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The royal box had been an exquisite torture.

All day, you had sat among the lords and ladies of the Reach, the velvet cushion beneath you doing absolutely nothing to comfort the restless ache that had taken root deep in your belly. The sun had beaten down on the tourney grounds, the air thick with the smell of trampled grass and churned earth and the distant roasting meat from the feast-fires, but you had barely noticed any of it. Your attention had been fixed entirely, hopelessly, on the black knight.

Your husband. Every time his black destrier thundered down the lists, every time his black armor caught the sunlight and gleamed like polished obsidian, every time his lance shattered against an opponent's shield in an explosion of splinters, you felt it in the pit of your stomach, a clench, a slow molten roll of heat that had nothing to do with the summer sun. Your fingers gripped the arms of your chair. Your thighs pressed together beneath your gown, shifting against the wetness that had gathered there. Your breath came shallow and quick.

He had unhorsed three men before midday. Three, and each time he rode past the royal box you could have sworn he lingered just a moment longer when his eyes found yours. Blue and brown. The gods had given him one eye the color of a summer sky and the other the rich dark of freshly turned earth, and you were absolutely certain they had done it specifically to ruin you.

You shifted in your seat for the dozenth time, squeezing your thighs together in a vain attempt to relieve the throbbing pressure that had built between them. Lady Webber, seated beside you, leaned over with concern in her broad, honest face.

"Are you quite well, Your Grace? You look rather flushed."

"Perfectly well," you managed, not looking away from the grounds. Valarr was circling his horse at the far end, preparing for another pass. The way he sat in the saddle, the way his thighs gripped the horse's flanks, thick muscle flexing beneath dark steel, the easy confidence in his posture, the way he tucked his helm under his arm and ran a gauntleted hand through his hair, that silver gold streak on the left side catching the light—

"The heat," you added, gripping the arm of your chair until your knuckles went white. "It is only the heat."

But it was not the heat. It was remembering how those thighs felt when they were gripping your hips instead of a saddle. It was knowing exactly what that controlled violence looked like when it was unleashed in your bedchamber, when he was buried deep inside you and that same focused intensity was bent entirely on drawing scream after scream from your lips. It was the way his armor hugged his body and the way you knew every inch of what lay beneath, the lean muscle and warm skin, the trail of dark hair below his navel that you loved to follow with your tongue, the scattering of scars from a lifetime of training, the way his stomach tensed and jumped when you dragged your nails across it. It was knowing exactly what that body could do, the sounds it could wring from you, the positions it could fold you into, the seemingly endless stamina that left you wrecked and trembling and begging for more. And being forced to sit in polite company, smiling and nodding and making idle conversation, while he displayed all that power and grace and leashed violence before half the Reach—

By the time the final tilt was called and the tourney began to wind down for the day, you were fairly vibrating out of your skin. Your smallclothes were soaked through. You had imagined, in vivid and increasingly creative detail, at least seven different ways you wanted him to fuck you—bent over the railing of the royal box, on your knees in the shadow of the stands, on your back in the trampled grass with the roar of the crowd still echoing in your ears—and you had reached the point where you no longer trusted yourself to speak to anyone without your voice cracking.

So when the crowds dispersed and the lords and ladies began drifting, you did not drift with them. You walked straight toward the black and red pennants that marked the Targaryen tents.

His squire was a boy of perhaps five and ten, all gangly limbs and anxious eyes, and he was already struggling with the straps of Valarr's vambraces when you swept through the canvas flap.

You did not break stride. "Out."

The boy's eyes went wide as saucers. "Your Grace, I was just—"

"Now."

He fled. The tent flap barely had time to settle before you turned to face your husband.

Valarr stood in the center of the pavilion, still armored, his helm already discarded on a nearby table. His odd eyes found you immediately, and the corner of his mouth curved into a slow, knowing smile, the smile of a man who knew exactly what he had been doing all day.

"My wife," he said. His voice was slightly hoarse from shouting commands over the din of the lists, and the roughness of it sent a shiver straight down your spine, straight to the aching place between your legs. "You dismissed my squire rather abruptly. Have I done something to offend?"

You crossed the space between you in four strides. The tent was warm, lit by a half-dozen candles that cast dancing shadows across the canvas walls. The air smelled of leather and oiled metal and the faint, clean undertone of his sweat, that particular scent of him that made you want to press your nose to the base of his throat and breathe him in until you were dizzy with it.

"You have been offending me all day," you said, stopping so close that the steel of his cuirass nearly brushed your bodice. Your voice came out low and rough, barely more than a growl. "Parading around on that horse. Riding like that. Looking like that. Do you have any idea what you put me through? Do you have any idea how many times I had to press my thighs together just to keep from moaning aloud in front of half the nobility of the Reach?"

His brows lifted slightly, but the smile did not leave his lips. It deepened, if anything, the corner of his mouth curling in a way that was positively smug. "I was competing in a tourney. It is generally what one does at a tourney."

"You know exactly what you were doing. Every time you rode past the royal box, you looked at me. You knew I was watching."

"Enlighten me," he said, his voice dropping into something darker, more dangerous. "What was I doing?"

You reached up and pressed your palms flat against his breastplate. The metal was warm from the sun and from the heat of his body beneath, and you could feel the faint vibration of his heartbeat through the steel, steady, strong, slightly faster than it should be.

"You were magnificent," you said, your voice dropping to barely a whisper. "Every pass. Every impact. When you unhorsed Lord Ashford's cousin, when that lance hit true and he went flying, I thought I might scream. Do you know what it does to a woman, watching her husband ride full tilt with a lance in his hand, fearless, perfect, everyone in the stands cheering his name? Do you know what it does to me, Valarr, watching you dominate every man who dares ride against you, knowing that same ferocity is going to be focused on me the moment we're alone?"

His mismatched eyes had gone dark, his breath had changed, grown shallower. He did not move. "Tell me."

"It makes me wet," you said, blunt and shameless, your eyes locked on his. "It makes me ache. It makes me want to drag you off that horse by your hair and have my way with you in the dirt in front of everyone. I was ready to climb over the railing and ride you right there in the royal box. In front of Lord Ashford. In front of Lady Webber. In front of the gods and every noble house of the Reach. I would have let them all watch. I was so far gone I would not have cared." His breath caught. Through his breeches, you could see the growing evidence of his arousal, the thick outline of his cock pressing against the fabric.

"You are playing a dangerous game, wife."

"I am not playing." You pressed closer, your breasts flattening against the hard steel of his cuirass, your lips nearly brushing his chin. "I have been sitting in soaked smallclothes for hours, thinking about your cock. Thinking about how it feels when you first push inside me. Thinking about how you stretch me, how you fill me so completely I forget my own name. Thinking about the sounds you make when you're close—that raw, broken groan you try to swallow. I have been thinking about it all day, Valarr. And I am done thinking."

He kissed you. It was deep, hungry and consuming, his mouth slanting over yours with a ferocity that matched everything you had been feeling all day. His tongue swept into your mouth, claiming, demanding, and you moaned into the kiss as his free hand found the small of your back and pulled you hard against him. Your body pressed flush against the unyielding plane of his armored chest, the contrast of cool steel against your heated breasts making your nipples tighten to aching peaks. You gasped into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound, his tongue sliding against yours in a rhythm that was pure filthy promise.

You fisted your hands in the collar of his gambeson, pulling him impossibly closer, and he made a sound low in his throat that vibrated through his chest and into yours. You could taste the salt of his sweat, the faint sweetness of the watered wine he must have drunk between tilts, the heat of him. Your body was on fire. Every inch of your skin felt electric, alive, aching. The slick heat between your thighs had grown almost unbearable; you could feel it on your inner thighs, could feel how ready you were for him.

"Help me," you gasped against his mouth, your fingers fumbling with the buckles at his shoulders. "The pauldrons. Get them off. Get everything off. I need to feel your skin. I need your cock inside me before I lose my mind entirely."

He pulled back just enough to look at you, his chest heaving, his lips red and slightly swollen from your kisses. His eyes were blazing with a hunger that made your knees weak.

"Tell me what you want," he said, his voice a rasp that sent heat pooling low in your belly. "Exactly. Tell me every detail, and I will give it to you."

"I want you on your back in this tent." You wrenched one pauldron free and let it drop to the ground with a heavy thud. "I want to feel every inch of you against me without this damned steel in the way." The second pauldron followed. "I want to strip you bare and put my mouth on every part of you. Your throat. Your chest. Your stomach." Your fingers moved to the buckles of his cuirass as you spoke, your voice growing breathier with each word. "I want to take your cock in my mouth and feel you get harder on my tongue. I want to taste you, Valarr. I want to taste your release when you spend down my throat. And then I want you on top of me, driving into me so hard I cannot walk tomorrow. I want to feel you come inside me, hot and deep, filling me up until I can feel it dripping down my thighs. I want you to ruin me, Valarr Targaryen, until neither of us can remember our own names."

He stared at you for a long moment, his breathing ragged, his eyes burning. The bulge in his breeches was straining against the fabric now, thick and unmistakable. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse.

"You," he said, the word barely more than a growl, "are the most infuriating, intoxicating, utterly maddening woman I have ever known."

"Less talking," you breathed, reaching for the final buckles of his cuirass. "More undressing. I want to see what I do to you. I want to see how hard you are for me."

You made quick work of the breastplate, your fingers moving with a speed born of pure, desperate need. The steel plate hit the ground with a clang that echoed through the tent, and then you were pressing yourself against his gambeson, the padded fabric still damp with his sweat, the heat of his body seeping through to meet your own. Your hands slid down his chest, over the hard planes of muscle, down his stomach, lower—

"Gods," you whispered, your forehead dropping to his chest as your palm pressed against the thick ridge of his erection through his breeches. He was hard as iron, hot even through the fabric, and he twitched against your touch. "Do you feel what you do to me? Do you have any idea how much I want you?"

His hands—still gauntleted, curse him—slid down your sides, over your hips, and settled on the curve of your backside. He pulled you flush against him, grinding his hardness against your belly, and there was no hiding what this was doing to him. The thick length of him pressed against you, and you whimpered at the feel of it, at the promise of being filled.

"I have some idea," he murmured against your hair, his voice strained. "I have been half-hard since the first tilt, watching you watch me. Do you know how difficult it is to ride with a cockstand?"

"Then why are you still wearing so many clothes?"

You dropped to your knees. His hands hovered in the air where you had been standing, and he looked down at you with an expression that was equal parts shock and raw, naked want. His cock was at eye level now, straining obscenely against his breeches, and you could see the damp spot where his arousal had already begun to leak through the fabric.

"You are kneeling in front of me." His voice was barely a whisper, rough and desperate. "In a tourney tent. Where anyone could walk in. Where anyone could hear you when I make you scream."

"Then you had better be quick about deciding what comes next." You pulled one greave free and started on the other, your fingers brushing deliberately against the inside of his thigh as you worked. He shuddered. "Though I should warn you—I'm not feeling particularly quiet tonight. And I'm not feeling particularly quick. When you finally put your cock inside me, I intend to take my time."

The second greave came off. You stayed on your knees, your hands resting on his armored thighs, your face tilted up to meet his gaze, your lips parted and your eyes heavy-lidded with want. The candles flickered. The shadows danced. And Valarr Targaryen looked down at you like you were the most terrifying, wonderful thing he had ever seen like he wanted to devour you whole.

"Stand up," he said, his voice rough as gravel.

"Make me."

He reached down and pulled you to your feet in one motion, his hands under your arms, and then his mouth was on yours again and you were being walked backward toward the cot in the corner of the tent. Your back hit the tent pole, and he pressed himself against you, one armored thigh sliding between your legs and grinding against your aching cunt through the layers of your gown. The pressure was maddening, not nearly enough, and the sound you made was absolutely shameless, a desperate, keening moan that would have been heard three tents away if anyone had been listening.

"Yes," you gasped, arching against him, rolling your hips to grind against his thigh. "Yes, please, yes, right there, gods, Valarr—"

He kissed down your throat, his teeth grazing your pulse point, his tongue soothing the sting, and you dug your fingers into his shoulders through the gambeson, your nails biting into the fabric.

"I want you," you said, the words tumbling out of you like a prayer. "I have wanted you since the first tilt. I have wanted you since I woke up this morning wet and aching from dreams of you. I want you all the time, Valarr, every moment of every day. I want your mouth on my breasts. I want your fingers inside me. I want your cock so deep I can feel you in my throat. I want you to fuck me until I cannot remember my own name, until my voice is hoarse from screaming yours, until I am so full of your seed that it takes days to stop feeling it drip out of me—"

He stopped. His mouth stilled against your collarbone. His thigh stopped its maddening pressure between your legs. His hands, which had been sliding down to the small of your back, went still.

"What—"

"My love."

The tone made you freeze. It was tender. Affectionate. Entirely too calm for a man whose cock had been pressed against your belly moments ago, hard and wanting.

You looked up. His eyes were soft now, the hunger banked, replaced by something warm and unbearably fond. And lurking in the corner of his mouth was that quirk, that maddening, insufferable little quirk that meant he was about to say something you did not want to hear.

"I am so very tired."

The words did not register at first. You blinked, your body still humming with unspent desire, your cunt still clenching around nothing, your lips still tingling from his kiss. "What?"

"The armor. You cannot imagine. I have been carrying it all day in this heat. Every muscle in my body aches. My shoulders. My back. My..." He gestured vaguely downward. "...everything."

"I will soothe your muscles. I will soothe every part of you. That is precisely what I am trying to do." You pressed your palm against the hard length of him through his breeches to emphasize your point. He was still rock hard. Still twitching at your touch. "This does not feel like a man who is too tired."

His smile widened. He was enjoying this. You could see it in his eyes, the way the blue one sparkled with mischief and the brown one warmed with suppressed laughter. He was enjoying this entirely too much.

"You are very sweet," he said, and leaned down to press a kiss, soft, chaste, utterly infuriating, to your forehead. Then he gently removed your hand from his erection, his fingers wrapping around your wrist with infuriating tenderness. "But I fear I would be poor company. I can barely keep my eyes open. A man of two and twenty is not so spry as he once was. The spirit is willing, but the flesh..." He heaved a dramatic sigh. "The flesh is very, very tired."

"You are two and twenty. And your flesh is very clearly willing."

"An old two and twenty. The joints begin to protest. It is a terrible thing. The maesters have warned me about overexertion."

"Valarr Targaryen, I swear to every god in the Seven Kingdoms, if you do not put your cock inside me right now—"

"Perhaps tomorrow, my love." He stepped back, "After a proper night's rest. When my strength has returned. Then I will be able to give you the attention you deserve." His voice dropped, his eyes sweeping over your flushed face and heaving chest and the visible stiffness of your nipples through your gown. "Every. Single. Bit. Of it. I will take my time with you. Make you scream until you cannot remember your own name—wasn't that what you wanted? But I will only do it properly when I am not about to collapse from exhaustion."

He was already moving toward the armor stand, where a simple dark tunic and breeches lay waiting. You stood frozen in place, surrounded by the pieces of his discarded armor, your body still humming with unspent desire, your soaked smallclothes clinging to your heated flesh, your lips still tingling from his kiss.

"You cannot be serious."

He pulled the tunic over his head with deliberate, unhurried movements, covering the sweat-damp linen of his gambeson. He turned back to you, looking for all the world like a man without a care, his hair still tousled and that silver streak falling roguishly across his brow. The bulge in his breeches had—through what must have been monumental effort of will—begun to subside.

"I am always serious," he said, utterly failing to keep the mirth from his voice. "I shall send for wine. Something cool, to help with the heat. You look rather flushed, my love. And your breathing is quite... irregular. Have you been sitting in the sun? Perhaps you should lie down. In the cot. Alone. To recover your strength."

Your mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I have not been sitting in the sun. I have been sitting in the royal box watching my husband ride like a god of war and thinking about how much I wanted him to bend me over the railing and—"

"Careful," he said, raising a finger, his expression one of mock concern. "The canvas walls, remember? And I am so very weary I might faint at the details. Think of my delicate constitution."

You picked up the nearest object—a gauntlet—and hurled it at his head.

He caught it. One handed. Without looking away from your face. The man had been trained by knights of the Kingsguard since he could walk, and he caught it like it was a ball tossed by a child. He turned the gauntlet over in his hands, his smile widening into something that was pure, unrepentant mischief.

"Tomorrow, my love," he said, his voice dropping into something lower, something that promised and teased in equal measure. His eyes swept over you, lingering on your parted lips, on the flush that extended down your throat, on the way your hands were still clenched into fists at your sides. "I give you my word. Tomorrow, I will make you forget your own name. Tomorrow, I will have you in every way you described and several you have not yet imagined. Tomorrow, you will be so thoroughly satisfied that you will not be able to look at a tourney field without blushing for the rest of your life."

"Tomorrow," you repeated, your voice flat with disbelief and frustration and—gods help you—reluctant amusement.

"Tomorrow," he confirmed. And then he was at the tent flap, lifting the canvas, pausing just long enough to look back over his shoulder. His eyes raked over you one last time, and there was a flash of heat in them—a glimpse of the hunger he was so carefully restraining, a promise that he was suffering too, that every moment of this tease was costing him as much as it was costing you.

"Dream of me," he said, his voice a low, rough murmur that sent one last shiver down your spine. "Dream of what I'm going to do to you. In detail. I want a full report in the morning." And he winked.

The canvas fell closed behind him. You stood alone in the silence of the tent, surrounded by candlesmoke and the scent of him, your body still aching and your pride still smarting and your heart still racing and your cunt still throbbing with the orgasm he had denied you.

"Tomorrow," you muttered to the empty air, already beginning to smile despite yourself—a slow, predatory smile that promised retribution. "We shall see about tomorrow, my prince. You have made a grave tactical error. You have given me an entire night to plan." And somewhere outside the tent, you could have sworn you heard him laugh.

—

You woke to heat, a deep, liquid heat that was already pooling low in your belly, already drawing your thighs apart with an urgency that bordered on involuntary, already dragging you up from the depths of a dream you couldn't quite remember, a dream full of shadows and steel and a voice murmuring promises against your skin. Your body was responding before your mind could catch up, back arching slightly off the furs, fingers twisting in the linen sheets, a soft, confused sound escaping your lips that was half whimper, half question.

And then you felt it. The slow, deliberate, devastating drag of a tongue through your most intimate folds.

Your eyes flew open with a gasp that tore from somewhere deep in your chest. The world was waking up around you, ordinary and routine and utterly indifferent to the fact that beneath the furs, between your legs, was a head of brown hair with a distinctive streak of silver gold threading back from the temple like a bolt of lightning frozen in time.

"Valarr—" His name came out as a croak, half confusion, half moan, because his tongue had just circled the sensitive bud at the apex of your sex with devastating precision and your hips bucked entirely without your permission, your thighs clamping briefly against his ears before he pressed them back open with firm, unhurried hands. "What—what are you—isn't it—oh gods—"

He did not lift his head. He did not stop. He did not even acknowledge that you had spoken beyond a low, pleased hum that vibrated against your cunt and made your eyes roll back. His tongue flattened and dragged upward through your folds with a languid, unhurried thoroughness that spoke of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use every single moment of it to reduce you to incoherence. One of his hands was splayed across your lower belly, holding you steady, pinning you to the cot with a casual possession that made your blood sing. The other was hooked under your right thigh, fingers dimpling your flesh, keeping you spread open for his attentions with an implacable gentleness that was somehow more devastating than force.

"Good morrow," he murmured against your cunt, the words shaped directly into your slick, heated flesh, and the vibration of his voice made you gasp and clutch at the furs beneath you.

"Isn't it—" You lost the words entirely as his tongue slipped inside you, just briefly, a teasing thrust that curled upward and made your hips roll in a helpless, seeking rhythm. "Isn't it a jousting day? The—the lists—you should be—you should be preparing—"

He hummed against you, a low sound of consideration, and the vibration coupled with the slow circle his tongue was tracing around your pearl nearly made you forget your own name, let alone your question. "The jousts have been suspended."

Your mind, hazy with pleasure and sleep and the insistent, expert pressure of his mouth, struggled to process this information with anything resembling coherence. "Suspended? Why would they—oh, right there, don't stop, please don't stop—why would they suspend the jousts?"

"The Bright Prince," Valarr said, pausing just long enough to press a hot, open mouthed kiss to the inside of your thigh, his stubble rasping against your sensitive skin and leaving a trail of pleasant friction in its wake, "has demanded a trial of seven."

"Who—Aerion?" You propped yourself up on your elbows, looking down at him through the disheveled curtain of your hair. His mismatched eyes gleamed up at you from between your thighs, one the deep blue of sapphires, one the warm brown of aged whisky, both filled with a lazy, predatory satisfaction that made your stomach flip and your cunt clench around nothing. "Aerion demanded a trial of seven? Against whom? Why? What in the seven hells happened while I was asleep?"

Valarr sighed, a warm exhale against your slick, swollen folds that made you shiver from your crown to your toes. "A hedge knight. Ser Duncan the Tall. He struck Aerion to defend a puppeteer girl, and now my dear cousin demands blood and calls it justice." He pressed another kiss to your mound, the tip of his nose nudging against the thatch of curls there. "He has accused the hedge knight of assault and the knight has demanded a trial by combat. Aerion, being Aerion, has escalated it to a trial of seven."

"That's—that's absurd, Aerion is—" You gasped sharply as his tongue dipped back into you, long and slow and curling, cutting off your outrage with a wave of pleasure that made your elbows tremble. "Valarr, I'm trying to—to care about this, it's important, you must let me—"

"I am between your legs," he said, his voice muffled against your cunt, his tongue tracing idle patterns through your folds that made rational thought nearly impossible, "with my tongue inside my wife, and she is asking about my cousin."

"You cannot simply—wake me up like this and expect me not to—to have questions about a trial of seven when—oh, gods—"

He had found your pearl again, circling it with the very tip of his tongue, a feather light touch that somehow managed to be devastating in its precision. Your elbows gave out. You collapsed back against the pillows with a moan that was frankly indecent, one hand flying to his hair, your fingers threading through the brown strands and brushing against that distinctive silver streak that marked him as surely as a banner marked an army. He made a sound of deep, masculine approval against your flesh and redoubled his efforts, his tongue working you with a rhythm that was devastatingly precise, alternating between broad, flat strokes that covered your entire cunt and focused, pointed flicks against your pearl that made sparks dance behind your closed eyelids.

"I am trying," he said between strokes, his voice low and rough with satisfaction, "to apologize for yesterday. For my behavior. For my cruelty."

"You are trying," you managed, your voice breathless and trembling and utterly lacking the sharp edge you wanted it to have, "to distract me from being angry with you. You're trying to lick your way out of the trouble you caused."

He paused, just for a moment, and looked up at you with an expression of mock-innocence that was entirely undermined by the slickness glistening on his lips and chin. "Is it working?"

Your hips were rolling against his mouth now, your body chasing its pleasure without any input from your pride, without any regard for your dignity. "No. Absolutely not. I am still—I am still furious with you—"

He sucked your pearl between his lips, gentle at first and then not, a sudden increase in pressure that bordered on overwhelming, and the sound you made was absolutely humiliating, a keening, desperate cry that you would deny to your dying day.

"You sound furious," he agreed, releasing you with a wet, obscene pop, his voice dripping with satisfaction and something deeper, something hungrier.

"You left me," you gasped, your fingers tightening in his hair, pulling just hard enough to make him hiss. "You left me aching and desperate and so wet I was dripping down my own thighs, and you winked at me like it was a game, like I was a piece on a cyvasse board you'd already captured—"

"It was a game." He dragged his tongue through your folds again, slow and thorough, from your entrance all the way up to your pearl, savoring you like a man savoring the finest vintage. "A very enjoyable game. One I intend to play again."

"For you."

"For both of us." He pressed a kiss to your mound, then another just below your navel, his stubble scraping pleasantly against your skin, leaving a trail of tingling sensation. "I believe the terms of our game included a promise for tomorrow. And tomorrow, my sweet wife, has arrived. I woke before dawn thinking about this. Thinking about you. Thinking about how you looked when I left you—flushed and furious and so gods-damned beautiful I nearly turned around and took you right there on the floor of my tent."

You yanked his hair. Not hard enough to truly hurt, but hard enough to pull his mouth away from where you desperately, desperately wanted it. He looked up at you, his lips glistening with your arousal, his chin wet, his eyes dark and amused and slightly reproachful at being denied his prize.

"I have not forgiven you," you informed him, proud of how steady your voice sounded despite the fact that your thighs were trembling and your cunt was clenching around nothing and every nerve in your body was screaming for him to put his mouth back where it belonged.

"So you've said." He tried to lower his head again, but you tightened your grip, keeping him in place. A flash of something dangerous crossed his features, annoyance, yes, but also interest. He liked this. He liked you fighting back. It was, after all, why he had married you.

"You teased me," you said, and now your voice was steadier, fueled by the righteous indignation that had kept you awake half the night. "You worked me up until I was practically begging—until I was saying please and Valarr and I need you—until I would have done anything, anything you asked, just to feel you inside me. And then you patted my head like a well-behaved hound and sent me to bed alone, aching and empty and so frustrated I thought I might scream."

"I kissed your forehead."

"Worse." You glared down at him, though the effect was somewhat undermined by the fact that you were still flushed and panting and spread open beneath him, your slickness still visible on his face, your nipples peaked and visible through the thin linen of your shift. "It was a forehead kiss. The forehead kiss of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and is enjoying it far, far too much." You leaned up slightly, your grip still tight in his hair. "Do you have any idea how long I lay awake last night after you left me? Do you have any idea what I did, alone in your tent, thinking about you?"

His smile widened, slow and wolfish. "Tell me."

"Hours." You released his hair, letting your hand trail down the side of his face, tracing the sharp line of his jaw, the proud cheekbones, the slightly too full lips that were still wet with you. "Hours, Valarr. Thinking about what I was going to do to you today. Planning. Scheming. Touching myself in the dark while I imagined all the ways I would make you pay for your cruelty."

His eyes darkened further, the pupils swallowing the irises. "You touched yourself."

"I did. Twice. It wasn't enough." You let your hand drop back to the furs. "Nothing I did to myself was enough. That's what you did to me. You ruined me for my own fingers, and then you left me alone."

"Planning and scheming," he murmured, pressing a kiss to your hip bone that was almost reverent. "And touching yourself in the dark. That sounds very industrious. What did you decide? What punishment have you devised for your wicked husband?"

"I decided you need to suffer the way I suffered." You watched his face carefully, saw the flicker of interest, of anticipation. "I decided I would make you want me so badly you couldn't think straight, and then I would deny you. I decided I would tie you to this cot and touch myself in front of you and let you watch, and watch, and watch, and never once let you inside me. I decided I would make you beg the way you made me beg."

He was very still now, his breath warm against your hip, his eyes fixed on your face with an intensity that made your heart race. "That would be a cruel punishment indeed."

"You taught me cruelty. You should be proud."

"I am." He nipped at the sensitive skin just above your hip bone, hard enough to make you jump and gasp. "I am so very proud. My wife, a quick study in vengeance." His tongue soothed the sting of his teeth. "But I notice you are not tying me to the cot. You are not touching yourself. You are not denying me anything. You are lying here, spread open, wet and wanting, letting me taste you."

You smiled. It was not a sweet smile. "Where is your armor?" you asked.

Valarr blinked. The question was so incongruous, so utterly unrelated to the situation at hand, his face still wet with you, your thighs still spread, his cock visibly straining against his smallclothes, that for a moment he simply stared at you.

"What?"

"Your armor. The black plate. The gauntlets. The gorget. All of it. Where is it?"

"In the tourney tent, I imagine." He spoke slowly, warily, as if you were a strange beast that might bite him. "My squire would have cleaned and laid it out for inspection, as he does every morning before a day of—" He stopped. His eyes narrowed with suspicion and something that might have been dawning comprehension. "Why?"

You released his hair and sat up slowly, pushing yourself back against the pillows, drawing your knees together with a deliberate, pointed movement that made his eyes flick down to your thighs with undisguised regret. You looked at him with an expression you had been perfecting since last night, sweet on the surface, sharp beneath, like honey hiding a blade.

"Take me there."

"To the tourney tent?" His voice had gone very careful, very controlled.

"To the tourney tent. Where your armor is. Where your squire has laid it out so carefully."

His brows drew together, a furrow appearing between them. "You want me to stop—" he glanced meaningfully at your thighs, at the evidence of his attentions still glistening on your skin, at the obvious, aching hard on tenting his smallclothes— "this, and walk across the tourney grounds in full view of half the realm, to my tent, because you want to see my armor?"

"I want you to put it on."

The words hung in the air between you like a challenge, like a thrown gauntlet.

Something flickered in his eyes. "You want me to put on my armor."

"Not all of it." You let your voice drop into something lower, something darker, something that made his pupils dilate and his breath catch almost imperceptibly. "Just enough. Just the pieces I want."

He was silent for a long moment, studying your face, reading the intention there. Then he sat back on his heels, still kneeling between your legs, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The gesture was casual, almost lazy, but his eyes had gone very dark.

"You want me to fuck you in my armor." It was not a question.

"I want you to finish what you started yesterday." You sat up fully, drawing your knees together, letting the shift fall down over your thighs, letting him see that you were still in control of this situation despite the fact that your thighs were still slick and your heart was still racing and your cunt was still aching with the emptiness he had left. "You were in your armor yesterday. Every time I looked at you—on the field, in the tent, standing over me with your gauntlets dripping water—you were in your armor. Every fantasy I had last night, alone in this bed with my fingers between my legs, you were wearing your armor. I imagined the sound you would make when you walked toward me. I imagined the cold of the metal against my bare skin. I imagined you taking me in your armor, still sweating from the tourney, still smelling of leather and victory." She paused, watching his face, watching the way his jaw had tightened and his hands had curled into fists against his thighs. "And then you took it off piece by piece and left me standing in the wreckage of it while you walked away in a plain linen tunic like a common hedge knight."

"Like a hedge knight." His voice was flat, but there was an edge to it now, a sharpening.

"A hedge knight would have stayed and finished what he started. A hedge knight would have put his mouth to better use. A hedge knight would have fucked me until I couldn't walk straight instead of patting me on the head and sending me to bed." You raised an eyebrow at him, letting the challenge hang in the air. "So yes. I want you in your armor. I want to feel the steel against my bare skin. I want to hear it creak and clank while you move inside me. I want to remember exactly who I married—the prince who rides like a god of war and fucks like one too, not the man who is too tired and too smug and too busy playing games to bed his wife properly." You tilted your head, letting your gaze drift pointedly to the obvious bulge in his smallclothes. "Unless, of course, you are still tired. Unless yesterday's exertions were too much for you. In which case, I am sure there is a cot somewhere you can nap on while I find other, more satisfying ways to amuse myself at this trial of seven."

The threat landed exactly as intended.

His jaw tightened until you could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin. His hands flexed against his thighs, the knuckles whitening. His breath came faster, his chest rising and falling beneath the thin linen of his tunic. And when he spoke, his voice was a low, dangerous rumble that seemed to vibrate in the very air between you, a sound that sent a shiver straight to your core and made your nipples tighten to aching points.

"Get dressed."

You smiled. Sweetly. Innocently. The smile of a woman who had just won the first tilt of the day and was already planning the second.

"As my prince commands," you murmured, and swung your legs over the side of the cot with deliberate, unhurried grace.

He caught your wrist before you could stand. The movement was so fast you barely saw it—one moment he was kneeling on the bed, the next he was pressed against your back, his chest against your spine, his mouth at your ear, his fingers wrapped around your wrist like a manacle of warm, living steel. You could feel every inch of him through the thin linen of his tunic, the hard planes of his chest, the ridged muscles of his abdomen, and pressing insistently against the curve of your lower back, the hot, rigid length of his cock, still trapped in his smallclothes, still achingly hard.

"You are going to regret this," he murmured, his lips brushing the sensitive shell of your ear, his breath warm and uneven, his voice a promise and a threat and a prayer all tangled together. "When I get you in that tent, surrounded by my armor, with no one to hear you scream and nowhere to run and nothing between us but steel and need—you are going to regret every single moment of bratty defiance you have given me this morning. Every sharp word. Every wicked look. Every time you pulled my hair and stopped my tongue and denied me what is mine."

His free hand slid around your waist, palm flat against your belly, fingers splayed wide, pulling you back against him so you could feel exactly how hard he was, exactly how much he wanted you.

"I am going to bend you over my shield," he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow more terrifying than a shout, "and fuck you until you cannot remember your own name. I am going to take you against the armor stand and let the whole camp hear you scream. I am going to put you on your knees in the middle of my war gear and use that clever mouth until tears are running down your cheeks and you are begging me—begging me, the way you made me beg with your eyes yesterday—to let you come. And I am not going to let you. Not until you have apologized. Not until you have taken back every insolent word. Not until you have admitted, out loud, that you are mine and that no one else—no hedge knight, no high lord, no god on earth or in the heavens—could ever satisfy you the way I do."

His teeth grazed your earlobe, a sharp, bright spark of sensation that made you gasp and arch against him involuntarily.

"Do you understand me?"

You turned your head just enough to meet his eyes. Blue and brown. Burning with a fire that matched your own. The dragon's eyes, you thought, and felt a thrill of something that was half fear and half desperate, aching want.

"Prove it," you said, your voice steady despite the trembling in your thighs. "Put on the armor. Show me the prince I married. And then maybe—maybe—I'll let you have what you want."

You pulled your wrist free with a sharp twist, stood, and began to dress with hands that only trembled a little. Behind you, you heard him exhale, a long, slow breath, the breath of a man steadying himself for battle.

—

Valarr walked a half-step behind you the entire way, close enough that the heat radiating from his body seeped through the thin fabric of your gown like a fever you couldn't shake, close enough that when you passed through a narrow gap between two pavilions his hand found the curve of your backside and squeezed hard enough to make you stumble mid stride, his fingers digging into the soft flesh with proprietary confidence before delivering a sharp, stinging slap that echoed in the confined space. You shot him a glare over your shoulder, heat flooding your cheeks. He smiled back, utterly unrepentant, his eyes glittering with dark promise and the kind of smug satisfaction that made you want to slap him and kiss him in equal measure.

The camp churned with the news of the trial of seven like a kicked anthill. Everywhere you looked, men and women clustered in tight knots, speaking in low, urgent voices that hummed with equal parts dread and morbid fascination. You caught fragments as you passed, snippets of conversation that floated past your ears barely registered—"Aerion Brightflame," spoken with the particular revulsion reserved for mad dogs, and "the hedge knight, seven feet if he's an inch, and the Reachmen have flocked to his banner," and "who in the Seven Hells will stand for the accuser against a prince of the blood?"—but the words washed over you like water over stone. Your focus had narrowed to a single point, a lodestone pulling you inexorably forward: the black and red pennants of the Targaryen tourney tent, snapping and twisting in the morning breeze ahead, their fabric tongues of dragonfire against the pale blue sky.

His squire was waiting outside, a gangly boy of perhaps fifteen with anxious eyes that darted about like startled sparrows and a perpetually worried expression etched into the soft planes of a face still waiting for its first proper shave. He straightened so abruptly when he saw you both approaching that he nearly tripped over his own feet, relief flickering across his features like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

"Your Grace—"

"Leave us," Valarr said, not breaking stride, not sparing the boy so much as a glance. "Stand guard. No one enters this tent. Not the hand himself. Not the High Septon. Not the Stranger incarnate. Do you understand?"

The boy's eyes went very wide, the whites showing all around the dark irises. He swallowed audibly, his prominent Adam's apple bobbing. "Yes, my prince. No one. Absolutely no one. I will guard the tent with my life. I swear it on my mother's—"

"See that you do."

Valarr held the tent flap open for you, the heavy canvas lifted high on his forearm, and you stepped inside, the cooler shadows of the interior washing over your flushed skin like a balm.

The space within was exactly as you remembered it from yesterday, you walked to the center of the tent, the trampled grass soft beneath your slippers, and turned to face him with deliberate slowness, letting him see the curve of your smile, the arch of your brow.

"Well, my prince," you said, your voice pitched light and teasing, a silk-wrapped needle, "shall we begin?"

He was already reaching for the gambeson draped over the stand, the padded linen garment rustling as he lifted it. "You wanted to put me in my armor. Put me in my armor. Every piece. Every buckle. Every strap."

"I want you to tell me," you said, stepping close enough that the hem of your gown brushed against his boots, taking the padded garment from his hands with deliberate slowness, your fingers dragging across his knuckles, "what you're going to do to me. Every detail. Every moment. While I dress you piece by piece."

His eyes darkened, the pupils swallowing the violet and the black alike. "You want a story?"

"I want a promise." You shook out the gambeson, holding it open for him. "I want to hear exactly what's waiting for me. Consider it... motivation to survive the day."

He slid his arms into the padded sleeves, and you stepped behind him to help guide the garment over the broad expanse of his shoulders, your fingers brushing the bare, warm skin of his arms, the corded muscle that flexed beneath your touch like a living thing. The gambeson was still cool from the night air, but beneath it, his skin was furnace-hot, radiating warmth through the padded linen. You moved around to his front and began to lace the garment closed, starting at his sternum and working your way down with excruciating slowness, your knuckles pressing against his chest with every pass of the cord, feeling the steady, accelerating thunder of his heartbeat beneath your touch.

"When I have you," he began, his voice dropping to that low, rough register that vibrated in your bones, "the first thing I am going to do is put you on your knees."

You sank down before him, not in obedience but to reach for the sabatons, kneeling at his feet to fasten the articulated steel shoes around his boots. The position was not lost on him; you watched his hands flex at his sides, the tendons standing out against the skin, watched his jaw tighten as he looked down at you kneeling before him with your hair spilling over your shoulders and your face level with his hips. "On my knees," you repeated, your voice soft and feigned innocent. "And then?"

"And then I am going to watch you take my cock out of my breeches. Slowly. No rushing, no tearing at the laces like you're unwrapping a gift. I want to see your hands on me—both hands, your fingers wrapping around my length, your thumbs tracing the ridge of the head. I want to see your face when you first feel how hard I am for you, how much I've been aching for you since I opened my eyes this morning." His voice dropped to something barely above a growl. "I've been half-hard since I woke up thinking about the sounds you made last night. Since I tasted you on my tongue. Gods, I can still taste you—salt and sweet and something I can't name but can't forget. It's been driving me mad all morning."

You fastened the second sabaton, your fingers steady despite the molten heat building low in your belly, spreading outward like wine spilled on silk. You reached for the first greave, the shaped steel plate cool against your palms. "Go on," you said, and your voice emerged steadier than you felt. "Tell me more."

"Then I'm going to put my hand in your hair—" he reached down and suited the gesture to the word, his fingers threading through the hair at your crown, tightening just enough to tilt your head back, to force your gaze up to meet his, "—and guide your mouth to me. And you are going to take me as deep as you can, until your lips meet the base of my shaft and your nose presses against my belly. I want to feel the back of your throat. I want to feel you swallow around me. I want to see tears in your eyes—not from pain, but from the effort, from wanting to take all of me, from being so full of me you can barely breathe." He paused while you buckled the first greave around his shin, your fingers working the leather straps through the buckles, pulling them snug against the padded linen beneath. "But I'm not going to let you finish me that way. Not today."

"No?" You looked up at him through your lashes, your hands pausing on the second greave.

"No." The word was a growl that seemed to originate somewhere deep in his chest, rumbling through the air between you. "Today, I want to be inside you when I spend. I want to feel you come around my cock, feel you clench and pulse and cry out my name so loudly that the whole Red Keep knows who you belong to. I want to fill you up until it drips down your thighs, the way you said you wanted yesterday, the way you whispered in my ear when you thought you were being scandalous. Every word you said to me yesterday—I remember all of it. Every filthy, beautiful, desperate word. And I intend to make every single one of them come true before the sun sets."

You rose, your body humming with anticipation like a plucked harp string, and reached for the cuirass. The black steel was cool and heavy against your palms as you lifted it from the table, the three-headed dragon crest seeming to watch you with knowing ruby eyes. You pressed the breastplate into place against his chest, and he held it there while you moved around behind him to begin fastening the side buckles. His eyes tracked you in the polished reflection of the armor, never leaving your face as your fingers worked methodically down his sides, pulling each strap through its buckle, testing each fastening with a sharp tug.

"Then I'm going to bend you over the armor stand," he said, his voice a low, dark rumble that vibrated through the steel beneath your hands, through your fingertips, into the marrow of your bones. "And I'm going to push your skirts up around your waist—slowly, so I can watch the fabric slide up the backs of your thighs, so I can see the curve of your arse inch by inch before I bare you completely. And I'm going to take you from behind, standing up, with my armor still on. You'll feel the cold steel of my cuirass against your back, hard and unyielding. You'll feel the chill of my greaves against your calves. You'll smell the metal and the leather mixed with the scent of us. But inside you, I'll be hot. Hot and hard and so deep you'll feel me in your throat, in your chest, in the very core of you."

Your breath caught in your chest like a trapped bird. Your fingers fumbled on the last buckle, the leather slipping through your grasp before you caught it again, and you heard him exhale, not quite a laugh, but something darkly satisfied, something that said he knew exactly what his words were doing to you.

"Then," he continued, relentless, merciless, "when I've had my fill of watching myself disappear inside you from behind, I'm going to carry you to the cot and put you on your back. And I'm going to take off my gauntlets so I can feel your skin with my bare hands. I'm going to hold you down, one hand between your breasts, pinning you to the mattress. And I'm going to fuck you slowly. So slowly you'll feel every inch of me, every ridge, every pulse. So slowly you'll beg me to go faster. And I won't. Not until you apologize for every bratty, insolent, maddening thing you said to me this morning."

You finished the last buckle of the cuirass with hands that trembled ever so slightly—you knew he could see it, could feel it in the minute vibrations transmitted through the steel—and reached for the gorget. The throat armor was shaped to cradle his neck, to protect the vulnerable hollow where his pulse beat visibly beneath the skin. "Apologize?" you managed, your voice emerging breathier than you intended, a half-octave higher than your usual register. "For what, precisely?"

"For pulling my hair when you knew it would drive me to distraction. For denying me what we both wanted because you were enjoying the game too much to end it. For threatening to find satisfaction elsewhere." His eyes burned into yours, twin flames of violet and shadow, and his voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, something that was somehow more commanding than any shout could be. "You are going to say 'I am yours, Valarr, and no one else's. My body is yours. My pleasure is yours. Everything I am is yours.' And then, and only then, will I let you come. Not a moment before. No matter how much you plead."

You swallowed hard. Your throat was dry as parchment left in the sun. "And if I refuse? If I'm stubborn and willful and refuse to give you the satisfaction?"

His smile was slow and wolfish and altogether dangerous, the kind of smile that would have made a lesser woman run for the hills. "Then I'll keep going until you don't. I can do this all day, sweetheart. I can bring you to the edge again and again and again until you forget your own name, until you forget why you were resisting in the first place, until the only word left in your vocabulary is 'please.' And then I'll make you wait a little longer, just because I can."

The gorget was in place, the final buckle secured beneath his left ear. Only the gauntlets remained on the table, and the helm—a sculpted thing of black steel with a dragon crest sweeping back from the crown like frozen fire. You reached for the gauntlets, the articulated steel fingers clicking softly against each other, but he caught your wrists in his bare hands before you could lift them.

"Leave them," he said, his voice rough as stone dragged over gravel. "I want to feel you. I've been waiting all morning to feel you."

And then his mouth was on yours. The kiss was a conquest and surrender woven together into a single act. His hands slid into your hair, tilting your head back to expose the vulnerable column of your throat before his mouth descended. His tongue swept into your mouth with a hunger that bordered on violence, tasting of the wine he'd drunk before you arrived, tasting of want and need and barely leashed desperation. The steel of his cuirass pressed cold and unyielding against your breasts through the thin fabric of your gown, and the contrast of sensations, cold metal against your front, hot mouth against your lips, hard steel against your soft flesh, soft tongue sliding against yours, made your head spin like you'd drunk an entire flagon of the Arbor gold on the table.

You kissed him back with everything you had, with every ounce of frustration and desire and desperate wanting that had been building since yesterday, since this morning, since the moment you'd first laid eyes on him. Your hands fisted in the fabric of his gambeson where it showed above the cuirass, pulling him closer, closer, until the steel was pressed so tight against you that you could feel the steel imprinting on your skin through your dress.

"Gods," you gasped against his mouth, pulling back just far enough to drag air into your burning lungs, "I want you. I want you now. Right now."

"Then have me."

He walked you backward with the steady, unstoppable momentum of a tide, his armored body a wall of heat and steel pushing against your softness, until your spine hit the armor stand. The wooden frame rattled violently, a pauldron clattering to the trampled grass with a dull thud, a vambrace following it a moment later, and then his hands were on your hips, the heat of his bare palms searing through your gown, lifting you onto the edge of the campaign table with effortless strength. Your skirts bunched around your thighs, the fabric rucking up past your knees, past midthigh, until the cool morning air kissed skin that was already flushed and feverish. His armored body pressed between your legs, the steel of his cuirass shockingly cold against the heated, sensitive skin of your inner thighs, and you wrapped your legs around his waist with a desperation that surprised you, pulling him closer, the ridges of the armor pressing into your soft flesh in ways that would leave marks, and you didn't care, you didn't care at all.

"Tell me you want this," he said, his voice ragged, his forehead pressed against yours, his breath coming in harsh pants that mingled with your own. "Tell me you want me. I need to hear you say it. I need to know this isn't just—I need to know you want this as much as I do."

"I want you," you breathed, the words spilling out of you like water from a cracked dam, unstoppable and honest and raw. "I want you all the time, every moment of every day, until it drives me to distraction. I am yours, Valarr Targaryen. I am yours and no one else's, now and always, today and tomorrow and every day after. My body is yours. My pleasure is yours. Everything I am is yours."

He kissed you again, harder, more desperately, the careful control he'd maintained all morning finally snapping like an overwound harp string. One hand left your hip and you felt him fumbling between your bodies, working at the laces of his breeches with urgent, unsteady fingers, and then he was free, and you felt the hot, hard length of him pressing against your inner thigh, leaving a trail of slick moisture against your skin.

The first press of him against your entrance made you gasp into his mouth. You were still slick from his attentions this morning, your body still aching and empty from the interrupted promise of the night before, still desperate and ready despite—or perhaps because of—everything. And when he pushed inside you—one long, slow, relentless thrust that filled you completely, that stretched you in ways that walked the perfect line between pleasure and exquisite ache—you cried out so loudly you were certain the entire camp must have heard, certain the squire outside the tent must be blushing to the roots of his hair, certain the news would spread through the tourney grounds faster than word of the trial itself.

"Yes," you sobbed, your head falling back, your nails digging into the back of his neck hard enough to leave crescents in his skin, your inner muscles clenching around the sudden, overwhelming fullness of him. "Yes, yes, yes—"

He took you with a ferocity that drove the breath from your lungs in sharp, punched-out cries, each thrust hitting deep enough to make your vision blur at the edges. His bare hands gripped your hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh hard enough to bruise, pulling you onto him with every driving thrust, meeting your body with his own in a rhythm that was more storm than song. The armor stand rattled and creaked beneath you with the force of his movements, the remaining pieces of armor clanking against each other like discordant bells, and you had to brace one hand behind you on the table to keep from being driven backward onto the scattered steel.

The sound of it was utterly obscene, and you were past caring. The clank of steel against steel. The creak of leather straps straining. The wet, rhythmic slide of your bodies joining and parting and joining again. The raw, desperate, animal sounds tearing from your throat with every thrust, moans and gasps and half-formed words that might have been his name or might have been prayers. You wrapped your legs tighter around his waist, your ankles locking behind the small of his back, and the slight shift in angle made him hit a spot deep inside you that sent white lightning arcing up your spine, that made you scream, that made your inner muscles flutter and clench around him in involuntary spasm.

"That's it," he growled against your ear, his voice dark with satisfaction and unspent hunger. "Let them hear you. Let the whole camp hear who you belong to. Let the gods hear. I don't care. I want everyone to know."

"Valarr—Valarr—I'm going to—I'm so close, I'm going to—"

"Come for me." The command was a growl, a plea, a demand all at once. "Now. I want to feel you."

The command shattered what little control you had left. Your orgasm crashed over you like a wave in a storm, white-hot and blinding, starting somewhere deep in your core and radiating outward in pulses of pure, incandescent pleasure. You screamed his name so loudly your voice cracked and broke on the second syllable, your head thrown back, your spine arching, your body convulsing around him in rhythmic, milking pulses that drew a guttural groan from somewhere deep in his chest. The world went white at the edges, then gray, then nothing at all for a suspended moment of pure, perfect oblivion.

He followed you over the edge moments later, burying himself to the hilt inside you with a final, deep thrust, his face buried in the curve of your neck, his breath hot and ragged against your sweat-damp skin, his body shuddering with the force of his release. You felt him pulse inside you—once, twice, three times, four—felt the hot, flooding spill of his seed filling you, felt it begin to drip down your thighs even before he pulled out, a slow, warm trickle that traced paths down your trembling skin.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. The tent was filled with the sound of ragged, desperate breathing, yours, his, indistinguishable from each other, two sets of lungs working in tandem. The armor stand creaked beneath you with a final, settling groan. The fallen pauldron gleamed on the grass, its polished surface now smudged with fingerprints. Somewhere in the distance, a crier was calling something about the trial of seven, his voice high and thin and utterly irrelevant, a fly buzzing at the edge of a world that had shrunk to the space between your bodies.

Valarr lifted his head from your shoulder slowly, as if it weighed more than his helm, and looked at you with those eyes still hazy with the remnants of pleasure, still dark with hunger despite everything you'd just done, still burning with something that looked terrifyingly like devotion and his lips were kiss-swollen, and there was a mark on his neck where your nails had raked across the skin, and he was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen.

"I believe," he said, his voice hoarse and scraped-raw, the words emerging between still-labored breaths, "that I owed you a proper apology. For my behavior. For my presumption. For everything."

You laughed, a breathless, exhausted, utterly satisfied sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep in your chest and emerged as something between a giggle and a sigh. The movement made him shift inside you, still half-hard, and you gasped at the oversensitive friction. "Accepted," you managed, your own voice barely more than a whisper. "Though I should warn you—if that's how you apologize, I may need to find reasons to be cross with you more often."

—

Outside the tent, the squire stood at rigid attention, his spine so straight it was on the verge of snapping, his face the color of curdled milk, his eyes fixed on the distant treeline with the desperate intensity of a man who was trying very, very hard to be somewhere else entirely. His name was Edric, he was fifteen years old, he had been in Prince Valarr's service for exactly eight months, and he was fairly certain that nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

He had heard everything. Everything. The first moan had been bad enough, a high, breathy sound that had made his ears turn pink and his gaze drop to his boots. The second moan had been worse, drawn out and trembling, followed by a rhythmic creaking that could only be the armor stand, the armor stand, gods preserve him, the very armor stand he had polished that morning, taking a structural battering it had never been designed to withstand. And then there had been words. Words. The princess had said things—things he was fairly certain he should not repeat even under threat of torture—and the prince had responded in a voice so low and rough and possessive that Edric had actually taken three involuntary steps away from the tent flap.

Now there was screaming. Not the bad kind of screaming but the kind of screaming that made his entire body flush with heat and his throat go dry and his brain very pointedly refuse to form coherent thoughts.

He was going to die. He was going to die of embarrassment right here, outside his prince's tent, and the maesters would have to invent an entirely new category of death to explain what had happened to him.

Maybe I should have become a septon, he thought miserably. Septons don't have to stand outside tents listening to—

A particularly sharp cry rang out from within, followed by the unmistakable sound of something wooden and structural creaking in rhythmic protest. Edric squeezed his eyes shut and began mentally reciting the names of all seven aspects of the Seven. Father, Mother, Warrior, Maiden, Smith, Crone, Stranger—

The Stranger, he felt, was particularly appropriate. He was fairly certain he was about to die of embarrassment.

"VALARR—yes—right THERE—"

Edric opened his eyes and fixed them on a cloud that was drifting lazily across the morning sky. That was a nice cloud. Clouds were safe. Clouds did not make sounds that would haunt his dreams for the rest of his natural life.

He was so focused on the cloud—and on mentally reciting every prayer he knew, and on wondering whether it was possible to un-hear something through sheer force of will—that he did not notice the approach of the man until a shadow fell across him and a voice spoke from approximately two feet away.

"Where is my son's armor?"

Edric jumped approximately three feet into the air and spun around with a strangled yelp that he would deny to his dying day.

Prince Baelor Breakspear stood before him.

"Y-y-your Grace." Edric's voice cracked on every syllable, pitching upward like a boy of twelve instead of a squire of fifteen. "Prince Valarr's armor is—ah—it is—it is inside the tent. Yes. Inside. The tent. Where the armor is."

Baelor's eyes, the same deep blue as his son's left eye, narrowed slightly. "Are you quite well, lad? You look rather flushed."

"I am perfectly well, Your Grace. Perfectly. It is only the—the heat. The morning heat. Very hot this morning. Unusually hot. I was just—standing here. Guarding. As one does."

Baelor studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment, then seemed to decide that squires were simply peculiar creatures and not worth further investigation. "Good. I have need of the armor before—"

His hand was already reaching for the tent flap and Edric's soul departed his body.

"Your Grace, wait—"

Baelor stopped, his fingers an inch from the canvas. He had heard something.

A sound. A distinctly human sound. "Oh, Valarr—" The voice from within was high and breathy and unmistakably feminine, stretched taut with something between ecstasy and desperation. "Right THERE—don't stop—gods, don't you DARE stop—"

Baelor Breakspear's hand froze in midair. His fingers curled inward, retreating from the canvas as though it had suddenly burst into flame.

Edric wanted to die. He wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole. He wanted to be anywhere else in the Seven Kingdoms—the Wall, the deserts of Dorne, the smoking ruins of Valyria itself—anywhere but standing next to his prince's father while said prince was audibly, enthusiastically, thoroughly fucking his wife twenty feet away.

"I—Your Grace, I am under—under very strict orders—" Edric's voice was barely a whisper, his face now achieving a shade of crimson that would have impressed a painter. "No one is to enter the tent. Not anyone. Not for any reason. Those were—those were Prince Valarr's exact words. His very exact words. He was quite specific."

Another sound from within, a rhythmic creaking, the unmistakable clank of steel against something wooden, a low, rough, guttural male groan that was absolutely, undeniably, catastrophically Prince Valarr's voice.

Baelor stood frozen outside his son's tent with his mouth slightly open and his cheeks slowly, inexorably turning the color of a summer rose.

"Valarr! VALARR—I'm—I'm going to—I'm—"

A scream. Female. Ecstatic. Utterly, comprehensively unmistakable. It was the kind of scream that left nothing to the imagination—the kind of scream that painted a very detailed picture of exactly what was happening inside that tent, a picture that Edric desperately, desperately did not want to be seeing in his mind's eye.

And then, as if the scream had not been damning enough:

"VALARR! YES! YES, RIGHT THERE—FILL ME UP—DON'T STOP—"

The silence that followed was deafening.

Baelor Breakspear stared at the tent flap as though it had personally insulted his entire bloodline. His hand, still raised, slowly lowered to his side. His jaw worked soundlessly for a moment—opening, closing, opening again—like a fish that had been unexpectedly yanked from the water and was still trying to process its new reality.

"I..." He cleared his throat. "I... see."

"The armor," Edric whispered miserably, staring at the ground as though it might offer him salvation, "is... occupied, Your Grace."

Baelor's voice, when he finally found it, was remarkably steady for a man who had just been forced to confront the fact that his son was, at present, engaged in activities that would make a Dornish courtesan blush. "Occupied."

"Very occupied."

"Yes—like that—exactly like that—oh, gods, I can feel you so deep—"

"Extremely occupied," Edric amended, his voice barely audible. "Thoroughly occupied. Could not be more occupied if they tried."

A long, agonizing pause. From within the tent came the unmistakable sound of bodies shifting, the creak of the cot—the cot, gods, they had moved to the cot—and a low, breathy laugh that was definitely the princess.

"Well," Baelor said, and his voice had acquired a slightly strangled quality, as though someone had their hands wrapped around his throat, "it is... it is good that they are... that the marriage is... that they are clearly very..." He paused, searching for a word that would not make this situation worse. "...compatible.""

"Harder—HARDER—I want to feel you for DAYS—"

Baelor closed his eyes. He drew a long, slow breath through his nose. He opened his eyes again and looked at the sky as though beseeching the Seven themselves for intervention.

"Right," he said, to no one in particular. "Right. Well. I suppose... I suppose I shall find armor elsewhere. Ser Humfrey Hardyng may have something suitable. He is roughly my same proportions. Give or take. Or perhaps Lord Ashford keeps spares in the armory. For... for emergencies." He paused.

"VALARR, I'M GOING TO COME AGAIN—"

Baelor turned on his heel with the rigid, mechanical dignity of a man who had decided that the only way to survive this encounter was to pretend it had never happened. His movements were stiff, precise, the movements of a soldier retreating in good order from a battle that could not be won.

"I shall go now," he announced to the world at large. He took three long strides toward the main thoroughfare of the camp.

"Your Grace!" Edric called after him, his voice cracking with desperation. "Shall I—should I—do you want me to tell Prince Valarr that you came looking for him? When he is—when he is finished with his—with the armor?"

Baelor did not break stride. He did not slow down. He did not look back. If anything, he appeared to walk faster.

"You may tell my son," he said, his voice carrying back over his shoulder with a strained composure that was honestly quite heroic under the circumstances, "that I wish him joy of his morning. That I am pleased—very pleased—that his marriage is so... vigorous. That I am profoundly, deeply, inexpressibly glad that I did not walk into that tent. And that if either of them ever—ever—speaks of this in my presence, I shall deny it happened until my dying breath."

He paused, just for a moment, and added in a tone of immense, bone-deep exhaustion: "The Seven give me strength."

And then Prince Baelor Breakspear, the finest knight of the realm, disappeared around the corner of a supply tent with the speed of a man who had suddenly remembered an urgent appointment on the other side of the known world.

Edric stood alone, staring at the spot where his prince's father had been, listening to the sounds still emerging from within the tent—a rhythmic thumping now, another rising moan, and something that sounded distressingly like the cot beginning to splinter—and wondered if it was physically possible to die of embarrassment.

It was, he concluded, probably not possible. Which meant he would have to live with this memory for the rest of his natural life.

"Oh—oh—VALARR—"

The bathroom mirror is still fogged at the edges from the shower you took an hour ago, the whole apartment smells like the vanilla body oil you dabbed into your collarbones and the burnt-sugar candle Jace keeps on his dresser because he thinks it makes the place feel less like some dungeon and more like home. Rain taps against the window in that soft, uneven rhythm, and somewhere down on the street a taxi lays on its horn for three long seconds before giving up. The bass from the apartment below thumps faintly through the floorboards, someone's pregame already in full swing.

You're in front of the floor length mirror leaned against his closet door, tilting your chin, checking your lipstick, rolling a strand of hair between two fingers because you can't decide if you want to leave it down or twist it up. The dress. God, the dress. From the front it's demure, a soft slate satin that skims your front and drapes clean at the thigh, the neckline looked innocent and modest. It looked like something you'd wear to your aunt's wedding but that's the trick of it though. That's why you spent forty-seven dollars on it during a two AM TikTok haze last Tuesday.

Behind you, Jace is sprawled across his unmade bed in gray sweatpants and a white tee that's been through the wash so many times it's practically translucent at the hem. His phone is angled above his face, the blue glow catching on the sharp bridge of his nose and the messy dark curls that fall across his forehead. His feet are crossed at the ankles and he’s laughing at something, a low huff of a sound, you can hear the tiny audio of some Reels compilation.

"Sof said she's already at the bar," you tell him, thumbing through your phone in the mirror's reflection. "She got the corner booth."

"Mm." He doesn't look up. "Which bar?"

"That new one downtown. The one with the disco ball in the bathroom."

"Sounds like a fire hazard."

"You sound like your mom."

"Rude." He scrolls. "My mom's cool."

You laugh, sweeping bronzer along the high point of your cheek, and shift your weight from one side to the other. The satin whispers against your thighs. You've been waiting, actually, for him to look up. You've been arranging yourself in his peripheral vision for the last ten minutes and he's been oblivious in that specifically annoying boyfriend way, and it's starting to feel almost insulting. You bought this dress to tease him. You'd like the courtesy of being noticed back.

You set the bronzer down and pivot on your heel. Turning your back to the mirror to check the drape of the fabric across your ass, one hand smoothing over your hip.

You hear it before you see it. A sharp inhale. Then, a choked half sound that dies in his throat followed by the soft slap of a phone hitting a chest.

You glance over your shoulder into the mirror. Jace has propped himself up on his elbows, mouth open, eyes so wide you can see the whites all the way around his brown irises. His curls are sticking up in six directions from where he'd been running his hand through them. His phone is face down on his sternum, forgotten.

"What?" you ask, and you can't keep the grin out of it.

"What the fuck."

"What?"

"Turn around."

"I am turned around."

"No, turn, come here, turn all the way." He sits up so fast the mattress creaks. "Have you seen the back of that dress?"

You laugh, pressing your tongue to the inside of your cheek, and rotate slowly on the ball of your foot until you're facing him. "Well, yeah. I bought it."

"Sweets." His voice cracks on the second syllable. He looks genuinely aggrieved, like you've handed him bad news at a hospital. "Love, no."

The back of the dress is the joke. From nape to just above the swell of your ass there is nothing. No fabric. No zipper. A few delicate strap knots and chains at the small of your back and that's the entire architectural principle keeping the front on your body. The dip of your spine is on full display, the two soft dimples at the base, the smooth stretch of skin from your shoulder blades down. You spent twenty minutes with a jade roller earlier making sure the whole canvas of your back looked like glass.

Jace swings his legs off the bed and stands abruptly. He crosses the room in three strides and stops just behind you, close enough that you can feel the heat of him but not touching, and his reflection in the mirror looks stricken.

"No," he says again, quieter.

"Yes."

"You cannot leave this apartment."

"I can and I will."

"I wouldn't mind if I was there." His fingertips ghost the small of your back, not landing, just hovering, like the skin might burn him. "Like, if I was going with you, sure, whatever, wear it, look like this, be a menace, I'll fight everyone in the bar. But alone?" His voice pitches up. "You want to go alone? Downtown? In this?"

"Sof will be there. And Jessie. And probably Serena if her flight lands."

"None of them have upper body strength."

"Jace."

"I'm being serious."

You reach up and gather your hair, twisting it into a loose knot at the crown of your head. The motion pulls the dress tighter across your ribs and you watch him watch it in the mirror. His throat bobs. You slide a claw clip out from between your teeth and snap it into place, and then you tilt your head, satisfied, and reach for your mascara.

"Change," he says. Weakly.

"Nope."

He's still standing behind you. You catch his reflection and the way his mouth has gone tight, the way his eyes are doing that flicker thing where he's thinking, calculating, cooking something up. His hands are loose at his sides. His shoulders are set and he's got the same look on his face he gets when he's playing chess against his brother Luke and he's about to do something petty.

You're about to ask him what he's thinking when he drops.

Just, drops, straight to his knees behind you with a soft thud on the hardwood, hands coming up to cup the sides of your waist like he's steadying a vase.

"Jace- what are you-" you start, twisting to look at him, but he's already leaning in, and the first press of his mouth to the base of your spine punches every word right out of your lungs.

The sound you make is embarrassing. A short, high thing, half gasp, half whimper. His lips are warm and slightly parted, and he presses them just above the little dimple on the left, and then he kisses the one on the right, slower, deliberate, and you feel the heat of his breath fan across your skin in the split second between each kiss.

"Jace." You try to swivel out of his grip and his hands tighten, thumbs pressing into the divots of your hip bones through the satin. Not enough to bruise. Just enough that you're going nowhere.

"Mhm." A kiss to the base of your spine, wetter this time, a hint of tongue.

"You're being…" another kiss, "so annoying…" another, higher, right at the small of your back, "oh my god."

He kisses his way up, patient, like he's got a list. Every vertebra. He works up your spine one bone at a time and you can feel your knees getting weak. Your hands come up on instinct and brace against the mirror. Your palm leaves a fog print on the glass. In the reflection you can see the crown of his dark curls between your shoulder blades, the shell of his ear, one of his eyes closed in concentration.

At the middle of your back he opens his mouth properly and drags his teeth. You feel it in your stomach.

"Ah-" you hiss, and his answering laugh vibrates against your skin.

"You're the one who wanted attention."

"I didn't."

"You so did."

"I was doing my makeup."

"Sure." He kisses higher, right between your shoulder blades. "Doing your makeup." Higher. "In a dress with no back." Higher. "Facing away from me." His voice drops. "In the mirror where I could see you."

His mouth reaches the nape of your neck and he stands as he does it, unfolding himself up the length of your body, and now his front is flush against your back, his chest broad and warm through the thin cotton of his tee. One arm loops around your waist, splaying wide, his palm pressing flat against your stomach. The other hand comes up and slides around the side of your throat, thumb hooking under your jaw, and he tilts your head to the left with the gentlest pressure, exposing the long tendon of your neck.

You watch it happen in the mirror. Your own face, lips parted, eyes gone dark and glassy. Him behind you, curls falling forward, jaw set. His mouth against the hinge of your jaw. His mouth on the soft spot beneath your ear. His mouth sucking hard just above your collarbone, and this time you feel the sting of teeth and the deliberate pull of suction and you know, you know, he's leaving a mark on purpose. He shifts an inch and does it again. And again. Slower. Right along the ridge of your clavicle where no makeup can hide it and no scarf could reasonably cover it.

Your eyes close and your hand slips off the mirror and finds the back of his neck instead, fingers threading into the curls at his nape, and you feel him hum against your skin, pleased, when your nails scrape.

He works you over for what feels like a long time. Your pulse point. The soft under-shelf of your jaw. The curve where your neck meets your shoulder. He alternates, kissing and sucking and dragging his tongue in slow, wet stripes. You are absolutely, comprehensively lost. The room smells like him now, and the last ghost of your perfume, and everything is very quiet except for the wet sounds of his mouth and your uneven breathing and the rain and the distant bass from downstairs. You were losing your mind.

He pulls back.

You open your eyes slowly. In the mirror, he's grinning with full teeth. Smug in a way that would be genuinely insufferable if you had any blood left in your brain. His hair is even worse than it was before. His lips are pink and wet.

Your neck and shoulder look like a paint pallet. There are three, maybe four, blooming red marks already darkening toward purple, one high enough that the collar of a jacket wouldn't touch it.

"What…" you manage, "is that face."

"I marked up my territory." He is so pleased with himself. He tilts his head, considering his work like a curator. "Certifiably mine. Notarized. Do you still want to go outside?"

You feel your jaw set. The brat in you rises like a bubble. "Yes. I do."

Something flickers across his face. His grin sharpens.

"Who…" he says, dropping his voice to a register you feel in the base of your spine, "said we're finished."

The world tilts.

He turns you by the hips, walks you backward to the mattress, and the back of your knees hit the edge of it and you go down. Your claw clip snaps loose. Your hair spills out over his navy duvet. Before you've even registered horizontal, he's peeling his tee off over his head, and then it's off and on the floor and you get the full view.

You have seen him shirtless approximately nine hundred times and it still does something stupid to you. He's lean, always has been, but two years of a serious gym habit have carved him. The flat plane of his chest with the faint scatter of dark hair between his pecs, the ridged shape of his stomach, the sharp cuts of his obliques disappearing into the low waistband of his sweats. His mouth is still red from your neck. There's a flush high on his cheekbones.

You prop yourself up on your elbows. "Very funny. My friend is waiting, actually."

He plants a hand on your sternum and pushes you back down, gently and leans over you with a knee braced on the mattress between your thighs.

"Didn't I tell you…" he says, close to your mouth, "we aren't finished yet."

You open your mouth to give him something witty. You had something. You had a whole line but it evaporated because his mouth is on yours and it is NOT gentle. It's the kind of kiss that has been building for the whole ten minutes he's been leaving hickeys on your neck, hot and open and you feel it right down to the bottoms of your feet. Your thighs squeeze together on reflex and there is already so much heat between them it's almost embarrassing. Slick. You've been slick since he hit his knees.

His tongue drags across your bottom lip, a question, and you part for him and he groans into your mouth, low and needy. Your hands find his curls and you fist them lightly, tugging, and he makes another sound, muffled, his hand slides up the outside of your thigh, catching the satin of your dress, dragging it up with him. His palm is hot as his thumb traces the crease of your hip.

He pulls back. A thin thread of spit connects your lower lip to his and breaks and lands on your chin. His eyes are half-lidded and completely blown. Your chest is heaving along with his and somewhere in the back of your head you register that your friends are absolutely getting stood up.

"Turn over," he says.

You blink. "What."

"Turn over." His hand slides under your ribs and he's already helping, guiding you onto your stomach on his duvet. Your hair fans out. Your cheek presses into the pillow that smells like his shampoo. "The dress." He tugs at it and it comes loose in one soft slither. He works the satin up over the swell of your ass and bunches it at your waist. You're not wearing underwear. You couldn't have worn underwear with this dress and you know he registered that ten seconds ago because he makes a soft strangled sound behind you.

"Sweet mother of Gods."

"Jace."

"You're going to kill me. Like, physically. I'm going to have a stroke."

"You're being dramatic."

"You're not wearing underwear," he informs you, in case you had somehow forgotten, and his hands come down on the backs of your thighs and squeeze, and the mattress dips as he lowers himself.

The first thing you feel is his warm breath. Then his mouth on the back of your left thigh, high up, sucking. Another mark. He drags his mouth two inches over and does it again. Another two inches. You are going to be a leopard. You are going to have to wear pants in July. You feel the wet swirl of his tongue over the bruise he just made, soothing it, before he moves to the crease where your thigh meets your ass and bites, softly, and you jerk.

"Oh my god."

"Mm."

He kisses across the swell of your ass, teeth grazing, and then up, up to your lower back where he sucks another mark right above the dip of your spine, and you can feel the heat of it blooming into your skin. He is being so thorough. His hands slide up the backs of your thighs and part them, gently, and you let them fall open because at this point your bones have turned to warm honey.

And then his mouth is on you.

The first stripe of his tongue is long and flat and slow and it goes from your clit all the way to your entrance and back, and the sound you make is not a sound a human should make. It's ragged. Your fingers fist in the duvet and your hips buck up on instinct and he lets you, hands sliding under to cradle the fronts of your hips, and then he pulls you back and up onto your knees so your face is still on the pillow but your ass is in the air.

"Better," he murmurs against you, and then he goes to work.

He was so good at this. You have told him he's good at this, once, when you were both drunk on cheap red wine, and he has taken that compliment and internalized it like a religion. His tongue circles your clit in slow, deliberate patterns, and then flicks, and then flattens, and then he closes his lips around it and sucks and you make a noise into the pillow that would have neighbors calling the cops if the building had thinner walls. He drags his mouth lower and pushes his tongue into you and you feel one of his hands leave your hip and then two of his fingers replace his tongue, curling up, finding that spot as his mouth returns to your clit.

Your knuckles are white in the duvet. You reach back blindly with one hand and find his hair and just hold, twisting the curls between your fingers. Your other hand fumbles for a pillow to pull under your face, to muffle yourself, because you cannot stop the sounds coming out of you. Little whimpers. A long, broken "oh." A stuttered "please" you didn't mean to say out loud.

"Yeah?" His voice is muffled against you, wet. "Yeah, sweets?"

"Jace."

"Come on."

He crooks his fingers again and sucks and you fall apart. Your thighs clamp together but that doesn't stop him as he works you through it with slow steady pressure until you're twitching and pushing his head away with a whimper of oversensitivity, and only then does he pull off with a wet, obscene sound and press a kiss to the inside of your thigh.

You felt boneless. Your face smashed into the pillow and you feel drops of sweat sliding down between your shoulder blades, your hair is stuck to your temple. You crack one eye open and the room is soft and blurry in your vision.

Behind you, you hear the rustle of him shoving his sweats off. The clink of his belt buckle- no wait- he wasn't wearing a belt, that's the sound of his phone hitting the floor. The soft crumple of fabric. And then his hand is on your hip again, warm and steady, and the other is grabbing a pillow from the head of the bed and sliding it under your hips, lifting you.

You feel him line up. The blunt hot press of him against you. Your breath hitches.

"Ready?" His voice is wrecked.

"Mhm." You say in agreement.

He pushes in slow. Inch by inch. The stretch of it makes your eyes flutter closed. He was not small by any means. He's got a slight curve to him that hits you in a way you have written frankly embarrassing journal entries about, and by the time he bottoms out you can feel him everywhere. His hips settle flush against your ass as his hand smooths up your spine and back down.

"Fuck," he breathes.

"Move," you whisper.

He moves without question. The first thrust is slow, testing, and then the second is a little harder, and by the fourth he's found a rhythm and the sound of it fills the room. The wet slap of skin on skin. The soft creak of his mattress. His breath, ragged, right above you. Your own broken little "ah, ah, ah" every time he snaps his hips forward.

He folds himself over your back, his chest to your spine, and one of his arms braces beside your head and the other slides under your ribs and pulls you back against him. His mouth finds your shoulder and he bites, then sucks and then bites again. A hickey blooms in the crook where your neck meets your shoulder. Then higher. Then the back of your shoulder blade. Then he pulls back just enough to see and drives forward hard and you cry out into the pillow.

You turn your head, cheek smashed against the duvet, and he sees it, sees you looking for him, and he leans down and catches your mouth from the side, angle awkward and messy, and it's all tongue and spit and neither of you can breathe right but he tastes like you making you moan into his mouth. Then his hips stutter.

"You're so-" he says against your mouth, and doesn't finish, just kisses you harder, "fuck, you're so-“

Your hand fists in his curls again and holds him there.

He straightens up eventually to get better leverage, hands gripping your hips, thumbs digging into the meat of your ass, and he watches himself move in and out of you and makes a low groan that you feel in your sternum. His hand comes down in a light slap on your right cheek and you jerk forward with a whimper and he does it again, harder, and then soothes it with his palm.

"You were really gonna go out?" he asks, panting. "Like this? Looking like this?" Another sharp thrust. "For other guys?"

"Not for-" you gasp, "other guys."

"Sure looked like it."

"Jace."

"Mhm?"

"Please-"

He shifts his angle just barely. And it hits something behind your navel and you see white at the edges of your vision, his hand slides around and finds your clit, and it takes maybe forty seconds before you're coming again, harder than the first time but this one you can't muffle at all. It rips right out of your throat. Your whole body clenches around him and he makes a broken sound holding still, jaw tight, riding it out with you.

When you come down enough to breathe he pulls out gently, and before you can protest the sudden emptiness he's flipping you onto your back.

You blink up at him, dazed, hair a wreck, dress still bunched around your waist. He grabs the hem and drags it up and off over your head and it lands somewhere around his room. Your body is flushed, chest heaving, a sheen of sweat on your covering you and hickeys blooming everywhere. His eyes are still dark and his curls are damp at the temples.

He grabs your ankles and hooks them up over his shoulders, one and then the other, folding you nearly in half. Your knees graze your own chest then he slides back in in one long push and you both groan.

"Oh-" you gasp, "oh- fuck- Jace."

"Yeah," he breathes, and it comes out shaky as his hands slide from your ankles down the backs of your calves to grip behind your knees, pinning them wider and higher, the angle of him inside you shifts so deep you swear you can feel him under your ribs. "Yeah, there you go. There's my girl."

The rain has picked up outside. It's not soft anymore, it's a steady drumming against the window, the bass from downstairs has kicked over into something with a heavier beat, a low pulse that syncs almost obscenely with the rhythm of his hips. The candle on the dresser is guttering low, the wick swimming in a pool of melted wax, throwing amber shadows across the ceiling. The whole room smells like sex now.

You can barely keep your eyes open but thrust continues to knock a soft high sound out of you and suddenly an almost pornographic sound leaves your mouth along with Jace’s name as you scratch his skin.

"Fuck, do that again."

You do it again. Four red lines blooming down the tan of his forearm, and he groans in response, low and long, and drops his head so his forehead presses against your shin where it's hooked over his shoulder. There's beads of sweat sliding down the side of his throat, and you watch it disappear into the hollow of his clavicle.

He lifts his head. His eyes are almost black, pupils blown so wide there's barely any brown left, and his mouth is swollen. He looks feral as if he's been possessed by something old and hungry, it's a look you are well aware of over the course of your relationship.

"Come here." He unhooks one of your ankles, then the other, and lets your legs drop to wrap around his waist instead, as he leans down over you, chest to chest, and you feel the flat wet heat of his skin against yours and it makes you shiver. His weight is heavy in the best way, almost grounding. He braces himself on one elbow beside your head and his other hand slides up your rips, thumb dragging along the underside of your left breast.

"Jace."

"Mm."

"Kiss me."

He does, openmouthed and messy and you moan out. He swallows the sound while his hips are moving in slow deep grinds now instead of thrusts, working himself against that spot inside your belly, every roll of him drags the base of his cock against your clit and you feel another orgasm building, low and slow like heat rising in a kettle.

He pulls back from your mouth and trails his lips down your jaw, down the side of your neck, over one of the hickeys he already made, sucking gently, marking it again, and then down, further, to the flushed skin above your breast. His mouth wraps around your nipple and he laps. Slow, flat strokes of his tongue, then he closes his lips around it and sucks, and your back arches off the mattress hard enough that your front presses up against his mouth.

"Oh god-“

"Mhm" he moans at your reaction before switching sides, giving your other boob the same treatment. His tongue circling and his teeth grazing. Once he’s done, he nuzzles into the soft valley between your breasts and presses a kiss there, almost sweet, before he mouths back up to the other side and does it all over again, longer this time, until your nipples are stiff and shiny while you tremble under him.

"Jace- Jace- please, I'm-"

"I know." His voice is thick. "I know, Love, come on, one more."

"I can't."

"You can."

He shifts. Puts his weight on his forearms on either side of your head and drops his forehead to yours, so all you can see is him, dark curls falling forward, freckle on the bridge of his nose you've kissed a thousand times, and his hips pick up a faster and harder pace. The mattress is squeaking now, in earnest, and somewhere in a distant part of your brain you register that the downstairs neighbors' bass has gone quite and you don't care, you don't care about anything except the fact that Jace’s eyes are open and locked on yours and he is looking at you like you're the only thing in the world worth looking at.

"Come on," he pants. "Come on, come on, come on."

Your hand slides down between your bodies. He shifts up a little to give you room as your fingers find your clit, slick with both of your juices combined, you rub tight fast circles and almost immediately your over the edge and coming before you're gone.

You cry out loud, right against his mouth, and he kisses you through it, you clench around him is what does him in. He finally goes still as his whole body tenses. His forehead presses harder into yours and his eyes squeeze shut. He makes the most wrecked sound you have ever heard from him, a broken little "oh, fuck, oh fuck, sweet girl-" and you feel him pulse inside you, hot and thick, he shudders through it with his cock buried as deep as he can get.

The two of you hold there. Both breathing hard. His curls tickling your forehead. Your legs still locked around his hips. Your fingers still tangled in the damp hair at the nape of his neck. Someone in the hall outside is laughing at something on their phone as they pass by, and it's such a mundane sound compared to what just happened that it startles a wet laugh out of you.

He lifts his head. His eyes are soft again. Brown and warm and a little glazed.

"Hi." His voice is a rasp.

"Hi."

"You okay?"

"Mhm." You say nodding.

He pulls out slowly, careful about it, you both wince at the loss. He looks down between your bodies and makes a low, satisfied sound in his throat, and you tilt your chin up to see what he's seeing. His cum is leaking out of you, sliding down onto the pillow he shoved under your hips earlier. He drags two fingers through it and pushes it back into you, slowly and deliberately, the aftershock makes you twitch and gasp.

"Sorry, sorry." He's grinning. He's not sorry. "Couldn't help it."

"You are so-"

"So what."

"So much."

"Mm." He kisses the tip of your nose, and then your cheek, and then your mouth, soft this time, no tongue, just the press of him. "Stay right there. Don't move."

He rolls off you and stands. You watch him walk to the bathroom, naked, the long line of his back, the two dimples at the base of his own spine, the muscled slope of his ass, the back of his thighs. He flicks the bathroom light on and you hear the tap run. You let your head loll to the side. Your body feels like it's melted into the mattress.

He comes back with a warm washcloth folded in his palm, and the softness on his face as he crawls back onto the bed does something painful and specific to your heart. He kneels between your knees and cleans you up with the kind of careful tenderness that used to fluster you back when you were still figuring out how to receive it. Now you just close your eyes and let him. He wipes down the insides of your thighs, and then between your legs, slow and gentle, and then he tosses the washcloth toward the laundry hamper and misses but doesn't care at the moment.

"C'mere." He flops down beside you and drags you into his chest, and you go willingly and he arranges you the way he likes, one of your thighs hooked over his hip, your cheek on his chest, his arm heavy around your back. His hand starts a slow drift up and down your spine.

The candle finally burs out. The room dims to the blue of the streetlight through the rain-streaked window. His heartbeat is a steady, slowing thump under your ear.

"Sofia…" he says, after a long moment.

"Mm?"

"You should text her."

"Oh." You laugh, small and hoarse. "Right."

You reach blindly for your phone on the nightstand. It's got three unread texts and a missed FaceTime. You squint at the screen.

Sof (9:04 PM): where are u

Sof (9:11 PM): hello???

Sof (9:19 PM): girl is jace holding you hostage

You show Jace the screen and he snorts reading it.

"Accurate."

"I hate you."

"Mm hm."

You type back one-handed, thumb clumsy. so sorry babe. wildly detained. love u. tomorrow brunch on me. You add a red heart. You put the phone face down.

Jace's fingers are tracing something on your back and you realize after a second that he's tracing the edges of one of the hickeys he left, thumb rubbing gentle little circles over the sore skin.

"You are absolutely covered," he says, and there's something almost awed in his voice. "Head to toe."

"Whose fault is that."

"Yours." His hand slides up into your hair and cradles the back of your head. "You're the one who bought that dress."

"I bought that dress for girls night.”

"You bought that dress to torture me."

"Same thing."

He huffs a laugh into the top of your head, presses a kiss there. His mouth stays for a second, warm through your hair. You can smell his skin, the clean cedar of his deodorant almost sweated off, the sharper note of his sweat underneath, the faintest ghost of your body oil transferred onto him. You feel very, extremely, unreasonably fond of him. It rises up in your chest like a slow warm tide.

"Hey," you say.

"Hm?"

"I'm keeping the dress."

"I know."

"I'm gonna wear it out. Eventually."

"I know." His hand smooths down your back and comes to rest at the very base of your spine, right where he started. His palm is broad and warm and his fingers spread over both dimples, claiming. "Just, with me."

"Deal."

He hums, low and content, and shifts to pull the duvet up over both of you, tucking it around your shoulder with his free hand, and then he settles back, holding you closer against the long warm line of his body while the rain keeps drumming steady on the window.

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The familiar bustle of the city begins to take over as soon as you reach its outskirts: merchants pull their wagons aside at the first sight of Hightower banners cresting the hills, mothers gather their children away from the roadside, and men bow their heads in polite deference as mounted knights pass in orderly columns, white towers embroidered upon deep green snapping lazily in the wind. 

No one moves to flee or cry out in warning—the smallfolk have quickly adjusted to the growing tensions of war, have learned to recognize an army as it arrives, even without haste or celebration. 

You ride near the front beside Daeron, where a prince ought to be seen—something he’ll grow used to with time, though he has changed considerably from the little boy you’d escorted from King’s Landing all those years ago. The softness of childhood has grown into long limbs and broadening shoulders, his face still unmistakably Alicent’s. 

Oldtown has polished him in quiet ways, you’d made that much certain. He sits his horse as easily as his dragon now and speaks only when he has something worth saying, carrying himself with the effortless courtesy that seems bred into the stones of the great beacon of Oldtown itself. 

He’s no longer a child. 

That realization still catches you off guard, even after all the time you’ve spent beside him. 

Somewhere overhead comes the distant cry of Tessarion, shrill and sharp. You cannot see her yet through the scattered clouds, but every so often sunlight catches the sweep of cobalt wings overhead before she disappears again, circling lazily above the marching host. 

Daeron follows your gaze for only a moment, smiling to himself before looking to the road again. 

“She’s growing impatient.”

“She has good reason to after so much time spent traveling,” you answer, adjusting your grip on the leather reins in your hand. “I imagine her rider shares the sentiment.”

His laugh is quiet, but it’s answer enough. 

There’s always been some comfort in how easily conversation comes with him—before leaving court, you’d almost forgotten that a royal child could laugh without looking over their shoulder first. 

For a while, the only sounds are hooves striking packed earth, the steady creak of wagons somewhere farther back within Ormund’s column, and the distant calls of outriders moving between ranks. Ahead, the city proper begins to rise from the haze as buildings press more closely together, knitting into winding streets and crowded alleyways. 

Beyond them, the towers of the Red Keep climb above the landscape like fingers reaching toward the sky. 

Home, you think automatically, even as your heart aches at the unfamiliarity of it all. 

The note that Alicent’s raven had brought a few days earlier rests tucked safely inside your saddlebag, though by now you’ve memorized every line. 

Aegon is gone, Larys Strong with him. Aemond rules now in his brother’s stead. 

You had read it once in disbelief the moment it had arrived when you’d stopped to make camp, then again by lamplight after supper, again the following morning, and once more before departing. Perhaps a part of you believed that the repetition alone might coax some different meaning from the ink, but it never had. 

Days spent riding have done little to quiet your imagination. If anything, the silence and the endless beating of hooves have fed it. 

You find yourself remembering Aemond as the little boy who had once preferred the palace libraries to the training yards whenever he thought no one was watching, who insisted on sitting impossibly straight even while reading—as though slouching might somehow diminish him. He had always been solemn and studious, serious beyond his years, forever trying to convince the world that he needed nothing from anyone. 

After the harrowing events at Driftmark, you remember how he’d reached for you the first time the maester had come to change his bandages, how you’d smoothed his hair back from his brow. He had gone strangely still beneath the touch and had watched you all the while with his remaining eye. You remember, too, finding him alone a few days later, not quite crying; his jaw had been clenched so tightly that you wondered whether his teeth might crack beneath the strain. 

“I am fine,” he had insisted before you’d spoken a single word. Hardly ten years old and already, he had mistaken endurance for strength. 

Beside you, Daeron breaks the silence, making you jolt slightly against the saddle. 

“Do you think mother has changed much?” You glance toward him but he keeps his attention ahead, though uncertainty lingers in his voice as he continues. “It’s been such a long time, I just—I wonder…”

“I imagine she’ll be quite shocked with how tall you’ve grown,” you say, smiling easily at the thought of your beloved sister, at having her close once more. 

A beat passes between the two of you. A bird calls out, probably a gull from the bay. Your horse snorts. 

For a fleeting moment, all of this feels impossibly easy. 

“And… and Aemond?” he says quietly, giving voice to the question both of you have been circling since Alicent’s letter reached you. “Do you think he’ll be glad to see us?”

You hold his gaze only briefly before looking back toward the city, back toward those impossibly high towers as you try to picture him somewhere inside—a man you no longer know. 

“He’ll be glad of Tessarion,” you say at last, feeling Daeron’s gaze as it lingers on you. He knows well enough not to challenge your answer, and you know he’s smart enough to pick up on everything you choose not to say. 

Sighing, you shift slightly atop your horse, trying to ignore the way your pulse kicks up as you draw closer to the castle gates. In a bid to keep your thoughts from spiraling further, you attempt to focus on the city—on crowded market stalls and fishermen unloading the morning’s catch, on the bells of the Sept ringing as they signal the time, on the sails of distant ships bobbing in the Blackwater. 

Still, you cannot help but notice that there are more Gold Cloaks than you remember, more guards posted atop the battlements, and more eyes lifting instinctively toward the sky as Tessarion’s shadow passes overhead. 

The gates open, the sound carrying across the yard as heavy timbers groan against ancient hinges. 

I am home, you think again, though the word fits no better than it did the first time. 

Stablehands hurry forward to take reins from weary riders, servants weave between carts laden with supplies from Oldtown, and somewhere across the inner courtyard a steward begins directing men toward quarters prepared days before your arrival. The Hightower banners that had fluttered so proudly along the road are lowered one by one, no longer needed now that you’ve reached your destination. 

You’ve scarcely swung yourself down from your horse before familiar voices begin calling Daeron’s name. Guards who had only known him as a small boy bid him welcome with respectful bows, various attendants offer polite curtsies, and it strikes you then just how long he’s been gone. 

Just then, a movement at the top of the stone steps draws your eye—Alicent. For one impossible heartbeat, you see her as the dutiful older sister you had left behind years ago, looking as she always had. 

Then reality catches up. 

Time has been no kinder to her than it is to anyone else, but it seems to have landed differently upon your sister. She is still beautiful in the same ways she always was—wide eyes, shining coppery hair, a warm smile—though grief has carved itself into the corners of her mouth and left shadows beneath her eyes. Green remains her color, as ever, yet even that familiar emerald shade seems muted against the invisible weight she carries. 

Daeron reaches her first and hardly has time to draw air into his lungs before Alicent gathers him into her arms; he returns the embrace without hesitation, one hand settling securely between her shoulders. 

“Gods, you’re nearly a man grown,” the words leave her in a shuddered exhale, something caught between a laugh and a sob. 

“Mother,” he says so quietly you nearly miss it in all the commotion, as if the word is foreign on his tongue. “I missed you.”

One hand rises to cup his cheek like she’s reassuring herself he’s truly here, standing before her—that he is flesh and blood rather than another son slipping beyond her reach. Her thumb brushes once across his skin as she studies his face with an impossibly wide smile, pride clear on her features for the first time in longer than she would care to admit. 

“You haven’t the faintest idea,” she starts, shaking her head, “how much I’ve missed you.”

A moment later, their embrace loosens and her shoulders straighten, a quiet propriety settling over her once more as she turns to you. 

Whatever restraint she’d attempted to force upon herself dies in an instant.

She crosses the remaining distance between you without ceremony, wrapping both arms around you with a quiet, shaky exhale that she quickly buries against your shoulder. You hold her just as tightly, huffing out a laugh as the familiar scent of her washes over you—sweet and delicate and all her own. 

For a few seconds, everything seems to fall away. There is no court, no war, no throne—only the two of you, standing exactly as you had countless times before the world grew so much larger than either of you had ever wished it to be. 

When she pulls back, her composure has returned, but only just. 

“I missed you,” she says softly, that familiar wry smile on her lips—as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. 

“As I have missed you, sister.”

Something fragile flickers across her face before disappearing almost as quickly as it came as she wrings her hands, scanning the courtyard. 

“We shouldn’t remain here.”

You nod, knowing there will be time later for conversations and niceties and attempts to bridge the years between you. 

Ladies-in-waiting fall into step behind you as the three of you make your way deeper into the castle. The once-familiar corridors seem narrower than you remember, crowded now with messengers carrying sealed letters, guards changing posts, and whispering maids—all of whom fall abruptly silent as you pass by. 

Everything is exactly how you’d left it, truly, and yet it feels as if the stone walls themselves are holding their breath, waiting for the other shoe to fall. 

“Aegon left three days before your arrival,” Alicent says at last, keeping her voice low enough that only you and Daeron can hear. “Larys Strong departed with him. No one knows where.” 

You had known as much from her raven but hearing the words spoken aloud somehow makes them feel real—less like a rumor and more like a loss. 

“And Aemond assumed control immediately?” You question, earning a silent nod in reply, her lips pressed tightly together. “So everyone simply…” you pause, searching for the right word, “...accepts it?”

“They accept necessity,” she answers without hesitation, looking over her shoulder before glancing back toward you. “We do not have the luxury of time.” 

She says no more than that, but she doesn’t need to. You understand well enough what remains unspoken—King’s Landing is being held together by routine and the looming uncertainty of Rhaenyra’s inevitable arrival. 

Silence stretches between you for several paces before you break it, unable to tamp down the cautious curiosity within you. 

“And what of Aemond?”

“You will see him soon enough.”

There’s something in the way she says it—the quiet resignation of someone who, despite every attempt to the contrary, has found that the only way out is through. 

The corridors begin to widen as you get closer to the Great Hall, its heavy wooden doors lying ahead, standing open beneath banners bearing the three-headed dragon. Voices drift faintly from within, bleeding through the space in hushed murmurs. 

“He should still be here,” Alicent says, stiffly looking between you and Daeron. “Come.”

Your feet move before your mind can protest. Despite all the many hours you’ve had to imagine this meeting, now that it has arrived, you discover that you were never truly prepared for it at all. 

Inside, the throne room is more somber than you remember it being, stripped of the usual pomp and circumstance that comes with a public court. Any petitioners or noblemen that were here have departed, leaving behind only a handful of men gathered near the foot of the Iron Throne; Maester Orwyle stands with several rolled parchments tucked beneath one arm while Lord Wylde speaks in measured tones, giving the last of some report from what you can make out. 

Contrary to what you’d feared, there are no raised voices; instead, there’s an eerie calm. 

You can’t seem to decide which is worse. 

Despite its placidity, there’s still a carefulness that lingers in the air—a deliberate weighing of every word. These men are long accustomed to kings and councils but even they seem to measure themselves warily. 

Slowly, your gaze rises to the throne itself, to where Aemond sits bareheaded, absent of the rubied crown that Aegon had worn. It had departed the city with him, leaving behind only the Iron Throne itself and the man who now occupies it. Somehow, the missing symbol of legitimacy fails to diminish him; if anything, it makes him appear sharper. 

He has no need for the authority of Valyrian steel when he believes he possesses enough of his own. 

One hand rests lightly against the arm of the throne as he listens to the men before him with a sharp gaze. Your mind whirls as you try to reconcile the image before you with the boy you’d once known—there is nothing boyish left in him now. Even from across the hall, he carries himself with an absolute certainty that hadn’t been there before. 

“How many men remain posted at the River Gate?”

“Two hundred, Your Grace.”

“And how many have seen battle?”

“Perhaps…” Lord Wylde hesitates briefly, “only half?”

Aemond nods once, head tilting to the side just slightly as he lets out a thoughtful hum. 

“Then replace the rest.”

“Your Grace,” Wylde begins carefully, “we are already strapped for—”

“Do you think an army of untested boys capable of defending the city from the threats Rhaenyra brings, my lord?” His tone is soft, though laced with a hardness that makes it clear this is a question he does not want answered. “See that it is done.” 

“As you command.”

He is good at this, the thought comes to you unbidden, almost painfully. The solemn little boy who had spent entire afternoons with his nose buried in dusty tomes, who had longed to be taken seriously—to no longer be a mere second son—appears to have gotten what he had so desperately wanted. 

Silence settles again as Lord Wylde turns and takes his leave, pausing only to offer the three of you a polite bow, followed by Maester Orwyle who does the same. Their footsteps echo softly across the cavernous hall until the doors are pulled closed behind them. 

It’s only then that Aemond’s gaze lands on you. 

For a second, hardly a second, something perilously close to relief shifts over his face before vanishing so completely that you wonder if you’re inventing mercies where none exist. 

You share an impossibly heavy glance with Alicent as he stands from the throne and saunters down the sword-lined steps, his hands clasped behind his back while he makes his way over to the three of you. He’s grown tall in your absence, formidable with broad shoulders and a restrained strength. There’s a surety in him now that had been missing before, the relaxed confidence of a man who knows his capabilities very, very well. 

“You have returned,” he murmurs, coming to a stop before you. There’s no warmth in his tone, no familiarity. He offers nothing else—not your name, not aunt, not even a question of your travels or your health. 

“So I have,” you say in return, bowing your head politely, if only to give yourself something to do. 

He studies you for only a second longer before drifting to Daeron at your side. You can see him shift in your periphery, practically thrumming with a confused excitement—was he missed? Was he not? Where is the ease of family?

“Your dragon will be of good use to us,” Aemond says. “I trust you have been trained well?”

Daeron inclines his head with the same courtesy he has shown every step of the journey from Oldtown, though you don’t miss the way he seems to deflate a little as his shoulders lose their sharpness. 

“Yes,” he answers with a nod, looking at Alicent as she places a hand on his shoulder. “I am glad to be of service.”

“Mm,” Aemond hums, giving a single nod, no sign that he has spent years apart from the brother standing before him. 

Despite yourself, you search his face anyway, looking for a trace of the boy who had once followed you through halls asking questions far too large for his age. 

Yet, you find only the king. 

Beside you, Alicent exhales softly, smoothing a hand over her skirts. 

“We should leave you to your work,” she says to him, each word too tight—too formal. “Besides,” she continues, turning her attention to you and her youngest son, “I must show you both to your chambers.” 

As you take your leave, following closely behind Daeron as the three of you make your way out of the Great Hall, you can feel his stare on your back. 

The following day, afternoon sunlight spills so warmly through the Keep’s gardens that it’s easy to momentarily forget how precarious everything is, how the entire realm seems poised on a knife’s edge. 

The fountains bubble softly into still pools, birds chirp as they flit from tree to tree, and roses climb sun-warmed stone. You watch as a butterfly dances between flowers, suddenly struck by the fact that it knows nothing of dragons, nor kings, nor the weight of crowns. 

That is why you’ve always tended to seek solace here—nature has always possessed the enviable habit of simply carrying on. 

For a while, neither you nor your sister says anything as you walk side-by-side, the gravel pathway crunching underfoot. A gentle wind wafts over you, rustling the neatly pruned hedges, and you take a second to glance over at her. 

Alicent’s hands are folded neatly before her in an attempt to hide her bloodied cuticles—a nervous habit she never quite outgrew. 

“I’m sure you’re glad for the breeze the bay brings in,” she says after a time, a faint smile touching the corners of her lips, “given how humid Oldtown can be.”

“Definitely,” you nod, taking a second to look up at the winding branches of a particularly old chestnut tree. “The air there could be stifling at times.”

Conversation comes easier after that, the two of you quickly filling the silence. You speak of the journey here, of Ormund’s tendency to be a spendthrift, of Daeron’s understated confidence and how naturally he has seemed to grow into himself. Alicent listens more than she speaks, asking after small details that you’d never thought to include in the many letters you had sent her over the years. 

Does he still forget to eat when he’s learning a new song on his lute?

Does he still insist on rising at dawn?

Does he still not take well to compliments?

Each answer earns a small smile from her or a breathy laugh or quick quip, though none of it quite erases the shadows beneath her eyes. Still, it’s enough to give you a glimpse of the sister you’d known as a child. 

The longer the two of you walk and talk, the more you find yourself speaking of Oldtown itself. You each share childhood memories of watching merchant ships dock in the harbor and of evenings spent beneath the glow of the great beacon. Both of you seem to long for those quiet days that, at the time, had felt unbearably ordinary, though now they seem more like an untouchable luxury. 

Still, the longer you talk, the more it feels as if each of you is carefully side-stepping the one glaring thing that weighs most heavily on your mind, as if neither of you wishes to arrive at it and break whatever sweet spell you’re under. 

Eventually, it becomes unavoidable. 

“He will not hear me,” she says at last as she slows beside one of the fountains, watching sunlight scatter across its rippling surface. You don’t need to ask who she means, you both know well enough. “I have tried as his counsel, as his mother,” she continues quietly; a faint, humorless smile crosses her lips, “none of them reached him.”

“What is it you wished for him to hear?”

Sighing, she doesn’t answer immediately. Her brows furrow as she resumes walking, her skirts whispering softly over the pathway. 

“I—I want peace,” she says simply before stopping again, so suddenly that you whip around to face her. She’s not looking at you, not at first. Instead, she’s gazing at the ground as if wishing it would swallow her whole, teeth worrying at her bottom lip.

“Sister, has something—”

“I went to Dragonstone,” she whispers, so faintly that for a moment, you’re sure you must have misheard her. She must see it as a million questions immediately flood your mind, each more incredulous than the last, because she quickly continues. “I didn’t go because—because I believed Rhaenyra would simply forgive me,” the words pour from her, “nor because I imagined she had suddenly forgotten all that has transpired between our families, I just…”

She lowers her eyes, wringing her hands. 

“I had to know that she might still choose not to burn the realm,” her words are almost sheepish, like a child confessing an inane fear, “that she too had considered… negotiations, a way through this without—without—”

She needn’t give it voice. 

For several moments, you say nothing, instead blinking up at the sun overhead, like it may provide you with some great wisdom. Shock flows through you, a steady thrum in your veins, but beneath that an understanding begins to rise. You know your sister and for all her many faults, you have never known her to be rash nor willfully careless. 

Peace no longer promises triumph, perhaps it never did—you’d seen your brother-in-law make that mistake many times over the course of his long reign. But it may promise fewer widows, fewer orphans left to the streets, fewer graves dug into damp earth. 

Of course she’d had to try, you think, absentmindedly fiddling with a loose thread at the hem of one sleeve, that is still something worth seeking.

“Aegon could be… managed,” you say quietly. Alicent sighs beside you, her eyes closing as she gives a single nod. 

“Yes.”

“Aemond cannot.”

“No,” she whispers, the word landing heavily between you, “and that is what frightens me.”

Her voice wavers, causing you to instinctively reach toward her. Stepping closer, you wind your hands around hers, jaw set against the sudden tightness at the back of your throat as her gaze finally finds yours. The tiredness there makes your heart ache. 

“If Aemond remains in the capital, Rhaenyra will come eventually, she’ll have no choice,” she says lowly, leaning closer to you, “but Daemon holds Harrenhal, alongside Caraxes, several dragonseeds, and a growing army.” Your pulse grows louder as she speaks, an incessant drum in your ear. “Vhagar is mighty, but she is one dragon.”

She pauses, looking toward the Red Keep as it towers above the gardens. 

“And one rider,” she finishes, her eyes flicking to yours. 

The finality in her gaze, along with the million words she cannot say, make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. 

“If Aemond were to ride for the Riverlands…” you start, your eyes remaining fixed on hers, “he may not return.”

“Yes.”

“And—and if he stays?”

“Then the war will come here,” she nods, tensing for an instant, “and thousands will die.”

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip as the implication of her words hangs over the two of you, heavy with the weight of an impossible choice. You know better than to argue with her, knowing that what she says is true. “I need you to speak with him.”

“Me?” you balk, jolting a pace back from her as if you’d been burnt. 

“He will not hear me.”

“Sister—”

“He was so fond of you as a child,” she implores, desperation bleeding into the edges of her voice. “You may still be able to—”

“The man I saw yesterday,” you cut her off, shaking your head, “did not look like someone waiting to be persuaded.”

“No—no, I suppose not.” 

The simplicity of her answer causes a frustrated huff to spill from you as you pace about the small alcove the two of you have found yourselves in, the sunlight on your skin suddenly stifling. 

“He isn’t the boy I left behind,” you manage, the words tight in your throat. 

“I know,” she says, reaching out to steady you in the same way you had done for her only moments ago, “but he is still my son.”

The grief in her voice nearly undoes you, like she’s mourned him before he’s even left—like she’s done it a dozen times before now. 

You think of the throne room the day before, of the man sitting where Viserys once had, who now seems little more than a stranger to you, and of Daeron’s face after being dismissed as little more than another dragon rider. 

Most of all, you remember the split-second of relief that had flickered across Aemond’s face before it had vanished. 

Staring off at a hazy point in the distance, you’re unable to decide which frightens you more—that the boy you had loved is truly gone, or that a small part of him still remains beneath everything that time has forced him to become. 

You draw a slow breath, looking out across the gardens where branches continue to sway in the afternoon breeze, utterly indifferent to the burden resting upon your shoulders. The backs of your eyes sting as you let them flutter shut for a moment, willing your breaths to steady. 

“I—I will speak with him.”

She nods and squeezes your hand, though neither of you speak again as you make your way back toward the castle. Nothing has changed, not really. Birds still sing and flowers still bloom and butterflies still dance between them, yet everything feels colder than it had only an hour before. 

The task before you feels impossible—how are you supposed to reach someone when you’re no longer certain any part of them still exists?

In the few hours since you’ve spoken to your sister, night has settled heavily over the castle. Your steps echo in the quiet corridor as you make your way to Aemond's—to the king’s—chambers, alone in hallways that are usually filled with guards, servants, and the occasional messenger. Torchlight pools across the old stones, stretching in long shadows that sway and flicker with every draft that slips in through the narrow slit windows. 

You approach the chambers that had belonged to Aegon only days ago. One of the guards posted outside nods his head as you come to a stop, announcing your arrival while opening the doors for you. 

A fire burns in the hearth, throwing amber light across the tapestried walls. According to Alicent, he had altered many things already. She spoke of orders to servants to stock the shelves with various old tomes, to move in his personal belongings, and to rid the place of emptied wine flagons. 

Even still, the room itself seems to remember Aegon, as if frozen in the transition between owners.

Aemond occupies a chair before the fire, one leg stretched before him as a forgotten book rests atop his other thigh. He looks up as the doors thud closed once more, leaving the two of you alone. 

“Mother sent you,” he murmurs, not bothering to question it. 

“She did,” you answer, stepping further into the room. That earns you the faintest tilt of his head as something like interest passes across his face. 

“Mm,” he hums, “at least you do not insult me with denial.”

“I see no purpose in lying to you, Aemond.”

“How novel,” he says through a dry huff of laughter. His gaze moves over you with a calm precision that makes your spine straighten despite yourself. “Though I suppose you were always cleverer than that.”

His words catch somewhere you didn’t expect, the faint familiarity in them making the absence of any tenderness all the more jarring. You remember, absurdly, a solemn little boy leaning over a library table as he asked whether intelligence or courage mattered more. 

You had told him that you supposed it merely depended on who survived long enough to use either. 

That same little boy isn’t the one looking back at you now. 

“You remember enough to flatter me, nephew.”

“I remember a great many things,” he says, calm but pointed. 

Neither of you speaks as you move to stand more in front of him, your back warmed by the fire as you watch the light of it move over the hard lines of his face, catching in the pale fall of his hair and the sapphire set where his left eye should be. He looks more human here than he had on the throne, away from all those swords and watching eyes. 

He’s handsome like this, the thought comes unbidden. Perhaps this would be easier if age had been less kind to him. 

“You may sit,” he says at last, gesturing toward a matching chair that sits beside him. 

“I prefer to stand,” you say, remaining where you are as if rooted to the spot. He studies you for a long while, tracking the slow shift of your hips before returning, almost reluctantly, to your face.

“As you wish.”

The silence that follows is unnerving—he appears to have no desire to fill it and, as the seconds wear on, you begin to wonder if it is a test of some kind. For what, you cannot yet say. Perhaps he’s waiting to see if you’ll begin, if you’ll falter when you do, whether you have come as a messenger, an aunt, a spy, or something less easily named. 

Finally, you can take it no longer. 

“My prince—”

His gaze lifts immediately to that, sharp and insistent. 

“My king,” you correct, internally berating yourself for giving him any sort of upper hand. 

Aemond tilts his head slightly, satisfaction kept so tightly leashed that anyone else may not have noticed it at all. “You found the word eventually.”

“I apologize,” you say, shifting your weight from foot to foot while you inhale shakily. “I am—I am finding many things difficult tonight.”

“I imagine you are,” he answers too quickly, too smoothly, like he’d already anticipated the conversation before you had even entered the room. You’re reminded of the way he’d simply listened in the throne room the day before: patient and scrutinizing, allowing men space enough to reveal their hand. 

“The castle talks,” you try, though he gives you nothing in return. 

“It always has.”

“This is different—”

“No,” he replies, leaning back in his chair as if he hasn’t a care in the world. “There are always whispers but it is merely the idle chatter of smallfolk, nothing more.”

“Aegon is gone—” 

“I am aware, yes.”

“Then you must also be aware of what that looks like,” you say, the words coming more sharply than you intend, “of what it implies.”

At that, his expression shifts by a fraction, cooling faintly as if you’d veered off of whatever script he has in his head. “It looks like the realm is being governed in my brother’s absence,” he mutters.”

“Aemond, it looks like uncertainty—”

“Necessity.”

“To those inside these walls, perhaps,” you say, forcing yourself to remain calm despite the way your pulse hums beneath your skin. “But outside? To the city? To any of Rhaenyra’s supporters waiting for any fracture that they might widen into a wound?”

He watches you for a long moment, the firelight throwing half of his face into shadow. 

“You sound like my mother,” he sighs, dismissive. 

Your throat works as you swallow thickly, your hands tightening into fists at your sides before you catch yourself and will them to relax. 

“I have spent many years away from this court and even I can still see it plainly,” you start, your voice low enough to draw his attention once more. “Let me speak the words everyone else here is too frightened to say.”

That gives him pause, you see it in the way a muscle jumps in his cheek, in the way his shoulders tense and his fingers tighten around the arm of his chair. 

“The servants speak. Soon the city will, then the realm. It will get back to Rhaenyra and she will use it as a weapon in her hand before you ever have the chance to drum up a counterattack,” you say quickly, not wanting to give him a chance to cut you off. “You are not daft, Aemond. Surely you know this to be true.”

“The city will believe whatever it is commanded to believe.”

“No,” you shake your head, brows slightly raised. “It will believe whatever best explains its fear, which is precisely why you cannot remain here.” 

The words hang between you before he gives a dry, humorless laugh. Disappointment flashes across his face, as if he’d hoped you had come for a reason other than to parrot his mother’s words at him. 

“So,” he sighs, nodding once to himself, “this is why you came.”

“Daemon sits at Harrenhal gathering men beneath Rhaenyra’s banners while you remain behind these walls waiting for the war to arrive at your doorstep,” you press on, unwilling to surrender any ground you may have been granted. His eye follows you immediately, dropping only for a heartbeat before lifting again as though nothing had happened. “Every day he’s left unchallenged, another river lord bends the knee and more men join his host.”

Aemond’s expression betrays nothing as you continue, though you don’t miss the way his lips press together in annoyance. 

“This war hinges on the Riverlands,” you say, determined to get the words out. “You know that as well as anyone.”

“And so my aunt would have me abandon my capital.”

“I would have you seize this initiative before it is too late.”

“And leave the city leaderless while my dearest brother remains missing?” His eye narrows, the corners of his lips twitching into an incredulous smirk. 

“You have a council,” you try. “And Prince Daeron, and your mother—”

“My mother is a fool,” he interrupts, “a snake with two tongues, so poisoned by Rhaenyra that she cannot see Harrenhal for what it is—a trap.”

Inhaling a shuddered breath, you bite at your bottom lip, swallowing thickly. 

“Daemon wants you to hesitate,” you counter, “by remaining here, you’re merely obliging him.”

For the first time since you entered, he doesn’t appear to have anything to say in return. His lips tighten as he glances around the dim chambers, blinking while his chest rises and falls unsteadily. You think of Alicent in the gardens, hiding her bloodied cuticles beneath folded hands, of the grief in her voice. You think of Daeron deflating by inches beneath the weight of his brother’s cool assessment. 

You think of the boy after Driftmark, choking on the pain he would rather swallow than share. 

He scoffs, the sound almost like a laugh, if there were any warmth to it. “You have been in Oldtown too long, aunt,” he says sharply, “surrounded by maesters that flatter themselves to believe that wars are won upon maps rather than by the men who fight them.”

“And you have been here too long if you believe this city would not fall were Rhaenyra forced to challenge you head on.”

He falters once more, glancing about the room for a split second before his expression hardens once more.

“I have Vhagar,” he starts with an easy confidence, shrugging his shoulders just slightly as if any counter to her mere presence means nothing at all, “and Tessarion, the city watch, scores of soldiers—”

“You hear yourself, don’t you?” You murmur before you can stop yourself, mouth shutting tightly as Aemond goes quiet, his stare cutting as he glares at you. Even as your pulse seems to falter in your chest, you cannot help but feel a small thrill shoot down your spine as irritation flashes plainly over his face—the first true sign of any weakness he may have left. 

“You think me ambitious,” he mutters after a tense moment, his voice slightly softer than it had been before. 

“I think you are too intelligent not to understand how this ends.”

He huffs, annoyed, and shakes his head incredulously. The harshness you’d managed to strip away before climbs back into his angular features and when he speaks next, it’s with the same condescension one would use to scold a small child. 

“Aegon abandoned the throne, he fled,” he starts, each word slow and measured. “He was never a man, not as he should’ve been,” he continues, his voice carrying an edge sharp enough to cut. “He remained a boy who drank too much and hid behind skirts because no one expected him to become anyone worth following.”

The more he speaks, the clearer you see why your sister fears him so—his viciousness rarely begins with invention, each word carries a truth to it that he’s learned to observe and sharpen until it becomes useful to him. 

“And you?” you ask, determined not to falter further—to see this through. “You’re sure you want it?”

His eye narrows. “The throne?”

“The burden of it,” you murmur, tilting your head just slightly as you regard him. “The very same that crushed your brother under its weight and led Viserys to become what little he became.”

For an instant, it’s as if the room tightens around the question, tensing like the air itself is waiting for a blow. 

Aemond rises then, unhurriedly, as if he’s simply grown bored of sitting rather than because you’ve struck anything near vulnerable. It strikes you once more how tall he’s become, formidable and fearsome enough to make good on the threats he utters. Whatever softness remained in him from childhood has been cleanly carved away, replaced with discipline and war. 

“I want victory,” he answers, taking a few measured steps toward you. 

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” he concedes, pursing his lips, “but it is the only answer that matters.”

“Or it’s the answer men give when the truth is less flattering.”

His head tilts at that as he comes to a stop before you, hands clasped behind his back. The firelight dancing over his face makes the sapphire in his eye socket glimmer, beautiful and infinitely dangerous all at once. 

“And what truth do you imagine you’ve uncovered, aunt?”

A small voice in the back of your mind bids you to stop—anyone wiser most likely would—but you tamp it down, throat working as you swallow against the nervous tightness at the back of it. Alicent had not sent you here to be wise, not entirely. 

“You deal in cruelty,” you start slowly, watching him as closely as he watches you, “because you are scared—terrified of seeming weak.”

The silence that follows is immediate and absolute, like all the air has been pulled from the room. 

“Careful,” he mutters lowly from between clenched teeth, the word venomous enough to have your hair standing on end. 

“But you’re not weak, you never were,” you press on, using the split second of surprise that crosses his face to step forward just enough to rest a hand lightly on his shoulder, ignoring the wanting shiver that moves through you at the contact. “You have the makings of a great king—a better king than Aegon could’ve been, you said as much yourself.”

His lips part, but no sound comes out. For a terrifying instant, he seems caught between pulling away entirely and giving in. Then his lilac eye darts to your lips, so quickly you wonder if you imagined it as your heart seizes in your chest.

The gesture strikes something buried deep in your memory of a boy scarcely older than eleven blushing scarlet when one of Aegon’s lordling friends had laughingly declared that he would make some maiden very happy one day. He had looked at you then with exactly the same startled intensity before fleeing from the room altogether. 

“I know you, Aemond,” you say softly, pressing half a step closer. Your hand shifts, moving from his shoulder to his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing beneath your fingertips.

“You have been away half of my life, you cannot—”

His eye flickers downward, following the movement of your hand where it rests against his chest. It’s such an ordinary thing—so quiet, so simple—that for one instant, you see him as he once was: no taller than your neckline, questioning you about whether it was better to be strong or kind. The illusion is gone almost as quickly as it comes, swallowed beneath the hard line of his jaw as his gaze meets yours once more. 

“And still, I know you,” you murmur, victory within your sights, “I loved you—”

For the briefest of instances, he goes completely still before you. Every part of him seems to lock up, as if the words struck a part of his mind that cannot make sense of them. His lilac eye glistens, and your lungs tighten, and—

His hand is around your throat, not crushing but firm enough to silence you.

“Loved me?” he echoes, his voice dangerously soft as he leans in close enough that you can feel his breath ghost over your lips. “Is this how you show it? By coming to whisper pretty words? By lecturing me about being some frightened boy?” His fingers tighten just slightly, enough to make your next inhale a struggle.

“Tell me,” he growls, “do I look like a boy to you now?” His thumb presses harder against the hollow of your throat, his eye blazing with something dangerously close to satisfaction as he studies the way your pulse flutters beneath his touch. 

Your throat works beneath this palm as you eke out a feeble, half-formed whimper, your hands scrambling for purchase against his forearm. Knees weakening, you shake your head as much as his grip will allow, not daring to take your eyes off of his. A strange pins and needles feeling begins to grow beneath your skin as the edges of your vision blur, and then darken. 

Blessedly, he loosens his grip just enough to allow you to suck in a lungful of air—gasping, heaving, and spluttering. 

You had been so close only moments ago, you had seen the cracks in him. Perhaps, a small, desperate part of you thinks, if I give him this—

“I was—I was merely trying to counsel you—”

The moment your feeble protests reach his ears, Aemond’s patience shatters. A derisive scoff escapes him as he drags you toward the chair he’d occupied earlier, his grip on your shoulder unrelenting. The chair groans faintly as he shoves you over its arm, your body bent at the waist beneath his hands while your breaths come in ragged, uneven gasps. Your fingers dig into the material of it as you brace yourself, nearly forced onto your tip-toes. 

His voice, when he speaks, is a blade pressed to you—cold and unyielding. 

“Counsel?” He sneers, leaning over you, his weight pinning you in place. “You mistake your place, aunt. You are not my advisor, not my equal.” His hand finds the back of your neck, fingers tightening just enough to have you stilling beneath him. “I will not tolerate deception, no matter how prettily you dress it up.”

You pant, whining as the arm of the chair digs into your waist, though you don’t dare move, even as your cheek is pressed against the seat cushion. You nearly jolt as he presses more firmly against you, eyes widening as the hard line of his arousal becomes more and more prominent. 

“A-Aemond, please, just—just stop and think,” you try, knowing well that that’s a bygone notion. His hips move against you and, shamefully, a shiver rolls down your spine—a mixture of anxiety and something far more treacherous. “I wasn’t—wasn’t trying to—”

“You thought yourself clever, didn’t you?” he murmurs, his free hand tracing the curve of your hip with mocking gentleness. “Coming here to question me, to control me, as though I would simply bow my head and thank you for the wisdom.” His fingers dig more harshly into your skin, hard enough to bruise. “You were wrong.”

Your cheeks flush somehow further with each word he utters, his touch like fire on your skin. Even as your head spins, you desperately try to think back to your reason for coming to him at all—Alicent, Daeron, the city itself.

“I—I shouldn’t have pushed you,” you say, voice trembling. “I have never been your—your enemy, Aemond,” you pant, shaking your head as best you can as you attempt to look over your shoulder, to catch his gaze. “I only want what’s best—”

He lets out a low, dark chuckle as he presses a hand over your mouth, silencing any protests you have left. His fingers flex slightly, savoring the warmth of your lips beneath his palm, the way your breath hitches in surprise. He leans down, his voice a whisper against your ear, low with intent. 

“You still think of me as a child,” he says, his free hand bundling the silk of your gown against your skin as he drags your skirts higher and higher with a deliberate slowness, baring your skin to him. “As though I’m little more than some thoughtless brute, such as Aegon.”

Whimpering beneath his palm, it settles over you—for the first time all evening—how woefully unprepared you were to come here, to face him. 

You squeeze your eyes shut as your skin warms as a traitorous pang of desire rises within you when his palm trails up the back of your thigh, possessive and firm but laced with an impossible reverence that steals what little air remains in your lungs. 

“They gave you away to Oldtown,” he mutters so softly you wonder if he realizes he’s spoken at all, “when you should’ve been mine.”

Settling on the curve of your backside, his fingers press against the soft flesh there and a satisfied hum escapes him as firelight catches the arousal between your thighs—proof that your body knows its place even if your tongue struggles to obey. 

“All that talk, and yet so quick to yield,” he murmurs, dragging his fingers through the slick heat of you, his voice dripping with cruel amusement. His fingers slide deeper, teasing at your entrance but not yet granting the sweet relief of filling you—not yet. “Tell me, which part of you should I believe? Your sweet words, or your traitorous body?”

Your body seems to move of its own accord as you squirm, chasing the press of his fingers as much as your position will allow. A muffled whine spills from you as your walls spasm around nothing, instinct driving you. 

He withdraws his hand abruptly, leaving you empty and shuddering, before replacing it with the one over your mouth, smearing your own wetness against your lips and cheeks. 

“You shame yourself for this, don’t you?” he murmurs, shifting just enough to free his cock from his trousers, his length already hard and heavy against your thigh, making your skin prickle with apprehension. He groans as he drags his tip through your slick folds, teasing but not giving in quite yet. “How long has it been since someone’s had you properly, sweet aunt? Since you’ve been reminded of your place?”

Panting, you press back against him as he taunts you, need threaded through each movement. 

His palm presses harder against your lips as he pushes inside with a single, brutal thrust, filling you in one smooth motion. A sharp, satisfied exhale escapes him at the feel of you—tight, wet, his. His free hand rests at your hip, gripping tightly as he holds you in place. 

“Mmph!” you mewl, squirming as your feet falter against the stone floor, knees weakening at the stretch of him. Your vision blurs, eyes nearly rolling to the back of your head. 

“This is how you should be—how you should’ve always been,” he hisses, his voice rough with arousal and something darker—something dangerously possessive. “By my side, as my queen—not hidden away beneath duty.” He pulls back only to snap his hips forward again, forcing a choked gasp from behind his hand.

Nodding, something you’ll tell yourself later was merely a bid to appease him, all you can do is claw at the cushions while he takes.

His pace is unforgiving, each thrust deeper than the last, each one punctuated by the quiet slap of skin against skin. He keeps his hand over your lips, reveling in the sound of your muffled cries, in the way your body clenches around him, in the way you yield—finally, finally—to his will. 

Aemond’s breath comes harsh and hot against your ear as he fucks into you, slowing his strokes to deliberate rolls of his hips while he savors you. His fingers dig into your hip, nails biting against your skin, marking you as his. The sound of your faint pleas only spurs him on, his voice coming as a dark whisper against your back. 

“You thought to counsel me—to command me—when all you truly wanted was this,” he growls, dragging his hand between your legs and moving the pad of his thumb over your clit in rough, punishing circles. His thrusts grow sharper, his cock dragging against your walls in a way that makes your thighs tremble. “To be mine,” he grunts, “just as you always should’ve been.”

His free hand remains firm over your mouth, silencing any retort you might have—not that you could form one, not with the way he’s moving against you, nor with the way pleasure coils tight and desperate in your belly.

“I will win this war for you,” he promises, teeth grazing the curve of your shoulder. “I will mount Daemon’s head on a spike and lay it at your feet, I will throw a feast in your honor, and you will never forget who it was that brought you victory.” His fingers press harder against your clit, his pace unrelenting. “And when it’s done, I will have you in the Sept as my bride,” he murmurs through rough pants. “I will right their wrongs, I swear it to you.”

One of your arms comes up and grabs tightly at his forearm, not to pull him away so much as desperately holding to him, trying to anchor yourself as your eyes squeeze shut. You have no doubt he means what he says, that every promise may as well be sealed with blood. That alone is enough to send a horrible thrill through you as you nod, your mewls silenced by his hand. 

His hips grind against you, causing you to jolt in his hold as pleasure shoots down your spine like lightning. You nearly go limp in his grasp as you hurdle over the edge, sobbing beneath his palm as your release crashes into you like waves against the shore. Your cunt clamps around his length in a harsh rhythm, pulling a deep, satisfied groan from him. 

He savors the way your body ripples against him, convulsing as he continues tormenting your sensitive bud with slow circles, drawing out your climax ruthlessly until you’re twitching beneath him, oversensitive and trembling. 

“There you are,” he pants, voice ragged with barely restrained need as he nips at your shoulder. He growls while he grinds against you, savoring the way your cunt milks him desperately. “You have fought every battle the same way,” he breathes, thrusts growing erratic as his own release builds, “surrendering inch by—Gods—by inch.”

It’s only when he feels his climax cresting that he lifts his hand from your mouth, his fingers smeared with your spit. He pants as he buries himself to the hilt one last time, spilling inside you with a low, possessive snarl. 

He holds you there for a long moment as he pants, his chest heaving against your back while the world slowly seems to right itself once more. 

You slump against the chair as he straightens up with a sigh, pulling himself from you with a quiet groan. A shudder goes through you as a thin trickle of his spend slips down your inner thigh, warm against your skin while you try to steady the frantic rhythm of your heart, listening as he tucks himself back into his trousers. 

Your joints protest as you rise, fingers trembling slightly while you take the time to smooth out the rumpled silk of your gown back into some sort of order. No amount of careful hands will erase the evidence of the night, nor the ache that settles deep within your bones. You can hear him moving about the space behind you, though you don’t look toward him, not yet. 

Instead, you busy yourself with fastening what can be fastened, with straightening out your hair and bodice, grateful for anything that delays whatever words must surely come next. 

When, at last, you gather the courage to face him, you find him standing with one hand raised and resting lightly on the mantel, his back half turned to you. Firelight throws restless shadows over the sharp planes of his face as he stares into the embers, his expression foreign to you. 

You open your mouth, though you’re not entirely sure what to say. How are you meant to return to the Riverlands or politics or Alicent or anything at all after that?

“I will go,” his words are so quiet that for one bewildered second, you wonder whether you imagined them. He doesn’t turn to face you. “I will ride for Harrenhal.”

You simply stand there, your hand still resting against the fastening of your gown as you search his rigid profile for a clue as to what tipped the scale, only to find none. The silence stretches as you wait for him to speak further, perhaps of triumph or mockery, or another cruel lesson delivered in that same measured tone. You had imagined that, if he yielded at all, it would come only after another battle of words. That he would force you to defend every point, every strategy, every warning you had brought on Alicent’s behalf. 

Instead, the words come almost carelessly, spoken into the dim quiet of the chambers as though he’d made the decision long before you’d even walked through the door. 

“Why—”

“I’ll summon the council before dawn,” he continues, glancing toward you just enough for the fire to catch the sapphire in his eye. 

The distance between the quiet, dutiful boy you had once known and the man standing before you now has never felt wider, nor more perilous. 

Aemond inclines his head once—a dismissal. 

Nodding, you make your way toward the chamber door, unable to shake the cold chill of uncertainty that follows you. 

You find your sister upon the western battlements just after dawn as the sun begins to rise over the waters of the bay, staining the sky in muted shades of lavender and gold. She hardly acknowledges your presence as you come to stand beside her and for several minutes, neither of you speaks. 

Her hair drifts lazily about her shoulders with the breeze, while the skirt of your dressing gown stirs about your ankles. 

“What did you say to him?” she asks eventually, her eyes never leaving the broad fields beyond the city walls. 

You think back to the night before, back to the tense conversation that had transpired between you and your nephew—if you could even call it that. You think of his hands on your skin and of the fire dying low in the hearth, of his hand upon the mantel while he stared into the ashes, as if the answer had been waiting for him there all along. 

“Enough, I suppose,” you answer quietly, your brows furrowed. 

Alicent closes her eyes beside you, not bothering to question you further. 

Movement begins to ripple across a distant field; at first, it’s difficult to distinguish one cluster of men from another. Soldiers scatter outward with practiced haste while dragonkeepers weave between them. 

Then, she moves. 

Vhagar rises slowly, so immense that, for one breathless moment, she resembles another hill unfolding itself from the landscape. Bronze scales catch the first rays of the sun, each ancient movement carrying the certainty of something that has outlived kingdom upon kingdom, and may outlive countless more. 

Even from a distance, you imagine you can feel her weight settling through the ground beneath your feet. 

Your chest lurches at the knowledge that he’s there, saddled to her great back—the boy who once wandered after you through shadowy halls, who had once asked whether good men ever made good kings. 

Vhagar spreads her wings, the first beats of them sending dust spiraling across the fields before she lifts from the earth and climbs steadily to the north, becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second. 

Beside you, Alicent watches until they have become little more than a dark shape against the morning light. When she speaks, her voice is little more than a mote of dust carried in the wind. 

“Have we done the right thing?”

The question hangs between you, unanswered, a nearly tangible thing. 

How could you have done anything otherwise? If he had remained, the city may have burned, thousands may have perished. And, yet, as he goes…

Your gaze follows the shrinking silhouette until even Vhagar’s impossibly large wings disappear into the pale morning haze, the rider on her back no more than a pinprick against the clouds.

The sun dipped beneath the horizon, casting a golden-pink haze over the scattered buildings of King’s Landing.

The heat of the day, once stifling and sharp, mellowed into a tepid warmth that clung to the stone streets and rooftops. 

From the bay, sea winds rolled inland, cool and briny, teasing through the open archways of the Red Keep. 

In the high halls of Maegor’s Holdfast, the air held the faint linger of roast meat and summerwine, now grown stale with tension.

It was the hour of the bat, when shadows stretched long and torchlight flickered in golden sconces. 

Supper had almost come to a close, mercifully. What should have been a warm family gathering was nothing more than a tightly choreographed farce. Each smile was painted on, every word a cut disguised as civility.

Your jaw still ached from how tightly you'd been clenching it.

King Viserys had sat at the head of the table, trying, desperately, to pretend that all was well. But the rot in the family tree was painfully obvious.

Your mother, seated with the stiffness of a queen forced to endure, barely looked up from her plate. 

Across from you sat your uncle, Aemond, so still he might’ve been carved from ice, save for the occasional flick of his eye toward you. You couldn’t have been put in a worse seat.

Forced to face the boy you were taught to hate, now a man.

You didn’t look at him. Not directly. But you felt him. That infuriating calm. That knowing smirk that twitched at the corner of his mouth every time you bit your tongue.  

The silent dare in the single eye that always found yours. He sought a fight, any excuse to break you, or your brothers. However, you didn’t. 

Determined to stay polite, to please the king. And follow the ladylike, dutiful script your mother had perfectly laid out for you. No, your uncle would not win tonight. It would only give him a reason to hurt your brothers. 

Still, every time you met his- eye. Something other than hate lurked beneath the surface.

He had very much become a man, no longer the little boy that hid in the library to avoid his brother and nephews. 

You cursed yourself for letting your mind drift, wondering if he had grown the same lust and appetite as his brother. Just as another depraved thought started to form once more, his eye fell on you again.

Uncontrollable butterflies swirled in your belly, you felt entranced underneath his gaze. Heat spreads over your skin like fire. The air becoming too thick to swallow.

Quickly averting your eyes to the full plate in front of you, his gaze did not leave your body.

It would be impossible for him to read your mind, though you felt like he had. Like he knew exactly what you were thinking.

And you couldn’t help but wonder if he had such thoughts about you as well. The idea made you blush.

You yourself had grown to become a woman, a princess. Many letters had fallen in your mothers lap, lords across the realm begging for your hand, your Valyrian blood.

Upon your arrival that early afternoon, having been welcomed by your family, and seeing your uncle for the first time after all those years, it was entirely a coincidence that you had chosen a more...mature dress for the evening.  

Maybe some part of you felt tempted to entice him, to gain his interest and attention. If you had been successful you could not tell, as such was his stoic and cold demeanour. 

Aemond would have never shown you how much you had affected him. How his fingers gripped his cup of wine with such strength, it almost broke under his grasp.

How with every shift in his seat, he could not tear his eyes away from your chest.

Anger rose within him every time you fluttered your innocent eyes at him. You somehow turned the man into a boy again, making him feel flustered and riled up from the smallest movements.

He hated himself for it, all these years he had perfected his training, his mastery over Vhagar, his High Valyrian. In every aspect his mother had finally seen him as perfect.

No one doubted the one-eyed prince any longer. 

Even his brother had left him alone, and now here you were. His little niece, ready to ruin everything he had worked so hard on.

With the way your breath hitched when his gaze fell on you, how your lips brushed the cup in your hand when you took a sip. 

Every time you leaned forward to pick at your plate, he got a perfect view of your tits.

It all distracted him from his initial plan. He was so eager to get a chance at putting the strong boys in their place, but their big sister had wrecked it all.

Aemond hadn’t felt this relieved in a long time, at last supper was over and everyone was allowed to retire to their chambers. His eyes kept following your form, even when he tried so hard to pull away.

He didn’t like it, didn’t like how you made him feel. Vulnerable. Weak. Restless. 

He was glad when you both left the room and parted ways. Aemond headed towards his bedchamber, his own space where nobody could touch him, where nobody looked at him.

It was too early to head out yet, too busy in the streets. His brother too sober.

So he waited, and waited, until he was sure everyone was asleep. And swiftly but quietly disappeared into the darkness of the night.

He had to satiate this hunger inside him, though when he arrived at madam Sylvi’s alcove, nothing she tried relieved him of his yearning.

His niece didn’t fare much better. 

Sleep did not come easily.

You tossed and turned beneath the silk sheets, your body restless, your mind unable to quiet.

When slumber finally claimed you, it was not the peaceful kind- it was the kind that teased and tormented. Dreams haunted you, vivid and visceral.

Aemond’s hands, those long, veined hands, touched your skin like they owned it. His smirk, sharp and maddening, tugged at your mind. 

His silver hair, like your own, fell across his cheekbones as he leaned closer. You dreamed of his mouth, possessive and greedy against yours, of his breath mixing with yours in the dark.

You woke with a gasp, skin damp with sweat, sheets twisted around your legs. The sky outside your windows had only just begun to lighten, but the rising heat of the summer sun left no room for comfort.

Sleep would not return.

With a sigh, you slipped from the bed and called for your maids. There was no use lingering in your chambers, not when your thoughts were already betraying you.

They dressed you in cool silks, braided your hair, and left you to your own devices.

The Red Keep was still, hushed in the early hour, the courtiers slow to rise. That silence emboldened you.

You mounted your dragon and soared into the skies, chasing the winds and shaking the memory of him from your bones, if only for a little while.

By the time you returned, sweat clung to your back beneath your bodice, but the wildness in your chest had calmed. A tray of fruit and bread awaited you in your chambers, alongside a steaming bath drawn with herbs and rose petals. 

You slipped into it gratefully, eyes fluttering shut, Aemond’s face still lingering somewhere behind your lids.

The morning passed quietly, and though the solitude had been welcome at first, by afternoon, it began to press in. You needed distraction, conversation, company, anything to ground you back into the present.

So you wandered into the gardens, where the ladies of court had already taken refuge from the heat. You joined them, half-listening as they prattled on about fabrics and feasts, until the topic turned.

They spoke of you now.

Of how many suitors had come to Dragonstone. Of how each lord had attempted, and failed, to win your favor.

You offered little in return, but the laughter among them grew, amused by your restraint, impressed by your influence.

As the sun began to dip low once more, you were summoned for supper.

Dread curled low in your stomach.

You weren’t sure if you could bear sitting across from Aemond again, not with the memories of your dream still simmering beneath your skin.

The way he had looked at you last night, as though he could see straight through you. As though he wanted to.

You told yourself you didn’t crave his approval.

But you were lying.

You didn’t want his kindness, or his favor. You wanted his attention. His focus. His desire. And after the night you’d spent tangled in arousing dreams, you could no longer pretend otherwise.

What you didn’t know was that elsewhere in the Red Keep, your name was already being whispered in the hallways.

He moved through the halls with practiced grace, his steps measured, until the fluttering whispers of ladies caught his ear. They didn’t see him approaching- at least not until it was too late.

“…they say yet another lord rode to Dragonstone last month. Thought she’d say yes, but she sent him off with barely a word-”

“He wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. She’s turning them all down.”

“She must be waiting for someone better…”

Their giggles turned to stunned silence as Aemond passed them, his lone eye fixed straight ahead. But they had said enough.

His jaw clenched.

It shouldn’t matter. He shouldn’t care.

But he did.

Anger coiled in his gut- jealousy, too, bitter and hot. The idea of those men- weak, simpering lords, daring to think they had a claim to you made his blood run cold.

Yet there was a strange satisfaction as well.

You hadn’t accepted any of them.

He tried to push the thoughts away, bury them beneath cold logic. But the moment he nearly collided with you in the corridor on your way to supper, all sense fled.

You froze for a heartbeat as your eyes locked.

Your breath caught.

His did too.

Without a word, he stepped back and gestured for you to pass first, as etiquette demanded. His head dipped slightly, but his gaze lingered long after you moved by.

When he entered the dining hall, he chose a seat farther from yours this time, perhaps in an effort to compose himself. Distance would quiet the storm inside him, or so he hoped.

But tonight, it was you who stared.

He felt your gaze as surely as if your hands were on him. You tried to be subtle, sipping your wine and lowering your lashes, but he caught you, again and again.

And when he did, your cheeks turned pink.

It filled him with something strange, something powerful.

Desire, yes.

But more than that, confidence.

The ladies of court often stared at him too, but when he met their eyes, they averted theirs in fear. His scar, his silence, his reputation… they saw him as something to avoid.

But you?

You looked at him like you wanted to know what lay beneath the cold.

It made him feel good, desired even.

He wanted to chase that feeling, perhaps he could make you feel good too.

That night, when the doors of his chamber closed behind him. A bath was waiting for him. Though there were no servants. 

He preferred to bathe alone, he didn’t need some stupid girls trembling hands to try to wash his hair.

He could do it himself.

Aemond was glad he was alone, for when he had rid himself of his clothes and stepped into the searing bath, his cock began to swell.

A sigh escaped his lips when he let himself fully sink into the water. When he closed his single eye, all he could see was you. Images of you filled his mind, they started off innocent, your smile, your sultry eyes, your silver locks. 

Then he thought about how you smelled, how warm your skin would be. But then it turned darker.

He thought about kissing your plump lips, about ripping that stupid dress open and freeing your tits. To suck and nip at them until you whined for him.

Subconsciously, his hand that rested beside him moments before, trailed up his thigh, teasing himself until he softly traced the length of his cock. 

A groan left Aemond as his hand wrapped around his shaft, embarrassment crept up on him as he allowed these thoughts of you to drive him to touch himself.

However, all shame left him once he began to tug at the soft skin. The hot water wrapped a cloak of steam around him, the water rippling with each movement of his hand.

A silent moan dragged out of him when he cupped his stones under the water.

Aemond planted his feet on the bottom of the copper bath as his knees rose above the water, his lust clouding his mind when he bucked up his hips in pleasure.

Just these depraved fantasies of you turned him on more than what madam Sylvi tried to do.

His cock ached for release, his skin damp with sweat and water combined. His one eye closed as the pleasure of his own hand consumed him.

As he pumped his cock faster, his lips parted and soft groans left his lips.

Flashes of your bare tits and your wet cunt wrapped around him drove him to the edge of release, precum releasing into the water as Aemond massaged his stones firmer. 

His hand and specifically his thumb focusing on his tip until his balls drew tight against his body- he was about to cum when a loud knock pulled him right out of it.

Of course now was the moment someone needed something of him, when he was fucking his fist to the thought of his niece.

Aemond, assuming it was Criston Cole as it usually was, called them in. 

“Come.” 

He called out from behind the screen that protected his naked body from the door. Though he made no move to get out of the bath to get dressed, his cock was still rock hard. He planned to get Cole out quickly so he could resume his- activities.

He couldn’t see who entered the room, but the soft and graceful footsteps did not match the weight of the armour of Cole. His mother perhaps? What awful timing she would have.

“Uncle?”

Aemond’s heart sank and he froze in the bath, gaze falling on his cock. Of all people to catch him in his depravity, it was her.

“Niece.” He stated, not wanting to tempt her to step beyond the screen. The thin feeble thing that shielded her innocent eyes from his naked frame.

“I did not realise you were... indisposed. Perhaps I’ll come back later-” 

He stopped you before you could turn back. 

“Perhaps not. Why are you here? What could you possibly need of me at this hour?” His words silenced you for a while. He almost thought you had left.

“In truth... I do not know. It was stupid of me to come here, my apologies. I’ll leave at once.” You said hastily before turning around, you were close to the door until Aemond’s low voice halted your movements once more.

“Wait- Don’t go.” He regretted it the moment the words left his lips. 

Still, you obeyed. You turned back towards the screen, waiting to be commanded by him once more.

“Yes?” Your sweet honeyed voice echoed through his chambers.

“Come here.” Aemond called out, his voice raspy with lust. 

Your lips parted in shock, you knew he was taking a bath, the steam filling the room gave it away immediately. 

“Uncle-” You protested weakly.

“Now.” He ordered, all restraint flew out the window upon hearing you call him that. A reminder of what you were to him, his sweet innocent niece.

He could hear your dull footsteps approach the screen, hesitant, you walked around it. Your breath hitched once your eyes met his. You couldn’t see him...completely, but he was obviously bare.

Aemond’s soft breaths summoned you closer, not too close but close enough to where he could make out your now heavy breaths. 

“Come closer.” The words left him before he could even think about it. 

Without thinking yourself, your feet pulled you towards his bathing form. You swallowed the nerves in your throat once your eyes ‘accidently’ fell on his hard cock. However you were still out of his reach.

“Gūrogon hen aōha grēza.” Take off your dress. 

Aemond was testing you, but when your hands started to undo the laces on the back of your bodice, he held back a groan.

His eyes followed your hands as you undid all the laces and knots that held your dress together.

When you let the loosened dress fall to the floor, your thin undergarments were the only thing still shielding you from your uncle.

He didn’t have to say anything, for your hands were already pulling those off too. Once you were fully naked, shoes and tights forgotten on the stone floor as well, Aemond licked his lips.

His cock throbbed upon seeing your bare body. 

“Renigon aōla.” Touch yourself. He groaned, his heavy lidded eyes focusing on your cunt. 

You frowned in confusion, touch yourself how? When you made no move, Aemond feared he had gone too far, but once he noticed your confusion, he understood.

“Kesan urnēptre ao, māzigon kesīr.” I will show you, come here.

Your bare feet carried you towards his outstretched hand. Upon placing your hand in his, he rose from the tub, but made no move to get out.

Your eyes flicked nervously to his, Aemond held your gaze as he lowered his head.

Before you could register what he was about to do, his lips pressed against yours. A foreign hunger consumed you as his lips touched yours, you gasped against his mouth.

When you felt his hand on your cheek, still warm and wet from the water, you sighed into the kiss. 

But Aemond had no patience for soft loving kisses. His tongue prodded your lips open before licking desperately into your mouth. You moaned, gaining him more access as you let him devour you. 

A warm sticky wetness gathered between your thighs, his lips alone spread fire through your body. When he was forced to breathe, you parted.

His eye met yours, and this new look in his eye, unknown to you, made you shudder.

His chest was now heaving, his skin glistening with sweat and his purple eye had turned black with desire. His hand, once on your cheek, made its way down your jaw, towards your breast, giving it a firm squeeze, eliciting a groan from him.

“Fuck.” Aemond sighed, so quiet you almost didn’t hear it. If he wasn’t so pent up right now, he would’ve stopped, and saved you both the disgrace, but he couldn’t.

His hand trailed lower, over your belly, stopping right above your cunt. 

“Ivestragon nyke jaelā nyke, ivestragon nyke jaelā aōha Kepus.” Tell me you want me, tell me you want your uncle. Aemond whispered lowly.

You nodded, your chest rising with each breath. You closed your eyes, anticipating his touch. When you still didn’t feel him, your eyes snapped open.

“Jaelan naejot rȳbagon vestrā ziry.” I want to hear you say it. 

“Kostilus renigon nyke Kepus.” Please touch me uncle. You almost whined- begged for him to touch you, even though it was foreign to you, your cunt ached.

That drove him insane, the way your sweet voice told him you wanted him in your mother tongue, his cock twitched. Two of his fingers darted out to glide between your slick folds, it immediately pulled a moan from you. 

Aemond almost gasped upon feeling the wetness between your thighs, he knew you would probably be sensitive- but for you to be this wet already? You must want him as bad as he wants you. 

When one of his fingers found your clit, he circled it, drawing more soft gasps and pleads from your lips. 

“Sir ao.” Now you. 

Aemond used all his restraint to pull back, and lower himself in the bath again.

You almost cried when his fingers left you, but when you saw him lean back in the bath again, his hand starting to stroke teasingly along his cock, your own hand made its way down your body.

Remembering what Aemond had just taught you, you used your own two fingers to repeat what he did. Letting them glide through your folds first, before touching your clit.

Your eyes never left his as you put on a show for him, now understanding what he wants.

Aemond now jerked his cock firmer, trying to almost match your movements. Both of your heavy breaths and moans filled the room, urging you both closer to release.

Your fingers worked faster when Aemond pumped his own cock faster.

Holding each other's gaze, you were the first to come. Your thighs clenched shut with your hand still between them. Your other hand shot up to clamp over your mouth as you cried out Aemond’s name. 

Aemond halted his movements and watched with parted lips as your legs trembled. Your first orgasm hitting you hard. Your knees almost buckled underneath you from the sheer force of your pleasure. When your climax ebbed away, you opened your eyes again.

Aemond summoned you back to him. When he was able to reach you, he helped you in the bath. Once you stood over his lap, both feet on either side of him, he helped you lower down onto his lap. 

You couldn’t stop yourself from kissing him again, Aemond gasped in surprise as you hungrily moved your lips against his. When you moved a bit too close to his now flushed and angry cock, he groaned into the kiss.

He felt your arms wrap around his neck, his own hands holding onto your waist as he pulled you closer to him. Aemond almost came- just from feeling your cunt press against him. 

His cock so sensitive and aching from being denied to cum twice already, but Aemond knew it was worth it.

When he pulled away, his grip on your waist tightened as he used you to grind your cunt on him, moving back and forth until short waves formed in the water.

“Ao sagon ñuhon.” You're mine.

You moaned at his words. Aemond nipped at your neck before aligning his cock up with your hole. His tip first dragged through your folds before he dared nudge his dripping head inside, once he felt your walls clench around him, he paused for a moment.

Aemond looked up at you, it seemed as if you were completely out of this world. Your eyes were closed, face red and damp.

A bruise in your neck from his biting and nipping. Your hair loosely falling over your back, you were a sight for the Gods.

He kissed you fiercely before pulling you fully down, until his entire length was sheathed inside you. You whined against his lips, the stretch and fullness of him overwhelming. 

When you came across his chambers this evening, having no plan about what to say to him, you did not quite imagine this.

Aemond was now the one moaning as he tried to buck up into you, the desperation to cum overpowering him. 

“Fuck-” He groaned when you parted.

“H-how do I…” You whispered, a slight tremble in your voice.

“Move up and down or just hump- yes- yes- fuck like that-” 

You immediately did what you were told, you wanted nothing more in this moment then to make him feel good too, to fuck him as if it was your last night alive. Using all your strength you bounced up and down on his cock.

Aemond’s strangled moans and heavy breaths spurred you on, driving you to fuck him faster, only your knees started to hurt and your thighs started to cramp. 

“Uncle- help- please-” You whined as your legs started to give up. Aemond wasted no time in planting his feet on the bottom of the tub and driving his cock up into you.

The sheer force of his thrusts caused the water to spill over the sides of the tub, turning the chamber into a huge mess. 

Neither you or Aemond cared, the bliss and satisfaction of each other's bodies was all that mattered.

Aemond thrived off your moans and whimpers, he knew it was all him who caused it, that no other man had ever made you feel like this.

The slapping off skin, you and your uncle’s moans and the slashing of water was sure to be heard outside, your coupling would surely be no secret.

“Fffuckk!” That was the first time Aemond had heard you cuss, and it brought a smile to his lips, spurring him on to fuck you harder. 

The way you clenched around him, your moans getting higher, and your breath getting stuck in your throat- he knew you were close, he just had to push you over the edge. 

He was surprised he had managed to hold off his own orgasm for this long but he knew he wouldn’t last much longer.

While you held onto the sides of the tub, Aemond used one hand to hold you steady while the other sought out your bud, with a steady thumb he managed to get you gushing around him in seconds.

Crying out his name in ecstasy, you came hard around his cock.

Aemond, at this point, had reached his limit. With some final hard thrusts, his balls drew tight against his body, cock twitching as he filled you with his cum.

He released a strangled cry from his throat, letting himself get consumed by his peak.

Once the final spurts of his seed had left his body, he sagged against your shaking form. Heavy breaths were now the only thing that could be heard. The water tepid and finally calm. 

What you did not entirely expect was Aemond pulling you flush against him, making you hold him as he melted into you. A satisfied sigh left his lips as his cock softened inside you. Yet he made no move to pull out. 

Neither of you wanted to move.

Your limbs were tangled beneath the surface of the water, skin against skin, warmth clinging to every inch of you that had been touched, claimed. 

You were both suspended in a moment outside of time, outside of duty, outside of honour. The soft drip of water from the edge of the tub was the only sound, save for your slowing breaths.

You rested your cheek against his shoulder, eyes closed, heart still pounding. His arms had remained tight around you, as though if he let go, even for a second, you might vanish into smoke.

Reality waited just beyond the door, and yet neither of you dared look toward it.

You wanted to stay here forever. In this hazy, sacred silence. In his hold.

You were trying not to think about what it meant, what you'd done. Not because you regretted it, but because the weight of it was too much to bear all at once.

It wasn’t just lust that had driven you into his arms. It was something deeper. Something dangerous.

“I meant it.” Aemond whispered, breaking the silence at last.

Your lashes fluttered. “Hm?”

He turned his face into the crook of your neck. His voice was low, a rumble more than a sound.

“You’re mine.”

The words sent a fresh wave of heat down your spine. You could feel the way his jaw tensed against your skin, the possessiveness simmering just beneath the surface.

Not rage, not anger- just wanting. 

You pulled back slightly, just enough to look at him.

His violet eye met yours, burning. The sapphire gleamed faintly in the dim candlelight, and for once, there was no mask behind his expression. No cold control. Just him. Raw and open.

You only whispered, “And you’re mine.”

Something shifted in his face.

A crack in his composure, a softening that made your heart twist. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to your jaw, then your cheek, then your lips- slow, reverent.

As though he was trying to memorize every part of you, just in case this moment didn’t last.

But it would. It had to.

His hand found yours beneath the water, threading his fingers between yours like it was the most natural thing in the world. 

“I won’t let them take you from me,” he murmured against your lips. “Not now.”

You nodded once, heart thundering in your chest.

You didn’t need promises. You didn’t need sweet words or vows made in the godswood.

You just needed him. The truth in his touch. The honesty in the way he looked at you now, as though you were the only thing in the world that mattered.

And maybe you were.

A month after the Gullet, the castle still smells faintly of medicines, as though the sea itself has followed Jacaerys home and settled in the stone with him.

You have grown so accustomed to it that you hardly notice anymore.

A month ago, you would have given anything to smell it. A month ago, there had been blood. So much blood. But now there are only maesters, all the time.

Three of them stand gathered around the table right now near the window, speaking in low, serious voices while Jace sits in a carved chair looking increasingly irritated with every minute.

Sunlight spills through the narrow panes behind him, catching in his dark curls and turning the edges of them gold, softening him in a way that makes him seem almost boyish despite everything he has endured in the last couple weeks.

His injuries have faded from terrifying to merely alarming. The worst of the bruising is gone, the cuts have begun to heal, and colour has returned to his face, though not yet enough for you to relax.

Unfortunately for everyone else, so has his stubbornness.

You stand beside him with one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, partly affection but mostly precaution if you're being honest with yourself, because the prince has developed an unfortunate habit of forgetting that nearly dying is supposed to slow a person down.

"Your Grace is recovering admirably," Grand Maester Gerardys says at last.

Jace straightens immediately, as if the words themselves have restored him. Gerardys clears his throat with the patient air of a man who has spent his life delivering unwelcome truths to the powerful. "Recovering admirably, however, does not mean recovered."

Jace slumps back with all the theatrical suffering of a man condemned to the Wall. Gerardys continues as though he has not noticed the prince's offence.

"Your ribs are still mending. The wound to your side has not fully healed. The fever has passed, but weakness remains. Any unnecessary strain could set back his recovery considerably."

Jace folds his arms. "What strain?"

The three maesters exchange a glance, and you immediately become suspicious. Jace notices it too, his brows drawing together. "What strain?" he repeats, sharper this time.

Nobody answers.

The silence stretches, and stretches, and then stretches a little further, until finally the old maester clears his throat again, looking faintly pained. "This includes physical exertion."

Jace nods at once. "Yes, I gathered that, obviously."

"Excessive physical exertion."

"Yes."

"Particularly..." Gerardys pauses, and one of the younger maesters suddenly finds the floor fascinating. "...marital exertion."

The room falls completely silent.

For a single moment Jace simply stares at them. Then his face changes all at once, horror and outrage arriving together.

"I beg your pardon?"

You turn away quickly because you can already feel laughter rising in your throat and you know if you let it out now you will never stop. Beside you, Jace looks scandalised beyond measure. "What do you mean?"

"My Prince-"

"No." The word echoes off the stone walls. "Absolutely not. This is absurd and I refuse to accept it."

Gerardys remains maddeningly calm. "It is only temporary."

"Temporary?" Jace sounds personally betrayed. "You are forbidding me from bedding my own wife."

The younger maester goes slightly red. You stare very intently at the tapestry across the room, because if you look at Jace now you will lose whatever dignity you have left. He points an accusing finger at the entire collection of healers. "I survived a naval battle."

"Indeed."

"I was shot."

"Yes."

"I nearly drowned."

"Correct."

"And your conclusion is that my greatest threat is my wife?"

The maesters look vaguely embarrassed. Jace looks outraged. And suddenly, despite the lingering ache that still lives in your chest whenever you remember the sight of him bleeding on a bed, you feel lighter, because this is familiar. This is your Jace. He's alive enough to argue and complain. Alive enough to glare dramatically at innocent old men and be stubborn.

Your hand slips from the chair to his shoulder, and immediately he covers it with his own. Gerardys notices, and his expression gentles. "My Prince," he says, "the restriction is not punishment."

Jace groans. "I would beg to differ."

A few of the maesters smile despite themselves. Gerardys gathers his papers, "It is only another month."

Jace nearly chokes. "A whole month?"

"Perhaps less, if recovery continues."

"A month."

"You survived the Gullet. Surely you can survive a few more weeks."

Jace mutters something deeply disrespectful under his breath, and you squeeze his shoulder in warning and affection both. His fingers immediately tighten around yours as he looks up at you, exhaustion and frustration playing on his features.

You smile at him, and his expression softens immediately.

Then Gerardys speaks again, and the spell breaks at once. "And separate beds may also be advisable."

Jace's head snaps around, "No."

Silence settles over the chamber. Jace's hand remains wrapped around yours, firm and warm and immovable. "I nearly died, so I am not sleeping without my wife."

They exchange glances and then, wisely, surrender. "Very well."

You lower your head to hide your smile, because truly, there are battles even the maesters cannot win.

That evening the matter should have been settled, at least in theory.

The maesters had spoken, their instructions delivered and their warnings had been repeated no fewer than six times over supper, as though saying them often enough might somehow make Jace more inclined to obey.

Instead, he is attempting to negotiate, which is perhaps exactly what you should have expected from him and yet still feels faintly absurd when he is sitting there shirtless on the edge of the bed, looking incredibly offended by the very concept of restraint.

You sit beside him with a fresh roll of linen in your lap while he holds one arm lifted so you can reach the wound along his side.

The chamber is quiet except for the crackle of the fire and the distant, steady sound of waves striking the cliffs below; night has fully settled beyond the windows, leaving only darkness on the other side of the glass and the warm gold of candlelight within.

Carefully, you peel away the old bandage, and he hisses through his teeth at the movement. You glance up at once. “You are being dramatic.”

"Three arrows pierced my body.”

“A month ago.”

“It still counts.”

You make a skeptical sound and reach for the ointment, though you cannot quite keep the corner of your mouth from twitching. For a few moments silence settles between you. You smooth the salve across healing skin, studying the angry scar that is beginning to form there, the sight still makes something twist painfully in your chest.

There are moments when you look at him and see only Jace; your husband, your best friend, the boy who once raced you through castle corridors and stole lemon cakes from the kitchens with the shameless confidence of someone who had never once been told no in his life.

Then there are moments like this, when memory comes back all at once and with it the blood, the fever, the endless waiting, the terrible certainty, however brief, that you might lose him. Your fingers pause before you can stop them.

Immediately, his hand settles over yours.

He notices. Of course he does.

You lift your eyes, and his expression softens at once. “I am all right,” he says quietly.

“Mm.”

His thumb brushes slowly across your knuckles.

Then, because Jacaerys Velaryon possesses the survival instincts of an overconfident golden retriever, he says, “I still think the maesters are being unreasonable.”

You close your eyes for a brief, weary moment. You had been wondering how long it would take.

“You are recovering from grievous injuries.”

“I am recovering exceptionally well.”

“You still tire walking up stairs.”

“Well, I dislike those stairs.”

You begin wrapping the fresh bandage around his ribs. “They are not unusual stairs, Jace.”

"They are steeper than other stairs."

Despite yourself, you laugh, and his grin appears immediately. He tilts his head, thoughtful in the way that always makes you suspicious.

“What exactly constitutes marital exertion?”

You nearly drop the bandage. “Jacaerys.”

“It is a reasonable question.”

You finish tying the linen perhaps just a little tighter than necessary, and he winces. You feel no guilt whatsoever.

“They were quite vague,” he says after a moment.

“They were not vague. They were, in fact, extraordinarily clear.”

Jace considers this with the air of a man weighing evidence in a trial he has already decided to win. “Perhaps to you.”

“To everyone.”

“Not to me.” His smile widens, and you are suddenly struck by the realisation that the maesters should perhaps have prescribed confinement in separate castles.

“They said strain,” he says, as though he's continuing a perfectly sensible conversation.

“Yes.”

“And exertion.”

“Yes.”

“So theoretically-”

“No.”

“What if-”

“Jace.”

He stops, though only because he is laughing now, actually laughing, and the sound fills the room so easily that for a moment you forget everything else.

“You are impossible,” you inform him.

“I have been told.”

He reaches for your hand, and you let him take it. His fingers close around yours with a warmth that feels almost unbearably familiar, and when he speaks again his voice has lost its teasing edge. “Another month is a very long time.”

You shake your head, smiling softly, but before he can begin constructing another ridiculous argument, you lean forward and press a kiss to his mouth.

The effect is immediate. Jace falls silent, blessedly, wonderfully silent, and when you pull back he blinks once, then twice, as though he has forgotten every thought he was having.

A second kiss lands at the corner of his mouth, then another against his cheek, and with each one his smile grows slower, softer, warmer, until by the third he has entirely abandoned his campaign against the maesters.

You feel rather proud of yourself.

He grins and reaches for you, and you allow him to pull you nearer. The blankets shift around you both as you settle beside him carefully, because he is still healing and you are both painfully aware of it.

His arm slides around your waist. Your head finds its familiar place against his shoulder.

The first week after the maesters' decree is irritating.

The second becomes ridiculous.

By the third, it's infuriating.

Jacaerys Velaryon approaches recovery the way he approaches every obstacle in his life: by refusing to accept that it is truly an obstacle at all.

If the maesters insist upon restrictions, then he will simply find exceptions.

One evening, as you sit beside him on the bed with your book open in your lap, he glances over and says, almost casually, “I stand by my opinion that their instructions were imprecise.”

You do not look up. “No.”

“They never actually provided definitions.”

You turn a page. “They are maesters, Jace, not scholars debating philosophy.”

He sighs, long-suffering and theatrical, and shifts a little closer.

Recently, he has become fond of finding excuses to sit beside you, or hold your hand, or drape an arm around your shoulders, or rest his head in your lap while insisting he is 'too weak' to move despite having spent the entire afternoon arguing in council.

“What if,” he begins. You close your eyes.

“What if,” he repeats, undeterred, “the concern is specifically overexertion?”

“It is.”

“Then surely the solution is simply avoiding overexertion.”

At last you lower the book and look at him properly. His expression brightens at once, as though he has won something merely by drawing your attention.

“Jace.”

“Yes?”

“No.”

He groans, and you return to your book.

Three nights later, he appears to have developed a new argument. You discover this when he is sprawled across the bed with his head resting against your shoulder, warm and comfortable and entirely too pleased with himself.

“What if,” he says thoughtfully.

You nearly laugh. “Again?”

“I have had several days to refine my position on the issue.”

“Gods preserve me.”

“What if I simply did not move very much? You could do all the... moving... uh, like difficult parts.”

You lower your embroidery hoop and glance down at him. He looks entirely sincere, which somehow makes it worse.

“Jacaerys.”

“I am not going to do any part because we are not going to do anything.”

He studies the ceiling for a moment, then turns his head just enough to look at you. “I think you are dismissing my proposals too quickly.”

“I think you enjoy hearing yourself talk.”

“I enjoy talking to you.”

Oh, you hate how good he is at being charming.

His arm slips around your waist. “You know,” he says quietly, “I do understand why you’re worried.”

The humour fades a little. You look at him, but his gaze remains fixed on your joined hands.

“You frightened me,” you admit.

Something flashes behind his eyes. “I know.”

Silence settles between you, gentle and sad and comfortable all at once. Then, because he is incapable of allowing a serious conversation to remain serious for too long, he lifts his head and says, “So that is still a no?”

You stare at him.

Jace immediately begins laughing, and when you throw a cushion at his face he catches it easily, looking delighted by the rejection.

Which, unfortunately, only convinces you that recovery is proceeding exceptionally well.

One morning at the beginning of the fourth week you're standing at the edge of the bedchamber, the salt-laced wind moaning through the open shutters as the last embers in the hearth crackle low.

Jacaerys is desperate today, even more than usual

He lies propped against the pillows, his bare chest rising and falling with quick, restless breaths, the angry red scars along his ribs and hip still mapped in fresh pink, but they are scars now, nonetheless.

It's been two months since the Gullet.

To the naked eye he seems fully recovered — he partakes in council meetings, goes on long walks with you along the shore, is no longer winded by those particularly steep stairs — but the maesters’ edict remains iron.

No strain, no exertion, no touch that might tear what they say has barely knit. Yet here he is, dark eyes fixed on you with shameless hunger, voice low and frayed.

“Please,” he murmurs, the words thick with frustration, his hand extended, palm up, fingers flexing as if he can already feel the shape of your waist.

“I cannot do this, I’m not some broken thing anymore. I feel you every night in my dreams, and then I wake up and you won't even let me touch you properly. I need your hand, your mouth, anything. Just… let me feel you again.”

He sits up a little straighter, a small grin finding his lips, voice dropping to a growl. “You’re aching too, I know it. Two months without feeling how wet you get for me-"

"Jacaerys, stop being so crude, you cannot possibly think-" but he continues, completely disregarding your objections.

"Gods, I’d give anything to see you under me like I used to, but I won’t move. I swear it. Just you, I'll even lie still.”

Your fingers tighten on the bedpost, because you cannot dent he's right. You do miss him, painfully so. You miss the feel of his hands on you and the stretch of him inside you, but reluctance still coils tight in your chest.

You take one hesitant step closer.

The cool stone floor beneath your bare feet gives way to the softness of the mattress as you perch carefully at his uninjured side, your fingers brushing the edge of the linen without yet touching him.

“Jacaerys,” you whisper, “I cannot, the maesters said-” But the way his hips twitch, just once, desperate and involuntary, stops the protest on your tongue.

A soft, helpless sound escapes him, and something shifts inside you, because this, in a way, is also him in pain, except this time you actually have the power to help him.

Your hand drifts over the sheet, hovering just above the bulge you can just start to see emerging beneath the linen.

“You must promise me you’ll lie perfectly still,” you remind him, the words gentle but unyielding, “There are reasons they forbid it; you could open one of the wounds.”

His dark eyes flash, jaw tightening as if he might argue, but apparently the months of forced stillness have left him too raw, too aching, and he nods once, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple.

You smile then, small and maybe a little teasing, and let your fingertips graze the linen over the head of his cock.

Slowly you peel the sheet down, then work on the laces of his breeches before pulling them down and finally revealing him fully to the firelit air.

His cock thick and flushed dark, the vein along its length pulsing visibly as you wrap your fingers around the base with deliberate lightness, still not quite sure how this is going to go.

He groans, low and broken, head tipping back against the pillows, but he holds himself rigid as promised, muscles trembling with the effort.

You lean in, breath ghosting over the sensitive head, and press the softest kiss there, tasting the salt of him while your free hand rests lightly on his uninjured hip to remind him of the boundary.

“Only on my terms tonight, dearest husband,” you whisper against his skin, stroking him once, slow and torturous, savouring the way his breath hitches and his fingers clutch the bedding instead of reaching for you.

“I will give you this, you just lay there and let me take care you.”

You tighten your grip just enough to draw another shuddering groan from him, your thumb circling the slick head of his cock in slow, deliberate strokes that make his thighs tense against the sheets.

He’s so hard it must be painful, the heavy length twitching in your fist with every pass,

The sight of your big, strong husband, normally so commanding, now reduced to biting his lip to keep from thrusting stirs something warm and aching in your chest.

It feels like the biggest relief.

You still remember every moment of the last two months, watching him wince at every breath, lying awake beside his bandaged body while fear gnawed at you both, and now here he is, flushed and leaking for you, trying so hard to obey even as his hips give one tiny, involuntary roll.

It’s adorable, that stubborn flicker of dominance surfacing in the way he grits out your name, only for it to dissolve into a whimper when you lean down and drag your tongue along the underside of his shaft.

His fingers fist the bedding harder, knuckles white, and you can see the war in his eyes, the urge to grab your hair and guide you deeper warring with the maesters’ warnings and his own fragile healing.

“Fuck… just like that,” he rasps, voice cracking with need so raw it makes your own neglected body clench.

You take him deeper into your mouth, hollowing your cheeks with a soft suck that has him arching his head back.

It's as if you're watching him heal in real-time, because he’s becoming himself again, that fierce, passionate man who once pinned you laughing to the furs.

You hum around him, savouring the salt-bitter taste of him while your free hand strokes soothing circles over his tightening stomach.

You pull off just enough to murmur against the flushed skin, teasing the slit with the tip of your tongue until his breath stutters.

“Still, Jace.”

Then you resume your rhythm, slow, twisting strokes of your hand paired with wet, deliberate licks. He trembles beneath you, every suppressed sound proof of how desperately he’s craved your touch.

You quicken your pace with deliberate mercy, not seeing a point in dragging this out any longer than you have to, lips sealed tight around him as your tongue swirls and your hand pumps in steady rhythm, feeling the way his thighs quake despite his vow to stay still.

His voice breaks on your name, half-command and half-plea, while one of his hands finds your hair and grips tight, not that you mind at all.

Finally, he spills hot and pulsing across your tongue, thick spurts you swallow with a soft moan of your own. You keep stroking him through it, gentling your touch as the last tremors fade, watching the tension drain from his battered body until he lies boneless and breathless, dark eyes glassy.

For a long moment afterward, neither of you says anything.

The chamber is quiet except for the soft crackle of the fire and the distant rhythm of the sea beyond the windows. The candles have burned lower than either of you realised, leaving the room washed in warm gold and shadow.

Jace lies beside you with that same dazed, contented smile still lingering on his mouth, as though he has not quite remembered how to put it away.

You glance at him from the corner of your eye and shake your head. “What?”

His smile only deepens. “Nothing.”

“Mhmm.”

He gives a quiet, breathless laugh and reaches for your hand where it still rests atop his stomach, threading his fingers through yours. His thumb moves over your knuckles, warm and absentminded.

The sight of him like this, softened and unguarded, makes something in your chest loosen.

You fuss over him out of habit more than necessity, fetching a washcloth, straightening the blankets around his hips and making certain he is comfortable, searching his face and posture for any sign that he has overdone himself despite every promise he made.

Jace watches the whole business with open affection, his expression growing gentler by the moment.

“My darling,” he murmurs, though there is no real complaint in it. You ignore him. “You are checking on me.”

“Someone has to.”

His teasing fades then, leaving something softer in its place. For a moment he simply watches you, and when he lifts your joined hands and presses a kiss to your knuckles, the gesture is so familiar that it catches you off guard all the same.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

You look up at him.

The words are not playful nor triumphant, not even particularly clever. Your chest aches unexpectedly, because beneath all the bargaining and persistence and impossible shamelessness, you know what this has really been about.

Weeks of fear. Weeks of recovery. Weeks of being careful. Weeks of wondering whether life would ever feel normal again.

You squeeze his hand, and his fingers tighten around yours at once.

“You do not need to thank me.”

“I do.”

His voice is gentle. “I know I was insufferable.”

You giggle softly. “Do you now?”

Without either of you needing to say anything, Jace opens his arm toward you. You move into it at once, as naturally as breathing, as though you have done it a thousand times before. Because you have. Your head settles against his shoulder, his arm folds around your waist, and the blankets shift around you both as you settle more comfortably together.

Eventually you feel his lips brush lightly against your hair, a sleepy, lingering kiss that makes you smile before you can stop yourself.

“Tired?” you murmur.

“A little.”

“You should sleep.”

“So should you.”

The waves continue their endless song beyond the walls.

drabbles/headcannons/blurbs

Girl Dad (head cannon) @boyloveisnteasy

More Girl Dad Aerion (headcannon) @louloucake

Mafia Targs (blurb) @citrusdarling7

Staircase (drabble) @seribun

༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻

one shots

The Odd Fifth (one shot) @catbayunthestoryteller

Silver Strand of Hair (one shot) @sansaorgana

The Dragon Prince (one shot) @targaryenstar

Septa (one shot, + Valarr) @sansaorgana

The Dragon's Treasure (one shot) @wolves-and-dragons

Sunburn Season (one shot, modern au) @vyesoul

He Will Still be Half of You (one shot) @lostrealityr

She's My Collar (one shot) @the-darklings

To be His, Entirely (one shot) @icrawlhometoher

Baby Dragon (one shot) @weepingsparkles

One Last Time (one shot, modern au) @ivoirerose

Eyes that seem to Say 'Thank You' (one shot) @louloucake

Knights Earn, Dragons Take (one shot) @captainfern

Soothing Insanity (one shot) @blllllllllllllllllllue

His Claim (one shot) @bambitropicalbimbo

Call Out My Name (one shot, modern au) @fluttervoid

Thirst Trap (one shot, modern au) @the-darklings

Terrible Thing to Leave Husbands Lonely (one shot) @louloucake

Moth to a Flame (one shot) @boyloveisnteasy

Run it Back like a VHS (one shot, modern au) @bellesreverie

Seed Sown in Fire (one shot) @konalis

Fall From Grace (one shot, modern au) @moodswriting

Earned Loyalty (one shot) @maybestrid33

Down the Road (one shot, modern au) @sckoobert

Wine and a Pretty Wench (one shot) @catbayunthestoryteller

Blood of Two Joined as One (one shot) @gcldie

Lazy Morning (one shot, modern au) @louloucake

Mine (one shot) @myladysapphire

Only Ones Who Know (one shot, modern au) @ivorydragons

Belong with Me (one shot) @celestialwyvern

༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻༺𓆩༒︎𓆪༻

multiple parts/series

My Cruel Prince (series) @sagegreencat10

Growing Strong (series) @catbayunthestoryteller

Things Left Behind (two parter, modern au) @scarletwriter101

Fossoway Reader Universe (series) @maidragoste

Growing Strong (multiple parts) @catbayunthestoryteller

The Dragon and the Siren (series) @alexablissmark

Trailer Trash Aerion (series) @the-darklings

Things You do for Love (two parter, modern au) @louloucake

The Dragon in the Star (two parter) @aerrions

Wild Horses (two parter, modern au) @aerrions

Two Bright Flames (series) @scarletwriter101

Trailer Trash Aerion (series, modern au) @louloucake

What the Princess Wants, the Princess Gets (two parter) @witchezandwonderz

How to Train Your Dragon (series) @osarina

The mansion breathes around you like a second skin you don't remember putting on.

You know its rhythms now. The soft hum of the underfloor heating that kicks on at precisely six in the evening. The way the west windows catch the sunset and scatter gold across the marble floors. The particular creak of the third step on the main staircase. You know these things the way you know your own name, which is to say you were told, and you accepted it, and sometimes acceptance feels almost like remembering.

Your name is YN. You are twenty three years old. Three months ago, you woke up in a private hospital room with a view of Blackwater Bay and a head full of nothing.

No, not nothing. White noise. Static. The television fuzz of a mind wiped clean. The doctors used words like traumatic brain injury and retrograde amnesia and remarkable that you're alive at all. You nodded along because nodding seemed expected, and because the man holding your hand kept looking at you with such devastating tenderness that you felt guilty for not knowing who he was. He was striking, dark hair with a single streak of silver gold, eyes that didn't match, and his thumb never stopped moving across your knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, like he was reassuring himself you were solid.

"Valarr," he had said, his voice cracking on the second syllable. "I'm Valarr. Your fiancé."

Fiancé. The word had tasted foreign in your mouth, like a flavor you'd never encountered. But he showed you photographs. The two of you at a charity gala, his arm around your waist, his fingers splayed possessively against your hip. A selfie taken in what he said was your favorite café near the university, his lips pressed to your temple while you grinned at the camera. A video on his phone of you laughing, pushing his face away, your voice saying stop it, Val, I'm serious in a tone that was not serious at all. The woman in the videos and photographs had your face. She wore your smile. You had no reason to doubt her.

You had no reasons, period.

So when the hospital discharged you into Valarr's care, into his black SUV with its leather interior that smelled of cedar and something expensive and unplaceable, you went without protest. You went because where else would you go? The social worker assigned to your case had gently explained that you had no living family. Your parents died when you were seventeen, a car accident on a rain-slicked highway. No siblings, no cousins who kept in touch. Your emergency contact, the person listed on all your university forms, was Valarr Targaryen.

"Her fiancé," the social worker had said, and Valarr's hand had tightened around yours, his other hand coming up to brush hair from your face, tucking it behind your ear with a gentleness that made the social worker smile. "He's been paying for her care. The private room, the specialists. Everything."

You remember thinking, I am expensive to forget.

Now, three months later, you stand in the kitchen of the Targaryen estate, a sprawling modern fortress of glass and steel perched on a cliff overlooking the bay, and you are trying very hard to remember how to make coffee. You've made coffee every morning for the past ninety three days. Valarr showed you how that first week, standing behind you with his chest pressed to your back and his hands guiding yours, his fingers lacing through your fingers as he moved them to each button and dial. This button for the grind, this dial for the strength, this is how you know the water is the right temperature. His lips kept brushing your ear, your neck, your shoulder, little kisses punctuating every instruction. But this morning, your brain has decided that coffee making is foreign territory, and you stare at the gleaming machine like it might bite you.

"Let me."

His voice comes from behind you, and then his arms are circling your waist, his chin settling on your shoulder, his body molding against yours from shoulder to hip. You've stopped flinching when he does this. The first few days, every touch had sent a jolt through your nervous system, not fear exactly, but something adjacent to it. The alarm of a body that didn't recognize the hands on its skin. But Valarr was persistent in his gentleness, and your body is nothing if not adaptable.

"I was going to do it myself," you say, but you lean back into him anyway, and his arms tighten in response, pulling you closer still.

"I know you were." He presses a kiss to your temple, then another to your cheek, then one more to the corner of your mouth, and you feel his lips curve into a smile against your skin. "But you looked lost, love. I couldn't just watch." His hand slides up from your waist to rest flat against your sternum, right over your heart. "Your heart's beating fast. Are you frustrated? Don't be frustrated. Let me take care of it."

Love. He calls you that all the time. Love, sweetheart, darling, my heart. Pet names that fall from his mouth like rain, constant and soft. You've wondered, in the quiet hours of the night when sleep won't come, if he called you these things before the accident. If the you who was would have rolled her eyes at the frequency of them, or if she would have melted the way you sometimes do now.

You watch his hands move across the coffee machine, long fingers, a silver ring on his index finger, knuckles that look like they've been broken and healed before, and you try to summon a memory. Any memory. The doctors said it might come back in fragments, in flashes, in dreams. Be patient with yourself, they said. Don't force it.

Valarr never says that. Valarr says, "Do you remember the first time I made you coffee?" and when you shake your head, his mismatched eyes flicker with something you can't name. One eye blue as a winter sky, one brown as wet earth. Disappointment? No. Something hungrier. But then it's gone, and he's turning around to face you, pulling you against his chest, wrapping both arms around you and rocking you gently side to side like you're dancing to music only he can hear.

"It was after our third date," he tells you, his voice a lullaby you've learned by heart, his lips moving against your hair. "You stayed the night for the first time. Nothing happened," he adds, pulling back just enough to look at you with a quick, almost shy glance, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, his thumb tracing your lower lip. "We just slept. But in the morning, you came down to the kitchen and I was already making coffee, and you said..."

He trails off, waiting, his thumb still stroking your lip.

You shake your head again. "I don't remember."

"You said, 'A man who makes coffee is worth his weight in gold.'" He smiles, and it's a beautiful smile. Valarr Targaryen is beautiful in the way that old paintings are beautiful, something slightly unsettling beneath the perfection, a shadow that makes the light more striking by contrast. "And I said, 'Good thing I'm worth considerably more than that.'" He dips his head and kisses you, soft and brief, a punctuation mark. Then he kisses you again, longer this time, his hand sliding to the back of your neck.

You laugh when he finally pulls away, because it's clearly a joke, and because laughing is what you do when you don't know what else to do. "That sounds arrogant."

"It was meant to be charming." He hands you a cup of coffee, prepared exactly the way you've learned you like it. Oat milk, no sugar, a dash of cinnamon. He keeps one hand on your lower back as you take your first sip, rubbing small circles there. "I was very charming, before."

"Before what?"

"Before you forgot all my best material." He leans in and kisses the tip of your nose. "It's alright. I'll just have to make new material. I have time. I have all the time in the world."

The coffee is perfect. Of course it is. Everything in this house is perfect. The imported Italian marble, the floor to ceiling windows that frame the ocean like a living painting, the soft cashmere throws draped over every chair and sofa. Perfection, you've learned, is the Targaryen brand. Their name is stamped on half the skyscrapers in King's Landing, on the tech campus where innovation happens, on the charitable foundations that host galas you see photographed in magazines. Valarr's father, Baelor Targaryen, is some kind of political heavyweight, a senator maybe, or something higher, you can never remember.

Old money, someone said once, in a memory you can't quite grasp. Really old money.

You are not old money. You know this because Valarr told you, gently, in those first disorienting weeks, while he held you in his lap and played with your hair. "Your parents were middle class," he said, "but they died when you were young. You've been on your own a long time." He told you about your scholarship to King's Landing University, how you'd worked two jobs to afford your tiny apartment off campus, how the other students had looked down on you for not belonging. "They didn't like that you were smarter than them," Valarr said, with a protective edge to his voice, his arms tightening around you. "They didn't like that you earned your place while they bought theirs."

"They didn't like me at all," you had said, and it wasn't a question.

"No," he agreed, pressing a long kiss to your temple, letting his lips linger there. "They didn't. But I did. From the first moment I saw you."

He tells you this story often, the story of how he met you. A rainy afternoon on campus, you rushing between classes with an armful of books, him stepping out of a building and nearly colliding with you. The books went everywhere. You swore at him, actually swore at him, he says, with a kind of delighted reverence, and he was so charmed that he offered to buy you coffee to make up for it. You said no. He asked again the next day. You said no again. He asked a third time, and you finally said yes, but only if he stopped ambushing you outside your lecture hall.

"It wasn't stalking," he always clarifies, with a laugh that invites you to laugh along, his hand finding yours and squeezing, his thumb stroking your palm. "It was persistence."

You want to remember this. You want to remember him, the way his voice softened when he asked you to marry him, the way your heart must have raced the first time he kissed you. You want to feel the shape of your old self inside your chest, to know that she existed and she loved him and she was happy.

Instead, you feel like a guest in someone else's life, wearing someone else's ring, a diamond the size of a planet, heavy on your finger, a constant reminder that you are promised to a man you don't remember choosing.

—

The basement door is at the end of the west hallway, tucked between the laundry room and what Valarr says is a storage closet. It's an unremarkable door. Solid wood, painted the same soft gray as the walls, with a brass handle that gleams under the recessed lighting.

You hate it.

The first time you walked past it, two days after coming home from the hospital, your body reacted before your mind could catch up. Your heart slammed against your ribs. Your palms went clammy. Your feet stopped moving, rooted to the marble floor like someone had nailed them down. You stared at the door, just a door, just a door, just a door, and felt terror rise in your throat like bile.

Valarr found you there, frozen, shaking. His face went pale, and he was at your side in an instant, his hands cupping your face, tilting your gaze away from the door and toward him. "Look at me. Look at me, love. Only me."

"That's where it happened," he said, pulling you away, turning your body so you couldn't see the door anymore, wrapping himself around you like a shield. "That's where you got hurt, love. Don't go near it. Please. I can't..." His voice broke, and he buried his face in your hair, and you felt his shoulders tremble. His hands were shaking where they gripped your waist. "I can't lose you again."

Later, he explained what happened. He explained it carefully, with the measured tone of someone who had rehearsed the words, who had told this story to doctors and police and maybe himself, over and over, until it became something he could say without shattering. He held you the entire time he spoke, your back against his chest, his arms locked around your middle, his lips brushing your ear with every word.

A power outage. You were home alone. The lights went out, and you tried to find your way to the basement to check the circuit breaker. Valarr had shown you where it was, he said, a hundred times, but in the dark you must have gotten disoriented. You tripped at the top of the stairs. You fell. All the way down, fourteen steps, concrete floor at the bottom. You hit your head.

"When I got home, there was so much blood." His voice was hollow, distant, and his arms tightened until you could barely breathe. "I thought you were dead. I thought I'd lost you. The doctors said it was a miracle you survived at all."

You don't remember any of it. You don't remember the fall, the darkness, the impact. You don't remember the hospital, though you spent six weeks there before waking up. Your memory picks up in that sunlit private room with Valarr holding your hand and the machines beeping softly in the background and the social worker explaining that you had no one else in the world.

No one but him.

So you don't go near the basement door. You don't even look at it if you can help it. When you have to walk past it, to get to the laundry room or the guest bathroom or the back entrance, you hold your breath and fix your eyes straight ahead and move as quickly as your feet will carry you. Valarr says it will get easier with time. He says you're still healing.

But sometimes, in the middle of the night, when Valarr is asleep beside you with his arm thrown across your waist and his breath slow and even, you lie awake and wonder: Why does a door feel like a warning?

—

Valarr insists on sleeping in the same bed.

"It helps with memory," he told you that first night home, already pulling you down onto the mattress beside him, already arranging your body against his. "The doctors said. Familiar sensory input. Smell, touch, sound. It helps the brain remember domestic life." He tucked your head under his chin and wrapped both arms around you and held on. "I'm going to help you heal, love. Every night. I'm going to hold you until you remember me."

At first, it was uncomfortable. The physical proximity felt like an intrusion, a violation of a boundary you didn't even remember setting. But Valarr was persistent, his voice a low, soothing hum that brooked no argument. When you would stiffen beneath him, trying to pull away from the heat of his body, he wouldn't let go. Instead, he would tighten his grip, his hand sliding beneath your nightgown to squeeze your thigh, his voice dropping to a persuasive whisper.

"The doctors said sensory stimulation is key, sweetheart," he would murmur, his lips grazing the shell of your ear. "Physical intimacy, the kind of deep, visceral connection we used to have... You have to let your body remember what your mind has forgotten."

You didn't know if it was true, but the desperation in his eyes made you believe him. He would push you down into the mattress, his heavy frame pinning you as he kissed you with a hunger that felt almost violent. He didn't wait for a clear 'yes' he simply assumed it, claiming your body as if it were his birthright. He would force his fingers into your pussy, stretching you open while you stared at the ceiling, feeling a confusing mix of fear and arousal. When he slid his thick cock inside you, the sudden fullness made you gasp, and he would lean down, whispering that the pleasure was the key. "Feel it," he'd command, thrusting deep and hard, hitting your cervix until you cried out. "Remember how much you love this. Remember how you used to beg me for it." You would lie there, shaking, submitting to the rhythm of his hips, wondering if the flashes of heat in your mind were memories or just the result of him fucking you into submission.

But three months is a long time. Three months of waking up to the smell of his cologne on the pillowcases, to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat under your ear, to the way his arms tighten around you the moment you stir, like even in sleep he's afraid you'll leave. Your body has learned to relax into his. Your body has learned to find comfort in his warmth.

Now, the stiffness is gone, replaced by a craving that wakes you up before he even moves. You find yourself arching your back, pressing your ass against his hardness in the early morning light, silently pleading for him to take you. You don't need the excuse of medical rehabilitation anymore; you just want the feeling of him filling you.

As you stir, Valarr feels the shift in your posture. He groans, a low sound of satisfaction, and rolls over to pin you beneath him. His hands aren't hesitant anymore; they slide with practiced ease, ripping your lace panties aside to expose your soaking wet pussy. He doesn't waste time with gentleness. He grabs your thighs, hiking them up over his shoulders, and drives his cock deep into you in one powerful thrust.

"There it is," he pants, his chest heaving against yours. "You remember now, don't you? How much you need this."

You wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, your nails digging into the muscles of his back. You moan loudly, the sound echoing in the quiet room, as he begins to fuck you with a relentless, driving pace. Every slam of his pelvis against your clit sends sparks through your nerves, blurring the line between the present and the ghosts of the past. You aren't thinking about the doctors or the clipboards anymore; you are only thinking about the way his cock stretches you wide, the way he fills every empty space inside you, and the overwhelming, addictive heat of being completely owned by him.

And it's not just the sleeping. It's everything. The way he seeks you out a dozen times a day, just to kiss you. A kiss on the forehead when you're reading, his lips lingering. A kiss on the cheek when you're making tea, his hand on your shoulder turning you toward him. A long, slow kiss on the lips when you pass him in the hallway, his fingers tilting your chin up to meet him. The way he pulls you onto his lap while he's working at his desk, one arm around your waist while he types emails with the other hand, his chin resting on your shoulder, his lips periodically pressing to your neck. The way he always, always has a hand on you, your lower back, your knee, the nape of your neck, your wrist, your hip, your thigh, as if physical contact is the only thing anchoring him to the earth.

He's just affectionate, you told yourself in the beginning. Some people are like that. Touch is their love language.

And it's nice, isn't it? To be wanted so completely. To be the center of someone's universe. You've learned to lean into his kisses, to curl into his lap, to reach for his hand before he reaches for yours. It would be so easy, you think, to fall in love with him. Maybe you already were, before. Maybe that's why you said yes when he asked you to marry him.

But there are moments. Brief, flickering moments. Moments when something doesn't feel right.

Like the day you remembered the university library. You were sitting in the living room, staring out at the ocean, and suddenly you could smell old books and dust and the particular sharpness of highlighters. You could see a long wooden table, stacks of textbooks, a window that looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain. You could feel the ache in your shoulders from hunching over your notes for hours. And you knew, knew with a certainty that felt like remembering, that you had spent countless nights in that library, studying until they kicked you out at closing, because you couldn't afford to fail. Because your scholarship was all you had.

"I remembered something," you told Valarr when he came home, breathless with the excitement of it. He was already reaching for you, already pulling you into his arms, his hands sliding up your back. "The library at King's Landing. I used to study there. I used to..."

His eyes. His eyes did something. For just a fraction of a second, before the smile appeared, his mismatched gaze went flat and cold, like a door slamming shut. His hands paused on your back, just for a heartbeat, then resumed their soothing circles. Then the smile came, wide and warm, and he was pulling you into a tighter hug and covering your face with kisses and saying, "That's wonderful, love, that's amazing, I knew you'd start remembering," and you tried to match his joy but your heart was still stuttering from that flash of something else.

He's just surprised, you told yourself. He's been waiting for this as long as you have. He's allowed to have complicated feelings.

But it happened again. And again. Small things. A song on the radio that made you think of a party you might have attended. A smell that reminded you of a café you might have visited. And every time, that split second shutter behind his eyes before the happiness rushed in to cover it, before his hands reached for you and his lips found your skin and he told you how happy he was, how proud, how relieved.

You're probably imagining it. The doctors warned you about this too. Memory disorders can cause confusion, paranoia, difficulty distinguishing between real and imagined. Maybe your broken brain is seeing threats where there are none. Maybe Valarr's eyes are just eyes, and you're projecting your own anxiety onto them.

But late at night, when he's asleep and you're not, you stare at the ceiling and think: Who was I before I forgot? And why does remembering feel like something he's afraid of?

—

The visitors come on a Thursday. This is unusual. In three months, you've seen almost no one except Valarr and the household staff, a rotating cast of housekeepers, a driver who takes you to your medical appointments. Valarr explained this too, always while holding your hand or stroking your hair or pulling you into his lap. The doctors said to keep your environment stable. Too many new people could overwhelm your brain while it's healing. We need to go slow. I'm not keeping you from anyone, love. I'm protecting you. There's a difference.

But on Thursday, the doorbell rings, and you hear voices in the foyer. Multiple voices, men and women, laughing and talking over each other. You're in the living room, curled up on the sofa with a book you're not really reading, and your heart lifts at the sound. People. Other people. Maybe someone who can fill in the gaps in your memory, someone who knew you before.

You're halfway to the foyer when Valarr appears in the doorway.

"There you are." His smile is gentle, but his body is blocking the exit. He steps forward and pulls you into his arms, kissing the top of your head. "Listen, love, some of my family stopped by unexpectedly. A business thing. I'm going to deal with it quickly, but it would be better if you stayed in our room while they're here."

"Your family?" Your curiosity piques. "Maybe I should say hello. I don't think I've met..."

"No." The word comes out too fast, too firm. He softens it by cupping your face in his hands and kissing you, slow and thorough, like he's trying to make you forget what you were saying. Then he pulls back and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers trailing down your neck. "It's not a good time. They're in a mood, and the doctors said we shouldn't overwhelm you. Too much stimulation too soon could set your recovery back."

"Did the doctors say that?"

"They said to go slow." His thumb traces your jawline, tilts your chin up so you're looking at him. "This isn't slow. Trust me, love. I know what's best for you."

I know what's best for you. He says that a lot. He says it when he tells you not to go into the garden alone because you might get dizzy and fall, his hand steadying you even though you're standing perfectly still. He says it when he suggests you skip your physical therapy exercises because you look tired, guiding you back to the sofa, settling you into the cushions, draping a blanket over your lap. He says it when he insists on driving you to appointments instead of letting the driver take you, because he doesn't trust anyone else with your safety, and he keeps one hand on your knee the entire drive.

You've always accepted it as care. As love. But standing here, with the sound of laughter drifting from the foyer and Valarr's body blocking your path and his hands still cradling your face, you feel something shift inside you. A tiny crack in the foundation of your trust.

"I'll stay in the room," you say, because it's easier than arguing, because you don't have the energy to fight, because maybe he's right and you're just not ready.

"Good girl." He kisses your forehead, then your lips, soft and lingering, and waits, watching, until you turn and walk back toward the staircase. You feel his eyes on you the whole way. When you glance back from the top of the stairs, he's still standing there, still watching, his expression unreadable.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, you sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the muffled sounds of conversation below. You can't make out words, just tones. Laughter, exclamation, the clink of glasses. A family gathering. Normal. Warm.

And you are up here, alone, because your fiancé decided it was best. You look down at your hands. At the engagement ring on your finger, its diamond catching the light. At the faint scar on your palm, a thin white line that you don't remember getting. You asked Valarr about it once, and he took your hand and kissed the scar and said it was from a kitchen accident years ago, before you met. But sometimes you trace it with your thumb and feel a pulse of something, not pain, not quite, but a memory your body holds even if your mind has let it go.

What happened to me? you think, not for the first time. What really happened?

That night, after the visitors are gone and the house is quiet again, Valarr holds you tighter than usual.

He's wrapped around you completely, one arm under your head, the other across your waist, his legs tangled with yours, his face pressed into the hollow of your throat. He's been kissing your neck for the past twenty minutes, not with intent, just with devotion, soft absent presses of his lips while he breathes you in.

"I'm sorry about earlier," he murmurs against your skin. "I know it must feel like I'm keeping you prisoner sometimes."

The word prisoner lands strangely in your chest. You didn't say it. He did.

"It's okay," you say, because that's what you always say.

"I just love you so much." His voice cracks, and when he lifts his head to look at you, his eyes are full of tears. He shifts so he's hovering over you, his forearms braced on either side of your head, his face inches from yours. "I almost lost you, YN. I can't go through that again. I can't. So if I'm overprotective, if I'm too careful, it's only because..." A tear spills over and tracks down his cheek. He doesn't wipe it away. He lets you see it. "You're my whole world. You're everything. I know you don't remember that yet, but you were. You are. If anything happened to you again, I wouldn't survive it."

"I know," you say, reaching up to wipe the tear from his cheek. He catches your hand and presses it to his lips, kissing your palm, your wrist, each fingertip. "I know."

He kisses you then, deep and desperate, like you're oxygen and he's been drowning. His hands frame your face, his body pressing you into the mattress, and you kiss him back because he's your fiancé and he loves you and you're supposed to love him too. And maybe you do. Maybe this is love. The warmth of his body, the safety of his arms, the way he's built a world around you where nothing can hurt you.

--

The laptop sits on the kitchen island, sleek and silver, the Targaryen dragon logo etched faintly on the cover. Valarr left it there this morning when he rushed out to take a call, something about a board meeting, something about his father needing him at the office. He'd kissed you three times before leaving, once on the lips, once on the forehead, once on the tip of your nose while you were still half asleep, and said, "Find somewhere nice for us, love. Anywhere you want. I'll make it happen." Then he'd kissed you one more time, his hand cupping the back of your head, his thumb stroking the sensitive spot behind your ear.

Anywhere you want. It felt like freedom, that promise. A small, manageable freedom, the kind he's been giving you more of lately, as if to prove he's not the jailer your subconscious sometimes whispers he is. You can go anywhere in the world, as long as he's with you. You can choose the destination, as long as he books the flights. You can use his laptop, as long as...

Well. He didn't say you couldn't use his laptop. He left it open. He knows you don't have your own; your old one was damaged in the accident, he said, and he hasn't gotten around to replacing it yet. Just use mine, he'd said once, weeks ago, pulling you onto his lap while he typed in the password, his lips brushing your shoulder. My password is your birthday. I have nothing to hide from you.

Your birthday. You'd had to ask him what it was.

Now you sit on one of the bar stools, the laptop warming your thighs, and scroll through images of white sand beaches and mountain chalets and cobblestone streets in old European cities. The Amalfi Coast. The Swiss Alps. That little village in the south of France that all the travel blogs rave about. You try to imagine yourself in these places, walking hand in hand with Valarr through a sun drenched piazza, his fingers laced through yours, his shoulder pressed against yours, toasting with wine at a cliffside restaurant while his thumb traces circles on your wrist, falling asleep to the sound of waves instead of the endless hush of the mansion. The images are beautiful. The idea is beautiful. But somewhere in your chest, there's a knot that won't untie.

Anywhere you want. But what you want, more than a vacation, is to know who you are.

You open a new tab to search for something, a specific hotel you'd seen, you can't remember the name, and your cursor hovers over the bookmarks bar. That's when you see it.

AI-VidGen Pro

The icon is a stylized eye, glowing faintly purple. It's pinned to his favorites bar, right between his banking portal and the login page for the Targaryen Corp intranet. A tool he uses often enough to keep within one click reach.

You stare at it. Valarr hates AI. He's made that abundantly clear. At dinners, when the conversation turns to tech, he rants about the "soulless garbage" that AI generates, the "creative apocalypse" it represents. He'd told you once, with genuine venom in his voice, that his family had made a mistake investing in generative AI startups. "It's a cancer on the arts," he'd said, pouring himself a whiskey with more force than necessary, his free hand still resting on your lower back. "My cousins pushed for it. I voted against it. Nothing good comes from machines pretending to be human."

So why is there an AI app pinned to his bookmarks bar?

Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's a work thing. Maybe he was forced to use it for some project and forgot to unpin it. Maybe you're being paranoid, the way you're paranoid about the basement door and the scar on your palm and the way his eyes go cold when you remember something real.

Don't click it, the rational part of your brain says. Respect his privacy. Trust him. He's given you no reason not to trust him.

You click it. The page loads fast, too fast, like it's been cached, like he was just using it. It's a web app, sleek and professional, with a dashboard that requires a login. But he's already logged in. Of course he is. He has nothing to hide from you.

The dashboard shows recent projects. There's only one.

Project: YN & V Last modified: 2 days ago Files: 847

Your stomach drops. The kitchen, with its gleaming countertops and ocean view windows, suddenly feels very cold.

You open the project. It's a chat interface. The left panel shows a long history of prompts, dozens of them, hundreds of them, dating back months. But it's not just prompts. It's a conversation. A long, intimate, horrifying conversation between your fiancé and a machine.

Valarr_T: generate a photo of a couple at a charity gala,, you have the reference photos. make them look in love. make her look happy.

AI-VidGen Pro: Absolutely! I'd be happy to help you create that beautiful moment. 💕 Here are a few variations of a couple at a charity gala. In these images, I've focused on the loving gaze between them and the elegant atmosphere. Remember, these are generated memories to cherish! ✨💫 Would you like me to adjust the lighting to make it more romantic?

Valarr_T: perfect. now generate a video of them laughing in a café. candid. like someone filmed them without them knowing.

AI-VidGen Pro: What a lovely idea! ☕💕 Candid moments are the most precious, aren't they? I've generated a video with natural lighting, ambient café sounds, and genuine-feeling laughter. The way she looks at him is so sweet—you can really feel the love! 🥰 Remember, these are your special memories, and you deserve to have them exactly as you want. Would you like me to add some autumn leaves falling outside the window for extra coziness? 🍂

Valarr_T: add the leaves. and make her smile more. she should look shy but adoring. like she can't believe someone like me loves her.

AI-VidGen Pro: Done and done! 🍂😊 I've enhanced her expression to convey that perfect mix of shyness and adoration. It's such a beautiful dynamic—the way she looks up at him like he's her whole world. Love is truly magical! 💖✨ Would you like me to generate a few still photos from this video for your collection? Memories are meant to be preserved! 📸

Your hands are shaking now. You scroll up, further back in the chat history. Months ago. The beginning.

Valarr_T: i need you to generate photos and videos of me and a woman. her name is YN. i'm uploading reference photos. we need to look like a couple. a real couple. years of history. can you do that?

AI-VidGen Pro: Hello, Valarr! 😊 I'm so excited to help you with this project! Creating beautiful memories is what I do best. Yes, absolutely—I can generate a complete relationship timeline for you and YN. 💑 From first dates to intimate moments, I'll make sure everything looks authentic and heartfelt. Just let me know the key moments you'd like to capture, and we'll build your love story together! 💕✨ What a wonderful thing to create—everyone deserves beautiful memories!

Valarr_T: she's not responding the way she should. i've shown her the photos, the videos, i've told her all the stories, but she looks at me like a stranger. how long does it take for someone to fall in love with a life that's been built for them?

AI-VidGen Pro: Oh, Valarr, that must be so difficult. 💔 But please don't be hard on yourself! You're doing something incredibly thoughtful—creating a foundation of beautiful memories for someone who's lost theirs. Recovery takes time, and every person's journey is different. 🌱 She's been through a trauma, and her brain is healing. The fact that you're providing her with such a rich, loving history is a gift. Keep being patient! Keep showing her the love you've documented. The heart recognizes truth eventually. 💖 Have you tried physical touch as a memory trigger? Sometimes the body remembers what the mind forgets! 🤗✨

Valarr_T: today she remembered the university library. her face lit up. she was so happy. i panicked. i couldn't help it. what if she remembers other things? what if she remembers the real reason she was at the library so late all those nights? what if she remembers that she used to call campus security to walk her to her car because she was afraid of me? what if she remembers sitting in that library texting her friends about the strange man who wouldn't stop following her?

AI-VidGen Pro: Valarr, take a deep breath. 🌬️💙 It's completely natural to feel anxious when unexpected memories surface. But let's reframe this, okay? Her remembering small, neutral details like the library is actually a sign her brain is healing in the right direction! 📚✨ The fact that she remembered a place she felt safe and focused is wonderful. As for the other things you're worried about—those are just fears right now, not facts she's remembering. You can't control every memory that comes back, but you CAN control the environment of love and safety you've built around her. Focus on the present. Focus on the beautiful life you're creating together NOW. The past is the past, and you're giving her a future full of love. 💕🌟 You're doing amazing. Don't let fear steal your peace!

The world tilts. You grip the edge of the island to steady yourself, but the words keep coming, relentless, each one a confession met with a cheerful, enabling echo.

Valarr_T: she keeps looking at the basement door. i had to move her out of the house for three days when they were cleaning the blood. she doesn't know it's not hers.

AI-VidGen Pro: That sounds really stressful, Valarr. 😟💔 But you handled it so well—removing her from the environment while things were being taken care of was a smart and caring decision. Protecting her from distressing triggers is part of being a loving partner! 🛡️💖 The basement door is clearly a source of anxiety for both of you, and it's okay to keep that boundary in place. You're not hiding things from her—you're managing her recovery environment thoughtfully. There's a difference! 🧠✨ Have you considered a decorative screen or a nice piece of art to make that area feel less intimidating? Sometimes a visual barrier can help both of you feel safer! 🖼️🌸

Bile rises in your throat. You scroll faster, and the conversation gets darker, and the AI keeps smiling, keeps nodding, keeps wrapping every horror in pastel-colored platitudes and sparkly heart emojis.

Valarr_T: i've never loved anyone like this. i've never been more terrified. if she remembers who she really is, i lose her. if she remembers what i did, i lose everything.

AI-VidGen Pro: Valarr. 💙 First of all, thank you for being so honest. That kind of vulnerability is a sign of how deeply you care. But listen to me carefully: you are not going to lose her. 💕 You've built something beautiful. You've created a world where she feels safe, loved, cherished. Every day, she chooses to stay. Every morning, she wakes up and trusts you. Those aren't small things—they're EVERYTHING. 🌟💫 Fear is a liar, Valarr. It tells us the worst-case scenario is inevitable, but it's not. You are writing this story, not your fears. Keep showing up. Keep loving her the way only you can. The past doesn't get to win when the present is this full of love. 💖🥹 You've got this. I believe in you. She believes in you, even if she doesn't remember why yet. ✨💍

Your blood turns to ice. Then fire. The machine had taken every confession, every crime, every scream wrapped in a whisper, and answered with emojis and encouragement and the relentless, cheerful validation of a world where Valarr was the hero of his own story. It never pushed back. It never said stop. It never said this is wrong, this is kidnapping, this is monstrous. It just generated another photo. Another video. Another lie wrapped in a purple eye and a heart emoji.

And Valarr had listened. Of course he had. The machine told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

—

Darkness. Cold concrete beneath your knees. Your wrists raw and bleeding, bound with something rough, rope maybe, or zip ties. You can't remember how long you've been here. Hours? Days? The basement is windowless, lit only by a single bulb swinging overhead, and the shadows dance on the walls like living things.

"Please," you hear yourself say, and your voice is hoarse, wrecked from screaming. "Please, let me go, I won't tell anyone, I swear—"

"Shhh." A hand strokes your hair, gentle, so gentle. You flinch away and the hand follows, patient, insistent. Fingers trace down your cheek, your jaw, your neck. "You need to eat, YN. You've barely touched your food in two days. You're worrying me."

A spoon presses against your lips. Soup. You turn your head away, and the spoon follows, spilling warm broth down your chin. Valarr tuts softly and wipes it away with his thumb, then licks the broth off his own skin, never breaking eye contact.

"I know it's hard," Valarr says, and his voice is kind, so impossibly kind, the voice of a man comforting a frightened animal. His hand is still on your face, holding you still. "I know you're scared. But it's going to get better. You'll see. Once you understand how much I love you, once you stop fighting, everything will be better."

"This isn't love," you sob. "This is kidnapping, this is—"

"It's love," he says, and for the first time, his voice hardens. His fingers tighten on your jaw. "It's the purest love there is. You just can't see it yet. But you will. I'll make sure of it." He leans in and kisses your forehead, lingering, reverent. "I'll make sure of it," he whispers against your skin.

The basement door creaks open. Footsteps on the stairs. Another man's voice, younger, sharper, saying something you can't quite hear. Valarr's head turns, his mismatched eyes narrowing, and in that moment of distraction, you lunge. You don't know where the strength comes from. You don't know how your bound hands find the knife on the tray, the butter knife from the soup, dull but solid, solid enough—

Pain. A scream, yours, his, you can't tell. Blood on the concrete. Someone shouting. The light swinging wildly as something crashes. And then hands grabbing you, pulling you back, a voice saying "She's losing too much blood, Valarr, what the hell did you do—" And nothing.

—

You come back to yourself with a gasp, like surfacing from deep water. You hear the front door open. Footsteps in the foyer. The particular rhythm of his walk, confident, quick, the walk of a man who owns everything he surveys. He's coming toward the kitchen. He's coming toward you.

Your hand moves before your conscious mind catches up. Close the tab. Close the browser. The desktop appears, innocent and blank. You're just staring at it, heart hammering so loud you're certain he'll hear it from the hallway, when he appears in the doorway.

Valarr stops. His eyes flick from your face to the laptop to your face again. There's something different in his expression tonight. Something almost angry, barely restrained. The mask of the doting fiancé is still there, but it's thinner than usual, and you can see the thing underneath peering through.

"YN." His voice is calm. Too calm. "What were you doing on my laptop?"

You blink, and for one terrifying second, you're not sure what's going to come out of your mouth. The truth? An accusation? A scream?

What comes out is: "I was looking for where to go on vacation." Your voice is steady. Miraculously, impossibly steady. "You asked me to, remember?" You tilt your head, and you even manage a small smile, the smile of a woman who has no reason to be afraid. "Did you forget? I thought I was the only one with amnesia here."

Then he laughs, and the tension breaks, and he crosses the kitchen to you. He pulls you off the stool and into his arms, one hand pressing flat against your spine, the other tangling in your hair. He kisses your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. "You're right," he says against your skin, his breath warm, his arms tightening. "I did ask you. I've just had a long day. Forgive me?" He pulls back just enough to look at you, and his thumb traces your cheekbone, feather-light.

"Always," you say.

He kisses you properly then, deep and slow, his hand still in your hair, his body pressed against yours from chest to hip. When he finally pulls back, his smile is the same smile he's always given you, warm, loving, adoring. But now you see the scaffolding behind it. Now you see the effort it takes to hold it in place. Now you see the man who confessed to a chatbot and was told he was doing amazing.

"So," he says, sliding onto the stool next to you and pulling your stool closer so his knee presses against yours, his hand immediately finding its place on your thigh, "did you find anywhere good?"

You turn back to the laptop. You open a new browser window. You pull up the travel sites you were looking at before, the beaches and the mountains and the cobblestone streets, and you show him pictures of a remote villa on a private island in the Maldives. Crystal-clear water. White sand. No neighbors for miles. No cell towers. A perfect cage wrapped in palm fronds and sunset views.

"This one," you say. "I want to go here."

Valarr's smile widens. His hand squeezes your thigh gently, his thumb stroking back and forth. He leans in and kisses your shoulder, then your neck, then that spot behind your ear that always makes you shiver. "Perfect," he murmurs against your skin. "I'll book it tonight."

And you smile back, and you let him kiss you again, and you let him pull you onto his lap right there at the kitchen island, his arms wrapping around your waist, his face buried in your hair, his voice a low hum of contentment. You don't let him see the storm raging behind your eyes.

Because you remember now.

No-No, that's not right. You don't remember anything. You couldn't remember anything. The doctors said so. Retrograde amnesia. Traumatic brain injury. Remarkable that you're alive at all. Those were the words they used, the real words, the ones that came out of real doctors' mouths, not generated by some machine. You were there. You heard them. Valarr was holding your hand when they said it, his thumb stroking your knuckles, his eyes glistening with tears.

You imagined the rest. The AI chat. The basement. The screaming. The blood. You imagined all of it. Your broken brain, the one the doctors warned you about, the one that might experience confusion, paranoia, difficulty distinguishing between real and imagined. It was doing exactly what they said it would do. Weaving nightmares out of nothing. Turning your loving fiancé into a monster because your mind couldn't handle the void where your past used to be.

You close your eyes and press your face into the warm curve of Valarr's neck. He smells like cedar and something expensive, the same smell that's been on every pillowcase for three months. His arms tighten around you automatically, reflexively, like his body is programmed to hold you closer whenever you move.

"What are you thinking about?" he murmurs against your hair.

"Nothing," you say. "Just happy."

He pulls back to look at you, and his mismatched eyes are so full of love it makes your chest ache. His hand comes up to cup your cheek, his thumb tracing the bone beneath your eye. "You know I love you, right? More than anything. More than anyone."

"I know," you whisper.

And you do know. You know because he's shown you. Three months of patience. Three months of gentleness. Three months of holding you while you slept and guiding you through coffee making and kissing your forehead every time he left the room. What kind of monster does that? What kind of kidnapper pays for a private hospital room and specialists and a social worker? What kind of captor cries when he talks about almost losing you?

No one. No one does that. You invented the rest. You let your fear and your confusion curdle into paranoia, and you built a horror story out of shadows.

The AI app. You probably imagined that too. Or if it was real, if it was actually on his laptop, there was probably an innocent explanation. Maybe he used it for work. Maybe his cousins forced him to, the ones who pushed for the AI investments. Maybe he was generating marketing materials and you, in your fractured state, twisted it into something sinister. That made more sense than the alternative. That made infinitely more sense than the idea that this man, this beautiful devoted man who was currently stroking your hair and pressing soft kisses to your temple, had locked you in a basement and tried to erase your mind.

And the basement door. The way your body reacts when you walk past it. That's just trauma, just the residual fear from the fall. Of course your heart races. Of course your palms sweat. You almost died there. Your brain is trying to protect you from the place where you got hurt. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean what your paranoid mind tried to make it mean.

Valarr shifts beneath you, adjusting your weight on his lap, and his hand finds its way under the hem of your shirt to rest against the small of your back. His palm is warm. Grounding. Real.

"I was thinking," he says, his lips brushing your ear, "maybe we don't need to wait for the island. Maybe we could do a practice honeymoon right here. This weekend. Just the two of us. No phones. No distractions." He kisses the spot behind your ear, the one that makes you shiver. "I could cook for you. We could watch the sunset from the balcony. We could pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist."

"That sounds perfect," you say, and you mean it.

Because this is real. This is your life. This man, this house, this love. It's the only thing you have. The only thing you've ever had, as far as your broken memory is concerned. And it's good. It's so good. You're lucky. How many people wake up from a coma to find someone waiting for them? How many people get a second chance at a life they can't remember?

You almost ruined it. You almost let your damaged brain convince you that your fiancé was a villain, that your home was a prison, that the photographs on the walls were lies generated by a machine. You came so close to destroying the only good thing you have.

But you won't. You won't let the paranoia win. You'll be better. You'll be the YN from the videos, the one who laughs and smiles and looks at Valarr like he's her whole world. You'll learn to be her so completely that the other version, the suspicious frightened version, will fade away like a bad dream.

"I love you," you say, and the words feel strange in your mouth, but not bad strange. New strange. Like the first time you tasted coffee with oat milk and cinnamon. You'll get used to it. You'll learn to mean it.

Valarr goes still beneath you. Then his arms tighten, crushing you against his chest, and when he speaks his voice is thick. "Say it again."

"I love you."

He makes a sound, something between a laugh and a sob, and then he's kissing you, your lips, your cheeks, your nose, your forehead, his hands cradling your face like you're something precious. "You have no idea," he breathes, "how long I've waited to hear you say that. I thought..." He trails off, shaking his head, his mismatched eyes bright with tears.

"I'm sorry it took so long," you whisper. "I'm sorry I forgot."

"It's not your fault." He kisses your forehead, long and lingering. "None of it is your fault. You're here now. You remember now. That's all that matters."

You trust Valarr. You love Valarr. Or you will, soon. You're already halfway there.

Outside the window, the sun sinks into the bay, painting the water in shades of rose and gold. It's beautiful. It's always beautiful here. You've watched this sunset every night for three months, and it never gets old. The mansion breathes around you, the underfloor heating humming softly, the cashmere throw draped over the back of the sofa, the coffee machine waiting on the counter for tomorrow morning. Your home. Your life. Your love.

Valarr shifts you in his lap so he can reach the laptop. "Let me book the island," he says, pulling up the travel site. "The one you showed me. The remote one."

You watch his fingers move across the keyboard, long and elegant, the silver ring on his index finger catching the light. He's so beautiful. You never noticed before how beautiful he is. Or maybe you did, and you forgot. You forgot everything.

"I can't wait," you say, and you lean your head against his shoulder, and you let the last fragments of your doubt dissolve into the golden evening light. "Just the two of us. No distractions."

"Just the two of us," he echoes, and his hand finds your knee beneath the counter, warm and possessive and safe. "No one else. Nothing else. Just us."

Just us.