuse you too plainly. Not with the door open.

And most of all, he could not bring himself to say it. Stop looking at me. Stop calling me to you. Stop standing too close. Stop trying to make me want you.

You almost pitied him. “If I have offended you,” you said softly, “I would prefer to understand how.”

Gwayne’s gaze dropped to your mouth.

You could see the war in him, the desire to look away, to retreat, to salvage what remained of his composure. But his eyes lingered on the curve of your lips, on the slight, inviting part of them, before he wrenched his gaze back to yours with an effort that was almost violent.

The fury in his restraint was far more gratifying than any confession might have been.

“You are making sport of me,” he said.

There. As close as he could come.

You tilted your head, letting your hair slide across your shoulder. “Am I?”

He wanted to rebuke you. He wanted to leave. He wanted, perhaps most of all, for you to have enough mercy to stop forcing him to name the thing neither of you were supposed to know.

But mercy had never been among your favourite virtues.

“I had thought,” you said, letting the words drift, “that I merely summoned my husband’s cousin to ask why he has begun treating me as though I carry some illness. As though proximity to me might stain his honour.”

“You should not summon me at all.” His voice was low, threaded with something that might have been desperation.

“Because you dislike my company?”

He did not answer. He could not say yes. It would be false. He could not say no. It would be ruinous. Poor, pretty Ser Gwayne.

At last, he said, “Because it is unwise.”

Unwise. Not wrong. Not forbidden. Only unwise, as though the sin lay in the risk of discovery rather than in the act itself.

Then, very slowly, you smiled. “Then I shall try to be wiser,” you said. The softness of your voice made the lie almost beautiful.

Gwayne stared at you. He stood there, caught between the door and the desk, between duty and longing, and you could see the precise moment when he understood that you would not relent.

You turned away first, breaking the spell. You returned to your desk, the wood smooth and cool beneath your palms, and picked up the folded letter as though the matter had reached its natural conclusion.

Only then, having taken what you wanted from him did you permit him the dignity of escape. “You may go now, Ser Gwayne.”

He remained there for another moment. You did not look back, but you felt him. His anger. His restraint.

Then he bowed. “My lady.”

The words were courteous. His voice was not. You listened to his steps recede. Then the quiet pull of the door as he closed it behind him. Only once he was gone did you allow yourself to smile properly.

So.

He could be made to beg.

Gwayne had come to the conclusion several days ago that the Lady of Oldtown might be the wickedest woman alive.

It was a monstrous thought to have about his cousin’s wife.

It was also becoming increasingly difficult to disprove.

He had known you for years in the vague, ordinary manner of family by marriage. Lord Ormund’s wife. Lady Hightower. The mother of the heir. A woman of excellent birth and composed manners who inhabited the Hightower as naturally as the old stone itself.

You had been beautiful, certainly. He had never been blind. But your beauty had belonged to the room in the same manner as polished silver, carved marble, costly tapestries, and all the other fine things arranged around Ormund’s life.

A pleasant, distant ornament, admired without being touched.

Months ago, before he left for King’s Landing, you had treated him as little more than another ornament in your husband’s household. A kinsman to greet. A knight to thank. A man to whom courtesy was owed and nothing more.

Now, when you looked at him, the world tilted.

It vexed him. You vexed him.

Worse still, he could not escape you.

You were everywhere.

In the training yard, seated beneath the arcade with wine and fruit at your side, watching him as though he had been placed there for your private amusement.

In the gardens, walking slowly beneath the cypress shade. The way you said his name, Gwayne, drew out the syllables like honey, letting them rest on your tongue a moment longer than necessary. The way you touched your own throat when you spoke to him, fingers trailing along the column of your neck as though you were showing him where you wanted his mouth.

At supper, beside Ormund, where you did not need to speak to him at all.

That was perhaps the worst of it.

By day, he could at least remove himself. By night, he was made to sit across from you at his cousin’s table and endure the unbearable intimacy of being observed in plain sight.

Ormund would speak. Daeron would listen with patient attention. Olyvar would lean sleepily against his mother’s side, his small hand resting on your breast without any of the meaning that haunted Gwayne’s own thoughts.

And you would look at Gwayne.

You looked rarely enough that each glance struck him cleanly. A slow lift of your eyes while reaching for your cup. The deliberate arch of your back as you leaned forward to set down your glass, the fabric of your gown tightening over the curve of your breasts.

Except he always felt it.

He began drinking less at supper. Wine softened resolve. Wine made men slow and foolish. Wine allowed thoughts to loosen from the places where discipline had bound them.

So he watered his cup more heavily, ignored Ormund’s amused remarks about moderation, and kept his hands folded or occupied with his knife whenever you were near.

It did not help. Sobriety only made him more aware. He noticed everything with painful clarity, the colour of your mouth, red and full and slightly parted, as though you were always about to speak, or to kiss.

The measured grace of your hands as you fed some small piece of fruit to Olyvar, and he could not stop imagining what they might feel like wrapped around something else. The faint perfume that followed when you passed behind his chair, a blend of jasmine and something warmer, something that made his mouth water and his groin tighten.

There were evenings when he left the table feeling as though he had survived a battle no one else had seen.

His cock would be half-hard, aching against the seam of his breeches, and he would have to walk carefully, slowly, to keep his body from betraying him.

He would retreat to his chambers and pour cold water from the basin, splashing it over his face, his neck, the burning length of his arousal, praying for relief that never came.

And sleep, which should have offered mercy, became another place where you found him.

In dreams, you were less careful. In dreams, your lips brushed his ear as you whispered things no honourable woman would ever say aloud. 

I want you inside me, Gwayne. I want to feel you stretch me, fill me, ruin me. 

Your hand rested over his bare chest, palm warm against the hard, uneven beat of his heart, and then slid lower, down the plane of his stomach, past the trail of auburn hair, until your fingers curled around the rigid length of his cock.

In dreams, you stroked him slowly, your thumb circling the slick head, your breath hot against his throat while you whispered that you had thought of this, of him, every night since he returned.

Sometimes he saw only fragments, the red tint of your mouth, which left marks all over his body like a brand. The dark sweep of your lashes as you looked up at him on your knees, your lips parted, your tongue tracing the tip of him before you took him into the wet heat of your mouth.

A place no man had any right to imagine you.

And yet he did. He imagined you swallowing him, your cheeks hollowed, your eyes glazed with want, your hands gripping his thighs as you took him deeper, deeper, until he spilled down your throat with a groan that tore from his chest.

He would wake before dawn with his breath unsteady and his body burning with the evidence of thoughts he had not permitted himself while conscious.

The sheets would be tangled around his legs, damp with sweat, and his cock would be painfully hard, slick with the evidence of his shame. He would lie there, staring at the dark ceiling, and feel the phantom warmth of your mouth still lingering on his skin.

Desire had made a traitor of his flesh, and no amount of cold water splashed across his face, no amount of silent, bitter prayers muttered into the dark, seemed able to make it loyal again.

So he went to the Sept.

He went more often than duty required.

In the grey hush before morning, when the candles had burned low and the air smelled of wax, Gwayne knelt before the Seven and forced discipline into himself one prayer at a time.

The chill of the floor seeped through the wool of his breeches, a grim penance against the warmth still lingering from his dreams.

To the Warrior, he prayed for strength, the strength to wrestle his own nature into submission, to look at you without hardening. To the Father, for just judgment, though he knew any fair verdict would condemn him. To the Mother, for mercy, though he did not think he deserved any measure of it.

And to the Maiden, he found himself unable to pray without shame curdling thick and bitter in his throat.

The statue regarded him with downcast stone eyes, her hands folded in a gesture of perfect innocence, and every image of purity she offered turned, wickedly, inexorably, back towards you. The fall of her marble gown became the drape of your silk. The modest curve of her mouth became the full, parted softness of your lips, red and wet and waiting.

The purity of her form dissolved into the memory of your body moving beneath candlelight, the shadow of your nipples against the fabric, the sway of your hips as you walked past his chair.

That was when he knew he was in danger.

Not when you smiled at him across the training yard. Not when he woke hard and aching from dreams of your mouth on his cock. Not even when he began avoiding the very corridors of his own kin’s house like some green boy frightened of the cook’s daughter.

No. He knew he was truly lost when sacred things began to bend around the shape of his temptation.

When the flicker of candle flames recalled the heat in your gaze. When the scent of frankincense mingled too closely with the memory of your perfume.

When the word sin no longer frightened him quickly enough, because it had become inseparable from the thought of you.

He confessed in fragments. Not to a septon. He did not trust his own mouth to form the truth where another man might hear it. Instead, he knelt with his head bowed, and spoke only inside himself, where the gods could see what he was too cowardly to name aloud.

I have entertained impure thoughts. I have looked too long. I have wanted what is not mine.

Even that was not honest enough. Because the whole truth was uglier, heavier, more damning.

He did not merely want a woman who belonged to another man. He wanted you. And some part of him, some shameful, resentful, deeply buried part he had spent years mastering, knew exactly whose wife you were and wanted you more because of it.

Ormund’s ring on your finger. Ormund’s name on your tongue. Ormund’s bed you shared, the sheets where you lay bare and willing for a man who did not deserve the half of what he possessed.

That was where guilt turned into something heavier.

Ormund, who was arrogant, impossible, vain in the way only highly cultivated men managed to be. Ormund, who had corrected him since boyhood, bested him when he could, raged when he could not, and carried every triumph as though it had been written into the order of the world.

Gwayne had learned early how to yield.

A boy could only endure so many games ruined by Ormund’s wounded pride before he understood that victory was not always worth the cost. Let him win. Let him speak. Let him stand taller if standing taller kept the peace.

Cousin. Lord. Blood.

And yet at supper, Ormund sat beside you and spoke as though everything in the room existed by his possession of it. His tower. His table. His wife.

And you looked at Gwayne over the rim of your cup.

That was the thought that made him feel most wretched. Not merely that he wanted you.

That he reveled in being wanted by you. That when Ormund’s attention was elsewhere and your gaze found Gwayne’s across the table, something low and disgraceful in him answered with a surge of savage, possessive triumph.

Not yours, cousin. Mine.

He closed his eyes, and the taste of the communion wine on his tongue was not enough to wash away the imagined sweetness of your mouth.

Gwayne bowed his head and swallowed hard, his hands clasped so tightly before him that the knuckles ached.

He prayed for deliverance, knowing he would not recognise it if it came. He prayed for punishment, knowing he deserved nothing less than the fire of seven hells.

He prayed, most of all, for the strength to stop wanting the very thing he feared, with every desperate, traitorous beat of his heart, he would not refuse if it ever came close enough.

He prayed for a grace he knew he did not possess, while his body, his treacherous, aching, unredeemed body, prayed silently for you.

Supper, again.

There was nothing unusual in that. And yet Ormund, for reasons known only to himself and whatever dark humour had taken root in him that evening, had chosen his cousin as his entertainment tonight.

It had begun lightly enough. A remark about Gwayne’s return from King’s Landing. Some comment on how the capital seemed to drain the vigour from men who were not careful of it.

Gwayne had accepted it with a faint smile and a lowered gaze, giving the answer expected of him.

Then Ormund had continued. That was always the danger with him. A single barb was never enough if the first found flesh.

“I only say it out of concern,” Ormund said, turning his cup slowly between his long fingers. “There is a certain manner men bring back from the Red Keep. A taste for ceremony over substance. They stand straighter, speak less, and begin to mistake silence for depth. Or emptiness for self-control.”

Gwayne’s expression did not change. He sat with one hand resting near his knife, the other pressed flat against his thigh, as if grounding himself in the solid weight of his own bones.

Only the faint colour along his cheekbones, deepening towards his jaw, suggested the words had landed anywhere at all.

“You find me changed, then?” he asked mildly.

“I find you quieter,” Ormund replied. “Though perhaps that is mercy. A man who speaks less reveals less of his want. It is a useful discipline.”

Daeron glanced down at his plate. You remained silent, your hand stroking Olyvar’s back in slow, absent circles.

There were many things your husband enjoyed, but few so much as the sound of a room carefully adjusting itself around his temper. He had a talent for creating discomfort without ever raising his voice.

Ormund looked to Daeron then, drawing the boy in with the careless confidence of a man who knew refusal would feel like disrespect. “You noticed it as well, surely. Ser Gwayne has returned to us a model of piety.”

Daeron’s fingers tightened around his cup. “I had thought my uncle much the same as he was,” he said carefully.

“A loyal answer,” Ormund said, smiling faintly. “Not a perceptive one. But a boy cannot be expected to read the hunger a man hides behind his prayers.”

Daeron’s face warmed.

Gwayne looked at him then, not at Ormund. The look was brief, steadying, almost protective. It seemed to say that none of this mattered, that the boy need not trouble himself trying to answer well.

Ormund leaned back, pleased with himself. “Come now, my Prince. You have spent enough time under my roof to know that affection does not require blindness. Even kin may be assessed honestly.”

Daeron swallowed. “Ser Gwayne is an honourable knight.”

“Honourable, yes,” Ormund allowed, the words falling like a judgement from a high bench. “But honour is a beginning, not an accomplishment. Many dull men are honourable because they lack the imagination to be otherwise. Or the appetite for the pleasures that require a bolder nature.”

Daeron persisted. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the table’s hush like a stone through still water. “I do not think Ser Gwayne dull.”

Ormund’s eyes slid back to him. The boy seemed to regret speaking the moment the words left him, but he did not take them back. You saw the effort it cost him to remain seated properly, to meet Ormund’s attention and not shrink from it.

Gwayne saw it too.

“My prince is kind,” he said, before Ormund could answer. His voice was calm. “But your lord is not wrong to say I am not made for the games of court and chamber. I have always been a simpler instrument.”

Ormund smiled. The smile of a man who had seen his opponent lay down his sword.

“No,” your husband said. “You were always more suited to sword and saddle. There is use in that, of course. Every house requires bodies that can be aimed. Strong hands and a willing back. A sword has no need of pride, only a hand to wield it.”

The servants continued moving as though nothing had happened. A dish was replaced. Wine was poured. Somewhere beyond the windows, the evening wind moved faintly against the stone.

Gwayne gave a small inclination of his head. “As you say, cousin.”

The words were old. Worn smooth from years of use. You looked at Gwayne and wondered how many times he had said them as a boy. How many times he had decided that yielding was simpler.

How many little contests Ormund had been allowed to win so the household might be spared his wounded pride.

Your husband turned to you then.

There was a glimmer in his eyes, subtle but unmistakable, the satisfied gleam of a man who had performed precisely as he wished and now sought the most particular witness.

His wife. Beautiful, silent, seated beside him in green silk that caught the candlelight in slow, liquid shifts, watching with an expression he had not yet managed to read.

“What say you, my love?” Ormund asked. “Am I too severe?”

He wanted you to admire him.

He had taken a man apart in small, polished pieces and now expected you to praise the elegance of the blade. You looked at him for a long moment. Long enough for the silence to grow heavy with the weight of what he was not hearing.

Ormund waited, his mouth faintly curved, ready to be indulged.

Across the table, Gwayne did not move. He stared down at his cup as though your answer had nothing to do with him.

Daeron’s gaze remained fixed on his plate, a flush creeping up from his collar.

You stroked Olyvar’s hair once, the soft strands slipping through your fingers like silk, then lifted your wine.

“I think,” you said at last, “that you always know precisely how much severity a room will tolerate.”

Ormund’s smile sharpened, pleased before he understood you fully. Then something in his expression cooled by a fraction, a tightening at the corners of his mouth, a flicker of recognition that he had not been praised but measured.

You took a slow drink. The wine was warm on your tongue.

Gwayne’s eyes lifted.

They met yours across the table, and for a breathless instant, the room fell away. There was only that look, before he lowered his gaze once more.

Ormund studied you over the rim of his own cup, some private irritation passing like shadow behind his face. But there were servants in the room, and Daeron at the table, and his sleeping son tucked against your side. So he did not press you.

Instead, he gave a soft, dismissive hum.

“A wife’s answer,” he said.

You lowered your cup, the ceramic clicking softly against the wood. “Naturally. I am told I am very accomplished at being one.”

Daeron did not dare look at you.

Gwayne did. This time, he failed to hide it.

You held his gaze across the table, your face calm, your pulse strangely awake beneath your skin. There was no smile this time. Only the plain, silent acknowledgement that you had seen what Ormund had done to him. And that you had not partook.

Ormund resumed speaking before the quiet could thicken beyond his control, turning the conversation towards the rebuilding of some minor sept outside the city.

And supper ended without further incident.

That was to say, no one raised their voice, no cup was overturned, no servant was sent scurrying from the room with instructions to summon anyone of consequence.

Ormund rose from the table satisfied with himself, as he so often did, and excused himself to attend to some letters that apparently required the grave intervention of his intellect.

Daeron slipped away soon after, his shoulders dropping as he crossed the threshold. Olyvar had long since been carried to his bed, heavy-eyed and half-asleep against your shoulder before his nurse came to collect him.

You remained a little while longer.

Only when the servants began clearing the last of the cups, did you finally rise and leave the solar. The halls of the Hightower were cooler at night, the old stone holding the memory of the sea wind even when the windows were shuttered.

You had nearly reached the turn towards your personal chambers when you saw him.

Ser Gwayne stood near one of the tall arched windows, half in shadow, his hand braced lightly against the stone ledge as he looked out over the city below. Beyond the glass, the lights of Oldtown glittered like scattered embers, and the distant spire of the Starry Sept rose against the dark sky.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then he straightened.

“My lady.”

You looked at him carefully in the dim torchlight. The humiliation from supper had not left him. His face was composed, but there was a tiredness around his eyes, a thinness to his mouth. A man who had endured insult after insult without allowing any of them the dignity of visible injury.

“You do that often,” you said.

Gwayne’s gaze moved to yours. “My lady?”

“Allow him to make sport of you... to bully you.”

Gwayne went still, the last of his polite greeting draining from his face like water through sand. “My cousin does not bully me,” Gwayne said.

You nearly smiled at the choice of denial. The way he said it, the lie worn smooth by repetition.

“No. Of course not. Lord Ormund is far too cultivated for anything so plain.” You let your eyes drift towards the dark window. “He merely cuts, and waits to see who is polite enough to bleed quietly.”

Gwayne’s mouth tightened. The muscle in his jaw jumped once, a small betrayal of control. “You need not defend me.”

“I did not.”

His eyes narrowed, exhaustion and something sharper. “Then why—?”

“My husband asked me a question,” you said, your voice soft and even. “I answered.”

Gwayne looked away first.

In profile, the resemblance between him and Ormund was clearer, the same noble blood shaped differently, Ormund severe and ornamental, Gwayne cleaner, warmer, made dangerous by the very effort he took to be good.

After a moment, he gave a quiet, humourless breath.

“Why do you care?”

There it was. Not accusation at first. Weariness. Frustration. Something close to embarrassment that you had seen too much.

You took a step nearer, unhurried. “Because I prefer you.”

Gwayne’s head turned back to you. For one suspended moment, the words seemed to pass through him without finding a place to settle. And you watched the slow process of their meaning sinking into his skin like water into thirsty ground.

Then weariness hardened into anger so quickly you almost felt the air shift with it.

“You should not say such things.”

“Why?”

“You know why.” His voice was low, rough at the edges. “You are married.”

“I am aware.”

“This is not some idle game.”

“No?” You let the word linger, arching your brow just enough to catch the torchlight.

“No.” He stepped closer then, not enough to threaten, but enough that you felt the heat of his temper more keenly than before. “Whatever amusement you find in this, whatever pleasure you take in provoking me, it is sin. It is dishonour. It is adultery.”

You watched him, unmoved. The word hung in the air like a bell that had been struck and was still trembling.

“We have committed no adultery,” you said softly, your voice dropping to a murmur that seemed to brush against his skin. “Not yet.”

Gwayne stared at you.

The silence after that was almost violent. His breath came shallow, his chest rising and falling beneath the fine wool of his doublet.

His throat moved once, and you had the sudden impression that every prayer he had ever spoken had risen in him at once and found no answer strong enough to silence the want curling in his gut.

He looked appalled by you. By himself. By the fact that you had taken the ugliest word he possessed and handled it as though it were merely a door neither of you had opened.

“Do not,” he said, but his voice cracked on the second word.

He was angry. Humiliated. Aroused. You could see each one warring through him, as they bled into each other, staining his composure, making his breath come faster.

“You should return to your chambers,” he said, but the words were barely audible now.

“You should stop telling me what I ought to do.”

His breath left him through his nose, a sharp, frustrated sound that was almost a groan. Anyone might turn the corner. A servant, a guard, Ormund himself. Gwayne was surely thinking the same thing. Still, he did not move.

You lifted your hand and touched his chest. Your palm settled over the front of his doublet, light enough to be refused, deliberate enough that refusal would require movement.

The fabric was warm from his body, fine and smooth beneath your fingers. Beneath it, you felt the solid wall of his chest, the hard muscle tensing at your touch.

His breath caught.

Beneath the fine cloth, his body went rigid. You felt the hard shape of him, the held breath, the living warmth beneath all that piety. The heat of his skin seemed to seep through the layers, reaching for yours.

His eyes dropped to your hand. Then, suddenly, his fingers closed around your wrist.

It was the first time Gwayne had touched you as a man rather than a courtier offering courtesy. His grip was firm and warm, the calluses of his palm rough against the soft skin of your inner wrist.

You looked up at him.

His face had changed. The anger was still there, but it had been overtaken by something more dangerous. Want, stripped of all its polite disguises.

His pupils had dilated, the torchlight catching the dark gleam of his eyes. His lips parted slightly, and you saw the quick movement of his tongue wetting them.

He was looking at you now as he had fought not to look for days, with his restraint pulled so taut that one more breath might snap it entirely.

Your wrist remained caught in his hand. Neither of you moved.

Then his gaze fell to your mouth. This time, he did not pretend otherwise. His eyes traced the curve of your lips, the slight parting of them, the shine of moisture where your tongue had touched.

You felt the smallest shift in him before it happened. His grip tightened, his fingers pressing into your pulse point.

His body leaned nearer by a fraction, the space between you shrinking until you could feel the warmth of his breath on your skin. His eyes lifted once to yours, as though searching for some last warning, some final scrap of sense.

You gave him none.

For one wild, breathless instant, you thought he would kiss you.

He would kiss you as the man who had sat across from you at supper and endured your husband’s insults while your gaze rested on the bruise of his pride. He would kiss you as the man who had prayed against wanting you and failed.

His mouth came close enough that you felt the warmth of his breath, the faint brush of air across your lips. His chest pressed against your hand, the rapid beat of his heart hammering against your palm.

Then he stopped.

A muscle jumped in his jaw, tight and hard as a bowstring. His eyes closed briefly and when they opened again, something cold and brutal had returned to them. The hunger was locked away, and in its place stood a fortress.

He released your wrist as though it had burned him.

You remained very still, your hand falling slowly back to your side, the memory of his calloused palm scorched into your skin.

Gwayne stepped away, putting cold stone between you.

“You shame yourself,” he said, his voice low and rough, “And you would have me drown in that shame with you.”

The words struck cleanly, a blade drawn across the softest part of your pride. For a second, there was no sound but the faint hiss of the nearest torch and the ragged sound of his breathing, quick and shallow as a hunted thing.

Then heat rose beneath your skin, not the sweet warmth of desire, but the bitter burn of humiliation. You had offered him the victory of your nearness, the scent of your skin, the softness of your mouth beneath his.

And then he had chosen to rebuke you as though he had not been one breath from proving himself no better than the rest… as though his own cock had not been stiff with the very sin he now condemned.

“Do not flatter yourself, Ser Gwayne.” Your voice emerged smooth and cold. “Do not mistake a moment’s curiosity for a need I am desperate to repeat.”

His expression flickered. Shock. Shame. Something raw and wounded beneath.

“You must not speak to me so again,” he said, but the authority had drained from it, leaving only a plea and a warning tangled together.

Your smile vanished.

Something in Gwayne’s face shifted when he saw it, some belated understanding that he had passed from guilt into insult.

And that you, unlike the gods he prayed to every night, were not inclined towards mercy. You stepped back. This time, he was the one who looked unsettled, his hand lifting an inch as though to reach for you before he caught himself.

“Then you shall be relieved to know I have no reason to remain here.” Your voice had gone cool enough to frost the stone between you, to freeze the very heat you had stoked between his thighs. “I ought to return to my husband. He will not turn from what I offer.”

Gwayne flinched. The mention of Ormund, a lash across his conscience.

You gathered your skirts and turned from him, anger carrying you before pride could be made to limp behind it. You did not look back. Not once.

Let him stand there with his honour. Let him pray over the taste of almost. You had offered him the edge of something exquisite, and he had chosen to bleed himself on restraint rather than fall into the sweetness of your body.

Very well, you would return to Ormund.

And Ser Gwayne Hightower could choke on whatever holy comfort he found in that.

For the first three days, Gwayne told himself he had been granted mercy

He woke each morning with the ghost of your scent still tangled in the linen and the shameful, persistent stiffness of his cock beneath the sheets. The remnant of dreams so vivid they left him breathless and aching. Dreams of your mouth. The weight of your thigh over his hip.

He punished his body to quiet his mind.

He rode until his thighs burned and the saddle rubbed him raw, forcing exhaustion into his bones so that sleep might come without your face behind his eyelids.

He sparred until sweat darkened his tunic and the ache in his shoulders became something pure, something that had nothing to do with the memory of your skin beneath his hand.

He prayed in the sept until his knees bruised on the cold stone, begging the Mother and the Maiden to scour your image from his thoughts.

It did not work.

By the fourth day, the truth cracked through his ribs like a splintered lance. Your silence was not mercy. It was the most exquisite punishment you could have devised against him.

Because he had spent every hour organising himself around the task of resisting you. The war had given his days shape. 

Do not look at her mouth. Do not imagine the weight of her breast in your palm. Do not let your voice soften when you speak her name. Do not think of her cunt… warm, wet, waiting for a husband who does not deserve it.

Every moment had possessed its own private battle. Then, suddenly, the siege was lifted. The enemy had withdrawn behind her walls. And he was left standing on the empty field with his sword drawn, looking like the greatest fool in the Seven Kingdoms.

He became a hound scenting the air for a master who had locked him out.

At supper, you starved him. When courtesy compelled a greeting, your voice emerged smooth and cool as river-stone.

“Ser Gwayne.” No honeyed edge. No secret sliding of your gaze down the length of his body.

“My lady,” he answered, and the effort of keeping his voice level made his jaw ache.

It made his throat tight with the effort of pretending he did not want to drag you from that chair and take you against the nearest wall.

Then you turned away.

You looked at Ormund. You laid your hand on Ormund’s arm. You smiled at him. It should have relieved him, this withdrawal. Seven above, he had begged for it.

Had he not gone to the sept with his hands clasped too tightly, praying for the strength to remove you from his thoughts? Had he not rebuked you in the corridor with every scrap of honour left to him?

You were doing exactly what decency demanded.

And it was ruining him.

By the third supper, he felt the absence of your gaze like a physical deprivation. He had condemned that gaze so fiercely when he possessed it. He had called it temptation. He had called it wickedness.

Now, without it, he felt like some poor living thing dragged from the sun, withering in the cold. That thought shamed him nearly as much as the dreams.

You were cruel, Gwayne decided. No woman could do what you had done by accident.

No woman could spend weeks drawing a man’s desire out from beneath his armour, teaching his body to answer yours like a well-strung lute, and then step back into the safety of cold courtesy as if she had merely been practicing a dance.

As if his prayers, his shame, his despair had been nothing more than an entertainment that had briefly failed to please you.

But the true poison in the cup was Ormund.

Gwayne had endured his cousin all his life. Ormund’s pride. His theatrical displeasures. The exquisite little humiliations dressed as wit. That was familiar territory. Irritating, yes. Often humiliating. But known.

Now, however, he found himself aware of Ormund in ways he had never permitted himself before.

Aware of how often Ormund addressed you, seeking your ear. Aware of the way your husband’s hand rested at the back of your chair. Aware of how Ormund sought your approval with a subtle, wheedling persistence that should have been laughable.

It was not laughable.

Because Gwayne watched you lean into that touch. Watched you offer Ormund the attention that he was dying for. He imagined Ormund in your chambers. He imagined your husband’s hands on your skin, his mouth on your throat, his body moving over yours in the dark.

One evening, Ormund spoke at length about some carved screen he had commissioned for the lower hall. He described the quality of the wood, the way the artisan had coaxed the figures from the surface like peeling back a lover’s gown.

He praised the cleverness of the design, the interlacing vines and hidden beasts, and then, with that familiar curl of his lip, dismissed the inferior works of other houses. He performed. He always performed.

And though half the room might have been spared by a merciful collapse of the ceiling, you listened. Not with affection, Gwayne could see that plainly enough. You did not adore Ormund. But you indulged him.

You tilted your head at the correct moment. You gave him a faint smile over your wine, lips parting just enough to wet the rim of the cup. You offered, in that smooth voice, exactly enough admiration to satisfy him.

“It is finely chosen,” you said. “You have always had a good eye for ornament.”

Ormund’s face warmed with pleasure, his chest puffing slightly as he reached for your hand where it rested near his plate. He lifted it to his lips, a slow kiss to your knuckles.

Gwayne wanted to be the one holding your hand. He wanted to feel your pulse beneath his thumb, wanted to taste the salt of your skin on his tongue. He looked down at his plate instead. He hated himself for that too. Hated, most of all, the vile little thought that came again before he could stop it, curling through his mind like smoke from a censer,

She does not want him.

It brought him no peace. Only more shame. Because you might not want Ormund, but you sat beside him. You wore his house colours. You bore his name. You had borne his son, had given that smug, undeserving man a child from your own womb.

When the household looked at you, they saw Lady Hightower, Lord Ormund’s wife. And still, when you laughed softly at something Ormund said, a throaty sound that made Gwayne’s sack ache, he felt betrayed.

By the next supper, he was no better.

You arrived late, though not so late as to be remarked upon. Ormund looked up first, displeasure prepared and then softened, as it often did, by the sight of you. His eyes trailed over your gown, the low cut of the bodice, the way the fabric clung to the swell of your breasts.

Olyvar brightened at once and reached for you when you passed behind his chair, and you bent to kiss your son’s head.

Gwayne looked at his cup. He told himself not to look again.

Then Ormund said your name.

Not sharply. Merely summoning your attention to some matter beside him. You leaned closer to your husband, one hand resting lightly against the table, close enough that your fingers brushed his. Gwayne saw the way his cousin’s hand turned, palm up, inviting yours to rest within it. He saw you place your hand in Ormund’s.

He felt the movement like a hand closing around his throat.

He looked up despite himself. Then, as though feeling Gwayne’s gaze across the table, your eyes lifted. At last.

For one breath, you looked at him. Only a cool acknowledgement, as one might grant a man whose presence was expected and uninteresting. Then you returned your attention to your husband.

The pain of it was so precise it almost steadied him. A clean, sharp blade slipped between his ribs. Yes, he thought, staring down at his untouched wine, his jaw tight, his throat dry.

Wickedest woman alive.

Your existence must have driven him to madness. There was no other sensible explanation. No other defence for why, after a week of praying against you, he had written a note with his own hand and left it in your solar.

He had not trusted a servant with it. The thought alone had sickened him. No. If disgrace was to be invited, he had at least possessed the miserable dignity of delivering the invitation himself.

The note had been brief. Painfully so.

My lady, If you would grant me a private word after supper, I shall await you in my chambers. Ser Gwayne Hightower

A private word. What a cowardly phrase. What a polished little lie. What he wanted was not words.

He did not know what he wanted from you. Explanation, perhaps. Some answer for why you had made a ruin of his thoughts and then withdrawn as though he had ceased to amuse you. Or comfort, though the shame of desiring comfort from you nearly made him crush the parchment in his hand.

Perhaps he wanted you to look at him. That was the worst possibility. That he had summoned his cousin’s wife to his chambers after supper because he could no longer bear being deprived of her gaze.

By the time the meal ended, Gwayne was certain he had made a catastrophic mistake. By the time he reached his chambers, he was certain of very little.

He paced like a condemned man. The room was orderly, as it always was. Nothing in the chamber suggested sin. Nothing in it looked capable of holding you. And yet the air felt altered because he was waiting for you inside it.

Gwayne stopped before the small polished mirror and immediately despised himself for doing so. Still, he adjusted his collar. Then smoothed his hair. Then did it again. The ridiculousness of it struck him with almost physical force. He was a grown man. Years your senior, no less.

He turned away from the mirror. Then turned back once more, his fingers brushing the front of his breeches where the fabric had begun to tent, pressing himself flat in a futile attempt at composure.

“Seven preserve me,” he muttered.

A knock came at the door.

His heart stilled. For one absurd moment, he thought of not answering, of letting the note remain unanswered and the shame remain private. But his body moved before cowardice could complete the thought. His hand found the latch.

He opened the door. And for a moment, Gwayne forgot every carefully prepared word.

You stood in the corridor, dressed for the night, or near enough to it to undo him utterly. A pristine pale nightgown showed beneath a robe fastened at your waist, the fabric modest in shape and devastating in implication.

The thin linen clung to the swell of your breasts, and he could see the dark shadow of your nipples beneath, the way the cloth dipped to follow the curve of your ribs.

Your hair was loose over your shoulders, freed from the pins and ornaments that usually made you Lady Hightower before the court. In the softer glow, you looked less like an apparition than something far more tempting.

Your brow lifted slightly. The movement drew his eyes to the arch of it, the line of your jaw, the soft parting of your lips. “You summoned me, Ser Gwayne.”

The coolness in your voice bit deeper than accusation might have done.

He stepped aside without trusting himself to speak.

You entered with a calm that felt obscene given the hour. Your eyes moved once around his chambers, taking in the bed, the devotional candle burning low near the window. A slow, faint smile touched your mouth, and he watched the way your lips curved. “How improper.”

The words were quiet. Almost idle.

Gwayne closed the door. The sound seemed too loud, a thud that echoed, sealing the two of you inside.

“You came,” he said. His voice was rougher than he intended.

You turned towards him, the loose spill of your hair shifting over your robe. “You called.”

His hands closed briefly at his sides before he forced them open. He could see the outline of your thighs through the linen, the shadow between your legs where the fabric fell in a soft V.

“I did.”

Gwayne could feel his restraint fraying in real time. The fabric of his breeches grew damp at the tip as a bead of precum leaked out.

You looked at him for a moment, then allowed your gaze to drift once more to the devotional candle. “Did I interrupt your prayers?”

That was when something in him finally broke. “You should not mock prayer.” His voice came out harsh, the words bitten off.

Your eyes returned to him, mild as ever. “I merely asked a question.”

“You know what you asked.” He took a step closer, then stopped himself, his fists clenching at his sides.

“And you know why you sent for me,” you replied.

Gwayne stared at you, and all at once the week rose inside him… every sleepless night, every wet dream, every prayer he had tried to drown you in. It surged up from his gut, and hardened his voice into something ragged.

“You are cruel,” he said.

Your expression barely changed, but something sharpened, a glint of satisfaction. “Am I?”

“Yes.” The word left him too quickly, too raw, and with it came the rest. “You have made a sport of me from the moment I returned. You looked at me over the supper table, and every look was a promise you never meant to keep. You smiled, knowing exactly how it tightened my breeches. You whispered your little meanings beneath every harmless word, and when I would not give you what you wanted, you withdrew as though I were nothing.”

You watched him with a stillness that made him angrier. The quiet composure of a cat watching its prey exhaust itself.

“You do not get to look surprised,” he said, his voice trembling now with the effort of restraint. “Not with me. You know exactly what you have done to me.”

“I have done very little, Ser Gwayne.”

The title, in that voice made something in him snap.

“Little?” He stepped away from the door, unable to remain still, his boots heavy on the stone. “You have bewitched my mind. You have tainted every prayer I offer until the words turn to ash on my tongue. You have brought shame into the sept with me. I kneel before the Mother and the Maiden and find your face, your body, beneath the robes of every goddess.”

Your lips parted faintly. The smile on your face brightened. Your nipples pressed visibly against the thin fabric of your gown. In interest.

Gwayne saw it, and it unsteadied him worse than outrage could have. “You are pleased,” he said, the words hollow. “Gods help me, you are pleased to hear this.”

You lowered your lashes for a moment, but not quickly enough to hide the triumphant glimmer there. “I am listening.”

“No. You enjoy tormenting me.”

You took one slow step closer. Gwayne went still. His whole body locked, every muscle taut.

“My poor Ser Gwayne,” you said, so gently it felt like mockery wearing silk. “Have I truly made you suffer so?”

Your gaze dropped deliberately to the front of his breeches, where the straining fabric left nothing to the imagination. A slow, knowing smile touched your lips. “It seems you are suffering even now.”

His jaw tightened hard enough to ache. “Do not.”

Your face softened into innocence. “Do not what?”

He looked at you then and hated how beautiful you were. Hated that his fury had brought a glow to your face and pleasure to your eyes. “You know.”

“I am afraid you must be plainer.”

He could hear the provocation in it, the demand for more.

“You want me to say it?” His voice rose before he could stop it. “You want me to stand here and confess that I have thought of your mouth wrapped around my cock for nights on end? That I have woken with your name caught behind my teeth and my seed hot on my belly? That I cannot hear Ormund speak of you as his wife without wanting to silence him with my fist and and bend you over the nearest surface?”

He took another step, then stopped himself, fists clenched so hard the tendons stood out. “You have made me faithless. You have made me resent my own blood. You have made me want sin, and worse, you made me miss it when you took it away..”

For the first time, you did not immediately answer. The quiet pleased him and terrified him in equal measure. You stood close enough now that the heat of your body reached his. Then you smiled.

Triumphant.

“You missed me.”

Gwayne stared at you. That was all you had taken from it. Not his guilt. Not his horror. Not the vile, glorious wreckage he had laid at your feet. You missed me. His anger returned so swiftly it nearly steadied him. “You are impossible.”

You came nearer. Slowly, as though approaching something wounded enough to bite. “You hate that you want this,” you murmured.

Gwayne’s breath altered. He felt it betray him, the way his chest rose and fell too quickly.

“Say I am wrong,” you whispered, your lips so close now that he could almost taste the words.

He said nothing. The denial died in his throat, strangled by the sight of your lips. You lifted your hand. It trembled, a tiny flaw in your perfect composure that sent a thrill through him.

Gwayne caught your wrist before you could touch him.

His fingers closed around the delicate bones, the soft skin. Your pulse hammered wildly against his thumb. He felt it. You looked down at his hand around you, then back up at him. The satisfaction simmering in your face became unmistakable.

He had meant to stop you. Instead, he was holding you.

Your voice came low, a velvet knife against his raw nerves. “There you are.”

Gwayne released you as though waking from a fever. He stepped back, and the cold air that rushed between you was a cruelty he had not deserved but accepted like penance. You remained where you were, unmoved, unashamed. Your eyes were bright with victory.

He hated you then. The hatred was a hot, venomous thing in his chest.

“You should leave,” he said.

For a moment, you only stared at him.

Then the pleasure left your face. Like a curtain drawn back from a colder room. Your mouth settled into a hard, disdainful line. Whatever warmth had gathered between you curdled instantly into something proud and wounded, and Gwayne knew that he had struck not your conscience but your vanity.

“How tedious you are,” you said, the words dipped in vitriol.

His breath remained uneven, ragged.

“You summon me to your chambers like a man half-mad with rut,” you continued, voice low and cutting, your gaze dropping deliberately to the hard outline straining against his breeches. “Accuse me of bewitching you, speak of sin and ruin as though I held a knife to your cock, and now I am to leave because your courage—”

You let out a soft, cruel laugh.

“—has failed you again.”

His jaw clenched so hard it ached. “You should never have come. I made a mistake.”

You laughed softly then, but there was no amusement in it.

“Yes,” you said. “you made a mistake. You thought you could look upon the fire and not be burned.”

Then you turned.

You let your hair spill across your back, let the silk of your robe drape over the curve of your hip. At the door, your hand touched the frame. You paused. Without looking back, you delivered the killing stroke.

“My husband awaits me in our bed, Ser Gwayne. He does not pray for permission. He does not tremble. If you do not want me, Ormund surely will.”

The words hit him like a blade sliding between his ribs. Then something in him snapped. It was the last thin thread of his obedience. His piety. His honour. His fear of the Seven. All of it fell away in a single, hot rush.

Gwayne crossed the room before sense could catch him. His hand closed around your arm and he wrenched you back towards him with such force that you stumbled against his chest.

Then he was kissing you.

There was no gentleness in the first collision. None. Only the brutal, devouring hunger he had been choking down since the first night you looked at him across Ormund’s table.

For half a heartbeat, you went still. Testing him. Then you yielded. A soft, satisfied sound, a hum of pure approval, escaped your throat and went through him like a razor dipped in honey.

Your mouth opened beneath his, warm and eager, and Gwayne felt the last of his restraint shudder out of him in a ragged groan against your lips. Your arms rose around his neck, drawing him closer with such shameless welcome that he actually did groan, a broken sound of pure, animal relief.

You did not resist. Your tongue swept against his, you let him plunder your mouth and then answered it as though you had been waiting for him to stop pretending he was anything better than this.

A sinner and a thief of another man’s wife.

His hands found your waist. The silk of your robe was smooth beneath his palms, but the body beneath it was no dream at all. He slid one hand lower, gripping the curve of your hip, then the full swell of your ass, pulling you hard against the aching length of him.

You gasped into his mouth and pressed closer, your fingers tangling in his hair, nails scraping against his scalp, your thighs pressing together against his.

Gwayne lost the ability to think in anything but fragments of pure, burning sensation, the wet heat of your mouth, the taste of wine, the soft, pleased catch in your throat when he kissed you harder, when his teeth grazed your tongue, when his hips pressed forward in an involuntary thrust, grinding himself against the soft cradle of your thighs.

He had imagined this too many times and not once had imagination been merciful enough to prepare him for this. Reality was a thousand times worse.

He could not stop. Even when some distant, horrified remnant of himself commanded him to pull away, his body refused. His mouth moved over yours again and again, harder, wetter, more desperate, as though if he devoured you thoroughly enough, he might pass the torment back into you and be free of it.

But you only held him closer. You moaned against his mouth, your nails digging into his shoulders, your body arching into his. You accepted his ruin like tribute.

He kissed you until he seemed to remember, all at once, that breathing was required of mortal men.

Only then did he break away. Barely.

His forehead came to rest against yours, the bridge of his nose brushing the tip of your own, his breath hot and uneven against your damp, parted lips.

For several moments, neither of you spoke. The only sounds were the ragged pull of his breathing, the soft rustle of silk as your body shifted against his.

Your lips were flushed from him. The sight of them, of his work upon your mouth, nearly undid him all over again. “Why?” he asked.

The word came out rougher than he intended. He closed his eyes briefly, his forehead still pressed to yours, his hands still gripping your waist.

“Out of every man who would fall over himself for one smile from you. Every knight, every lord, every fool at court who would crawl if you asked it of him.” His voice roughened further. “Why me?”

You lifted one hand from his neck and touched the side of his face, your thumb resting lightly near the sharp line of his cheekbone, tracing the faint stubble there with a slowness that made his breath catch.

He held utterly still beneath it, a hawk frozen by the weight of a gaze.

It was almost tender. Almost.

“Just to see if I could.”

Gwayne opened his eyes. For a moment, the words cut so cleanly he could not feel the wound. To see if I could.

Not because you had suffered with wanting him. Not because you had prayed against him, dreamed of him, hated yourself for the shape of him in your thoughts. Not because you had lain awake at night, hand between your thighs, imagining the weight of his body on yours. Not because he was good. Not because he was loved.

Because you had looked at him and wondered whether he could be made to break. And he had.

The pain of it should have steadied him. It should have returned his anger, his dignity, some sharp fragment of self-preservation.

Instead, he looked at you and thought, with a despair so complete it nearly became peace, that he would cut his own heart from his chest and lay it in your hands if you asked him sweetly enough.

How cruel you were. How plainly, exquisitely cruel. And still, beneath your gaze, he felt chosen. Blessed, almost. The blasphemy of that thought should have driven him to his knees before the Seven. Instead it kept him standing there with you in his arms.

“I knew it,” you whispered, your voice a low, velvet purr. A faint smile touched your swollen lips. “I knew you wanted me.”

Gwayne’s grip tightened at your waist, his fingers digging into the silk of your robe. “You are wicked.”

“Yes.”

“You are vain.”

“Yes.”

“You are faithless.”

Your smile softened, but only at the edges, a flicker of something almost tender. “And yet.”

And yet. And yet he wanted you. And yet his cousin’s wife stood in his chambers with her arms around his neck, looking at him as though all his honour had only made the conquest sweeter.

Gwayne closed his eyes for one brief, agonised moment.

He despised you. He loved you.

The two truths struck together inside him until he could no longer tell which was meant to save him and which was meant to damn him.

His mouth crashed against yours with a force that drove you back a step, his hand sliding from your waist to the small of your back, pressing you hard against him so that you could feel the full, aching length of him, pressed against the soft cradle of your belly.

His hand rose to your jaw, fingers splaying along the delicate bone, thumb pressing against the hinge as he angled your head and kissed you with everything he had tried to bury.

He felt your smile against his lips, the way it softened the kiss even as his tongue plunged deeper. And yet somehow that seemed to upset him more.

His hands slid down your sides, over the curve of your hips, then lower still, palms flattening against the backs of your soft thighs. Without a second thought, he gripped the soft flesh and hauled you up against him, lifting you clean off the floor.

A delighted squeal escaped your throat, quickly swallowed as you wrapped your legs around his waist, your ankles locking behind him.

The shift of your weight pressed the damp, heated core of you directly against his stomach, and he groanedd as the sensation shot a jolt straight to his cock.

The laugh you let out against his lips was breathless, almost musical, “How wild you are with your lady, Ser Gwayne.”

In response, he kissed you rougher. His tongue tangled with yours, wet and demanding, as he walked backwards, one hand gripping the curve of your ass, the other flattened against your spine.

He broke the kiss only to mutter against your mouth, “I wished for respite. And you have granted me none.”

You broke out in an evil smile, your fingers threading through the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging gently. And yet how domestic the two of you must have looked, you cradled in his arms, your thighs locked around his hips. He held you as though you were precious, even as he carried you with long strides toward his bed.

“You cannot blame me for every wicked thought in your head.”

“I can blame you for putting them there,” Gwayne murmured.

Despite his rough handling, he sat you down on the edge of his bed with surprising gentleness. The mattress dipped beneath your weight. He stood over you, chest heaving, hands flexing at his sides as though he was restraining himself from simply tearing the clothes from your body.

You shrugged out of your robe, letting the silk fall from your shoulders in a whisper of fabric. Beneath it, your nightgown clung to every curve, the thin material barely concealing the peaks of your breasts, the sweet swell of your hips.

You looked up at him through your lashes, lips still slick and swollen from his kisses, and he had to resist the urge to drool over you.

“You flatter me,” you hummed.

“I condemn you,” he said.

And yet despite his words, his hands moved to the laces of his vest, pulling them loose with rough, impatient tugs. His chest was bare now, the muscles tensing and relaxing with each ragged breath.

His eyes roamed over you as though this would be the only time he ever saw you like this, as though he was memorising every curve, every inch of skin the candlelight touched.

“With your hands on me?”

Your wit was beyond him. You seemed to take great pleasure in angering him, in mocking him, in watching the war wage behind his eyes. All he could do was lean toward you, his hands finding the soft warmth of your thighs, fingers sinking into flesh as though he meant to anchor himself.

You leaned up to meet him, close enough to feel the heat of his breath.

He murmured, almost hypnotised by your lips once more, his gaze tracing the curve of your mouth, “I have prayed against this.”

“And have the Seven answered?” you whispered, mockingly sweet, your voice a velvet taunt.

Gwayne’s brows furrowed. A muscle twitched in his jaw. The prayer had gone unanswered, of course. And now, with your thighs warm beneath his palms, he knew there was no salvation left for him.

Then, suddenly, he moved.

His hands hooked behind your knees, dragging your legs to the edge of the bed with a rough, decisive pull. You let out a surprised noise as your back hit the mattress, your hair spilling across the pillows. You bent your knees instinctively, parting them slightly, and without prompt, Gwayne’s fingers found the hem of your nightgown.

He began to slide it up your beautiful bare legs.

The silk whispered against your skin, inch by inch, revealing the soft swell of your calves, the tender flesh of your inner thighs. The more skin exposed, the more excited and nervous he became. His eyes moved to lock with yours, pools of warmth, and he wanted to drown in them.

He dragged the nightgown higher, baring your hips, the dip of your belly, the shadowed apex of your thighs. And then he dropped his eyes. Oh gods above. You were bare there as well.

No shift, no smallclothes, no linen between him and the glistening, mouth-watering sight of your cunt. The folds were slick and swollen, and wet, the lips parted as though they had been waiting for him. The candlelight caught the sheen of your arousal, a dewy trail that glistened in the nest of dark curls above.

His throat went dry. His tongue felt thick and useless. What could he say now? He stared, utterly transfixed, his hands frozen on the bunched silk at your waist.

“Say something, Gwayne,”  you breathed, your voice a husky murmur, your hips shifting slightly, an invitation, a taunt. “The Seven have struck you dumb?” 

He swallowed hard, his eyes never leaving the sight of you. When he finally spoke, his voice was a hoarse rasp, “I have no prayers left for this.” 

His thumb moved, almost of its own accord, tracing a featherlight line up the inside of your thigh, stopping just short of where you ached for him. He closed his eyes, a low, tortured groan escaping his lips. Is this what his cousin got to smell every day? 

The thought fanned a flame of dark jealousy in his chest. Ormund was spoiled beyond measure, and he never even knew the treasure he had, the altar he neglected.

He opened his eyes, lifting his gaze to you. You were watching him, bated breath, lips parted, eyes heavy with a hunger that matched his own. You gave him a subtle nod, a silent command that brooked no argument. Your fingers threaded through his hair, a gentle but firm pressure urging him forward.

And who was he to deny his lady?

He dipped his head, and the first stroke of his tongue was a revelation. A slow, flat stripe from the slick, fluttering entrance of your cunt, all the way up to the tight, swollen pearl hidden in its hood. The taste of you flooded his senses, he groaned against you, the vibration making you gasp and arch into his mouth.

“Do you taste it?” you taunted weakly, your voice a broken whisper, pleasure bleeding through the mockery. “The sin on your tongue?”

He pulled back just enough to answer, his lips brushing against your slick inner thigh. “I taste nothing but you. Only you. I have tasted nothing so divine in all my life. This is the only altar I will ever kneel at again.”

He went back in, ravenous now. He licked and sucked, his tongue circling your pearl before flicking it sharply, before flattening and pressing broad, wet kisses against your entire cunt.

He learned you quickly; what made you cry out, what made your hips buck, what made your fingers tighten painfully in his hair. He drove his tongue into you, fucking you with it, lapping at your opening like a man dying of thirst.

Your taste coated his lips, his chin, his cheeks. He was utterly lost, a drowning man who had finally found the ocean he was meant to perish in. He needed more of you. He needed to be inside you in every way possible.

His thumb found your pearl, pressing and circling in time with his tongue, while his other hand fumbled down his own body, his cock aching and hard beneath his breeches, but he denied himself for now.

He needed to taste your peak. He needed to feel it on his tongue. He slid one thick finger into you.

“Oh, fuck…” you moaned, your head thrown back against the pillows.

The heat of you wrapped around his finger, clenching tight, gripping him as if begging him not to leave. He gasped against your cunt, his eyes rolling back. 

“Gods, you are so tight, my lady. How will I ever…” He pushed a second finger in, stretching you carefully, feeling your walls flutter and grip. “How will I ever fit my cock inside you when you squeeze my fingers so sweetly?”

“You will make yourself fit, Gwayne,” you insisted, your nails raking his scalp. “You will fill me until I cannot remember my own name. You will stretch me until I forget the feel of my husband’s cock.”

He groaned, a sound torn from the depths of his chest, and curled his fingers inside you, finding that rough, secret spot that made you scream.

“That’s it, my sweet knight,” you purred, your voice a velvet whip. “Drink from me. This is what you starved for while you knelt in the sept and begged for deliverance. There is no deliverance here. Only me.”

He pulled his mouth away just long enough to answer, his lips slick. “I have never wanted anything the way I want to be buried inside you. To feel you clench around me. To hear you scream my name until your voice breaks.”

He returned to his feast with a desperation that bordered on madness. His fingers pumped steadily, while his tongue was a relentless, flickering fire on your pearl. He was utterly consumed. The world had narrowed to the space between your thighs.

“Gwayne…” you gasped, your inner walls beginning to flutter and clamp around his fingers. “I am so close… I am going to… oh, gods, I am going to—”

But he did not stop. He could not stop. He was drunk on you, starving for you, and the thought of your release flooding his tongue was the only thing that existed in the universe.

Your first peak crashed over you like a wave of fire and lightning. Your body locked up, a sharp, keening cry tearing from your throat as your release gushed over his fingers and into his waiting mouth.

He drank it greedily, his tongue lapping at your pearl, swallowing every drop of your pleasure as though it were the holiest of sacraments.

But he did not relent.

The pleasure was blinding, a sharp, sweet agony, but his tongue kept moving, laving at your oversensitive pearl, his fingers still thrusting inside you, milking you for every last shuddering wave.

“Gwayne!” you gasped, your hands clawing at his hair, trying to pull him away. “Too much… it is too much…!”

He was deaf to it. He was drowning. The overstimulation was unbearable, a fire that burned too brightly, and yet his mouth was relentless, chasing more of your taste.

You had to shove him, your body arching away on the bed, your thighs snapping shut around his head to block him.

“Stop! Please, stop, I cannot—!”

He lifted his head, finally, lips slick and swollen, cheeks flushed, chin glistening with your wetness. His eyes were wild and dark, pupils blown wide with a hunger that was far from sated.

“Did… did I hurt you?” His voice was hoarse, confused, as if he was just waking from a fever dream.

“No…” you panted, your chest heaving, your thighs still trembling from the force of your release. “No, just too much…”

He blinked, realisation dawning slowly. A slow, sinful, utterly satisfied smile spread across his glistening lips.

“Forgive me, my lady. I was lost in you. I could not bear to let you go. I did not know you had crested until you pushed me away.”

He crawled up your body, his hard length pressing against your slick thigh, leaving a trail of your own wetness on your skin as he moved. The rough wool of his breeches scratched against your oversensitive flesh.

“But now…” He lowered his mouth to yours, letting you taste yourself on his tongue. “I fear I must taste that relief for myself. Inside you.”

He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, his forehead resting against yours, his breath mingling with your ragged pants.

“Tell me you want it. Say the words, my lady. Give me the sin I have prayed against, and I will worship you until the sun rises.”

Once again, that feline smile formed on your lips, slow and wicked, as you drank him in. His flushed state was a masterpiece… sweat beading at his temples, his lips still slick and swollen from his feast, your wetness glistening on his chin like a sacred anointing.

His pure blue eyes stared at you with such naked devotion, that it made your cunt clench around nothing, hungry for the fullness only he could provide.

“I shall never deny you, my love.” 

The words slipped from your tongue like honeyed poison, and you watched the effect take hold. His breath hitched. His pupils, already blown wide, seemed to shatter and reform. That single endearment struck him deeper than any blade.

His pretty blue eyes welled with sudden, unshed tears, glistening in the candlelight. He was trying to master himself, throat working as he swallowed down the emotion that threatened to break him.

You almost pitied the man.

Your hands moved while his heart was still reeling, fingers finding the laces of his breeches. He was so lost in the storm of your words that he did not even notice until your warm palm wrapped around his cock.

The sound he made, a surprised and strangled grunt, was muffled against your mouth as you claimed his lips briefly.

His hips jerked forward, thrusting instinctively into your grip, his breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps. You slid your hand slowly down his length, feeling every ridge, every throb of his pulse against your palm. He was thick, heavy, slick with need already.

Your thumb traced the weeping slit at the tip, spreading the bead of pre-cum across his crown, and he let out a low, guttural groan that vibrated through his entire body.

“Tell me,”  you purred, hand still stroking him, “how often have you dreamt of me?” 

Your finger slid over his slit again, pressing just enough to make him shudder. His words came out rushed, tumbling over each other like a confession torn from a dying man.

“Every night.”  His voice cracked. “Every night you have haunted my dreams. I wake hard and aching, my sheets soaked with the memory of you, my hand wrapped around myself. I have fucked my own palm more times than I can count, imagining it was your cunt, your mouth, your hand…” 

“Every night?” you mocked gently, your grip tightening just enough to make him gasp. “And what did you do in these dreams, my sweet knight? Did you worship me properly? Or did you take me like the hungry beast you pretend not to be?” 

“Both,”  he admitted, his voice raw, his hips twitching as he fought the urge to fuck your fist. “I have been gentle. I have been rough. I have kissed every inch of your skin and I have bent you over every surface I could imagine. But always, always, I end with my cock buried inside you, spilling my seed where it does not belong.” 

You laughed, and began to guide him. Your hand left his cock, and you reached down, spreading your slick folds, positioning the flushed head of his length at your entrance.

“My poor, sinful knight. So full of honour, and yet here you are, ready to defile your cousin’s wife. Tell me, Gwayne, does this make you a traitor? Or a true believer?” 

“I am whatever you want me to be,”  he breathed, his voice pleading. “Just let me in. Please. I beg you.” 

“Beg me,”  you whispered. “Beg me to let you fill me.” 

“Please, my lady, my love, let me inside you. Let me feel you. Let me—” 

But you did not let him finish. You pressed the head of his cock against your entrance, just barely breaching the first ring of muscle, and you held him there, torturing him.

Your words dripped with mockery, each one a sharp barb, “You are so eager to defile me, aren’t you? To spill your seed where your lord has planted his. To claim what is not yours. You are nothing but a common thief, stealing pleasures that were never meant for you.” 

He flinched. The words hit their mark, striking something. His eyes, those beautiful, tear-filled blue eyes, flickered with a flash of pain,and then something darker snapped.

He did not intend to be rough. He had sworn to himself he would be gentle, would worship you, would make love to you with the love you deserved. But your mockery clawed at the raw, bleeding edges of his guilt and his desire, and before he could stop himself, he drove forward.

There was no gentleness to be found.

He slammed into you in one brutal, desperate thrust, burying himself to the hilt in a single, shuddering motion.

The air left your lungs in a sharp, shocked moan, your body arching beneath him, your nails digging into his shoulders as you were stretched and filled beyond anything you had anticipated.

He was thick, and he was deep, and the sudden fullness of him made stars burst behind your eyes.

He froze immediately, horror dawning on his face. His eyes were wide, his breath coming in ragged pants, his body trembling as he realised what he had done.

“I—I am sorry—I did not mean to—”  His voice was a wrecked whisper, his hands gripping your hips, holding himself still, afraid to move. “Forgive me, I swore I would—” 

But you were already clenching around him, your walls rippling and gripping his length, and the sound you made was not a cry of pain.

“Don’t you dare stop,”  you gasped, your legs wrapping around his waist, pulling him deeper. “Don’t you dare be gentle now, Gwayne. You wanted to claim me? Then claim me. Fuck me like the thief you are.” 

He blinked, confusion and relief warring on his face. “But I—” 

“I said fuck me,”  you snarled, your hips grinding against his, your nails raking down his back. “Do not temper yourself. I want to feel you in my bones tomorrow. I want to limp when I walk past my husband.” 

A low, guttural groan rumbled from his chest.

The last shred of restraint crumbled, and he pulled out almost entirely, only to slam back into you with a force that made the bed frame groan.

You cried out, a sound of pure, unadulterated pleasure, and he drove into you again, harder, faster, his hips finding a brutal rhythm.

“Is this what you wanted?”  he rasped, “To be taken like a common whore?” 

“Yes,”  you moaned, your head thrown back, your body bucking against his. “Yes, yes, yes… give me more, Gwayne. Give me all of it.” 

His hand found your throat, pressing just enough to make your vision swim, and he leaned down, his lips brushing your ear, his breath hot and ragged.

“I will ruin you for any other man. I will brand myself so deep inside you that you will feel me for the rest of your life. And when you lie beside your husband, you will think of me. You will clench around him, dreaming of my cock. You will be mine, even if only in these stolen moments.” 

“Yes,”  you breathed, your voice breaking on the word. “Make me yours. Make me forget his name.” 

And he did. He drove into you with a fervour that bordered on madness, his hips slamming against yours as he chased the oblivion of your combined release. He was in absolute heaven, lost to the world, lost to everything but the feel of your cunt gripping his cock.

“I cannot get enough of you,” he gasped against your mouth, his voice ragged. “I need—I need to be closer—”

His hands slid down your flanks, gripping your thighs, pushing them up and back until your knees pressed against your own chest.

The new angle opened you completely, and you gasped at the devastating stretch, the length of him reaching depths you had never felt before, the ridge of his cock scraping against every sensitive inch inside you.

“Seven Hells—Gwayne—” Your voice broke on a moan as he drove deeper, his hips meeting the backs of your thighs with a wet, obscene slap.

“I know,” he groaned, his forehead dropping to yours. “I know. I cannot help it. I need to be inside you. I need to fill you.” His pace quickened, became animalistic. “I need to breed you. I need to leave my seed so deep inside you that you will feel me for days. That he will know what I have done.”

The words sent a thrill through you, “Yes,” you breathed, your nails raking down his back. “Yes… breed me. Fill me. Make me yours.”

He was absolutely lost.

The pious knight, he was nothing now but a creature of pure, ravenous instinct. He fucked you as if he were trying to imprint the shape of his cock into your very flesh. The bed groaned beneath you, the headboard knocking against the stone wall in a frantic rhythm.

And through it all, he could not stop kissing you.

Every thrust was punctuated by a kiss. He kissed your lips, your chin, the corner of your mouth, returning always to your lips as if he was drawing breath from you.

His tongue swept into your mouth, tangling with yours, the kiss deepening as his hips drove harder. He kissed your throat, your collarbone, the swell of your breasts, always returning to your mouth, unable to stay away.

You felt the peak approaching for a second time, the familiar coil tightening low in your belly. “Gwayne,” you gasped against his mouth. “I am going to—I cannot hold—”

His eyes flew open, and the panic in them was raw, “Neither can I,” he grunted, his rhythm stuttering. “I must—I should not—”

He tried to slow, to pull out, his muscles tensing against the instinct to bury himself deeper. The thought of spilling inside you, of leaving the physical proof of his sin, terrified him even as it drove him wild.

But you would not let him. Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels pressing into the small of his back, locking him inside you.

“Do not dare pull out,” you insisted, “I want your seed. I want it deep inside me. Give it to me, Gwayne. Give me everything.”

A broken sound escaped his throat, “You will carry my bastard. Ormund will know. The whole world will know what I have done.”

“They won't,” you whined, your hips grinding against his. “Let Ormund look at the child in my belly and think it his. Let him see me swell with your sin. I want it. I want your child. I want to carry you inside me.”

His control shattered completely. The last frayed thread of restraint snapped. “You will be mine, then. In every way that matters.”

He drove into you one last time, burying himself to the hilt, and you felt his release.

It flooded you, pulsing deep inside your womb, and the sensation of him spilling inside you pushed you over the edge with him. You cried out against his mouth, your body arching, your inner walls clenching around him, milking him.

It felt like an eternity, the two of you locked together, trembling, whispering each other's names into the dark. When it was done, he collapsed against you, his full weight pressing you into the mattress.

His breath was ragged, his body trembling. He felt emptied, exorcised of every demon that had haunted him since the moment he first laid eyes on you.

The silence stretched, broken only by the sound of your mingled breathing. After a long moment, he stirred, lifting his head to look at you. His beautiful blue eyes were wet, his cheeks flushed, his lips swollen from your kisses. He looked utterly undone.

“I did not mean to be so rough,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

You smiled, tracing the sharp line of his jaw with your fingertip. “I did not want gentle. I wanted you. The beast you hide behind your prayers and your honour.”

“I have no honour left,” he said, but there was no regret in his voice. Only wonder. “I have damned us both.”

“Then let us burn together,” you murmured, and leaned in to press a soft, lingering kiss to his brow.

Supper in the Hightower might have been the worst part of your day.

Not the petitions, with their endless parades of merchants and smallfolk, each weaving their troubles into tapestries of breathless appeal.

Not the household accounts, those dry ledgers where every copper was a stone upon your chest. Not even the ceaseless procession of men who seemed to believe that speaking slowly to you would make their concerns sound more urgent, as though your sex rendered you incapable of understanding plain Common Tongue.

No. It was supper.

The one ritual your husband insisted upon every evening, without fail.

A small table in his solar, always laid for the family. It might have been intimate, had your husband been a different sort of man.

Had he been the sort who reached for your hand beneath the cloth, or who paused to ask after your day with genuine curiosity, or who smiled at his son as though the boy were something more than an heir-in-training.

Instead, it was merely another chamber in which Lord Hightower could hear himself speak. Mostly, you suspected, it pleased him to look upon the arrangement; his wife, his son, his young ward, his table, his tower.

His life. Neatly arranged around him.

At present, Ormund was speaking at length about some new philosophical revelation that had apparently seized him during the afternoon. Something about the necessary refinement of taste, the vulgarity of spectacle, and the slow degradation of noble discernment among lesser houses.

You had ceased properly listening somewhere between the second and third mention of “cultural decay.”

Daeron, sweet boy that he was, was making a valiant effort to appear attentive. He sat very straight, hands properly placed, eyes politely fixed upon Ormund whenever your husband’s gaze passed over him.

But you noticed the way his shoulders had drawn in, the slight hunch he could not quite suppress. He always grew smaller under Ormund’s attention.

Olyvar, mercifully, was too occupied with his supper to care.

You drew his plate a little closer and began cutting his meat and vegetables into smaller pieces, careful and automatic, the way you had done since he was old enough to chew solid foods.

Ormund’s voice stopped.

The silence was so abrupt that even Daeron glanced up, his blue eyes widening like a startled deer.

“Do not help him, wife.”

You stilled. The knife hovered above the last piece of carrot, frozen mid-stroke. For a brief moment, only the fire spoke, crackling softly in the hearth behind you.

Then you lifted your eyes to your husband with great care, forcing your expression into something that might, from a charitable distance, resemble patience.

“Ormund,” you said evenly, “he is five.”

“And yet you insist on keeping him helpless.” Ormund leaned back in his chair, the wood groaning beneath his weight. His expression was one of mild disapproval, as though you were not his wife but a poorly argued treatise placed before him for correction. “Let the boy do it himself.”

Olyvar looked between you both, his little mouth parting, the spoon forgotten in his grip.

“He is learning,” you replied. The words came out softer than you intended, but there was a blade hidden beneath the velvet.

“Then permit him to learn.” Ormund reached for his wine, his fingers curling around the stem of the goblet with practiced ease. “You cannot expect him to become capable while forever placing your hands over his.”

Your fingers tightened around the knife. The handle bit into your palm.

For one small, ugly moment, you wanted very badly to ask him whether he had formed that opinion before or after spending all of ten minutes a day in his son’s presence.

Whether he had ever watched the boy wake from a nightmare, or taught him to hold a quill, or kissed the crown of his head when he was too tired to speak.

Then Daeron shifted slightly in his chair, eyes lowering to his own plate. And your son’s brows began to pull together in the way they did when he sensed discord but could not yet name it.

So instead, you inhaled through your nose and set the knife down. “Very well,” you murmured.

Olyvar’s lower lip wobbled with concentration as you placed the cutlery into his small hands. You adjusted his grip carefully, turning the knife so he would not nick himself, then brushed your thumb once over his knuckles.

“There,” you said softly. “Slowly, sweetling. No need to rush.”

Ormund gave a faint sound of approval which irritated you more than an outright insult might have done. And then, having successfully corrected the household to his satisfaction, he resumed speaking as though nothing had occurred.

“As I was saying, the issue is not merely taste, but the absence of discipline required to cultivate taste. Any merchant with coin may commission a fresco. That does not make him a patron. It makes him a purchaser with delusions of refinement.”

Daeron nodded because he was kind. Because he had been raised to nod. Because he was a prince far from his mother’s court, and he had learned that it was easier to agree than to not.

You lowered your eyes to your plate because you were not. A good example, you reminded yourself. For your son. For poor Daeron.

Your gaze drifted across the room, seeking any surface less tedious than the sight of Ormund’s mouth shaping another sermon. And snagged on a pair of blue eyes already fixed upon you.

Ser Gwayne sat near the far end of the table, newly returned to Oldtown after several months in King’s Landing. He had arrived that morning, travel-worn, but smiling.

He was your husband’s cousin. A familiar figure in the household whenever duty dragged him home. Handsome, yes, but handsome men were hardly rare among noble families.

The Hightower’s bred for it, it seemed. Generations of careful marriages filtering their blood until only the finest thread remained. You had never been a woman easily made foolish by a pretty face.

And yet he was looking at you now. His expression held some faint, mistaken softness that took you a moment to place.

Sympathy.

You scowled before you could stop yourself. Sympathy. From him. What in the seven hells had you done to earn pity from your husband’s cousin?

Gwayne seemed to recognise his error at once. The soft line of his mouth flattened, and he lowered his gaze in retreat. Then he reached for his cup with unhurried care, letting the movement shield whatever might have lingered in his face.

You turned deliberately to Olyvar, who had managed a crooked little piece of meat and was staring at it with triumph.

“Well done, sweetling,” you whispered.

He beamed.

Across the table, Ormund continued speaking as though the air had never been disturbed. “The tragedy, of course, is that most men mistake abundance for beauty.”

You nearly laughed aloud. From a man whose entire household was a monument to excess, the observation was either profound hypocrisy or staggering self-unawareness.

You let your eyes drift back to Ser Gwayne as though pulled by an invisible thread.

He had lifted his wine cup and was listening to Ormund with the practiced patience of a man who had spent his youth in this very hall. There was nothing remarkable in that. All men of Ormund’s blood learned eventually how to sit through him.

Yet now, under the softening candlelight, you found your attention catching on details you had never bothered to catalogue.

The leather jerkin he still wore, unbuttoned at the collar. The breadth of his shoulders, which seemed more pronounced than when you had last seen him.

Perhaps it was the riding leathers. Perhaps it was the way he had broadened through the chest. Perhaps it was only that you were desperate for a distraction.

Then Gwayne looked back.

A brief flicker. Questioning. His eyes met yours across your husband’s table, and after a breath of hesitation, he offered a small smile. Tentative. Cautious.

You did not return it. You merely watched him, as though he were a puzzle placed before you without warning.

The smile faltered. His fingers shifted once against the stem of his cup.

“You are very quiet,” Ormund said.

You turned your head slowly, feeling the weight of every gaze at the table now that his attention had shifted to you. “Would you prefer I interrupt?”

“No,” he said, his mouth curving with something that was not quite warmth. “I merely find the novelty... distracting.”

“I was listening.”

“Were you?” He tilted his head, a gesture of delicate disbelief. “To which part, precisely?”

“To the grand thesis on cultural decay,” you replied, letting a pleasant smile settle over your features. “I am saving my objections for the inevitable conclusion.”

A beat of silence. Ormund’s smile sharpened with genuine pleasure. He did enjoy this, the cut and thrust of a wife who refused to bend entirely. “How wise of you.”

“I’m aware.”

For a heartbeat, the table held itself very still. Daeron’s eyes flickered between you and Ormund before dropping to his plate.

You looked away first. Your gaze slid back towards the far end of the table, almost of its own accord. Ser Gwayne had not looked away. Your eyes met. He dropped his gaze at once, a trained movement, but not quickly enough.

There had been something in his face. Curiosity, stripped of its careful neutrality. The faintest glimmer of admiration before he remembered himself.

And for the first time that evening, supper became tolerable.

You had no clear notion of where your sudden interest in your husband’s cousin had seeded itself.

Desire, perhaps. Boredom, more likely.

The inevitable consequence of a life measured out in quiet afternoons and colder nights, spent beside a man who possessed the rare talent of making even fine Dornish red taste flat, simply by talking over it long enough.

Perhaps you ought to have felt guilt. There were, after all, several forms of guilt readily available to a woman of your station. The heavy, familiar drape of religious shame, if you had been feeling devout.

The colder weight of marital duty, if you had wished to pretend your union had ever been built on anything warmer than alliance and accommodation.

The quiet voice of conscience, urging you to remember your vows and the solemn weight of your name. No such voice came. And if it had, you suspected you would have silenced it without ceremony.

Instead, you had chosen to pursue the matter.

No… pursue implied a peasant greed, a grasping hunger unbecoming of your station.

You had always been a woman of refined taste, one who savoured rather than devoured. You had chosen to investigate. You sought only to determine whether the pious, honourable Ser Gwayne Hightower desired his cousin’s wife.

Which was how, two days later, you found yourself taking luncheon in the training yard. You had expressed a wish for fresh air, and the household had obliged.

Beneath the shaded arcade that overlooked the yard, a small table had appeared, dressed in linen and laden with the afternoon’s bounty. Your ladies had lingered only long enough to exchange pleasantries before you dismissed them with a soft word, granting yourself solitude.

Olyvar alone remained, settled on a cushion near your feet, his painted wooden knights drawn up in opposing armies across the stone. The fate of a dozen imaginary houses rested on his small hands.

The yard below was alive with the familiar music of men at practice, the crisp ring of blunted steel, the scuff of boots on packed earth, and the occasional burst of low laughter when some young squire overreached and paid for his ambition with a mouthful of dust.

Ser Gwayne was not difficult to find among the men. He stood out as a flame stands out among dying embers. You told yourself this was mere practical observation.

He was paired with a knight of your husband’s household guard, a seasoned man who was beginning to look profoundly dissatisfied with the shape of the lesson.

Gwayne fought with a clean grace that bordered on maddening. No wasted theatrics, no brute display of strength simply to intimidate.

He was quick when speed was demanded, firm when force was required, his sword flashing in the high sun before turning aside another blow with that maddening elegance.

You leaned back, your head tilting as you considered him. It was not simply that he was handsome. Many men were handsome from a suitable distance, and considerably less so once they opened their mouths. Gwayne was something altogether rarer.

He was pretty.

The word felt almost improper for a knight wearing spurs, a man of proven steel and honourable name. Yet it was the truth of him. The fine structure of his face. The blue of his eyes like a shard of summer sky, vivid even from this distance. The colour that exertion had painted high on his cheekbones.

The damp strands of fair hair that had pulled loose near his temple, clinging to the skin there. A knight, yes. Unmistakably a man, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped and capable.

But a pretty one, all the same.

“Mother?”

Olyvar’s voice cut cleanly through your reverie. You looked down. He was holding up a wooden knight, its red paint chipped from a hundred imagined battles.

“Ser Redwyne has fallen,” he announced.

“A tragedy,” you said, your voice softening. “Was he taken honourably?”

“In the head,” Olyvar said, frowning at the knight’s fate. “He did not see the blow.”

“Then he ought to have worn a better helm,” you replied, a faint smile touching your mouth. “A commander must learn from his defeats.”

Olyvar considered this with the grave deliberation, then nodded once, satisfied with your counsel, before returning to his campaign.

Below, Gwayne turned to receive some remark from a man at the edge of the yard. And then, with the casual lift of a man stretching his neck, his gaze swept the arcade.

He found you. You marked the instant awareness passed through him, a micro-shift in his posture, a pause barely long enough to measure. His eyes traced the table, the wine, the figs. Olyvar at your feet. Then you. After a beat, Gwayne inclined his head with the precise measure of courtesy owed to his cousin’s lady.

“My lady,” he called, his voice carrying cleanly across the stones, polite and proper for all the yard to witness.

“Ser Gwayne,” you returned.

And from that moment onward, his composure became a thinner thing.

He continued to fight well, beautifully even, but his attention had frayed at the edges. Every few passes, his eyes flickered up towards the arcade. Fleeting glances, brief enough that he must have believed them subtle.

They were not subtle.

You watched, unhurried, savouring the small triumph of observation. You reached for a fig, and brought it to your lips. The skin split beneath your teeth, the flesh yielding sweet and crimson. A small, private indulgence.

Olyvar made a small sound of triumph as one wooden knight toppled another.

“Was that Ser Redwyne avenged?” you asked, though your eyes remained on the yard.

“No,” Olyvar said. “That was Lord Costayne. He is dead now too.”

“How grim.”

Below, Gwayne’s gaze lifted again. His eyes met yours across the dust and sunlight, and this time you allowed yourself a smile. A small curve of your lips, intended for him alone.

A promise held out like a flower, waiting to see if he would reach for it.

The effect was immediate. His gaze dropped as though the weight of your attention had physically pressed him down. His jaw tightened. He faltered, just slightly, and the other knight pressed his advantage, almost landing a blow along his ribs.

Gwayne turned it aside at the last breath, an elegant recovery.

Then he answered. A counter-strike that rang through the yard, a perfect connection that forced his partner back several steps. The watching squires let out a low murmur of approval.

A few minutes later, the bout drew to its close. Gwayne stepped back, breathing a little harder, and clasped forearms with his opponent A servant appeared with water. Gwayne took the cup, raised it, and drank. Then, in a gesture so casual it felt almost on purpose, he tipped the remainder over the back of his neck.

You watched the water trace a silver path along his skin, disappear into the dark collar of his tunic, darken the fabric where it clung. Gwayne looked up once more, his gaze finding the arcade as though drawn there by a thread you had already begun to wind.

To your surprise, he passed his practice sword to one of the waiting squires and began walking towards the shaded arcade.

You watched him approach, your brow lifting a fraction.

He looked good like this, you thought with some irritation.

Flushed from exertion. His fair hair damp at the temples, darkened to auburn. The open collar of his tunic showing the hollow of his throat, the skin there still gleaming from the water he had poured.

He reached the shade of the arcade and bowed his head with dutiful courtesy.

“My lady,” he said. His voice was perfectly polite, though the breathlessness still clung to it, “I confess, I had not thought to find you watching over the yard.”

“Have I no right to observe the men of my own household?”

“You have every right. It is simply a pleasure I had not anticipated.”

That was well said. You let the words settle, then smiled. “I thought it would be good for Olyvar to observe the training yard. The discipline. The instruction. The camaraderie of men.”

You lied easily enough.

Gwayne’s eyes shifted past you. Olyvar, at your feet, had not looked up once throughout the entire exchange. His wooden knights lay in a violent little heap, and he was currently engaged in the solemn work of making one dead man stab another dead man.

Gwayne was quiet for half a second. Then his gaze returned to you.

“Ah,” he said.

You felt your mouth curve. “You seem unconvinced, Ser.”

“I should never presume to question a mother’s judgement.”

“A wise answer.”

“I try to give those when I can.”

That made you smile properly, a genuine warmth that you could not quite suppress.

Gwayne noticed it. You saw the flicker of his attention, the way his gaze touched your lips, fleeting as a blink, then returned at once to your eyes.

You leaned back slightly in your chair, considering him.

“You fight well,” you said.

His expression settled into modest courtesy at once. “You are kind to say so.”

“I did not say it to be kind.”

His eyes held yours a moment too long before he inclined his head again. “Then I thank you for your honesty.”

“How formal you are.”

“I am speaking with my lord cousin’s wife.”

“Yes,” you said mildly. “I am well aware of the relation.”

The air between you shifted. Gwayne seemed to feel it too, because whatever brief warmth had touched his face retreated behind the careful architecture of his courtesy.

He bowed once more. “I shall leave you to your luncheon, my lady.”

“So soon?”

His eyes caught yours. The question had been plain enough to be heard, innocent enough to be denied.

“The men will be waiting,” he said.

“Of course.”

Another pause.

Then he gave you a small, dutiful smile, the sort of smile a man offers when he wishes to close a door without seeming to slam it. “Enjoy the rest of your day, my lady. I shall see you at supper.”

And then he left.

You watched him descend the shallow steps, noting the deliberate length of his stride. He did not glance back. Did not slow. He returned to the training yard as though the shade beneath the arcade had held no temptation at all.

You frowned. Was that all?

How vexing. Perhaps Ser Gwayne Hightower was too pious for implication. Or perhaps he simply needed a sharper provocation.

Very well, then.

You would need to be plainer.

“May I speak plainly, my lady?”

Daeron’s voice came from beside you, pitched low enough that the question might have been lost beneath the murmur of the fountain.

Your arm was hooked through his as the two of you walked slowly through the Hightower gardens, the gravel crunching beneath your slippers.

You turned your head towards him, noting the slight furrow between his brows, the way his gaze remained fixed on the path ahead rather than meeting yours. “With me, sweet prince? Always.”

He smiled faintly at that, though it did not quite reach his eyes.

You let your gaze drift ahead again, momentarily distracted by the peonies along the eastern walk. They were not blooming as they ought. Too sparse near the roots, too heavy in some places, and the colour had come in weaker than you had requested. A small irritation, perhaps, but one nonetheless.

You made a silent note to speak with the gardeners before the week’s end. Such neglect was unbecoming of a household of Oldtown’s standing.

Daeron walked quietly beside you for another few paces.

“I have missed our talks,” he admitted at last.

There was something almost shamefaced in the confession, as though he had failed at some duty by desiring a little ordinary companionship.

You looked at him more fully then, taking in the slight hunch of his shoulders, the way his hands clasped together behind his back as though he were still a boy being chastised by a maester.

He was no longer the shy ten-year-old you had met when you first came to Oldtown as Ormund’s bride. That boy had been all wide eyes and careful manners, quick to blush and quicker to apologise.

Daeron glanced down at the gravel path, his jaw working for a moment before he spoke again.

“The maesters have kept me very occupied,” he continued, his voice taking on a rehearsed quality. “Lord Ormund wished my lessons expanded. Histories of the Reach, the foundations of the Hightower, the genealogies of its principal bannermen, matters of law and patronage…”

His mouth twisted slightly before he corrected it. “It is a great honour, of course.”

“Of course,” you said, the words dry as dust.

“And important,” Daeron added quickly, as though fearing you might mistake him for ungrateful. “It is important to venerate the history of House Hightower. Lord Ormund says a prince fostered here ought not leave Oldtown ignorant of the house that shaped him.”

You hummed softly. “That sounds very much like something Lord Ormund would say.”

Daeron looked at you, uncertain whether he was permitted to laugh.

You saved him the trouble by squeezing his arm lightly. “You need not perform gratitude for me, sweet prince.”

His shoulders eased a fraction, the tension draining from his frame as though a knot had been loosened. “I am grateful,” he said, but more honestly this time. “Only… tired.”

“Those two things are allowed to exist in the same body.”

He breathed out, a long, slow exhale, and there it was, the quiet relief of a boy who had been granted permission to be less than perfectly composed. The breeze stirred the auburn hair at his temples, and for a moment, he looked younger than his years.

“I know the lessons matter,” Daeron murmured, his gaze fixed on the path ahead. “But sometimes it feels as though every hour must improve me somehow. If I read, it must be the correct book. If I ride, my seat must be assessed. If I speak, I must consider whether my thought is worth saying aloud.”

“Ah,” you hummed. “A particular cruelty. Being made to weigh every word before speaking.”

He gave you a small, knowing look, a flicker of something wry in his eyes. “You do not seem to suffer from it.”

“No,” you replied pleasantly. “Marriage cured me of that.”

Daeron’s lips parted in surprised amusement, and then he looked quickly ahead, as though worried someone might have heard him almost laugh.

Your gaze drifted past Daeron’s shoulder then, moving idly over the garden path, the sunlit hedges, the distant figures gathered near the cypress walk.

And caught on one figure in particular.

Ser Gwayne stood a little way off, conversing with some lord whose name you could not immediately recall and had no great desire to.

He was dressed for court rather than the yard today, a tunic of deep green, the Hightower sigil embroidered at the breast in silver thread, his hair neatly combed, his posture impeccable.

One hand rested at his belt as he listened with a look of courteous endurance, the expression of a man who had heard this particular speech before and was merely waiting for it to conclude.

Before good sense could advise you otherwise you lifted your voice.

“Ser Gwayne.”

The name carried cleanly through the garden air, clear as a bell tolling in still weather. You did not raise it unduly, but there was a specific clarity to it, a refusal to be ignored.

His head turned almost at once.

The very instant your voice crossed the gravel and the hedges and the soft murmur of the fountain, his attention came to you, direct and unguarded.

You noticed. You tucked the knowledge away like a coin slipped into a pocket.

So did Daeron, judging by the quick, sideways glance he gave you.

“Perhaps you might come and soothe your favourite nephew’s spirits,” you continued, letting amusement thread through your voice, “The maesters have made a martyr of him.”

Daeron straightened beside you, a flush rising to his cheeks. “My lady—”

“Oh, hush. I said martyr, not rebel. There is dignity in martyrdom. Surely they have taught you that much.”

He closed his mouth, half-protesting and half-pleased.

Gwayne said something brief and polite to the lord before him and bowed his head in farewell with the easy grace of a man accustomed to extricating himself from tedious conversations.

You watched him approach with an expression of mild innocence, as though you had merely done him a kindness by providing an excuse to withdraw. He stopped at a perfectly respectable distance. Far enough to satisfy propriety.

He inclined his head.

“My lady. My prince.”

Perhaps it was inconsequential. Perhaps it meant nothing at all. Still, you noted that he addressed you first.

Daeron brightened at once, some of the earlier tension easing from his face. “Uncle.”

“Have your lessons grown so unbearable already?” Gwayne asked, his mouth curving faintly. His expression was warm, genuinely fond, “I had thought you more resilient than that.”

“I did not say unbearable,” Daeron protested.

“No,” you said, before he could gather a proper defence. “He merely looked as though he might fling himself into the Honeywine.”

Daeron turned to you in open horror. “I did not.”

“You did a little.”

Gwayne’s eyes flicked to you then. There was caution there now. A guardedness that had not been present before supper, before the training yard, before he had learned that your attention was not always accidental.

“I am certain the prince suffers nobly,” Gwayne said, his voice even.

“Thank you, uncle,” Daeron replied, gathering what dignity he could manage.

“And if your tutors become too terrible,” Gwayne added, “you may always inform them that your uncle has recommended idleness as an essential part of princely education.”

Daeron blinked, then smiled. “Would you truly?”

“No,” Gwayne said. “But you may imagine it with comfort.”

You laughed softly despite yourself.

Gwayne looked at you again.

“You see?” you said, glancing between them, “Ser Gwayne understands you. He has spent a lifetime surviving Lord Ormund’s instruction.”

The change in Gwayne was slight. Almost nothing. A tightening around the eyes. A subtle stillness in his shoulders, as though he had braced himself against something unexpected.

But you saw it.

Daeron, sweet enough to miss the sharper thing beneath your words, only looked between you and his uncle with polite interest.

“My cousin has always been generous with his wisdom,” Gwayne said carefully.

“How delicately put.”

“It is a delicate subject.”

“Is it?”

“With you, my lady, I suspect most subjects may become so.”

There was no impropriety in the words. None that could be named. You smiled at him, slow and without hurry.

Daeron glanced between you both again, visibly uncertain whether he had missed some small jest. “You are both speaking strangely,” he said slowly.

“Are we?” you asked, still smiling.

“Yes.”

Gwayne’s mouth softened. “Then it must be your lessons, nephew. They have made you too perceptive.”

Daeron accepted that with a faintly pleased look, though he tried not to show it. The boy’s hunger for approval was a tender thing, easily assuaged by a scrap of recognition.

You let your hand rest lightly over the prince’s arm, “Come,” you said. “Walk with us, Ser Gwayne. Unless the nameless lord we stole you from was saying something terribly important.”

Gwayne glanced back once towards the man he had abandoned, still standing alone near the cypress walk, looking vaguely confused.

“He was explaining the superiority of his family’s kennels.”

“Then we have rescued you.”

“So it would seem.”

He fell into step on Daeron’s other side, close enough that the three of you moved together like a single, unhurried current beneath the long shade of the garden walk.

Daeron began asking him some earnest question about training yard drills and Gwayne answered with patient attention, his tone easing as he spoke to the boy, the guarded edges softening into something simpler.

You listened in silence for a few moments, allowing the rhythm of their voices to wash over you, the low murmur of his explanations blending with the fountain and the bees.

Then, without turning your head, you let your gaze drift towards Ser Gwayne from the corner of your eye.

He was already looking at you.

This time, he did not look away quickly enough.

You allowed yourself to notice it with only the faintest turn of your mouth, careful not to give him the satisfaction of being caught too plainly.

Gwayne, for his part, seemed to realise his mistake a breath too late. His attention shifted towards the hedges, then towards Daeron, as though the garden had suddenly become full of urgent things to observe.

Fortunately, the fates proved generous. Only a few minutes later, one of Ormund’s guards appeared at the end of the walk.

“My prince. Lord Ormund requests your attendance. The maester is waiting.”

The small measure of ease Daeron had gathered vanished at once, dissolving like frost touched by sun. He did not complain. He was too well-bred for that, too accustomed to obedience. But the look he gave you was helpless enough to make your heart pinch.

You squeezed his hand where it rested against your arm. “Courage,” you murmured.

Daeron attempted a smile. It was a brave attempt, if not entirely convincing.

Gwayne’s expression softened as he looked at him. “Farewell, nephew. I shall see you after, should you survive.”

It was a small jest, dryly delivered, but it did what it was meant to do. Daeron’s mouth curved, and some of the dread left his face before he inclined his head to you both and followed the guard back along the path.

You watched him go until the turn of the hedge took him from sight.

Then there was only Gwayne. Perfect. For a long, suspended moment, neither of you moved. The garden seemed to hold its breath without Daeron between you, the air growing heavier, warmer, as though the afternoon had drawn closer to listen.

You turned to him with a slow, playful smile, letting it unfurl across your lips like a secret shared too late to recall.

“So,” you said, your voice carrying the lightness of discovery, “you can be amusing.”

Gwayne’s eyes dropped for the briefest fraction of a heartbeat to your mouth before returning to meet yours. The movement was subtle, almost imperceptible, but you caught it.

“Does that surprise you, my lady?” he asked.

His voice remained courteous, polished to a fine, untouchable sheen. But something in it had changed. Only slightly. Enough.

“Indeed it does,” you said, and began to walk again.

You did not ask him to follow. He did anyway. Gwayne kept to your side, not too close, not distant enough to be rude. Every inch of him arranged according to propriety, every muscle held in careful alignment.

How tiresome. How interesting.

“You are always so formal with me,” you said, looking ahead rather than at him, “One begins to wonder whether you have any other manner at all.”

There was a pause before he answered, as though he was choosing each word with care. “You are my cousin’s wife,” Gwayne said. “And Lady Hightower of Oldtown.”

You gave a quiet sigh. “Yes. You do enjoy reminding me.”

“I would not presume you had forgotten.”

“No?” You glanced at him then, turning your head just enough to catch his profile. “How generous. For a moment, I feared you thought I required instruction in the shape of my own life.”

Gwayne’s jaw shifted, a muscle tensing along its edge, but he said nothing.

“I am aware I am Lord Ormund’s wife,” you continued, your voice mild, unhurried, as though you were discussing the weather. “I have borne the man a son. I sit at his table. I listen to his thoughts on taste and virtue and the failings of lesser men, night after night, until the candles gutter and the wine runs dry. Believe me, Ser Gwayne, I have not misplaced the fact of my marriage.”

His steps slowed by the smallest measure, a falter in the rhythm of his stride. You did not slow with him. After a moment, he caught up, his boots crunching against the gravel as he fell back into step beside you.

“That was not my meaning,” he said.

“Was it not?”

“No.”

You looked at him again, long enough to make him feel the full weight of your attention. There was discipline in him, certainly. Faith too, perhaps. Honour arranged about him so tightly that you wondered how often it chafed against his skin, how often he wished to loosen the bindings.

“Then what was your meaning?” you asked.

Gwayne’s eyes moved once across your face, and again they paused too near your mouth. The moment stretched, before he pulled his gaze away.

“My meaning,” he said at last, “is that respect is owed to you.”

Respect. A pretty word. A useless one, in that moment. You smiled as though pleased by the answer, and turned your attention back to the path ahead. “How very dutiful of you, Ser Gwayne.”

He did not answer immediately. But beside you, his hand flexed once, the fingers tightening briefly before releasing.

You allowed him the mercy of another subject, though not entirely out of kindness. The game required patience, and you had learned long ago that too much pressure would cause a man like Gwayne to retreat entirely.

“Was King’s Landing much changed?” you asked, your tone light, conversational. “You have been away long enough that we nearly began to forget you.”

“Nearly?”

“You must not ask for too much flattery. It becomes unbecoming.”

The corner of his mouth moved, a ghost of a smile that seemed determined not to fully form. “King’s Landing is as it ever was. Loud. Crowded. Restless.”

“Vile, then.”

That drew his attention more cleanly. He turned his head to look at you, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. “You dislike the city?”

“I dislike most cities that mistake stench for importance.” You brushed your fingertips along the head of a rose as you passed, careful not to catch your fingers on the thorns hidden beneath the leaves. “My father thought the Red Keep a wretched place. A painted skull upon a hill, I believe he once called it.”

“A severe judgement.”

“He had a gift for those.”

“And do you share it?”

“For severity? Frequently.” You glanced at him, your eyes meeting his. “For judgement? I suppose that depends on the object.”

Gwayne’s eyes narrowed faintly, not in displeasure but in caution, as though he had heard the soft shift beneath your words and did not yet know whether he was meant to step over it or step around it.

You continued before he could decide.

“I have always thought the Red Keep must be suffocating,” you said, your voice thoughtful. “All those ambitious men pressed together in one place, each certain his own desires are better hidden than they are, each watching the others for signs of weakness. A city built on whispers and half-truths.”

Gwayne looked ahead, his gaze fixed on the path before you. “Men at court are not known for modest ambition.”

The garden path narrowed, forcing him closer beside you as you moved beneath the arbour. The space did the work for you, his sleeve brushing near yours, the warmth of him briefly more present than it had any right to be.

“Did you enjoy it?” you asked.

Gwayne inhaled quietly. You had the impression of a man choosing between several safe answers and finding all of them insufficient. He settled, eventually, on honesty trimmed to an acceptable shape.

“There are moments of honour to be found there,” he said. “And many more moments of inconvenience.”

“How diplomatic.”

“It is often safer than truth.”

You looked at him then, and this time he did not immediately look away. The sunlight shifted through the leaves overhead, breaking across his face in brief gold fragments.

He really was irritatingly pretty. The kind of beauty that seemed almost unfair, a face that belonged in a tapestry or a song.

“Do you prefer safety, Ser Gwayne?”

His gaze held yours.

For a moment, the garden seemed to contract around you, the air thickening with the scent of lavender and heated stone.

Then his jaw tightened, just slightly. “When it is wise.”

You did not let the silence sit for too long. You paused near a low wall where the roses climbed thickly over pale stone, their blossoms heavy and overripe in the afternoon heat.

One had drooped beneath its own weight, petals dark at the edges, bruised almost purple where the sun had touched it too long.

“This one has spent itself,” you murmured, touching the bloom with the pad of your thumb. The petal was soft, the velvet surface dimpling beneath your pressure. “It has given everything to the sun without thought for the consequence. Now it hangs there, open and past its prime, waiting for someone to notice it before it falls.”

Gwayne’s eyes followed your hand.

“Do you know much of roses, Ser Gwayne?”

His expression had gone very still.

“No, my lady.”

“No?” You let your thumb trace the edge of the petal, dragging slow and idle across the bruised flesh. “A pity. They are not unlike women in that regard. They require a firm hand, not rough, but certain. They must be guided, or they climb wild, tangling with whatever brushes against them. And if handled carelessly…”

You pressed until the petal dimpled deeper beneath your thumb, the bruise spreading like an ink stain in water. “They bruise so easily.”

You looked up at him then, your lashes low. “The secret is knowing exactly how much strength a stem can bear before it breaks.”

Gwayne’s throat moved as he swallowed.

“Perhaps I should ask the gardeners instead,” you said, letting your hand fall from the rose. “They seem to understand the practical application of pressure.”

“That would be wise.”

His answer was controlled, but thinner than before, as though the words had to press past something tight to reach the air. He looked at you as though you had at last said something plainly enough to leave him no comfortable place to stand.

You waited. His hand flexed once at his side.

“You should take more care with your words,” he said. The voice was stripped bare, scraped of all the courtly veneer he had worn so carefully all afternoon.

You felt your smile soften into something far less polite. “Should I, Ser? How considerate of you to advise me.”

“This is not advice.”

“No?” You tilted your head, letting your gaze trail down his form with slow, appreciative leisure, then back to his eyes. “What is it, then? A plea? A prayer?”

Gwayne’s mouth parted, then closed again. You watched the truth he wanted to speak rise to his tongue, watched him force it back down. At last, he managed, “You know very well what you are doing.”

For one brief, clean moment, satisfaction moved through you like honey.

“I know many things, Ser Gwayne.” Your voice lowered, soft as a touch against his skin. “You will have to be plainer with me.”

The muscle in his jaw jumped. A vein pulsed at his temple beneath the pale auburn of his hair.

A distant laugh rose from somewhere beyond the hedge, bright and careless, a sharp reminder of the world that existed outside this charged pocket of air.

Gwayne blinked once, as if waking from a fever dream. He stepped back with the abrupt control of a man yanking his hand from an open flame. “I should return.”

“To what?”

“To anything else.”

You laughed then, the sound escaping before you could temper it. It was absolute delight. His eyes snapped to yours. For the first time, you saw irritation there. Not the measured discomfort of a man offended for honour’s sake. It was irritation at you.

It suited him. It made him human.

“Of course,” you said, smoothing one hand over your sleeve. “I would not keep you from your many duties.”

Gwayne bowed his head, but the gesture was stiff, a jerk of the chin rather than a fluid courtesy.

“My lady.”

“Ser Gwayne.”

He turned to leave. Then stopped. You watched his spine stiffen as he fought with himself. When he looked back, his face had recovered its composure.

“You should not seek to provoke what you would not wish answered.”

The warning slid through you like a blade wrapped in silk.

“Then perhaps you should take care with your answers.”

You were irritated. Unbelievably, utterly, exhaustingly so.

Ser Gwayne Hightower had taken to avoiding you now. Not merely keeping a respectful distance, no, that would have been proper, expected, even comfortable.

He had begun avoiding you with the single-minded dedication of a man preserving himself from a plague he had already seen ravage whole cities.

His gaze would slide over you, past you, around you, as if your presence were a piece of light too bright to be borne. It would have been a rich jest, a game to be savoured, if the sting of it had not run so deep.

In the last several days, you had seen him only at supper, and even then it took Ormund’s rigid insistence upon family ritual to trap him in the same room as you.

He kept his gaze fixed on his plate, the fine silver catching the candlelight, or on Daeron, or on Ormund whenever your husband felt compelled to expound on whatever subject had presently devoured his interest.

Never you. Not a single glance. The first night, you had nearly laughed at the absurdity of it.

By the third, you had found your fingers tight around the stem of your wine cup, an image of the dark red liquid arcing across the table to splatter against his chest blooming so vividly in your mind that you had to set the cup down entirely to resist the urge.

He would converse with Daeron gently enough, turning towards the boy with a soft curve to his mouth, asking after his lessons in a voice that held none of the clipped edge he reserved for the world.

He would answer Ormund with his usual, weary patience, enduring long-winded correction, tedious commentary, and the occasional thinly disguised insult without so much as a flicker of his composure.

But you might as well have been an empty chair at the far end of a long, abandoned hall.

At one point, during the fourth course, you had reached for the salt at the same moment he had. Your fingers had not touched. They had only approached the same small silver dish, drawn by the same need.

Gwayne had seen your hand coming and had withdrawn his own as though the metal had glowed red-hot.

Across the table, Daeron’s eyes flickered between you both, swift and confused, before dropping to his plate.

Ormund, naturally, had observed nothing.

When the meal finally, blessedly ended, Gwayne rose from his chair with a controlled haste that it became a spectacle in itself. His bow to Ormund was a little too stiff.

He murmured some careful excuse about the early hour required of him in the training yard, and was gone before you had even finished setting your cup down upon the linen.

You said nothing. You pressed your tongue against the inside of your cheek, tasting the faint, and decided that Ser Gwayne Hightower had become far, far too pleased with his own suffering.

He was preening in his little cage of honour. It was time to rattle the bars.

The following afternoon, the insult remained with you, a stone lodged beneath your ribs. You stood in the watery light of your solar while you fastened a narrow chain of delicate silver around your throat. Letters laid open on your desk went unread; the words blurred and swam before your eyes.

The Hightower moved around you as it always did, breathing and turning and obeying the immutable currents of its own existence.

Servants passed through the corridors with soft footsteps. A steward waited just beyond the solar door, his ledger tucked under his arm, patient for your attention. Somewhere below, Olyvar’s septa was drilling him in his letters. The whole of Oldtown lay at your fingertips, a stone-and-wood body waiting for your will.

Your Hightower. And Ser Gwayne thought he could hide from you inside it.

Did the man truly not understand who you were? Did he imagine that blood alone made a fortress? Yes, he was a Hightower by birth, carried the name like a shield. Yes, his position in this house was not insignificant, second-in-line after your son.

But you, at present, were Lady of Oldtown. Wife to its lord. Mother to its heir. Mistress of its pantries, its keys, its schedules, its gardens, its chambers, its wine cellars, its very breath.

There were very few doors in this tower that would dare remain closed to you. There were even fewer people inside it willing to deny you anything you might ask of them.

If Ser Gwayne wished to truly and irrevocably escape you, he would need to leave Oldtown entirely. Better still, the Reach altogether. He would need to put the whole of the realm between his conscience and your smile, if he wanted any real and lasting certainty.

You took your seat behind the desk, arranging your skirts with a practised hand, and waited. The knock came a short while later, two crisp raps against the oak door.

You let the silence stretch, counting the seconds, letting the weight of it settle into the space between you. Only when the pause had grown long enough to become a small, pointed statement did you speak.

“Enter.”

The door swung open. Ser Gwayne Hightower stepped inside, and the quality of the light in the room seemed to shift.

He looked, unfortunately, as handsome as ever. More so, perhaps, because irritation sharpened your appreciation rather than dulled it.

His eyes found you. For a heartbeat, they rested on your face, on the length of your throat where the silver chain lay.

Then, with an effort you could almost feel in your own chest, he moved his gaze to some respectful, neutral point near your shoulder, fixing it there as though the stone of the wall behind you held absorbing interest.

“My lady,” he said, his voice low and even. He bowed his head. “You sent for me.”

“So you do remember how to come when called.” Your words came out silken, touched with just enough of a serrated edge to catch.

You sat behind your desk, one hand resting lightly over the stack of unread letters, the other lying palm-down on the polished wood. You did not invite him to sit. You did not gesture towards the chair that stood opposite.

The door, you noted, had been left ajar behind him, wide enough to preserve propriety, narrow enough to feel like a cage. You had already ensured that your maid had departed on some errand that would keep her away for the better part of the hour.

“I was not aware I had given offence,” he said carefully, each word chosen with care.

“No?”

His mouth tightened

You leaned back in your chair, the wood creaking softly beneath you, as you studied him. If he wished to behave as though you were invisible then you would make a generous, thorough effort to correct that misapprehension.

You traced the line of his brow, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw that suggested he had not shaved as closely that morning as he usually did.

“For several days now,” you said, letting the words fall slowly, “you have looked at everyone in this household except me.”

Gwayne grew very still. The stillness of a man who has been caught in a trap and is calculating whether there is any graceful way to extricate himself. He lowered his eyes, in a retreat from the challenge of your gaze. “I meant no disrespect,” he said, his voice quieter now.

“Of course not. Men rarely do when they are being insulting.”

His jaw shifted once. A quick, involuntary clench, quickly released.

You smiled faintly, letting the expression touch only your lips, not your eyes. “Tell me, Ser Gwayne. Have I become difficult to look upon, or have you merely developed some sudden, consuming fear of my face?”

“My lady—”

“You may answer plainly. I assure you, I will survive the blow.”

For a long moment, he said nothing. His hand rested at his side, the fingers perfectly still, but you had begun to recognise the effort it cost him to keep them so. At last, he looked at you properly.

“My conduct has been improper,” he said.

You lifted your brows, letting the silence draw the words out of him.

“My attention,” he said, and the word came out halting, “has been improper.”

Ah.

You let the words settle between you, turning them over, tasting them. When you looked up again, his expression was taut.

“How pious,” you said softly.

You rose from your chair. The wood of the desk was warm beneath your fingertips as you pushed yourself upright, and you saw the change in him at once.

Gwayne’s posture shifted. Almost imperceptibly, a knight bracing himself for movement, for danger. His gaze tracked you, as you came around the corner of the desk.

You moved slowly, your steps unhurried. You stopped at a proper distance. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, to catch the faint, clean scent of him.

“You are in my husband’s house,” you said, your voice pitched low. “At my husband’s table. Beneath my husband’s roof. If you are determined to behave as though that makes me impossible to see, then I must warn you, Ser Gwayne, you have chosen a very poor place in which to be blind.”

His eyes snapped to yours.

And there, beneath all that honour, all that careful, excruciating virtue, you saw it. Irritation. It warmed his face, brought a flush to his cheekbones, made his eyes glitter with something that was not quite anger and not quite desire. 

Beautiful, you thought, with a flicker of cruel delight.

“You should not have sent for me,” he said. The words were ground out through clenched teeth.

You smiled. “And yet you came.”

His mouth pressed into a hard, flat line. “You must cease this.”

Your hand stilled over the correspondence. Slowly, you turned your head back towards him. “Cease what, Ser Gwayne?” Your voice was soft, almost curious.

His eyes sharpened. The green in them caught the light, flinty and hot. You watched the calculation flicker behind them, the risk of naming what he dared not name.

You let your face arrange itself into mild confusion. A little concern, even. It cost you nearly nothing, and the effect on him was immediate. His nostrils flared once. “You know very well.”

“I assure you, I do not.”

Gwayne looked towards the open door, then back to you.

The gesture was brief, but you caught it. He was measuring propriety, servants, the thin safety of appearances. He could not raise his voice. He could not accuse you too plainly. Not with the door open.

And most of all, he could not bring himself to say it. Stop looking at me. Stop calling me to you. Stop standing too close. Stop trying to make me want you.

You almost pitied him. “If I have offended you,” you said softly, “I would prefer to understand how.”

Gwayne’s gaze dropped to your mouth.

You could see the war in him, the desire to look away, to retreat, to salvage what remained of his composure. But his eyes lingered on the curve of your lips, on the slight, inviting part of them, before he wrenched his gaze back to yours with an effort that was almost violent.

The fury in his restraint was far more gratifying than any confession might have been.

“You are making sport of me,” he said.

There. As close as he could come.

You tilted your head, letting your hair slide across your shoulder. “Am I?”

He wanted to rebuke you. He wanted to leave. He wanted, perhaps most of all, for you to have enough mercy to stop forcing him to name the thing neither of you were supposed to know.

But mercy had never been among your favourite virtues.

“I had thought,” you said, letting the words drift, “that I merely summoned my husband’s cousin to ask why he has begun treating me as though I carry some illness. As though proximity to me might stain his honour.”

“You should not summon me at all.” His voice was low, threaded with something that might have been desperation.

“Because you dislike my company?”

He did not answer. He could not say yes. It would be false. He could not say no. It would be ruinous. Poor, pretty Ser Gwayne.

At last, he said, “Because it is unwise.”

Unwise. Not wrong. Not forbidden. Only unwise, as though the sin lay in the risk of discovery rather than in the act itself.

Then, very slowly, you smiled. “Then I shall try to be wiser,” you said. The softness of your voice made the lie almost beautiful.

Gwayne stared at you. He stood there, caught between the door and the desk, between duty and longing, and you could see the precise moment when he understood that you would not relent.

You turned away first, breaking the spell. You returned to your desk, the wood smooth and cool beneath your palms, and picked up the folded letter as though the matter had reached its natural conclusion.

Only then, having taken what you wanted from him did you permit him the dignity of escape. “You may go now, Ser Gwayne.”

He remained there for another moment. You did not look back, but you felt him. His anger. His restraint.

Then he bowed. “My lady.”

The words were courteous. His voice was not. You listened to his steps recede. Then the quiet pull of the door as he closed it behind him. Only once he was gone did you allow yourself to smile properly.

So.

He could be made to beg.

Gwayne had come to the conclusion several days ago that the Lady of Oldtown might be the wickedest woman alive.

It was a monstrous thought to have about his cousin’s wife.

It was also becoming increasingly difficult to disprove.

He had known you for years in the vague, ordinary manner of family by marriage. Lord Ormund’s wife. Lady Hightower. The mother of the heir. A woman of excellent birth and composed manners who inhabited the Hightower as naturally as the old stone itself.

You had been beautiful, certainly. He had never been blind. But your beauty had belonged to the room in the same manner as polished silver, carved marble, costly tapestries, and all the other fine things arranged around Ormund’s life.

A pleasant, distant ornament, admired without being touched.

Months ago, before he left for King’s Landing, you had treated him as little more than another ornament in your husband’s household. A kinsman to greet. A knight to thank. A man to whom courtesy was owed and nothing more.

Now, when you looked at him, the world tilted.

It vexed him. You vexed him.

Worse still, he could not escape you.

You were everywhere.

In the training yard, seated beneath the arcade with wine and fruit at your side, watching him as though he had been placed there for your private amusement.

In the gardens, walking slowly beneath the cypress shade. The way you said his name, Gwayne, drew out the syllables like honey, letting them rest on your tongue a moment longer than necessary. The way you touched your own throat when you spoke to him, fingers trailing along the column of your neck as though you were showing him where you wanted his mouth.

At supper, beside Ormund, where you did not need to speak to him at all.

That was perhaps the worst of it.

By day, he could at least remove himself. By night, he was made to sit across from you at his cousin’s table and endure the unbearable intimacy of being observed in plain sight.

Ormund would speak. Daeron would listen with patient attention. Olyvar would lean sleepily against his mother’s side, his small hand resting on your breast without any of the meaning that haunted Gwayne’s own thoughts.

And you would look at Gwayne.

You looked rarely enough that each glance struck him cleanly. A slow lift of your eyes while reaching for your cup. The deliberate arch of your back as you leaned forward to set down your glass, the fabric of your gown tightening over the curve of your breasts.

Except he always felt it.

He began drinking less at supper. Wine softened resolve. Wine made men slow and foolish. Wine allowed thoughts to loosen from the places where discipline had bound them.

So he watered his cup more heavily, ignored Ormund’s amused remarks about moderation, and kept his hands folded or occupied with his knife whenever you were near.

It did not help. Sobriety only made him more aware. He noticed everything with painful clarity, the colour of your mouth, red and full and slightly parted, as though you were always about to speak, or to kiss.

The measured grace of your hands as you fed some small piece of fruit to Olyvar, and he could not stop imagining what they might feel like wrapped around something else. The faint perfume that followed when you passed behind his chair, a blend of jasmine and something warmer, something that made his mouth water and his groin tighten.

There were evenings when he left the table feeling as though he had survived a battle no one else had seen.

His cock would be half-hard, aching against the seam of his breeches, and he would have to walk carefully, slowly, to keep his body from betraying him.

He would retreat to his chambers and pour cold water from the basin, splashing it over his face, his neck, the burning length of his arousal, praying for relief that never came.

And sleep, which should have offered mercy, became another place where you found him.

In dreams, you were less careful. In dreams, your lips brushed his ear as you whispered things no honourable woman would ever say aloud. 

I want you inside me, Gwayne. I want to feel you stretch me, fill me, ruin me. 

Your hand rested over his bare chest, palm warm against the hard, uneven beat of his heart, and then slid lower, down the plane of his stomach, past the trail of auburn hair, until your fingers curled around the rigid length of his cock.

In dreams, you stroked him slowly, your thumb circling the slick head, your breath hot against his throat while you whispered that you had thought of this, of him, every night since he returned.

Sometimes he saw only fragments, the red tint of your mouth, which left marks all over his body like a brand. The dark sweep of your lashes as you looked up at him on your knees, your lips parted, your tongue tracing the tip of him before you took him into the wet heat of your mouth.

A place no man had any right to imagine you.

And yet he did. He imagined you swallowing him, your cheeks hollowed, your eyes glazed with want, your hands gripping his thighs as you took him deeper, deeper, until he spilled down your throat with a groan that tore from his chest.

He would wake before dawn with his breath unsteady and his body burning with the evidence of thoughts he had not permitted himself while conscious.

The sheets would be tangled around his legs, damp with sweat, and his cock would be painfully hard, slick with the evidence of his shame. He would lie there, staring at the dark ceiling, and feel the phantom warmth of your mouth still lingering on his skin.

Desire had made a traitor of his flesh, and no amount of cold water splashed across his face, no amount of silent, bitter prayers muttered into the dark, seemed able to make it loyal again.

So he went to the Sept.

He went more often than duty required.

In the grey hush before morning, when the candles had burned low and the air smelled of wax, Gwayne knelt before the Seven and forced discipline into himself one prayer at a time.

The chill of the floor seeped through the wool of his breeches, a grim penance against the warmth still lingering from his dreams.

To the Warrior, he prayed for strength, the strength to wrestle his own nature into submission, to look at you without hardening. To the Father, for just judgment, though he knew any fair verdict would condemn him. To the Mother, for mercy, though he did not think he deserved any measure of it.

And to the Maiden, he found himself unable to pray without shame curdling thick and bitter in his throat.

The statue regarded him with downcast stone eyes, her hands folded in a gesture of perfect innocence, and every image of purity she offered turned, wickedly, inexorably, back towards you. The fall of her marble gown became the drape of your silk. The modest curve of her mouth became the full, parted softness of your lips, red and wet and waiting.

The purity of her form dissolved into the memory of your body moving beneath candlelight, the shadow of your nipples against the fabric, the sway of your hips as you walked past his chair.

That was when he knew he was in danger.

Not when you smiled at him across the training yard. Not when he woke hard and aching from dreams of your mouth on his cock. Not even when he began avoiding the very corridors of his own kin’s house like some green boy frightened of the cook’s daughter.

No. He knew he was truly lost when sacred things began to bend around the shape of his temptation.

When the flicker of candle flames recalled the heat in your gaze. When the scent of frankincense mingled too closely with the memory of your perfume.

When the word sin no longer frightened him quickly enough, because it had become inseparable from the thought of you.

He confessed in fragments. Not to a septon. He did not trust his own mouth to form the truth where another man might hear it. Instead, he knelt with his head bowed, and spoke only inside himself, where the gods could see what he was too cowardly to name aloud.

I have entertained impure thoughts. I have looked too long. I have wanted what is not mine.

Even that was not honest enough. Because the whole truth was uglier, heavier, more damning.

He did not merely want a woman who belonged to another man. He wanted you. And some part of him, some shameful, resentful, deeply buried part he had spent years mastering, knew exactly whose wife you were and wanted you more because of it.

Ormund’s ring on your finger. Ormund’s name on your tongue. Ormund’s bed you shared, the sheets where you lay bare and willing for a man who did not deserve the half of what he possessed.

That was where guilt turned into something heavier.

Ormund, who was arrogant, impossible, vain in the way only highly cultivated men managed to be. Ormund, who had corrected him since boyhood, bested him when he could, raged when he could not, and carried every triumph as though it had been written into the order of the world.

Gwayne had learned early how to yield.

A boy could only endure so many games ruined by Ormund’s wounded pride before he understood that victory was not always worth the cost. Let him win. Let him speak. Let him stand taller if standing taller kept the peace.

Cousin. Lord. Blood.

And yet at supper, Ormund sat beside you and spoke as though everything in the room existed by his possession of it. His tower. His table. His wife.

And you looked at Gwayne over the rim of your cup.

That was the thought that made him feel most wretched. Not merely that he wanted you.

That he reveled in being wanted by you. That when Ormund’s attention was elsewhere and your gaze found Gwayne’s across the table, something low and disgraceful in him answered with a surge of savage, possessive triumph.

Not yours, cousin. Mine.

He closed his eyes, and the taste of the communion wine on his tongue was not enough to wash away the imagined sweetness of your mouth.

Gwayne bowed his head and swallowed hard, his hands clasped so tightly before him that the knuckles ached.

He prayed for deliverance, knowing he would not recognise it if it came. He prayed for punishment, knowing he deserved nothing less than the fire of seven hells.

He prayed, most of all, for the strength to stop wanting the very thing he feared, with every desperate, traitorous beat of his heart, he would not refuse if it ever came close enough.

He prayed for a grace he knew he did not possess, while his body, his treacherous, aching, unredeemed body, prayed silently for you.

Supper, again.

There was nothing unusual in that. And yet Ormund, for reasons known only to himself and whatever dark humour had taken root in him that evening, had chosen his cousin as his entertainment tonight.

It had begun lightly enough. A remark about Gwayne’s return from King’s Landing. Some comment on how the capital seemed to drain the vigour from men who were not careful of it.

Gwayne had accepted it with a faint smile and a lowered gaze, giving the answer expected of him.

Then Ormund had continued. That was always the danger with him. A single barb was never enough if the first found flesh.

“I only say it out of concern,” Ormund said, turning his cup slowly between his long fingers. “There is a certain manner men bring back from the Red Keep. A taste for ceremony over substance. They stand straighter, speak less, and begin to mistake silence for depth. Or emptiness for self-control.”

Gwayne’s expression did not change. He sat with one hand resting near his knife, the other pressed flat against his thigh, as if grounding himself in the solid weight of his own bones.

Only the faint colour along his cheekbones, deepening towards his jaw, suggested the words had landed anywhere at all.

“You find me changed, then?” he asked mildly.

“I find you quieter,” Ormund replied. “Though perhaps that is mercy. A man who speaks less reveals less of his want. It is a useful discipline.”

Daeron glanced down at his plate. You remained silent, your hand stroking Olyvar’s back in slow, absent circles.

There were many things your husband enjoyed, but few so much as the sound of a room carefully adjusting itself around his temper. He had a talent for creating discomfort without ever raising his voice.

Ormund looked to Daeron then, drawing the boy in with the careless confidence of a man who knew refusal would feel like disrespect. “You noticed it as well, surely. Ser Gwayne has returned to us a model of piety.”

Daeron’s fingers tightened around his cup. “I had thought my uncle much the same as he was,” he said carefully.

“A loyal answer,” Ormund said, smiling faintly. “Not a perceptive one. But a boy cannot be expected to read the hunger a man hides behind his prayers.”

Daeron’s face warmed.

Gwayne looked at him then, not at Ormund. The look was brief, steadying, almost protective. It seemed to say that none of this mattered, that the boy need not trouble himself trying to answer well.

Ormund leaned back, pleased with himself. “Come now, my Prince. You have spent enough time under my roof to know that affection does not require blindness. Even kin may be assessed honestly.”

Daeron swallowed. “Ser Gwayne is an honourable knight.”

“Honourable, yes,” Ormund allowed, the words falling like a judgement from a high bench. “But honour is a beginning, not an accomplishment. Many dull men are honourable because they lack the imagination to be otherwise. Or the appetite for the pleasures that require a bolder nature.”

Daeron persisted. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the table’s hush like a stone through still water. “I do not think Ser Gwayne dull.”

Ormund’s eyes slid back to him. The boy seemed to regret speaking the moment the words left him, but he did not take them back. You saw the effort it cost him to remain seated properly, to meet Ormund’s attention and not shrink from it.

Gwayne saw it too.

“My prince is kind,” he said, before Ormund could answer. His voice was calm. “But your lord is not wrong to say I am not made for the games of court and chamber. I have always been a simpler instrument.”

Ormund smiled. The smile of a man who had seen his opponent lay down his sword.

“No,” your husband said. “You were always more suited to sword and saddle. There is use in that, of course. Every house requires bodies that can be aimed. Strong hands and a willing back. A sword has no need of pride, only a hand to wield it.”

The servants continued moving as though nothing had happened. A dish was replaced. Wine was poured. Somewhere beyond the windows, the evening wind moved faintly against the stone.

Gwayne gave a small inclination of his head. “As you say, cousin.”

The words were old. Worn smooth from years of use. You looked at Gwayne and wondered how many times he had said them as a boy. How many times he had decided that yielding was simpler.

How many little contests Ormund had been allowed to win so the household might be spared his wounded pride.

Your husband turned to you then.

There was a glimmer in his eyes, subtle but unmistakable, the satisfied gleam of a man who had performed precisely as he wished and now sought the most particular witness.

His wife. Beautiful, silent, seated beside him in green silk that caught the candlelight in slow, liquid shifts, watching with an expression he had not yet managed to read.

“What say you, my love?” Ormund asked. “Am I too severe?”

He wanted you to admire him.

He had taken a man apart in small, polished pieces and now expected you to praise the elegance of the blade. You looked at him for a long moment. Long enough for the silence to grow heavy with the weight of what he was not hearing.

Ormund waited, his mouth faintly curved, ready to be indulged.

Across the table, Gwayne did not move. He stared down at his cup as though your answer had nothing to do with him.

Daeron’s gaze remained fixed on his plate, a flush creeping up from his collar.

You stroked Olyvar’s hair once, the soft strands slipping through your fingers like silk, then lifted your wine.

“I think,” you said at last, “that you always know precisely how much severity a room will tolerate.”

Ormund’s smile sharpened, pleased before he understood you fully. Then something in his expression cooled by a fraction, a tightening at the corners of his mouth, a flicker of recognition that he had not been praised but measured.

You took a slow drink. The wine was warm on your tongue.

Gwayne’s eyes lifted.

They met yours across the table, and for a breathless instant, the room fell away. There was only that look, before he lowered his gaze once more.

Ormund studied you over the rim of his own cup, some private irritation passing like shadow behind his face. But there were servants in the room, and Daeron at the table, and his sleeping son tucked against your side. So he did not press you.

Instead, he gave a soft, dismissive hum.

“A wife’s answer,” he said.

You lowered your cup, the ceramic clicking softly against the wood. “Naturally. I am told I am very accomplished at being one.”

Daeron did not dare look at you.

Gwayne did. This time, he failed to hide it.

You held his gaze across the table, your face calm, your pulse strangely awake beneath your skin. There was no smile this time. Only the plain, silent acknowledgement that you had seen what Ormund had done to him. And that you had not partook.

Ormund resumed speaking before the quiet could thicken beyond his control, turning the conversation towards the rebuilding of some minor sept outside the city.

And supper ended without further incident.

That was to say, no one raised their voice, no cup was overturned, no servant was sent scurrying from the room with instructions to summon anyone of consequence.

Ormund rose from the table satisfied with himself, as he so often did, and excused himself to attend to some letters that apparently required the grave intervention of his intellect.

Daeron slipped away soon after, his shoulders dropping as he crossed the threshold. Olyvar had long since been carried to his bed, heavy-eyed and half-asleep against your shoulder before his nurse came to collect him.

You remained a little while longer.

Only when the servants began clearing the last of the cups, did you finally rise and leave the solar. The halls of the Hightower were cooler at night, the old stone holding the memory of the sea wind even when the windows were shuttered.

You had nearly reached the turn towards your personal chambers when you saw him.

Ser Gwayne stood near one of the tall arched windows, half in shadow, his hand braced lightly against the stone ledge as he looked out over the city below. Beyond the glass, the lights of Oldtown glittered like scattered embers, and the distant spire of the Starry Sept rose against the dark sky.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then he straightened.

“My lady.”

You looked at him carefully in the dim torchlight. The humiliation from supper had not left him. His face was composed, but there was a tiredness around his eyes, a thinness to his mouth. A man who had endured insult after insult without allowing any of them the dignity of visible injury.

“You do that often,” you said.

Gwayne’s gaze moved to yours. “My lady?”

“Allow him to make sport of you... to bully you.”

Gwayne went still, the last of his polite greeting draining from his face like water through sand. “My cousin does not bully me,” Gwayne said.

You nearly smiled at the choice of denial. The way he said it, the lie worn smooth by repetition.

“No. Of course not. Lord Ormund is far too cultivated for anything so plain.” You let your eyes drift towards the dark window. “He merely cuts, and waits to see who is polite enough to bleed quietly.”

Gwayne’s mouth tightened. The muscle in his jaw jumped once, a small betrayal of control. “You need not defend me.”

“I did not.”

His eyes narrowed, exhaustion and something sharper. “Then why—?”

“My husband asked me a question,” you said, your voice soft and even. “I answered.”

Gwayne looked away first.

In profile, the resemblance between him and Ormund was clearer, the same noble blood shaped differently, Ormund severe and ornamental, Gwayne cleaner, warmer, made dangerous by the very effort he took to be good.

After a moment, he gave a quiet, humourless breath.

“Why do you care?”

There it was. Not accusation at first. Weariness. Frustration. Something close to embarrassment that you had seen too much.

You took a step nearer, unhurried. “Because I prefer you.”

Gwayne’s head turned back to you. For one suspended moment, the words seemed to pass through him without finding a place to settle. And you watched the slow process of their meaning sinking into his skin like water into thirsty ground.

Then weariness hardened into anger so quickly you almost felt the air shift with it.

“You should not say such things.”

“Why?”

“You know why.” His voice was low, rough at the edges. “You are married.”

“I am aware.”

“This is not some idle game.”

“No?” You let the word linger, arching your brow just enough to catch the torchlight.

“No.” He stepped closer then, not enough to threaten, but enough that you felt the heat of his temper more keenly than before. “Whatever amusement you find in this, whatever pleasure you take in provoking me, it is sin. It is dishonour. It is adultery.”

You watched him, unmoved. The word hung in the air like a bell that had been struck and was still trembling.

“We have committed no adultery,” you said softly, your voice dropping to a murmur that seemed to brush against his skin. “Not yet.”

Gwayne stared at you.

The silence after that was almost violent. His breath came shallow, his chest rising and falling beneath the fine wool of his doublet.

His throat moved once, and you had the sudden impression that every prayer he had ever spoken had risen in him at once and found no answer strong enough to silence the want curling in his gut.

He looked appalled by you. By himself. By the fact that you had taken the ugliest word he possessed and handled it as though it were merely a door neither of you had opened.

“Do not,” he said, but his voice cracked on the second word.

He was angry. Humiliated. Aroused. You could see each one warring through him, as they bled into each other, staining his composure, making his breath come faster.

“You should return to your chambers,” he said, but the words were barely audible now.

“You should stop telling me what I ought to do.”

His breath left him through his nose, a sharp, frustrated sound that was almost a groan. Anyone might turn the corner. A servant, a guard, Ormund himself. Gwayne was surely thinking the same thing. Still, he did not move.

You lifted your hand and touched his chest. Your palm settled over the front of his doublet, light enough to be refused, deliberate enough that refusal would require movement.

The fabric was warm from his body, fine and smooth beneath your fingers. Beneath it, you felt the solid wall of his chest, the hard muscle tensing at your touch.

His breath caught.

Beneath the fine cloth, his body went rigid. You felt the hard shape of him, the held breath, the living warmth beneath all that piety. The heat of his skin seemed to seep through the layers, reaching for yours.

His eyes dropped to your hand. Then, suddenly, his fingers closed around your wrist.

It was the first time Gwayne had touched you as a man rather than a courtier offering courtesy. His grip was firm and warm, the calluses of his palm rough against the soft skin of your inner wrist.

You looked up at him.

His face had changed. The anger was still there, but it had been overtaken by something more dangerous. Want, stripped of all its polite disguises.

His pupils had dilated, the torchlight catching the dark gleam of his eyes. His lips parted slightly, and you saw the quick movement of his tongue wetting them.

He was looking at you now as he had fought not to look for days, with his restraint pulled so taut that one more breath might snap it entirely.

Your wrist remained caught in his hand. Neither of you moved.

Then his gaze fell to your mouth. This time, he did not pretend otherwise. His eyes traced the curve of your lips, the slight parting of them, the shine of moisture where your tongue had touched.

You felt the smallest shift in him before it happened. His grip tightened, his fingers pressing into your pulse point.

His body leaned nearer by a fraction, the space between you shrinking until you could feel the warmth of his breath on your skin. His eyes lifted once to yours, as though searching for some last warning, some final scrap of sense.

You gave him none.

For one wild, breathless instant, you thought he would kiss you.

He would kiss you as the man who had sat across from you at supper and endured your husband’s insults while your gaze rested on the bruise of his pride. He would kiss you as the man who had prayed against wanting you and failed.

His mouth came close enough that you felt the warmth of his breath, the faint brush of air across your lips. His chest pressed against your hand, the rapid beat of his heart hammering against your palm.

Then he stopped.

A muscle jumped in his jaw, tight and hard as a bowstring. His eyes closed briefly and when they opened again, something cold and brutal had returned to them. The hunger was locked away, and in its place stood a fortress.

He released your wrist as though it had burned him.

You remained very still, your hand falling slowly back to your side, the memory of his calloused palm scorched into your skin.

Gwayne stepped away, putting cold stone between you.

“You shame yourself,” he said, his voice low and rough, “And you would have me drown in that shame with you.”

The words struck cleanly, a blade drawn across the softest part of your pride. For a second, there was no sound but the faint hiss of the nearest torch and the ragged sound of his breathing, quick and shallow as a hunted thing.

Then heat rose beneath your skin, not the sweet warmth of desire, but the bitter burn of humiliation. You had offered him the victory of your nearness, the scent of your skin, the softness of your mouth beneath his.

And then he had chosen to rebuke you as though he had not been one breath from proving himself no better than the rest… as though his own cock had not been stiff with the very sin he now condemned.

“Do not flatter yourself, Ser Gwayne.” Your voice emerged smooth and cold. “Do not mistake a moment’s curiosity for a need I am desperate to repeat.”

His expression flickered. Shock. Shame. Something raw and wounded beneath.

“You must not speak to me so again,” he said, but the authority had drained from it, leaving only a plea and a warning tangled together.

Your smile vanished.

Something in Gwayne’s face shifted when he saw it, some belated understanding that he had passed from guilt into insult.

And that you, unlike the gods he prayed to every night, were not inclined towards mercy. You stepped back. This time, he was the one who looked unsettled, his hand lifting an inch as though to reach for you before he caught himself.

“Then you shall be relieved to know I have no reason to remain here.” Your voice had gone cool enough to frost the stone between you, to freeze the very heat you had stoked between his thighs. “I ought to return to my husband. He will not turn from what I offer.”

Gwayne flinched. The mention of Ormund, a lash across his conscience.

You gathered your skirts and turned from him, anger carrying you before pride could be made to limp behind it. You did not look back. Not once.

Let him stand there with his honour. Let him pray over the taste of almost. You had offered him the edge of something exquisite, and he had chosen to bleed himself on restraint rather than fall into the sweetness of your body.

Very well, you would return to Ormund.

And Ser Gwayne Hightower could choke on whatever holy comfort he found in that.

For the first three days, Gwayne told himself he had been granted mercy

He woke each morning with the ghost of your scent still tangled in the linen and the shameful, persistent stiffness of his cock beneath the sheets. The remnant of dreams so vivid they left him breathless and aching. Dreams of your mouth. The weight of your thigh over his hip.

He punished his body to quiet his mind.

He rode until his thighs burned and the saddle rubbed him raw, forcing exhaustion into his bones so that sleep might come without your face behind his eyelids.

He sparred until sweat darkened his tunic and the ache in his shoulders became something pure, something that had nothing to do with the memory of your skin beneath his hand.

He prayed in the sept until his knees bruised on the cold stone, begging the Mother and the Maiden to scour your image from his thoughts.

It did not work.

By the fourth day, the truth cracked through his ribs like a splintered lance. Your silence was not mercy. It was the most exquisite punishment you could have devised against him.

Because he had spent every hour organising himself around the task of resisting you. The war had given his days shape. 

Do not look at her mouth. Do not imagine the weight of her breast in your palm. Do not let your voice soften when you speak her name. Do not think of her cunt… warm, wet, waiting for a husband who does not deserve it.

Every moment had possessed its own private battle. Then, suddenly, the siege was lifted. The enemy had withdrawn behind her walls. And he was left standing on the empty field with his sword drawn, looking like the greatest fool in the Seven Kingdoms.

He became a hound scenting the air for a master who had locked him out.

At supper, you starved him. When courtesy compelled a greeting, your voice emerged smooth and cool as river-stone.

“Ser Gwayne.” No honeyed edge. No secret sliding of your gaze down the length of his body.

“My lady,” he answered, and the effort of keeping his voice level made his jaw ache.

It made his throat tight with the effort of pretending he did not want to drag you from that chair and take you against the nearest wall.

Then you turned away.

You looked at Ormund. You laid your hand on Ormund’s arm. You smiled at him. It should have relieved him, this withdrawal. Seven above, he had begged for it.

Had he not gone to the sept with his hands clasped too tightly, praying for the strength to remove you from his thoughts? Had he not rebuked you in the corridor with every scrap of honour left to him?

You were doing exactly what decency demanded.

And it was ruining him.

By the third supper, he felt the absence of your gaze like a physical deprivation. He had condemned that gaze so fiercely when he possessed it. He had called it temptation. He had called it wickedness.

Now, without it, he felt like some poor living thing dragged from the sun, withering in the cold. That thought shamed him nearly as much as the dreams.

You were cruel, Gwayne decided. No woman could do what you had done by accident.

No woman could spend weeks drawing a man’s desire out from beneath his armour, teaching his body to answer yours like a well-strung lute, and then step back into the safety of cold courtesy as if she had merely been practicing a dance.

As if his prayers, his shame, his despair had been nothing more than an entertainment that had briefly failed to please you.

But the true poison in the cup was Ormund.

Gwayne had endured his cousin all his life. Ormund’s pride. His theatrical displeasures. The exquisite little humiliations dressed as wit. That was familiar territory. Irritating, yes. Often humiliating. But known.

Now, however, he found himself aware of Ormund in ways he had never permitted himself before.

Aware of how often Ormund addressed you, seeking your ear. Aware of the way your husband’s hand rested at the back of your chair. Aware of how Ormund sought your approval with a subtle, wheedling persistence that should have been laughable.

It was not laughable.

Because Gwayne watched you lean into that touch. Watched you offer Ormund the attention that he was dying for. He imagined Ormund in your chambers. He imagined your husband’s hands on your skin, his mouth on your throat, his body moving over yours in the dark.

One evening, Ormund spoke at length about some carved screen he had commissioned for the lower hall. He described the quality of the wood, the way the artisan had coaxed the figures from the surface like peeling back a lover’s gown.

He praised the cleverness of the design, the interlacing vines and hidden beasts, and then, with that familiar curl of his lip, dismissed the inferior works of other houses. He performed. He always performed.

And though half the room might have been spared by a merciful collapse of the ceiling, you listened. Not with affection, Gwayne could see that plainly enough. You did not adore Ormund. But you indulged him.

You tilted your head at the correct moment. You gave him a faint smile over your wine, lips parting just enough to wet the rim of the cup. You offered, in that smooth voice, exactly enough admiration to satisfy him.

“It is finely chosen,” you said. “You have always had a good eye for ornament.”

Ormund’s face warmed with pleasure, his chest puffing slightly as he reached for your hand where it rested near his plate. He lifted it to his lips, a slow kiss to your knuckles.

Gwayne wanted to be the one holding your hand. He wanted to feel your pulse beneath his thumb, wanted to taste the salt of your skin on his tongue. He looked down at his plate instead. He hated himself for that too. Hated, most of all, the vile little thought that came again before he could stop it, curling through his mind like smoke from a censer,

She does not want him.

It brought him no peace. Only more shame. Because you might not want Ormund, but you sat beside him. You wore his house colours. You bore his name. You had borne his son, had given that smug, undeserving man a child from your own womb.

When the household looked at you, they saw Lady Hightower, Lord Ormund’s wife. And still, when you laughed softly at something Ormund said, a throaty sound that made Gwayne’s sack ache, he felt betrayed.

By the next supper, he was no better.

You arrived late, though not so late as to be remarked upon. Ormund looked up first, displeasure prepared and then softened, as it often did, by the sight of you. His eyes trailed over your gown, the low cut of the bodice, the way the fabric clung to the swell of your breasts.

Olyvar brightened at once and reached for you when you passed behind his chair, and you bent to kiss your son’s head.

Gwayne looked at his cup. He told himself not to look again.

Then Ormund said your name.

Not sharply. Merely summoning your attention to some matter beside him. You leaned closer to your husband, one hand resting lightly against the table, close enough that your fingers brushed his. Gwayne saw the way his cousin’s hand turned, palm up, inviting yours to rest within it. He saw you place your hand in Ormund’s.

He felt the movement like a hand closing around his throat.

He looked up despite himself. Then, as though feeling Gwayne’s gaze across the table, your eyes lifted. At last.

For one breath, you looked at him. Only a cool acknowledgement, as one might grant a man whose presence was expected and uninteresting. Then you returned your attention to your husband.

The pain of it was so precise it almost steadied him. A clean, sharp blade slipped between his ribs. Yes, he thought, staring down at his untouched wine, his jaw tight, his throat dry.

Wickedest woman alive.

Your existence must have driven him to madness. There was no other sensible explanation. No other defence for why, after a week of praying against you, he had written a note with his own hand and left it in your solar.

He had not trusted a servant with it. The thought alone had sickened him. No. If disgrace was to be invited, he had at least possessed the miserable dignity of delivering the invitation himself.

The note had been brief. Painfully so.

My lady, If you would grant me a private word after supper, I shall await you in my chambers. Ser Gwayne Hightower

A private word. What a cowardly phrase. What a polished little lie. What he wanted was not words.

He did not know what he wanted from you. Explanation, perhaps. Some answer for why you had made a ruin of his thoughts and then withdrawn as though he had ceased to amuse you. Or comfort, though the shame of desiring comfort from you nearly made him crush the parchment in his hand.

Perhaps he wanted you to look at him. That was the worst possibility. That he had summoned his cousin’s wife to his chambers after supper because he could no longer bear being deprived of her gaze.

By the time the meal ended, Gwayne was certain he had made a catastrophic mistake. By the time he reached his chambers, he was certain of very little.

He paced like a condemned man. The room was orderly, as it always was. Nothing in the chamber suggested sin. Nothing in it looked capable of holding you. And yet the air felt altered because he was waiting for you inside it.

Gwayne stopped before the small polished mirror and immediately despised himself for doing so. Still, he adjusted his collar. Then smoothed his hair. Then did it again. The ridiculousness of it struck him with almost physical force. He was a grown man. Years your senior, no less.

He turned away from the mirror. Then turned back once more, his fingers brushing the front of his breeches where the fabric had begun to tent, pressing himself flat in a futile attempt at composure.

“Seven preserve me,” he muttered.

A knock came at the door.

His heart stilled. For one absurd moment, he thought of not answering, of letting the note remain unanswered and the shame remain private. But his body moved before cowardice could complete the thought. His hand found the latch.

He opened the door. And for a moment, Gwayne forgot every carefully prepared word.

You stood in the corridor, dressed for the night, or near enough to it to undo him utterly. A pristine pale nightgown showed beneath a robe fastened at your waist, the fabric modest in shape and devastating in implication.

The thin linen clung to the swell of your breasts, and he could see the dark shadow of your nipples beneath, the way the cloth dipped to follow the curve of your ribs.

Your hair was loose over your shoulders, freed from the pins and ornaments that usually made you Lady Hightower before the court. In the softer glow, you looked less like an apparition than something far more tempting.

Your brow lifted slightly. The movement drew his eyes to the arch of it, the line of your jaw, the soft parting of your lips. “You summoned me, Ser Gwayne.”

The coolness in your voice bit deeper than accusation might have done.

He stepped aside without trusting himself to speak.

You entered with a calm that felt obscene given the hour. Your eyes moved once around his chambers, taking in the bed, the devotional candle burning low near the window. A slow, faint smile touched your mouth, and he watched the way your lips curved. “How improper.”

The words were quiet. Almost idle.

Gwayne closed the door. The sound seemed too loud, a thud that echoed, sealing the two of you inside.

“You came,” he said. His voice was rougher than he intended.

You turned towards him, the loose spill of your hair shifting over your robe. “You called.”

His hands closed briefly at his sides before he forced them open. He could see the outline of your thighs through the linen, the shadow between your legs where the fabric fell in a soft V.

“I did.”

Gwayne could feel his restraint fraying in real time. The fabric of his breeches grew damp at the tip as a bead of precum leaked out.

You looked at him for a moment, then allowed your gaze to drift once more to the devotional candle. “Did I interrupt your prayers?”

That was when something in him finally broke. “You should not mock prayer.” His voice came out harsh, the words bitten off.

Your eyes returned to him, mild as ever. “I merely asked a question.”

“You know what you asked.” He took a step closer, then stopped himself, his fists clenching at his sides.

“And you know why you sent for me,” you replied.

Gwayne stared at you, and all at once the week rose inside him… every sleepless night, every wet dream, every prayer he had tried to drown you in. It surged up from his gut, and hardened his voice into something ragged.

“You are cruel,” he said.

Your expression barely changed, but something sharpened, a glint of satisfaction. “Am I?”

“Yes.” The word left him too quickly, too raw, and with it came the rest. “You have made a sport of me from the moment I returned. You looked at me over the supper table, and every look was a promise you never meant to keep. You smiled, knowing exactly how it tightened my breeches. You whispered your little meanings beneath every harmless word, and when I would not give you what you wanted, you withdrew as though I were nothing.”

You watched him with a stillness that made him angrier. The quiet composure of a cat watching its prey exhaust itself.

“You do not get to look surprised,” he said, his voice trembling now with the effort of restraint. “Not with me. You know exactly what you have done to me.”

“I have done very little, Ser Gwayne.”

The title, in that voice made something in him snap.

“Little?” He stepped away from the door, unable to remain still, his boots heavy on the stone. “You have bewitched my mind. You have tainted every prayer I offer until the words turn to ash on my tongue. You have brought shame into the sept with me. I kneel before the Mother and the Maiden and find your face, your body, beneath the robes of every goddess.”

Your lips parted faintly. The smile on your face brightened. Your nipples pressed visibly against the thin fabric of your gown. In interest.

Gwayne saw it, and it unsteadied him worse than outrage could have. “You are pleased,” he said, the words hollow. “Gods help me, you are pleased to hear this.”

You lowered your lashes for a moment, but not quickly enough to hide the triumphant glimmer there. “I am listening.”

“No. You enjoy tormenting me.”

You took one slow step closer. Gwayne went still. His whole body locked, every muscle taut.

“My poor Ser Gwayne,” you said, so gently it felt like mockery wearing silk. “Have I truly made you suffer so?”

Your gaze dropped deliberately to the front of his breeches, where the straining fabric left nothing to the imagination. A slow, knowing smile touched your lips. “It seems you are suffering even now.”

His jaw tightened hard enough to ache. “Do not.”

Your face softened into innocence. “Do not what?”

He looked at you then and hated how beautiful you were. Hated that his fury had brought a glow to your face and pleasure to your eyes. “You know.”

“I am afraid you must be plainer.”

He could hear the provocation in it, the demand for more.

“You want me to say it?” His voice rose before he could stop it. “You want me to stand here and confess that I have thought of your mouth wrapped around my cock for nights on end? That I have woken with your name caught behind my teeth and my seed hot on my belly? That I cannot hear Ormund speak of you as his wife without wanting to silence him with my fist and and bend you over the nearest surface?”

He took another step, then stopped himself, fists clenched so hard the tendons stood out. “You have made me faithless. You have made me resent my own blood. You have made me want sin, and worse, you made me miss it when you took it away..”

For the first time, you did not immediately answer. The quiet pleased him and terrified him in equal measure. You stood close enough now that the heat of your body reached his. Then you smiled.

Triumphant.

“You missed me.”

Gwayne stared at you. That was all you had taken from it. Not his guilt. Not his horror. Not the vile, glorious wreckage he had laid at your feet. You missed me. His anger returned so swiftly it nearly steadied him. “You are impossible.”

You came nearer. Slowly, as though approaching something wounded enough to bite. “You hate that you want this,” you murmured.

Gwayne’s breath altered. He felt it betray him, the way his chest rose and fell too quickly.

“Say I am wrong,” you whispered, your lips so close now that he could almost taste the words.

He said nothing. The denial died in his throat, strangled by the sight of your lips. You lifted your hand. It trembled, a tiny flaw in your perfect composure that sent a thrill through him.

Gwayne caught your wrist before you could touch him.

His fingers closed around the delicate bones, the soft skin. Your pulse hammered wildly against his thumb. He felt it. You looked down at his hand around you, then back up at him. The satisfaction simmering in your face became unmistakable.

He had meant to stop you. Instead, he was holding you.

Your voice came low, a velvet knife against his raw nerves. “There you are.”

Gwayne released you as though waking from a fever. He stepped back, and the cold air that rushed between you was a cruelty he had not deserved but accepted like penance. You remained where you were, unmoved, unashamed. Your eyes were bright with victory.

He hated you then. The hatred was a hot, venomous thing in his chest.

“You should leave,” he said.

For a moment, you only stared at him.

Then the pleasure left your face. Like a curtain drawn back from a colder room. Your mouth settled into a hard, disdainful line. Whatever warmth had gathered between you curdled instantly into something proud and wounded, and Gwayne knew that he had struck not your conscience but your vanity.

“How tedious you are,” you said, the words dipped in vitriol.

His breath remained uneven, ragged.

“You summon me to your chambers like a man half-mad with rut,” you continued, voice low and cutting, your gaze dropping deliberately to the hard outline straining against his breeches. “Accuse me of bewitching you, speak of sin and ruin as though I held a knife to your cock, and now I am to leave because your courage—”

You let out a soft, cruel laugh.

“—has failed you again.”

His jaw clenched so hard it ached. “You should never have come. I made a mistake.”

You laughed softly then, but there was no amusement in it.

“Yes,” you said. “you made a mistake. You thought you could look upon the fire and not be burned.”

Then you turned.

You let your hair spill across your back, let the silk of your robe drape over the curve of your hip. At the door, your hand touched the frame. You paused. Without looking back, you delivered the killing stroke.

“My husband awaits me in our bed, Ser Gwayne. He does not pray for permission. He does not tremble. If you do not want me, Ormund surely will.”

The words hit him like a blade sliding between his ribs. Then something in him snapped. It was the last thin thread of his obedience. His piety. His honour. His fear of the Seven. All of it fell away in a single, hot rush.

Gwayne crossed the room before sense could catch him. His hand closed around your arm and he wrenched you back towards him with such force that you stumbled against his chest.

Then he was kissing you.

There was no gentleness in the first collision. None. Only the brutal, devouring hunger he had been choking down since the first night you looked at him across Ormund’s table.

For half a heartbeat, you went still. Testing him. Then you yielded. A soft, satisfied sound, a hum of pure approval, escaped your throat and went through him like a razor dipped in honey.

Your mouth opened beneath his, warm and eager, and Gwayne felt the last of his restraint shudder out of him in a ragged groan against your lips. Your arms rose around his neck, drawing him closer with such shameless welcome that he actually did groan, a broken sound of pure, animal relief.

You did not resist. Your tongue swept against his, you let him plunder your mouth and then answered it as though you had been waiting for him to stop pretending he was anything better than this.

A sinner and a thief of another man’s wife.

His hands found your waist. The silk of your robe was smooth beneath his palms, but the body beneath it was no dream at all. He slid one hand lower, gripping the curve of your hip, then the full swell of your ass, pulling you hard against the aching length of him.

You gasped into his mouth and pressed closer, your fingers tangling in his hair, nails scraping against his scalp, your thighs pressing together against his.

Gwayne lost the ability to think in anything but fragments of pure, burning sensation, the wet heat of your mouth, the taste of wine, the soft, pleased catch in your throat when he kissed you harder, when his teeth grazed your tongue, when his hips pressed forward in an involuntary thrust, grinding himself against the soft cradle of your thighs.

He had imagined this too many times and not once had imagination been merciful enough to prepare him for this. Reality was a thousand times worse.

He could not stop. Even when some distant, horrified remnant of himself commanded him to pull away, his body refused. His mouth moved over yours again and again, harder, wetter, more desperate, as though if he devoured you thoroughly enough, he might pass the torment back into you and be free of it.

But you only held him closer. You moaned against his mouth, your nails digging into his shoulders, your body arching into his. You accepted his ruin like tribute.

He kissed you until he seemed to remember, all at once, that breathing was required of mortal men.

Only then did he break away. Barely.

His forehead came to rest against yours, the bridge of his nose brushing the tip of your own, his breath hot and uneven against your damp, parted lips.

For several moments, neither of you spoke. The only sounds were the ragged pull of his breathing, the soft rustle of silk as your body shifted against his.

Your lips were flushed from him. The sight of them, of his work upon your mouth, nearly undid him all over again. “Why?” he asked.

The word came out rougher than he intended. He closed his eyes briefly, his forehead still pressed to yours, his hands still gripping your waist.

“Out of every man who would fall over himself for one smile from you. Every knight, every lord, every fool at court who would crawl if you asked it of him.” His voice roughened further. “Why me?”

You lifted one hand from his neck and touched the side of his face, your thumb resting lightly near the sharp line of his cheekbone, tracing the faint stubble there with a slowness that made his breath catch.

He held utterly still beneath it, a hawk frozen by the weight of a gaze.

It was almost tender. Almost.

“Just to see if I could.”

Gwayne opened his eyes. For a moment, the words cut so cleanly he could not feel the wound. To see if I could.

Not because you had suffered with wanting him. Not because you had prayed against him, dreamed of him, hated yourself for the shape of him in your thoughts. Not because you had lain awake at night, hand between your thighs, imagining the weight of his body on yours. Not because he was good. Not because he was loved.

Because you had looked at him and wondered whether he could be made to break. And he had.

The pain of it should have steadied him. It should have returned his anger, his dignity, some sharp fragment of self-preservation.

Instead, he looked at you and thought, with a despair so complete it nearly became peace, that he would cut his own heart from his chest and lay it in your hands if you asked him sweetly enough.

How cruel you were. How plainly, exquisitely cruel. And still, beneath your gaze, he felt chosen. Blessed, almost. The blasphemy of that thought should have driven him to his knees before the Seven. Instead it kept him standing there with you in his arms.

“I knew it,” you whispered, your voice a low, velvet purr. A faint smile touched your swollen lips. “I knew you wanted me.”

Gwayne’s grip tightened at your waist, his fingers digging into the silk of your robe. “You are wicked.”

“Yes.”

“You are vain.”

“Yes.”

“You are faithless.”

Your smile softened, but only at the edges, a flicker of something almost tender. “And yet.”

And yet. And yet he wanted you. And yet his cousin’s wife stood in his chambers with her arms around his neck, looking at him as though all his honour had only made the conquest sweeter.

Gwayne closed his eyes for one brief, agonised moment.

He despised you. He loved you.

The two truths struck together inside him until he could no longer tell which was meant to save him and which was meant to damn him.

His mouth crashed against yours with a force that drove you back a step, his hand sliding from your waist to the small of your back, pressing you hard against him so that you could feel the full, aching length of him, pressed against the soft cradle of your belly.

His hand rose to your jaw, fingers splaying along the delicate bone, thumb pressing against the hinge as he angled your head and kissed you with everything he had tried to bury.

He felt your smile against his lips, the way it softened the kiss even as his tongue plunged deeper. And yet somehow that seemed to upset him more.

His hands slid down your sides, over the curve of your hips, then lower still, palms flattening against the backs of your soft thighs. Without a second thought, he gripped the soft flesh and hauled you up against him, lifting you clean off the floor.

A delighted squeal escaped your throat, quickly swallowed as you wrapped your legs around his waist, your ankles locking behind him.

The shift of your weight pressed the damp, heated core of you directly against his stomach, and he groanedd as the sensation shot a jolt straight to his cock.

The laugh you let out against his lips was breathless, almost musical, “How wild you are with your lady, Ser Gwayne.”

In response, he kissed you rougher. His tongue tangled with yours, wet and demanding, as he walked backwards, one hand gripping the curve of your ass, the other flattened against your spine.

He broke the kiss only to mutter against your mouth, “I wished for respite. And you have granted me none.”

You broke out in an evil smile, your fingers threading through the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging gently. And yet how domestic the two of you must have looked, you cradled in his arms, your thighs locked around his hips. He held you as though you were precious, even as he carried you with long strides toward his bed.

“You cannot blame me for every wicked thought in your head.”

“I can blame you for putting them there,” Gwayne murmured.

Despite his rough handling, he sat you down on the edge of his bed with surprising gentleness. The mattress dipped beneath your weight. He stood over you, chest heaving, hands flexing at his sides as though he was restraining himself from simply tearing the clothes from your body.

You shrugged out of your robe, letting the silk fall from your shoulders in a whisper of fabric. Beneath it, your nightgown clung to every curve, the thin material barely concealing the peaks of your breasts, the sweet swell of your hips.

You looked up at him through your lashes, lips still slick and swollen from his kisses, and he had to resist the urge to drool over you.

“You flatter me,” you hummed.

“I condemn you,” he said.

And yet despite his words, his hands moved to the laces of his vest, pulling them loose with rough, impatient tugs. His chest was bare now, the muscles tensing and relaxing with each ragged breath.

His eyes roamed over you as though this would be the only time he ever saw you like this, as though he was memorising every curve, every inch of skin the candlelight touched.

“With your hands on me?”

Your wit was beyond him. You seemed to take great pleasure in angering him, in mocking him, in watching the war wage behind his eyes. All he could do was lean toward you, his hands finding the soft warmth of your thighs, fingers sinking into flesh as though he meant to anchor himself.

You leaned up to meet him, close enough to feel the heat of his breath.

He murmured, almost hypnotised by your lips once more, his gaze tracing the curve of your mouth, “I have prayed against this.”

“And have the Seven answered?” you whispered, mockingly sweet, your voice a velvet taunt.

Gwayne’s brows furrowed. A muscle twitched in his jaw. The prayer had gone unanswered, of course. And now, with your thighs warm beneath his palms, he knew there was no salvation left for him.

Then, suddenly, he moved.

His hands hooked behind your knees, dragging your legs to the edge of the bed with a rough, decisive pull. You let out a surprised noise as your back hit the mattress, your hair spilling across the pillows. You bent your knees instinctively, parting them slightly, and without prompt, Gwayne’s fingers found the hem of your nightgown.

He began to slide it up your beautiful bare legs.

The silk whispered against your skin, inch by inch, revealing the soft swell of your calves, the tender flesh of your inner thighs. The more skin exposed, the more excited and nervous he became. His eyes moved to lock with yours, pools of warmth, and he wanted to drown in them.

He dragged the nightgown higher, baring your hips, the dip of your belly, the shadowed apex of your thighs. And then he dropped his eyes. Oh gods above. You were bare there as well.

No shift, no smallclothes, no linen between him and the glistening, mouth-watering sight of your cunt. The folds were slick and swollen, and wet, the lips parted as though they had been waiting for him. The candlelight caught the sheen of your arousal, a dewy trail that glistened in the nest of dark curls above.

His throat went dry. His tongue felt thick and useless. What could he say now? He stared, utterly transfixed, his hands frozen on the bunched silk at your waist.

“Say something, Gwayne,”  you breathed, your voice a husky murmur, your hips shifting slightly, an invitation, a taunt. “The Seven have struck you dumb?” 

He swallowed hard, his eyes never leaving the sight of you. When he finally spoke, his voice was a hoarse rasp, “I have no prayers left for this.” 

His thumb moved, almost of its own accord, tracing a featherlight line up the inside of your thigh, stopping just short of where you ached for him. He closed his eyes, a low, tortured groan escaping his lips. Is this what his cousin got to smell every day? 

The thought fanned a flame of dark jealousy in his chest. Ormund was spoiled beyond measure, and he never even knew the treasure he had, the altar he neglected.

He opened his eyes, lifting his gaze to you. You were watching him, bated breath, lips parted, eyes heavy with a hunger that matched his own. You gave him a subtle nod, a silent command that brooked no argument. Your fingers threaded through his hair, a gentle but firm pressure urging him forward.

And who was he to deny his lady?

He dipped his head, and the first stroke of his tongue was a revelation. A slow, flat stripe from the slick, fluttering entrance of your cunt, all the way up to the tight, swollen pearl hidden in its hood. The taste of you flooded his senses, he groaned against you, the vibration making you gasp and arch into his mouth.

“Do you taste it?” you taunted weakly, your voice a broken whisper, pleasure bleeding through the mockery. “The sin on your tongue?”

He pulled back just enough to answer, his lips brushing against your slick inner thigh. “I taste nothing but you. Only you. I have tasted nothing so divine in all my life. This is the only altar I will ever kneel at again.”

He went back in, ravenous now. He licked and sucked, his tongue circling your pearl before flicking it sharply, before flattening and pressing broad, wet kisses against your entire cunt.

He learned you quickly; what made you cry out, what made your hips buck, what made your fingers tighten painfully in his hair. He drove his tongue into you, fucking you with it, lapping at your opening like a man dying of thirst.

Your taste coated his lips, his chin, his cheeks. He was utterly lost, a drowning man who had finally found the ocean he was meant to perish in. He needed more of you. He needed to be inside you in every way possible.

His thumb found your pearl, pressing and circling in time with his tongue, while his other hand fumbled down his own body, his cock aching and hard beneath his breeches, but he denied himself for now.

He needed to taste your peak. He needed to feel it on his tongue. He slid one thick finger into you.

“Oh, fuck…” you moaned, your head thrown back against the pillows.

The heat of you wrapped around his finger, clenching tight, gripping him as if begging him not to leave. He gasped against your cunt, his eyes rolling back. 

“Gods, you are so tight, my lady. How will I ever…” He pushed a second finger in, stretching you carefully, feeling your walls flutter and grip. “How will I ever fit my cock inside you when you squeeze my fingers so sweetly?”

“You will make yourself fit, Gwayne,” you insisted, your nails raking his scalp. “You will fill me until I cannot remember my own name. You will stretch me until I forget the feel of my husband’s cock.”

He groaned, a sound torn from the depths of his chest, and curled his fingers inside you, finding that rough, secret spot that made you scream.

“That’s it, my sweet knight,” you purred, your voice a velvet whip. “Drink from me. This is what you starved for while you knelt in the sept and begged for deliverance. There is no deliverance here. Only me.”

He pulled his mouth away just long enough to answer, his lips slick. “I have never wanted anything the way I want to be buried inside you. To feel you clench around me. To hear you scream my name until your voice breaks.”

He returned to his feast with a desperation that bordered on madness. His fingers pumped steadily, while his tongue was a relentless, flickering fire on your pearl. He was utterly consumed. The world had narrowed to the space between your thighs.

“Gwayne…” you gasped, your inner walls beginning to flutter and clamp around his fingers. “I am so close… I am going to… oh, gods, I am going to—”

But he did not stop. He could not stop. He was drunk on you, starving for you, and the thought of your release flooding his tongue was the only thing that existed in the universe.

Your first peak crashed over you like a wave of fire and lightning. Your body locked up, a sharp, keening cry tearing from your throat as your release gushed over his fingers and into his waiting mouth.

He drank it greedily, his tongue lapping at your pearl, swallowing every drop of your pleasure as though it were the holiest of sacraments.

But he did not relent.

The pleasure was blinding, a sharp, sweet agony, but his tongue kept moving, laving at your oversensitive pearl, his fingers still thrusting inside you, milking you for every last shuddering wave.

“Gwayne!” you gasped, your hands clawing at his hair, trying to pull him away. “Too much… it is too much…!”

He was deaf to it. He was drowning. The overstimulation was unbearable, a fire that burned too brightly, and yet his mouth was relentless, chasing more of your taste.

You had to shove him, your body arching away on the bed, your thighs snapping shut around his head to block him.

“Stop! Please, stop, I cannot—!”

He lifted his head, finally, lips slick and swollen, cheeks flushed, chin glistening with your wetness. His eyes were wild and dark, pupils blown wide with a hunger that was far from sated.

“Did… did I hurt you?” His voice was hoarse, confused, as if he was just waking from a fever dream.

“No…” you panted, your chest heaving, your thighs still trembling from the force of your release. “No, just too much…”

He blinked, realisation dawning slowly. A slow, sinful, utterly satisfied smile spread across his glistening lips.

“Forgive me, my lady. I was lost in you. I could not bear to let you go. I did not know you had crested until you pushed me away.”

He crawled up your body, his hard length pressing against your slick thigh, leaving a trail of your own wetness on your skin as he moved. The rough wool of his breeches scratched against your oversensitive flesh.

“But now…” He lowered his mouth to yours, letting you taste yourself on his tongue. “I fear I must taste that relief for myself. Inside you.”

He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, his forehead resting against yours, his breath mingling with your ragged pants.

“Tell me you want it. Say the words, my lady. Give me the sin I have prayed against, and I will worship you until the sun rises.”

Once again, that feline smile formed on your lips, slow and wicked, as you drank him in. His flushed state was a masterpiece… sweat beading at his temples, his lips still slick and swollen from his feast, your wetness glistening on his chin like a sacred anointing.

His pure blue eyes stared at you with such naked devotion, that it made your cunt clench around nothing, hungry for the fullness only he could provide.

“I shall never deny you, my love.” 

The words slipped from your tongue like honeyed poison, and you watched the effect take hold. His breath hitched. His pupils, already blown wide, seemed to shatter and reform. That single endearment struck him deeper than any blade.

His pretty blue eyes welled with sudden, unshed tears, glistening in the candlelight. He was trying to master himself, throat working as he swallowed down the emotion that threatened to break him.

You almost pitied the man.

Your hands moved while his heart was still reeling, fingers finding the laces of his breeches. He was so lost in the storm of your words that he did not even notice until your warm palm wrapped around his cock.

The sound he made, a surprised and strangled grunt, was muffled against your mouth as you claimed his lips briefly.

His hips jerked forward, thrusting instinctively into your grip, his breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps. You slid your hand slowly down his length, feeling every ridge, every throb of his pulse against your palm. He was thick, heavy, slick with need already.

Your thumb traced the weeping slit at the tip, spreading the bead of pre-cum across his crown, and he let out a low, guttural groan that vibrated through his entire body.

“Tell me,”  you purred, hand still stroking him, “how often have you dreamt of me?” 

Your finger slid over his slit again, pressing just enough to make him shudder. His words came out rushed, tumbling over each other like a confession torn from a dying man.

“Every night.”  His voice cracked. “Every night you have haunted my dreams. I wake hard and aching, my sheets soaked with the memory of you, my hand wrapped around myself. I have fucked my own palm more times than I can count, imagining it was your cunt, your mouth, your hand…” 

“Every night?” you mocked gently, your grip tightening just enough to make him gasp. “And what did you do in these dreams, my sweet knight? Did you worship me properly? Or did you take me like the hungry beast you pretend not to be?” 

“Both,”  he admitted, his voice raw, his hips twitching as he fought the urge to fuck your fist. “I have been gentle. I have been rough. I have kissed every inch of your skin and I have bent you over every surface I could imagine. But always, always, I end with my cock buried inside you, spilling my seed where it does not belong.” 

You laughed, and began to guide him. Your hand left his cock, and you reached down, spreading your slick folds, positioning the flushed head of his length at your entrance.

“My poor, sinful knight. So full of honour, and yet here you are, ready to defile your cousin’s wife. Tell me, Gwayne, does this make you a traitor? Or a true believer?” 

“I am whatever you want me to be,”  he breathed, his voice pleading. “Just let me in. Please. I beg you.” 

“Beg me,”  you whispered. “Beg me to let you fill me.” 

“Please, my lady, my love, let me inside you. Let me feel you. Let me—” 

But you did not let him finish. You pressed the head of his cock against your entrance, just barely breaching the first ring of muscle, and you held him there, torturing him.

Your words dripped with mockery, each one a sharp barb, “You are so eager to defile me, aren’t you? To spill your seed where your lord has planted his. To claim what is not yours. You are nothing but a common thief, stealing pleasures that were never meant for you.” 

He flinched. The words hit their mark, striking something. His eyes, those beautiful, tear-filled blue eyes, flickered with a flash of pain,and then something darker snapped.

He did not intend to be rough. He had sworn to himself he would be gentle, would worship you, would make love to you with the love you deserved. But your mockery clawed at the raw, bleeding edges of his guilt and his desire, and before he could stop himself, he drove forward.

There was no gentleness to be found.

He slammed into you in one brutal, desperate thrust, burying himself to the hilt in a single, shuddering motion.

The air left your lungs in a sharp, shocked moan, your body arching beneath him, your nails digging into his shoulders as you were stretched and filled beyond anything you had anticipated.

He was thick, and he was deep, and the sudden fullness of him made stars burst behind your eyes.

He froze immediately, horror dawning on his face. His eyes were wide, his breath coming in ragged pants, his body trembling as he realised what he had done.

“I—I am sorry—I did not mean to—”  His voice was a wrecked whisper, his hands gripping your hips, holding himself still, afraid to move. “Forgive me, I swore I would—” 

But you were already clenching around him, your walls rippling and gripping his length, and the sound you made was not a cry of pain.

“Don’t you dare stop,”  you gasped, your legs wrapping around his waist, pulling him deeper. “Don’t you dare be gentle now, Gwayne. You wanted to claim me? Then claim me. Fuck me like the thief you are.” 

He blinked, confusion and relief warring on his face. “But I—” 

“I said fuck me,”  you snarled, your hips grinding against his, your nails raking down his back. “Do not temper yourself. I want to feel you in my bones tomorrow. I want to limp when I walk past my husband.” 

A low, guttural groan rumbled from his chest.

The last shred of restraint crumbled, and he pulled out almost entirely, only to slam back into you with a force that made the bed frame groan.

You cried out, a sound of pure, unadulterated pleasure, and he drove into you again, harder, faster, his hips finding a brutal rhythm.

“Is this what you wanted?”  he rasped, “To be taken like a common whore?” 

“Yes,”  you moaned, your head thrown back, your body bucking against his. “Yes, yes, yes… give me more, Gwayne. Give me all of it.” 

His hand found your throat, pressing just enough to make your vision swim, and he leaned down, his lips brushing your ear, his breath hot and ragged.

“I will ruin you for any other man. I will brand myself so deep inside you that you will feel me for the rest of your life. And when you lie beside your husband, you will think of me. You will clench around him, dreaming of my cock. You will be mine, even if only in these stolen moments.” 

“Yes,”  you breathed, your voice breaking on the word. “Make me yours. Make me forget his name.” 

And he did. He drove into you with a fervour that bordered on madness, his hips slamming against yours as he chased the oblivion of your combined release. He was in absolute heaven, lost to the world, lost to everything but the feel of your cunt gripping his cock.

“I cannot get enough of you,” he gasped against your mouth, his voice ragged. “I need—I need to be closer—”

His hands slid down your flanks, gripping your thighs, pushing them up and back until your knees pressed against your own chest.

The new angle opened you completely, and you gasped at the devastating stretch, the length of him reaching depths you had never felt before, the ridge of his cock scraping against every sensitive inch inside you.

“Seven Hells—Gwayne—” Your voice broke on a moan as he drove deeper, his hips meeting the backs of your thighs with a wet, obscene slap.

“I know,” he groaned, his forehead dropping to yours. “I know. I cannot help it. I need to be inside you. I need to fill you.” His pace quickened, became animalistic. “I need to breed you. I need to leave my seed so deep inside you that you will feel me for days. That he will know what I have done.”

The words sent a thrill through you, “Yes,” you breathed, your nails raking down his back. “Yes… breed me. Fill me. Make me yours.”

He was absolutely lost.

The pious knight, he was nothing now but a creature of pure, ravenous instinct. He fucked you as if he were trying to imprint the shape of his cock into your very flesh. The bed groaned beneath you, the headboard knocking against the stone wall in a frantic rhythm.

And through it all, he could not stop kissing you.

Every thrust was punctuated by a kiss. He kissed your lips, your chin, the corner of your mouth, returning always to your lips as if he was drawing breath from you.

His tongue swept into your mouth, tangling with yours, the kiss deepening as his hips drove harder. He kissed your throat, your collarbone, the swell of your breasts, always returning to your mouth, unable to stay away.

You felt the peak approaching for a second time, the familiar coil tightening low in your belly. “Gwayne,” you gasped against his mouth. “I am going to—I cannot hold—”

His eyes flew open, and the panic in them was raw, “Neither can I,” he grunted, his rhythm stuttering. “I must—I should not—”

He tried to slow, to pull out, his muscles tensing against the instinct to bury himself deeper. The thought of spilling inside you, of leaving the physical proof of his sin, terrified him even as it drove him wild.

But you would not let him. Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels pressing into the small of his back, locking him inside you.

“Do not dare pull out,” you insisted, “I want your seed. I want it deep inside me. Give it to me, Gwayne. Give me everything.”

A broken sound escaped his throat, “You will carry my bastard. Ormund will know. The whole world will know what I have done.”

“They won't,” you whined, your hips grinding against his. “Let Ormund look at the child in my belly and think it his. Let him see me swell with your sin. I want it. I want your child. I want to carry you inside me.”

His control shattered completely. The last frayed thread of restraint snapped. “You will be mine, then. In every way that matters.”

He drove into you one last time, burying himself to the hilt, and you felt his release.

It flooded you, pulsing deep inside your womb, and the sensation of him spilling inside you pushed you over the edge with him. You cried out against his mouth, your body arching, your inner walls clenching around him, milking him.

It felt like an eternity, the two of you locked together, trembling, whispering each other's names into the dark. When it was done, he collapsed against you, his full weight pressing you into the mattress.

His breath was ragged, his body trembling. He felt emptied, exorcised of every demon that had haunted him since the moment he first laid eyes on you.

The silence stretched, broken only by the sound of your mingled breathing. After a long moment, he stirred, lifting his head to look at you. His beautiful blue eyes were wet, his cheeks flushed, his lips swollen from your kisses. He looked utterly undone.

“I did not mean to be so rough,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

You smiled, tracing the sharp line of his jaw with your fingertip. “I did not want gentle. I wanted you. The beast you hide behind your prayers and your honour.”

“I have no honour left,” he said, but there was no regret in his voice. Only wonder. “I have damned us both.”

“Then let us burn together,” you murmured, and leaned in to press a soft, lingering kiss to his brow.