soleil

Summerhall is suffocating. The air felt thicker here. It reeked of honeysuckle and sun-scorched earth, blown over from the rolling Dornish marches. The gardens were sprawling and luscious, once attentively kept by your husband’s lady-mother, Dyanna Dayne. He never spoke of her to you, but you knew about the traditional funeral practices of the Daynes of Starfall—that his mother’s corpse was most likely wrapped up in a chrysalis of lavender and left on the summit of the Red Mountains to be feasted upon by vultures. The servants tend to her thickets of moon-blooms now. You suppose that responsibility may one day fall to you when Daeron’s married off to some heiress of a great house and is made lord of all she holds dear. 

You swallow that thought down and it bobs viciously in your throat. You have no interest in being the lady of Summerhall, nor languishing in those sweltering gardens surrounded by the lilac buds nursed by a dead woman.

Home was even in the periwinkle thread you were using to stitch waves into muslin. Embroidery’s one of the only past-times you had left. When you miss the shallow waters of Driftmark lapping gently at the nape of your ankles, you put a needle to cotton. When the feeling of sun-warmed sand between your toes seemed like a different lifetime ago, you sit in the bay window of the chambers you share with Aerion, practicing your cross-stitch as you listen to the winds whistling through laburnum trees. 

Today, you’re sewing the pale stone outline of High Tide. 

“Another hard day spent, wife?” Aerion muses when he returns to your chambers after supper, draping today’s cloak over the back of the chair at your vanity. 

You look up from the embroidery hoop in your lap, briefly glancing over that small smirk and the half-lilt of his brows. “If you say so, husband. And you?”

“The hunt went well. Daeron fell off of his horse, but…” He shrugs, “that was to be expected after downing a gallon of wine.”

His mouth twitches, and he’s looking at you as if he’s expecting a similar, amused kind of reaction from you. The best you can manage is a wan, pursed smile that might’ve looked more like a grimace. 

“I’m glad your day was fruitful, my lord,” you offer diplomatically as his smirk melts into a rattled scowl.

“Hmph.” He’s displeased by your lack of reaction, but not surprised. He then gestures lazily to his crimson doublet. “Come. Help me undress, wife.”

This was something he’d make you do every evening since your wedding night. Whether he considered it a form of intimacy or control, it became a relentless part of your routine regardless. 

You sigh, putting your embroidery down beside you on the cushioned window-seat and standing, straightening out the creases in your silks before crossing the room to him. As soon as you were an arm’s stretch away from him, Aerion knocks his chin up, jutting his jaw the slightest bit. A muscle twitches there in his mandible as you step up to him, almost toe-to-two. Your skirts whispered faintly against his legs. His fingers flex at his side, reaching out just enough for his fingertips to touch at the soft satin of your gown.  

“You ought to wear more red,” he says quickly when you begin to work on the buttons of his doublet. “They’re your colours too now, after all. It is proper for a wife to represent her lord husband’s house.”

You bite into your tongue. You have no interest in donning scarlets and blacks to satisfy your husband’s ego. Aerion’s heart bleeds fire and blood so ravenously, he expects everyone to be so fanatic. Especially you, it seems, often regarding the sea-green and teal of your dresses with contempt. But, for a woman hundreds of miles from her home, your clothes were some of the last autonomy you had. Swathing yourself in blood-red would feel like the last bit of rebellion you had left in you rotting away.

Still, you bowed your head demurely and continued to undress him. “Very well, husband. I shall fetch for a seamstress, so they might get my measurements and fashion me something worthy of your noble house.”

If Aerion hears the sarcasm seeping into your calculated response, he doesn’t care enough to acknowledge it. Instead, he lets the corner of his mouth curl viciously and counters, “Well, not before long, this seamstress shall need to take a different set of measurements…to accommodate for the swell of your belly, of course.”

Your fingers went still against the ringmail-vest underneath his doublet. Another fascination of Aerion’s was the idea of you being round with his baby. 

The first time he bedded you, it was as tradition follows. Your consummation had been a private thing, per Aerion’s insistence. He’d bargained with his father that the maester might wait outside of the room until the two of you were finished, to only enter after the deed was done to ensure that you’d bled. After a day of feeling like you were dressed as some prized pig for the slaughterhouse, you’d taken this as a sign of chivalry. You’d almost thought that this marriage would be something you could stomach. 

That night, Aerion undressed you. Working slowly at the laces of your corset with your back turned to him, murmuring to himself about the humiliation of his family that night—Daeron drowning in his cups, his cousin Valarr’s peacocking as he twirled his Tyroshi wife under his arm, and his younger siblings constant nattering. You let him complain. You thought the longer this part of the night was prolonged, the less daunting the act itself would be. But the four-poster of your marital bed lingered in your periphery like some kind of beleaguering ghost as Aerion moved your hair over to one shoulder and started tracing chaste kisses along the trembling line of your shoulder.

“You’re scared, wife,” he’d muttered in observation, fingertips coming to feel the goosebumps along your skin.

Wife. You’re his wife.

“No,” you had scrambled to say, voice catching shallowly around your frantic lie. “Not scared, only…” You shuddered at the feeling of his mouth against the top of your spine, “nervous, that is all.”

“You’ve heard the whispers then. Brightflame. The monstrous second son of the king’s youngest son. So cruel, so capricious.” He slipped one of your arms out of its sleeve, then the other, and his chest rumbled with an amused laugh when your hands reached instinctively to clutch the material at your chest to your breasts. “Do you believe the whispers? Do you think me as frightening as they say?”

You couldn’t say what had possessed you to say it. Perhaps it was the unnerving sensation in your stomach that everything was slowly getting away from you—your dignity, your self-control, any sense of knowing your place in the world. 

“I know that my father did not want me to marry you,” you’d blurted, hands still grasping your gown to your chest. “I know that he would’ve rather married me off to your drunkard brother, but the court whispers that you longed for a Valyrian bride. That you long for Valyria itself. Though, the King wants to leave the days of marrying Targaryens to Targaryens behind. So, your grandfather and Prince Maekar compromised. They offered you me…” The thickening silence behind you had been startling. You could still remember the pounding of your heartbeat against your ribs as he said nothing at all. You’d swallowed and continued in spite of yourself, “Though, we lost most of our coin after the Dance…and, since Queen Daenaera married the Dragonbane, our dynasties have seemed to forget our old alliance. Until today.”

Aerion hummed contemplatively, the knuckle of his forefinger moving down the rosary of your spine over silk. “Until today.” 

“So no, I do not find you frightening because I think you are some cruel, erratic princeling,” you carried on. “I do wonder what you thought you could get out of a marriage with an almost penniless house from a lonely island across Blackwater Bay.”

“I assume the maester of High Tide taught you about Valaena Velaryon?”

You stilled again. “Valaena…?” 

“Let go of your dress,” said Aerion quietly.

“Excuse me?”

“Your dress.”

Taken aback, you felt the hold on the brocade slacken. Aerion hummed in satisfaction, reaching around you to firmly close his hands around your wrists and move your hands from your breasts. The satin of the bridal gown slipped down your body as seamlessly as water, pooling at your ankles and leaving you in the silk chemise your lady mother had commissioned for the wedding. It was lacy around the neckline and hem, intricate but dainty. It left the lengths of your arms and most of your legs bare and exposed to the cold air of your marital chambers.

The hairs on the nape of your neck stood tall, and you went on instinct to cradle your palms to yourself to emulate some semblance of warmth, forgetting that Aerion’s fingers were still clasped around you. The small thrash made him press both of his thumbs into the hollows of your wrists.

“Pretty,” he’d said. It made your throat swell. He then went on, “Valaena Velaryon was the fairest bride of her time, they say.” Your husband’s hands started to move up from your wrists, over your elbows, and up to the skimpy straps of your chemise, teasing his index finger under it to feel at the skin there. “A true beauty of Old Valyria. She married my namesake, did you know that? Lord Aerion Targaryen, lord of Dragonstone during the Century of Blood. He was the last rider of Aegarax. They had a fruitful marriage, Lord Aerion and his lady wife from your lonely island across Blackwater Bay. Do you know why?” 

All words and breath were lost to you. You were acutely aware that Aerion stood behind you, fully-dressed and entirely in control, whilst you were with your back to him, vulnerable and dressed in only a scrap of silk.

“I can’t remember,” was all you could muster.

“Hm.” He didn’t sound particularly disappointed, nor pleased, by your answer. There was no malicious edge or self-satisfied grunt at your haziness. He appeared to be entirely collected. Then, just when he began talking again, he started to pull the flimsy straps of your chemise down your arms, “Aerion and Valaena had three babes. A girl, first…” 

Aerion did not let you cover yourself this time. As soon as the straps were gone, he merely batted your arms away and hooked his fingers into the scooping neckline at the back of the slip, taking his sweet time in pulling it down your torso. 

“After their daughter, a son…” 

When the silk caught at your hips, Aerion let out a quiet, appreciative sound, stroking his thumb over the dip in the small of your back, before tugging it over the swell of your ass. Your breath hitched at the exposure, at the cold draught whispering from the open window. 

“After their heir, a final daughter.” 

The silk hit the floor, joining the shallow sea of your satin bridal dress with a murmur. You were entirely naked.

“Aegon,” you choked then, not even bothering to attempt covering yourself again. “The Conqueror and his sisters. Visenya and Rhaenys. Lady Valaena was their mother.”

“Clever girl,” he praised, half-mocking. “Lady Valaena, of your almost penniless house from your lonely island, birthed the three-headed dragon. Her womb made the Targaryen dynasty what it is today.”

Not a fraction what it was a century ago? You yearned to bite at him, but somehow had resisted the urge.

“And you think I am Lady Valaena born-again, to bring you forth three babes on the birthing-bed, so they might be conquerors?” you asked him. 

“Not conquerors, wife,” Aerion mused, kissing the curve of your shoulder again, “dragons.” 

Before that night, you’d heard horror stories about consummation. Of splitting pain and cruel, selfish men, pawing at breasts like raw meat or spoils of a hunt, emptying themselves into their ripe wives like grunting boars. 

Aerion was not like that. He did not mount you like some stable mare, fuck you brutal and short. It was a methodical art, the way he took you that night. He told you, between heated kisses, the filthiness of his mouth dragging against yours, that he’d had dreams of a three-headed dragon. Of flames, and the sky torn open, bleeding a comet of blazing red, as the night sung with the songs of dragons once more.

He laid you out on his bed, all bare and goose-flesh and shivering, and let the kisses move from your swollen mouth to the valley between your breasts. Your sternum arched from how you shamefully arched out of the crimson sheets and into his hunger. His mouth followed down to your abdomen, lingering over the swell of your lower-belly. He’d looked ravenous, you remembered. As if he could already picture your womb full of him. 

“You’ll give me dragons, wife,” he’d told you, moving himself lower, and lower, until he was brushing his spit-slick lips against the sensitive juncture of your thighs. 

His hands came down to your hips firmly when you started to jerk them, feeling tender and unfamiliar as your cunt started to ache. 

“Three of them.”

Then, he kissed your cunt how he’d kissed your mouth. Insatiably, dirtily, perfect. He licked at you, that tongue of his curling against a particularly tender spot of you that you’d only clumsily felt at yourself when you could not sleep. There was nothing clumsy about the way he handled you. 

A sound came out of you that might’ve been a sob when he sunk his index finger inside of the warm heat of you. He curled it with some kind of second-nature to a sweetness within you that made you needily buck your hips and finally move your hands from where they’d been balling up fistfuls of duvet into them.

“The maesters don’t want lesser men to know this,” he’d murmured against you, opening you up, coaxing a second finger into you, all the while tasting you and sucking at that pearl of yours, “but a woman’s pleasure is just as important as a man’s. I think Lord Aerion treated his lady wife right, do you? Old Valyria did not treat fucking like some sin.” 

You could barely listen to what he was saying, his fingers stimulating a part of you that felt so deep, so intense, and so good, that it felt like it belonged to him rather than you.

“Lord Aerion took care of his Velaryon bride. He fucked three dragons into her and they united all Seven Kingdoms.” 

He met your eyes then, his own so dark with lust and narrowed into almost slits that he almost looked like one of the beasts himself. His mouth left your heat for a brief moment, slick with your arousal and his own saliva.

“I shall do the same to you,” he’d promised.

Your moon-blood had arrived twice since your wedding, and you’d thought that might deter him. But his aspirations remain steadfast, and so does he. Your husband means to make some vessel of prophecy and magic out of you.

Every other night, he’d have his mouth on your cunt again. His fingers filling you. He’d make you unravel at least twice before unlacing his own breeches and taking you however he saw fit—bent over the edge of your bed, sprawled across the sheets with a pillow propped under your hips, you riding him. Each time was pleasurable as the last, and you’d be a liar if you said that you didn’t enjoy laying with him in such a manner. If your husband was anything, it was a good lover. 

But he was also cold and waspish. Cruel to his younger siblings, and derisive to his elder brother. He treated servants and guards alike as if they were animals. He rarely asked about you, rarely acknowledged you as little more than the future mother of his babes. He did not care that you hated the heat of Summerhall, that you missed the sea, and the salt-air, nor that you longed to feel the sand under your feet. He did not care that Driftmark haunts you when you sleep, girlhood laughter, and chasing your brother over the beach, tiny feet splashing through the waters. Your dreams weren’t deemed as important as his. If Aerion were to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and thrashing after some nightmarish terror of cities burning or dragons slain, he’d wake you up too. You’d try and ask him what was wrong, be the attentive wife, stroke your fingers through his short strands of silvery hair. He didn’t want comfort. 

He’d ruck up the cotton of your nightdress, sink into you, and mouth at the column of your neck as he spoke about fire and blood, slaughtering Blackfyres, the ways of Old Valyria, and how beautiful you’d look pregnant. 

“I pray to the Mother every day that I will one day be worthy of bearing your child, my lord,” you say then, smiling vacantly up at him as he stands there, shirtless and frowning.

He’s so handsome, you think. Handsome in that otherworldly kind of way that only really existed now in his bloodline or across the Narrow Sea in whorehouses. You wish that he cared more. That he’d notice your homesickness, the way you gaze so longingly out of your window as you look eastwards, and offer to visit Driftmark with you. Or at least sit next to you and ask about your home, about yourself, about what you liked to do. You hate embroidery. Your fingers are calloused from needle-pricks and unbuttoning the stiff fastens of his doublet every day. You miss horse-riding. You miss running. You miss talking about things other than Valyrian histories.

You have this grotesque, needy want in you for him to just want you back, not for some royal womb, or incubator for a three-headed augury. You want to be his wife in the same way your mother was your father’s, and Lady Dyanna was his father’s. Mayhaps then you’d care more for the gardens and being lady of Summerhall.

“Such pretty, obedient words,” croons Aerion, his knuckle caressing over your cheekbone. “I almost believe them.”

This makes your eye twitch, but you say nothing. You’re not sure Aerion expects you to, because he’s sweeping past you and over to his wardrobe to find some night-clothes to change into. You glance down at your own dress, then out at the pinkish sunset, and glide over to your own. Pointedly, you slip into a blue shift. You hear a disgruntled sound getting stuck in his throat as he watches the loose material of it all fall over you, but remain silent to start unbraiding your hair. 

Aerion would prefer that you have a maidservant to do these kinds of things for you, such as ready you for bed, and do your hair. He’d rather you do nothing at all but sit somewhere, looking ornamental and pretty all day, as he hunts and spars and spits cruelties to the small folk, then returns to you, so you might open your legs like a good little wife and do your duty. You prefer keeping whatever little of your self-government you have left since becoming a princess.

He waits for you on his side of the bed. He has the levelled look of a bored princeling in his expression, but those eyes of his can no longer deceive you. He’s cross with you. Impatient, for whatever reason. It might’ve unsettled you a moon ago, but now it only makes you languish more to prepare yourself for bed. The sun’s swallowed by the peaks of the marches by the time you climbed in next to him, smelling like the sprigs of lavender you rub against your pulse-points every night.

“How will you have me tonight, my lord?” you ask drolly, folding your hands sensibly over your lap.

Aerion squints at you, affronted. “You make it sound as if it is a chore.”

“It’s a duty,” you correct.

“Oh, so dutiful, when you’re moaning like a wanton whore in my ear for it,” Aerion snarls. He doesn’t like it when you’re short with him, nor when you get righteous about sex. “If you do not wish to be bedded tonight, wife, you need only tell me.”

You scoff. “That’s all I need-do, is it? Simply tell you?” 

“I am not some common brute. Some beggar-raper. I am your lord husband,” sneers Aerion, as if you could ever forget. “If you don’t want me to fuck you, say it. You have a tongue, don’t you? A mouth?” 

“Noticed, have you?”

“Clever girl, aren’t you? So full of wit and bite.” The malice in his eyes darkens when you stare stubbornly back at him, unflinching. “Go on then, what is it? What has upset you so? Are your days spent doing your embroidery and eating lemon-cakes so trifling, wife? Does my right as a husband to expect heirs from you upset you?” 

You feel incensed, wroth stirring in you with a heated sensation not too dissimilar from want. “I do not begrudge you for wanting heirs, Aerion. I understand what it means to be a woman in this world. I know my place. But am I such a frivolous fool for wanting, just once, for you to return from whatever sport you’re spoiling and talk to me?” 

“I am talking to you! I talk to you plenty!” he returns defensively.

“You don’t! You never do. You make snide remarks and ask me to undress you. You’re gone most mornings when I awake. We rarely break our fast together. When you do lower yourself to talk to me, it’s about seeing me round with child,” you seeth, a stinging in your eyes now. “I say child, but you do not want that. You do not want a son to teach how to be chivalrous, or a daughter to protect. You want me to labour three beasts, so you might return your house to its former glory. I knew even as a little girl that I would end up brood-mare to some lord of some castle, Aerion, but I never thought he’d only deign to converse with me if it’s to talk about your thirst for some hatchling to rip me open!” 

Aerion stares at you then, and the moment that ensues is long and filled with tension. The look he gives you is almost indiscernible in its multitudes. Wroth, bemusement, a hint of arousal. He likes you like this, and you know it. He loves the bite, even if he mocks it. He likens it to fire, but you know that it’s the sea. Vicious, still at times, but its belly is as ravenous as a dragon’s. 

“Feel better now?” he then asks, cruel and grinning lopsidedly. 

The steadiness of his voice is like nails against bone. You feel sick with anger and it makes the candlelight reflecting in his eyes resemble flames.

“You’re incorrigible,” you tell him, hurt.

“Next time you do not wish to lay with me, wife, just say it. You needn’t waste your precious breath with touching speeches such as that,” Aerion drawls, shifting to lie on his side all haughty and complacent. 

It made you feel so humiliating and wretched, but Gods, you wanted him to fight with you. To yell at you, just how he yells with his father and Daeron. It’s a ghastly longing, to wish that your husband would shout at you, but it was yours all the same. You remember arguments between your parents when you were growing up. Your father is temperamental as the waves that crash against the slates of Driftmark’s rockery, and your mother, a Stark, was as brittle as winter. Their spats would oft send High Tide splitting into factions. But when they would make up, they were perfectly happy. Your mother would press her lips to the stubble on your father’s jawbone and he’d kiss her brow, and love felt uniquely real. 

Now, silence torments you. Loneliness scabs over your skin like old wounds. You feel perverse for enjoying sex with Aerion when this rotten throb in the pit of your stomach yearns for more. Even if it was ugly. 

“Is that really all you have to say?” you utter, disconcerted as you stare at his turned back. “It is not just about not wanting to lay with you, Aerion, it’s—” 

“Sleep, wife,” he interjects coolly, “I’m sure you have another tiresome day in the morrow of needlework and staring out of your window.”

Do you know why I stare out of that window? You want to shout at him. Do you know what has been taken from me? 

But he doesn’t care. If you were to tell him about how homesick you felt, how alone and uncomfortable in your own skin, he’d surely make some crude remark about how a babe would surely make you busy enough to forget all about how forlorn you were. You did not want to be belittled anymore tonight, so you turn over, back facing him, and bury your cheek against the satin pillow. Under your skin feels so hot and nettled from your upset, but the satiny material cools it just enough for you to steady your breathing.

The window’s on your side of the bed. Your window, Aerion called it. 

Hundreds of leagues of grassland, moors, and plains splay out beyond the palace. Here, you weren’t far from the Red Mountains, crimson at sunset, soaked with the spilled-blood of old enemies. If you were to flee west, you’d reach Blueburn river and Grassy Vale, where House Meadows preside in a flowery keep on the banks. You did not know much about House Meadows, other than that they were sworn bannermen to House Tyrell, who’d surely send you right back to Summerhall, fawning sycophants that they were. South of here was Blackhaven, with its black basalt walls and a bottomless, dry moat. It might’ve been a good place to abscond if it weren’t for it being the seat of House Dondarrion, kin to your good-uncle Baelor. Further north was just miles upon miles of fertile land, rife with farmers and livestock. 

East, then. Storm’s End, at Durran’s Point. The Baratheons had no love for your husband’s bloodline. Their lord paramount, Lyonel, would take you under his wing. He was fond of your mother, having even named her Queen of Love and Beauty at a tourney in their shared youth. He’d feed you, offer you a bed, and extend you an olive branch of refuge all without sending a single raven to the Targaryens. He might find you a ship and send you on your merry way back to Driftmark before word even reaches Summerhall that you’re gone. 

You wait. 

Stars gather and twinkle in the sky. Each inhale, practiced to sound levelled and sleep-like, is taken like communion. 

You glimpse over your shoulder to the curve of his skull. He’s sleeping, you can tell. From the small sliver of his face you can see, there’s softness and an absence of his usual strain. His sleep is dreamless tonight. 

Good, you think. At least he won’t take up, muttering frantically about fire-scorched earth and prophecies. At least you have a head-start. 

Leaving the castle was easy enough. Summerhall’s a royal retreat and only lightly-fortified. The guards stationed at their posts were dolts, at best. They saw you, the mad prince’s wife, treading over cold-stone in your almost-translucent nightdress and just about had it in themselves to straighten their spines and avert their eyes respectfully. 

The gardens were luscious and thick with purpled flowers. Lady Dyanna lived in each flourishing bud of lilac. As you waded through knee-length sweetgrass and herbs, you felt a nastiness gnaw at your insides. A strange kind of jealousy, for the dead mother of your husband. Lady Dyanna was loved. Maekar loved his wife. You try to picture her as you move to the edge of her gardens. All that springs to mind is a saintly vision, of terracotta skin and angelic, violet eyes. In your mind, Lady Dyanna’s radiant and fascinating. Maekar would never let her rot in a window-pane, yearning for Starfall as she makes threads of plum-purple into the Palestone Sword. Why could they not have made their son in their image? 

Your two-faced husband, of perversions and filth when he’s got his mouth on you, who becomes disillusioned once he is spent. 

There’s a thicket of dense wood surrounding Summerhall. Your slippers traipse over splintery twigs as you move through a barren maze of red cedars, sentinels, and wormtrees. The night sky nips at your bare arms and you curse yourself for not bringing a cloak. You try to defend yourself, thinking about Aerion back in that blasted bed, and the odd uneven floorboard in your shared chambers. He could be a light sleeper at times. You couldn’t have risked it creaking underfoot and stirring him. 

The wood around you feels like a wet-breathed, living creature, slipping through the silk of your shift, lapping its roughened tongue over your bare calves. Blackberry brambles snag at the hem and leaves rustle in knotted branches. 

You think of Lyonel Baratheon’s silver streaks in his wiry, black hair and the way he laughs from his belly. Of salt spray, of the damp smell of a ship. It spittles against your skin and catches in your head. You think of that peace and nothing but. 

Certainly not the bed you’d left warm. Anything but the man inside of it. 

And yet…

“I hope they have your eyes,” Aerion told you one night last week, one of your legs hiked up to his waist as he cradled your face. “Our boy. Our girls. Our dragons.” 

A pale-blue tendril ribbons around your sternum, back through the woods, around the stems of Lady Dyanna’s moon-blooms, through the slumbering corridors of Summerhall, and to the very place you slipped away from him. Tonight’s the first night he didn’t fall asleep with an arm around your wrist, chin tucked into the crook of your neck as he mumbled sleepily into your hair. 

“Impudent little wretch,” you snarl to yourself grumpily, breaths rasping into tendrils of white before you as branches whip by in convoluted shapes.

Above, peaking through foliage, the sky’s a chipped, silver stag.

Lyonel, you try to think about instead. A warm hearth, a bowl of broth, a tankard of ale, and someone who thinks of you as a living girl rather than a walking womb. 

Just when the air starts tasting less like the incense Aerion likes to keep burning, that thick, earthy, leatherish smell, you hear a sound that’s not yours. Footsteps, the measured kind. Unhurried and somewhere behind you. 

No. No, no. “Shit.”

You don’t glance over your shoulder to decipher whom, or what, it is that is advancing. Your heart’s a hummingbird against your ribs, and you have the frantic, mindless sort of terror of a chased rabbit or hunted fox. You run.

The fur-lined slippers on your feet slide in damp loam, splattering up the back of your calves. Sweat starts to bead from your pores, making the silk of your nightdress cling to your thighs and collarbone. There’s nothing but the husk of your own frightened breaths and slippery footsteps. You fool yourself into thinking it’s gone—that whatever was chasing you grew sick of the hunt and trudged away. 

Until, “Wife.” 

There’s no wroth in it. The voice isn’t even raised. It scares you more than if it was a yell, torn through the sentries.

It makes your stumble, one of your slippers catching in the mud. You abandon it in your pursuit. One of your feet bare, the unearthed twigs and rocks scratch at the sole of it. You barely feel the sting. You run harder. 

It’s him, you know it. You can’t even hear a company of other footsteps. It’s just him, following after you with unhurried, fluid steps that sound deceptively calm.

“You’re making this worse for yourself,” he calls out to you. 

His words make a whimpered sob lodge itself in your throat. You try and pick up some speed, but the muscles in your legs are burning. Everything feels hot and suffocating. Since your honeymoon, you’ve been cooped up in Summerhall like a caged bird. This is the most you’ve moved in two moons. Those girlhood days of racing your brother and the steward’s son are gone. You feel sluggish, and exhausted, and—A root catches your foot. Your remaining slipper is wrenched off, and a cry tears through you.

The world morphs into a blur of snarling trees and dirt. Before your knees and jaw can slam against the filthy earth, a hand closes around your upper arm. It’s bruising and rough. It’s him. 

Your spine slams into rough bark so hard that your breath abandons you, skull thudding in tandem. Tiny white stars cloud your vision until his face emerges from the fog.

Your husband, your man, chest rising only faintly as if the hunt hadn’t been an inconvenience to him at all. His silver hair’s mused from sleep. No guards flanked him, no cloak rippled in the wind from his shoulders. He’s still in the fine-cotton of his sleep-shirt, eyes mirror-bright from the moonlight. He’s beautiful and terrifying. As pale as pearls and all yours. 

Neither of you speak. 

Shamefully, your breaths are the only ones that come out panting. You struggle to level them, chest heaving so hard that on the inhale it swells out to brush against his. Your teeth are chattering violently. All of your senses feel spiked and sharpened. You think you might be able to hear the footfall of a small creature from a mile away.

Aerion lowers his dilated gaze. Your bare feet are cut and muddied, wet leaves clinging to them, and the hem of your shift is torn. You’ve got your hands behind your back, fisting against the sticky bark, as if you’re protecting the last bit of yourself you can from him. It feels futile when his eyes return to yours and he has that mad, hungry look of a man who knows exactly what you’re thinking.

“You run poorly,” he says quietly.

It hits you like a blow. “You,” your voice is hoarse, wounded, “you followed me.”

His head tilts. “You didn’t think I would?”

The hatred in your flares hot and cancerous, spreading into every vein. “I hate you.” 

An emotion twitches in his expression but you’re too frightened to understand it. He raises one of his hands and the motion makes you flinch so violently that your shoulder slips against the bark, scratching at your skin enough to splinter. It only makes him hesitate for a moment, fingers flexing in the space between you, before it flattens the palm against the trunk beside your head.

He’s everywhere now. You feel in him your lungs. This somehow feels more intimate than sex. He’s in your marrow. 

“I dreamt of you. Of a nursery, bright with sunlight. I woke,” he says, darker, “and your side of the bed was cold.” Aerion’s jaw hardens, his lips so very close to yours. All hot air and want and fury. “Do you know what that felt like, wife?” 

You stare at him, still breathing heavily. You have no words to give him. Your own blood is trying to speak to you as something vile coils around your organs but you can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s an ouroboros that stifles you as his other hand snakes out to press your hip deeper into the tree.

“No,” he answers for you, “you don’t.” 

The cedars tremble as you do, and you’re weak enough to think about Driftmark again. It’s absurd but it’s yours, and you can almost hear the vicious breaking of black-water waves against slate. You remember being small and childlike but it’s nothing like this feeling of fragility. You want your mother and her lap, her hands combing through your tresses. 

Your eyes start to well and you hate yourself for it. Strangely, it’s more than you hate him.

“I wanted to leave,” you confess.

“I know.”

“I meant to reach Storm’s End. Ser Lyonel.” 

Aerion blinks. “And that he might find you a maiden ship that would send you back to your lonely island? Away from here. From me.” 

Your heart’s in your ears, your throat, it beats and pulses everywhere. “How do you…” 

You didn’t think he knew about your homesickness. You didn’t think he cared. 

“You talk in your sleep,” he tells you.

It’s enough to make you dumb. Marriage is a peculiar thing. You were so sure he didn’t know anything about you and yet he knows this. That your slumbering mumbles are of home and the sea. 

Gods, you wish things were different. In another life, you might spend your days swimming and wading through shallow coves as he spars and hunts. You’d return to him happier in the evenings. He’d kiss the salt off your skin and you’d mouth at the swollen bruises on his knuckles. You’d each taste of sea and fire; he’d love you completely, and you’d love him the same. 

“You would have frozen before dawn,” Aerion remarks at your shivering. “You wouldn’t even make the next village over.”

“I’d rather freeze than burn in your stifling palace,” you spit.

“Brave girl,” he taunts. His thumb strokes over your hipbone then and it makes you jolt. The way he smirks at you is maddening. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he’d want to splay you open and crawl inside. “Dragons don’t burn, wife. Haven’t I told you this?”

You want to scream in his face. “I’m not a dragon. I’m a Velaryon by blood. Salt and sea.” 

“Addam of Hull rode Seasmoke,” he challenges. 

“The Sowing of the Seeds as an abomination,” you sneer viciously. “The mythology of House Targaryen being pure-blooded and closer to Gods than men died the day Rhaenyra let bastards claim dragons. Vermithor and Seasmoke died at the Second Battle of Tumbleton. Silverwing died alone in the Red Lake after that useless oaf, Ulf, got himself killed. No one even knows what happened to Nettles and Sheepstealer.”

You thought that he might be angry at you for talking back to him, but that smirk of his softens into an amused curl of the lips.

“You’ve been reading our histories,” he muses fondly, thumb caressing lower from your hip, down to the hollow above your thigh, where the flesh is tender and sensitive. 

“There’s little else to do in your prison of a castle,” you say defensively. 

“Oh, I’m sure,” Aerion croons lazily. 

His entire hand shifts then to cover the entire expanse of your lower belly. Underneath, you feel a mad, ugly stirring. You almost choke.

“You’re vile.”

He bares his teeth. “Am I?”

“And cruel.”

“You fled my bed in your nightdress and slippers,” he reminds you. He presses the slightest bit into your stomach, relishing in the wicked way your face betrays you. “Without so much as a cloak to warm you.”

You glare at him nastily. “I left in haste.”

“No. You did not take a cloak because you feared the floorboard near the bed would creak,” he states. Your lips part in shock and his own widens into a grin. “That loose board by the window—third plank from the foot of our bed. You stepped over it.”

“That doesn’t mean you know me,” you seeth.

“No?” he says. Arrogance bleeds from him. The hand that’s next to your moves too, knuckles grazing along the curve of your torso until they brush the frayed rip of your shift. He toys with the torn threads and looks at you as if you’re a meal. “You stare east every sunset. You rub lavender at your wrists before bed because it reminds you of spring. You sew pretty waves into your embroidery when you’re lonely. You mutter for your mother in dreams. You like it when I fuck you from the behind…so I cannot see how much you’re enjoying it. It makes you feel in control.”

Breath hitches in your throat. 

Sensations invade you. The palm of his hand, greedy and warm, on the small of your back as he gets you when he wants you. The contrasting coolness of your own arms folded under your head as you gnaw on your bottom lip. Sometimes, he’ll kneel for you. A kiss to each hemisphere of your backside, the backs of your thighs, on your heat. Others, he isn’t as patient. He’ll have kissed your mouth first in these instances, after having you unbutton his doublet and peel away your own clothes. He’ll know that these devouring kisses would’ve left you wet enough for him. 

It’ll be as if he wanted to intertwine your body with his, those nights. Like he wanted to swallow you and spit you out onto his bedsheets. His fingers will reach and grab at any part of you he can find. 

You hate yourself. You hate him. 

“You do not ask me,” you manage to say gravelly. “You do not ask me anything.” 

He rolls his shoulder. “I notice.” 

“You have a grotesque way of showing it, husband.” 

You snarl it as an insult but hearing the title makes him smile. 

“Do I?” he mocks. “You wanted a fight tonight. You wanted me to shout at you, to get angry. To prove that I want you. Is that not grotesque to you, wife?” 

Tears gather and the sight of him wobbles in front of you as if seen through water. “You don’t know what I want.” 

“I know what you think that you want. You think you want that lonely island across Blackwater Bay.” Aerion shakes his head then, hand finally daring to slip under the rugged hem of your nightdress. A strangled sound escapes you when his fingers press into the flesh of your thigh. “But that’s not what you really want, is it? Not deep down. Not in here,” he emphasises, the fingers splayed out on your womb moving to linger over your heart. It thuds treacherously against him. “You want the same as I.”

You somehow have it in you to scoff at him. “Dragons, born-again?” 

“Maybe not yet. But you want this marriage. You want me,” he says, and it isn’t even arrogance now that he imbues. It’s just the self-assured confidence of someone who’s uttering a fact. As if he knows all of your wants and deficiencies. 

“You think very highly of yourself, my lord.” 

His teeth are pearl-like in the moon’s glow as he smirks. “Maybe.”

“Your ego is larger than the Red Keep,” you insult. 

“Go on.”

“And you are mad,” you rasp, feeling the heat of his fingers just over your cunt, not quite touching. “You treat the small folk as if they’re not even human, looking down at them in disdain. You think you’re leagues above the whole world, as if you’re still on dragonback. You’re addled with delusions and nightmares, I do not think you even know what is real.” 

“You,” Aerion says darkly, finally letting his fingers touch you, his index and middle slipping between your folds, where you want him, where you’re wet. “You’re real.” 

You keen as his thumb finds that sweet-spot of yours. “Fuck,” you grit, one of your arms untucking from behind you to grasp at his wrist. Startled, you realise your slip-up and look up at his hungry eyes. Chagrined, you correct the mistake, “Fuck you.”

“You want me to?” he asks, grinning. Gods, you hate him. His fingers sink into you, both at once. The stretch is enough for you to whimper, nails biting into his skin. All the while, he keeps his eyes on yours. “You want Driftmark, wife? I’ll find the finest captain and his best ship, I’ll take you. You want the sea? You’ll have it. You need only ask. The dragon ought never let his rider want for a single thing. I want you happy and mine. Let me?” 

His fingers curl then, reaching a part of you that makes you curl into him, forehead kissing his chest that finally feels like it’s at least a fraction as unsettled as yours. He drags them in and out of you at a deliciously slow pace, but your knees are weak with it. Both of your hands grasp at his arms now. He feels strong and unmoving. His mouth pecks at your hairline reverently.

“You’re evil,” you sob. “This is all I am to you. This is all you ever want.” 

Aerion merely hums. Rather than giving you reassurance, he presses an open-mouth kiss to your cheek, dewy and spit-slick. It’s all filthy.

“I want more.” 

Desperation wracks you. More what? You don’t even know. But you’re rocking yourself against him, grinding down onto his hands, and you want the hand that’s still on your heart to move the slightest bit down to grasp at your breast. 

He delivers another kiss, this time to your mouth as he nudges his forehead against yours to pry you away from the cover of his chest. He groans against your mouth, swallowing your own sob of pleasure depravedly. It’s a messy kiss, sloppy and shameless. You’re only distinctly aware that you’re still in the dead of the wood.

“Can you take another?” he checks. 

Your head shakes violently. “No.” 

He smiles against your mouth. “I thought you wanted more?” 

But he listens regardless, crooking the digits already inside of you just right, making you arch and moan brokenly. 

“I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I—” 

“Show me how much, wife.” 

You come on his fingers, a single tear rolling down your cheek. His tongue catches it, then it catches yours, and it tastes of salt as they tangle in an even dirtier kiss than the last. It tastes like home. He works you through it, kneading comfortingly at your hip as your hips jerked against his at the overstimulation. So gently, he slips them out, holding your gaze as he parts his lips and tastes you. The sound he makes is obscene. 

Bonelessly, you slump against him. His hand, the one that wasn’t just inside of you, shifts to cradle the back of your head against his heaving chest. He smells of smoke and you. 

“I want to go,” you pant, cunt dully aching between your weak thighs. “I don’t want to sit in that room, waiting for you every night.” 

“Then, don’t.” 

“What would you have me do? Tend to your lady mother’s flowers? Sit in your solar, gossiping with the other well-bred ladies, who all titter over how handsome you are?” Jealousy drips from your tongue and sanctifies him. You feel his smirk against your temple, and the only kindness is knowing those wretched lips of his taste like you. “What is it, husband, you think I do whilst I wait for your dragons to tear me open?”

Aerion waits. Thinks, perhaps. He squeezes at the flesh of your hips, rolling them closer to his. He hums again, more contemplative than the last. Then, he draws his wet mouth to the shell of your ear, and speaks,

“Run.” 

Your eyes blow open, gaping at him. “Pardon?”

“I want you, wife,” he says, suddenly letting go of you and stepping back, leaving you on fawn-like legs and shivering, “to run.”

“Is this a trick?” you demand indignantly, one of your eyes twitching.

“It’s no trick. I want you to run,” Aerion repeats. “I want you to prove to me how little you want to be the lady of Summerhall. How all of that court gossip bores you. I want to see how much my pretty wife misses the sea.” 

You’ve just finished on your hand. You can still feel the slick of it between your thighs and a throbbing for more in the bottom of your belly. And yet he’s telling you to run.

“Run,” you echo. 

His expression oozes a bright, fevered certainty. “Yes.” 

There’s no mockery there or even a challenge. It’s hunger and interest and he wants you to bite. He loves your bite, you remind yourself. 

“You mean to make sport of me. As if I’m some wild boar or feral stag,” you accuse.

His mouth twitches. “Perhaps.” 

“You’re sick, Aerion.” 

“And yet you’re still here?” he teases.

This is madness, but you indulge it. “What happens if I run?”

“I follow.” 

Terror waltzes along your spine. “And if I escape?” 

“Then you prove me wrong,” Aerion replies simply, daring you.

It feels like a trick, despite his reassurance that it isn’t. Though, you’re sea-born enough to want to reach the horizon he’s dangling in front of you, however much of a mirage it might be.

“You’d let me go?” you say in disbelief, prayer-like. 

Your husband’s gaze dissects you like you’re an animal as he remarks, “I’ll let you try.” 

“This is a game.” 

“Isn’t everything?” 

He makes an unbridled rage swell inside of you. “Fuck you.” 

“Is that what you want instead of running?” Aerion laughs. 

“You speak of me as if I’m an animal!” you yell at him, appalled.

Aerion doesn’t seem unnerved. “Are you going to do it or not?” 

Your heart’s in your mouth again, leaving your ribs hollow enough for dread to make itself wretchedly at home. It tucks itself away in a layer of rot as your feet move without leave. One step, then another, until a third makes a twig splinter in half under you. The pain lances through you, brief and startling, but you turn and run regardless. 

Aerion does not come after you right away, or maybe you just couldn’t hear it, for the blood that rushes in your ears and the woods that seem to swallow everything in its eerie stomach. 

Air bludgeons you as raw as a gut-blow. The terror you feel is primitive and thrilling. It makes your body unearth a scion of girlhood from within you that dusted over after your wedding in Baelor’s Sept. Outpacing your brother over wet sand, horse-riding along Driftmark’s cliffs, the first morning your father took you out to sea aboard his favourite ship. The gulls caterwauling above you and the entire world opening itself at your feet as if you mattered. 

Bizarrely, an hysterical laugh nearly breaks you in half, like a wishbone. 

He’s driving you to madness, is all you can rationalise. Rumours spill through the Seven Kingdoms about the madness of Targaryens—but what of their wives? Does the coin flip for them, too? How oft do the Gods hold their breaths for the brides of dragons?

The outstretching branches of trees catch at your arms and surely cut them to ribbons. You dread to think about the sorry state of the soles of your feet. As a child, splattered in sea-water and dirt, your mother would scold you for trekking dirt through High Tide’s hallowed walls. She’d clutch at the pearls around her neck to see you like this, soiled and brutish as you run through the woods away from your husband.

Your husband.

“Do you feel alive, wife?” he calls out to you then from within the dark, as if he knew that the thread that binds you had just given. “Do you feel in control?” 

Hearing his voice again excites you. A sick part of you hopes you both get lost in this forest. That the rest of your cursed marriage is spent like this. You would never have to hear the gall of a courtier again, or a buttinsky maestar fussing over your moon-bloods. It would just be the two of you. You’d like that, you think. 

“Tired yet?” he taunts. It’s as if he speaks through the trees. Omnipresent and haunting. 

He’s to you what Valyria is to him.

“Come, wife. Answer me.” You curse him as you run. How is he not out of breath? “I want to hear you. How does it feel? Do you still feel like an animal?” 

“You’re a monster!” you shout hoarsely. 

The trees laugh with him, you swear. It intermingles with the pursuit of footfall, spiking your panic. He’s close. You feel him in your bones. He’s in your very soul.

Your head turns to find him too late as something hits you from behind, hard enough to make the world pitch and eat you whole. You think it’s his name that you wail as you go down into damp leaves and loam. It’s only earth for a moment, your chest flush to it. You feel like a corpse in the dirt, alone and cold against the unending body of it. All that’s gone when a weight settles over you. 

Aerion rolls you onto your back in one effortless motion before you can scramble or grab purchase at tufts of soil. Your hair cascades across the forest floor, torn shift twisting around your thighs. You must look unseemly. 

Still, Aerion straddles you, knees bracketing your wildly-bucking hips. At last, his breaths struggled too. The moon ensnares him in this feral halo that can only be Targaryen. A smirk takes shape, the way a dragon must’ve once looked feasting on its prey. 

There was a dragon over a century ago they called the Cannibal. Aerion must be him in living, human form. The membranes of his wings now exist as Aerion’s arms that snap out to catch both of your wrists and pin them above your head against the moss and foliage. Sinews and tendons strain at the column of his throat, and he’s every bit of those beasts that he longs for. 

“Get off,” you spit, hips jerking up. 

He grinds his own down to meet you halfway. He’s hard. Had he been this whole time?  

“Careful. You’ll make me think you enjoy this,” he says condescendingly.

Your glare is as filthy as your nightdress. “You tackled me!” 

“I caught you. I won.” 

“That’s cheating!” you protest.

Aerion blinks. “We didn’t agree on any rules.” 

“As if you’d even bide by them if we—shit.” 

He moves your wrists into one hand and slips the other between your thighs again. Of course, you’re still wet. It’s smeared and messy, and he teases the tips of his fingers through it, catching them at your pulsing entrance, before quickly moving them up to your clit. He’s relentless in his desire to make a madwoman out of you.

“Look at you,” he says fondly, “my beautiful wife.” The hard length of him presses through his breeches and against your hip. “You look better like this than you did on our wedding night. You were a pretty bride but prettier prey, I think.” 

“What is wrong with you?” You can only marvel at his perversions. You wanted him to want you but this overwhelms your senses. Is this how he wants you? A heart thudding in fear, silk tattered, cunt slick, all as his fingers tease you. 

“Everything that is wrong with me is wrong with you,” he tells you as he leans in to breathe in the scent of your neck. Lavender. “Blood of two, joined as one…” 

Your spine arches away from the earth to press your breasts against his chest. It’s enough to make his fingertips stop teasing you, settling over your clit with a delicious pressure.

“Hen lantoti ānogar,” you murmur against his mouth, repeating the same words to him in Valyrian, “va sȳndroti vāedroma.” 

His pupils dilate, the violets of his eyes lost in seas of insatiable black. “You’ve been learning the old tongue?” 

“I read about Valyrian wedding traditions,” you tell him offhandedly, as if you didn’t do it to impress him. 

He looks at you as if you’re everything he’s ever wanted and suddenly shifts his hips so that his cock presses against your slick, aching heat. The rough fabric of his breeches rubs against your bare, tender folds. It makes you writhe wantonly. 

“And what other research have you been doing, wife?” Aerion asks. He’s released your wrists entirely now and his other hand comes to palm at the soft swell of your breast. His index and thumb find your nipple deftly, rolling it between the digits. “Tell me you haven’t been touching yourself during your lonely afternoons, imagining it was me.” 

Your mouth curls into a sneer. “When you leave me for hours on end, you mean? To slip away into boredom? So what if I did then, husband? So what if I let my hand wander—” 

“And touch what is mine?” he interjects darkly, eyes narrowing at you. He grinds against you again. His breeches must be soaked from you. “My filthy wife, slipping her pretty little fingers inside her dripping cunt. Do you think of me? Is it my cock you want when you get greedy and rub at yourself, or is it my tongue?” 

Heat ravages your body with a fever and you cannot reply to him. Your hips wiggle, seeking more stimulation. He does not give it to you. 

“Both, most like,” he wagers, lust roughening his voice as well as the pinch of his fingers around your nipple. “I bet you fuck yourself thinking about me. You’re not bored, are you, wife? You’re empty.”

“I’m not some whore from Silk Street that lives and breathes cock, Aerion. I want my husband,” you tell him raggedly. 

His lips twist into a pout of feigned sympathy. “Poor girl. I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I? What a cruel husband you have. To spend his days hunting when he has the prettiest of prey right there in his bed, waiting for him.” 

His degrading words make you dizzy. Is this what you even wanted? You wanted him to want you, yes, but this? The ache in you is for him, but it feels so wrong and perverted that you have to believe that there’s more you want. There has to be. You are not so debased as to think this is all you want from this marriage. You’re of the sea. There must be more.

“I want you to talk to me,” you say, bucking your hips up again, moving your heat against the tent of his cock. “I want you to ask me about my home, about my day. I want us to break our fasts together, after you’ve woke me up with your mouth on me. I want the whole castle to be sick of us when we fight and fuck. When they hear raised voices, they’ll know you’ll soon want me. It isn’t just your cock I want, Aerion, I want you.” 

It’s so painfully earnest that you feel even more humiliated than you did when he fingered you against that tree. 

But he doesn’t smirk at you in sick amusement or delight in your vulnerability. Aerion stares at you, just as desperate. 

“You terrify me,” he says, and it’s the last thing you expected, though you understand it perfectly. 

That terror is part of the want. It’s a limb in this living thing that exists between you. An amorphous mass of it that’s cancerous and obsessive. He looks fascinated by you and you hope he never loses that. You never want to be something that bores him. 

The idea of returning to Summerhall’s tedium makes you taste bile. 

Abruptly, Aerion’s moving from off of you and settling onto the forest floor at your side. He pulls you with him, arranging you as if you were a ragdoll until you’re draped heavily across his chest, head pillowed on the lean muscle beneath his sleep-tunic. His arms embrace you and you’re all his. 

“You’re right,” he admits (this must kill him). “I will do better. I’m sure Lord Aerion broke his fast with his Lady Valaena. If you’re to give me my three dragons, I ought to give you whatever you ask, hm?” 

You’re not sure what to say to that. You knew better than to think that madness would ever leave him, or his dream of a three-headed dragon. A sick part of you didn’t even want it to. As long as he thought of you as otherworldly as him, you were content. Both of your wants made something salvageable out of this marriage and you’d cling to them.

He tilts your chin up then and his gaze is as deep as the ocean, though far less volatile. There’s a tenderness to him that you’ve never seen in him before. 

“Tell me about the sea, wife.”

“Do you plan to hide in here all day, prince?”

Aerion fights a roll of his eyes when he hears your obnoxious voice come from his balcony. The sharp retort he has dies on his tongue the moment he looks up, because you are not wearing the sheer chiffon you usually prance around the island in. 

Instead, you are dressed in fitted black leather, the sort Aerion imagines that the dragonlords of Valyria might’ve worn during the height of the Freehold, when dragons still ruled the skies and the world bent beneath their fire. A black cape hangs from your left shoulder, the inside lined in deep red silk that flashes when the sea wind stirs it behind you. You look less like one of the island whores and more like a proper Volantene noble.

Aerion’s brow furrows faintly, his gaze dragging slowly over the unfamiliar sight of you, and he finds—somewhat irritably—that the image stirs a heat in his stomach he had not been expecting.

“Well?” you prompt, leaning lazily against the stone railing, the sea wind swaying the long fall of the cape behind you. “Or have you decided to waste the entire day glaring at walls?”

Aerion exhales through his nose, setting aside the goblet in his hand.

“You have never cared whether I rise before noon,” he drawls, violet eyes narrowing slightly as he studies you. “Why the sudden concern for my productivity?”

You push away from the railing and step into his chamber, boots clicking against the marble floor.

“I am not concerned,” you say lightly. “You did not come hunting for me this morning. I am bored.”

He snorts softly. “Tragic.” 

He watches as you make your way over to the table on the opposite side of his chambers, helping yourself to the grapes he’s been picking at all morning. He clicks his tongue at you, irritated, but you only give him a teasing smile, raising your eyebrows at him as you pop a grape into your mouth. 

“You almost look respectable,” he drawls, gaze still roaming over the sight of you dressed like this. He’s not used to seeing you with more clothes than not, and he finds—inexplicably—that he likes it more than he expects. He makes his way across the room, one hand reaching out to trail his fingers along the curve of your hip over the black leather. “What’s the occasion?” 

“I am always respectable,” you counter, ignoring his question as you lean into him, tilting your head back against his shoulder and lifting your lips to brush them against the underside of his jaw. His fingers bite tighter into your waist, and he pulls you into him until your back is flush to his chest. “Someone’s eager.”

“Respectable is not the reputation you cultivate,” he says with a sharp smile, leaning down to nip at your ear. His fingers slip beneath the waistband of your pants. “Bend over.”

You have the nerve to laugh at him, half-delighted, half-shocked. You tilt your face up, and Aerion leans down to press his lips against yours. Aerion’s lashes flutter shut as the familiar taste of firewine and grapes floods his mouth, and just as he’s about to deepen the kiss, drag you over to the table and forcibly bend you over it to see just how quickly he can slide your pants down to your thighs and his cock into your cunt, you slip from his grasp, stepping back with an infuriatingly satisfied smile.

“Later,” you say easily.

Aerion sneers. “Later?” he echoes, incredulous.

“Yes,” you reply, plucking another grape from the bowl and popping it into your mouth. “If you behave.”

Aerion scoffs, annoyed, folding his arms over his chest with a petulant frown. He can’t stand you, he thinks, amethyst eyes slivers as he glares at you, but you only wink at him.

“We have a dinner to attend,” you say, fixing your shirt in the polished silver on his wall. “If you’d bothered to leave the manse this morning, you’d know that envoys from Tyrosh and Myr arrived earlier. You’ll be expected to entertain the Tyroshi, considering your cousin is married to one of them.”

Aerion nearly snarls. “I am not expected to do anything,” he spits. “They cannot order me around.”

You roll your eyes. 

Aerion should gouge them out. 

You say, “No, but you should, because it will get back to your father that you’re making efforts to aid in foreign diplomacy. I am sure he’ll look at that favorably.”

Aerion pauses at your words, recalling the conversation he had with you not too long ago—the one the two of you are supposed to pretend never happened. He thinks of it often, despite the promise he made, and he wonders now why you would go out of your way to help him convince his father to bring him back to Westeros when he remembers the long silence that followed his question as to whether he would be survivable.

Why are you doing this? He wants to demand. Why, when we both know you do not wish to be stuck here alone?

A part of him wonders if it’s a trap, if you’re setting him up to make a mistake that will get back to his father and prolong his exile, but in the two moons he’s been here, you’ve had ample opportunity to undermine him and make him look bad, and you’ve never taken any of them. Even going out of your way to cover up his lapses in temper with various excuses. He considers, maybe, that you’re lulling him into a false sense of security to trick him into making a major mistake, but it just doesn’t feel like you. 

Maybe he’s just being naive, but Aerion has never been naive.

“And you?” he asks after a moment, sliding off his silks to change into a dark red velvet doublet and leathers—to look the part of a proper Targaryen prince instead of like a Lyseni silk boy. He doesn’t even notice you come up behind him until your arms slide around his bare waist. He hates the way he shivers as your gloved hands slide up his abdomen, the rings you wear on your right hand cool against his skin, and your lips brush his shoulder blades. Hates even more the way his body instinctively leans into your touch, a pleasant warmth spreading through his chest. He hates you. “What will you be doing?”

“Something similar,” you say, peering at him through the polished silver over his shoulder, eyes raking over his naked body. He raises his eyebrows at you, unabashed, and he feels you smile into his skin. “Volantis still has poor relations with Myr after the Century of Blood, so I will be wining and dining and entertaining our Myrish guests.”

Aerion doesn’t reply to that, though he has some choice words concerning why you’re playing diplomat for a city that has permanently exiled you, but he thinks you can read the question in his eyes anyway, because you exhale through your nose and let your arms drop from his body to step away from him. 

He thinks he hates most of all how strange he feels without your touch. 

Aerion has always run hot—so hot that when he was a child and was flung into episodes after particularly vivid dreams, he was convinced that there was fire in his body, running through his blood, raging beneath his skin, he clawed and clawed and clawed until blood dripped down his body and stained beneath his nails, trying to get it out. He has always run hotter than most, always has been made of flame and ruin—he is a dragon, and yet, the heat simmers into something pleasant and manageable when your skin is pressed to his, and when your touch disappears, the brief moments before the all-consuming fire within him returns are bitterly cold and achingly empty in a way he’s never experienced before. 

It infuriates him.

It terrifies him.

He fucking hates you.

Just as the thought crosses his mind, you let out a soft noise, turning to look at him again. The smile on your face leaves him suspicious and unsettled.

“What do you say we make it into a game?”

Gods—he really, really hates you.

“What type of game?”

————————

Aerion is not going to last.

He doesn’t even know why he agreed to this.

He’s stiff against the velvet cushions he’s sitting on, chatting with the green-haired Archon of Tyrosh while the man’s daughter sits at his side, inching closer and closer until she’s half-seated in Aerion’s lap, listening to him talk to her father.

Across the room, you’re laughing with two Myrish boys, brushing the long black hair from one of their faces as the other tells an animated story.

Aerion does not like it.

He does not like the way you’re laughing.

He does not like the way one of the Myrish boys leans close to murmur something in your ear, his hand resting far too comfortably on the back of your chair. 

He does not like the way you tilt your head toward him, lashes lowering just enough to make the boy grin like he’s just been handed a victory, like he has any right to what Aerion has claimed as his.

Gods, he hates you, and he hates your fucking games. Why the fuck did he agree to this?

Across the table, the Archon continues speaking, droning on about trade routes and dyes and some dispute in the Stepstones, but Aerion is only half listening. He nods at the appropriate moments, answers smoothly when addressed, even manages a charming smile when the Archon’s daughter presses closer to his side.

She is warm and perfumed and eager to please. Ordinarily, Aerion would have no complaints.

Tonight, he finds himself irritated every time she laughs.

He takes a sip of wine and forces his gaze away from you.

“You have visited Tyrosh before, my prince?” the Archon asks.

“I have not had the pleasure,” Aerion says, lazily swirling his goblet and turning his full attention to the Archon as though the man has been the most fascinating creature in the room all along, and not you several yards away, laughing with a pretty Myrish boy. He almost bends the metal of the goblet when he sees you run your thumb over one of the boy’s lower lips. “Though I’ve heard Tyrosh described often enough to be curious.”

The Archon’s green brows lift with interest. “What have you heard of us, my prince?”

Aerion’s mouth curves faintly, mind working to spin the nasty rumors he’s heard of his cousin’s lady wife into something more palatable. “Your people are, ah, colorful. Opinionated. Very proud of dyes.”

The Archon laughs loudly at that, clearly pleased, and launches into an enthusiastic explanation about Tyroshi trade and the superiority of their artisans. Aerion listens with the patient expression of a prince indulging a useful conversation, nodding occasionally, asking just enough questions to keep the man talking. As long as it gets back to his father that he’s playing the role of the perfect prince, he will suffer through this agonizingly boring conversation.

Beside him, the Archon’s daughter inches even closer. She smells of saffron and something sweet. Her bright hair is braided with tiny pearls, and when she laughs, she tilts her head in a way that presses her shoulder lightly into his chest.

“My father speaks of dyes as if they were kings,” she says conspiratorially.

Aerion glances down at her with a small smile, feigning amusement. “In Tyrosh, perhaps they are.”

She giggles again, clearly delighted by the attention, and shifts until she is comfortably settled against his side, one hand resting lightly on his abdomen. Aerion has half a mind to shift away, irritated by how the girl is acting so casual with him. His gaze instinctively rises to seek you out, and you—

Aerion pauses when he realizes that you’re already looking at him. You don’t even notice that he’s caught you staring, lips pressed into a thin line, eyes chips of ice as they follow the hand trailing down his abdomen. Aerion had been on the verge of brushing the girl’s hand off, but he stops himself, tilting his head to the side, lips curled up into a smug smirk as he realizes that you seem to be even worse off than he is. He glances down at the Tyroshi girl and gives her a charming smile that makes her flush faintly. She leans closer at once, encouraged, her hand settling firmer on his body.

Across the room, your jaw tightens.

Aerion nearly laughs, delighted.

The Myrish noble boy on your left has to say your name three times to get your attention, and even as he lifts his hand to your chin—making Aerion’s blood burn unpleasantly—to tilt your face to him, your gaze stays pinned on the hand tracing Aerion’s body until you can’t anymore.

As soon as your attention is off of him, he swats the girl’s hand away, ignoring her spluttering to rise to his feet with a bland excuse of needing air, a thrill running through him, vicious and bright, at the idea of getting a reaction out of you. All evening, he had thought this to be torture—having to watch you laugh with those Myrish peacocks while he played the obedient prince for a table full of diplomats. 

Now, he realizes that the game may not be as one-sided as he feared.

Gods, he might actually win.

He makes his way out to the terrace, the sea breeze brushing against his face and cooling the heat that had begun to gather under his skin. Music and laughter spill through the open doors behind him, but out here, the noise dulls to a distant murmur. He doesn’t turn around when he hears footsteps follow behind him, assuming that you’ve broken away from your Myrish boys to join him on the balcony, but he stiffens when he hears a male voice come from behind him instead.

“You should be careful, my prince.” 

Aerion whirls around, lips curled down into a frown, an accusing expression on his face as he takes in the vaguely familiar face standing behind him—a boy around the same age as you with neatly combed silver hair and violet eyes. It isn’t until he comes to stand with him at the railing that Aerion recognizes him as one of your favorite whores, always fluttering around you, shooting Aerion calculating eyes and unreadable smiles. 

Aerion doesn’t know his name, and doesn’t particularly care to, but he has some nerve approaching him like this. 

“With what, exactly?” Aerion drawls, taking a sip of his wine and tilting his head to the side, beckoning the boy to continue.

He only smiles pleasantly, pale lips tilting up and eyes glittering. “My lady has learned… patience over her five years here, but once upon a time, she was quite quick to temper. You bring out good parts in her, yes, but I fear you might also bring out the worst.”

Interest thoroughly piqued, he squints and asks, “And what makes you say that?”

“Call it intuition,” the boy shrugs elegantly, painted lashes fluttering as he gives Aerion an easy smile that irritates him instantly. “I’ve known her the longest of anyone here besides the First Magister himself—” Aerion doesn’t like that. “—when she first arrived, she was quite volatile and unapproachable. The First Magister asked me to be the one to… ease her into her new life—” Aerion likes this even less, jaw tightening. “—and the last time I saw an expression like that on her face was moments before she put a blade through the hand of the Prince of Pentos for getting too… presumptuous with her, and then forced him to thank her for not putting it through his throat.”

Aerion barks out a surprised laugh. “Did she really?” he asks, lips curving up and irritation instantly draining. He almost can’t believe it, cannot reconcile the lackadaisical, languid creature who cares not for anything besides entertainment and pleasure with the violence your whore presents, but he supposes that it makes sense, knowing what he does now.

The boy hums, smiling against the rim of his wine glass. “Her first year here was not quite as smooth as your first two moons, my prince,” he says. “You have handled yourself with… remarkable restraint—” Aerion feels as though he should be insulted, because he doesn’t like the way the boy says that, but he only frowns. “—but my lady had no cause or incentive to show the same. Over time, she mellowed out and learned to make a life for herself here, but there was once a time where half of the island placed wagers on when she would finally be provoked into killing someone important.”

Aerion lets out a quiet huff through his nose, swirling the wine in his cup as he considers that. He supposes this almost seems more believable than what he’s seen of you these last two moons—a daughter of Volantis, an old blood of fire and steel, is not what you’ve made yourself out to be, but it is what you are at your core, no matter how many years pass since your exile. 

He can’t help the way it gnaws at him, eats him alive with want, with need.

He desires to see that side of you. Desperately. 

As though taking note of his curiosity, your whore adds, “She broke a man’s jaw in the harbor for spitting near her feet. Set fire to a merchant’s inventory because he tried to cheat her. Threw a magister’s son into a fountain during a feast because he would not stop touching her sleeve.” His lips lift faintly. “The First Magister spent an exhausting amount of time smoothing over those… misunderstandings.”

Aerion snorts, eyes sliding shut as he tries to picture it. “And now she lounges about velvet cushions with whores draped over her lap and wine in hand,” he drawls. “How dull.”

The boy hums. “Dull, perhaps, but at ease. Though people like her do not truly change, my prince, as I’m sure you know. They grow bored and complacent, until someone comes along who can relight that fire, and you, my prince, seem to be that person for her, and you do not seem like the kind of man who encourages moderation.”

Aerion’s mouth curves.

“I would be offended,” he says lazily, “if that were not entirely accurate.”

“All this to say, I would advise you against unnecessarily antagonizing her.” The boy’s pleasant smile suddenly drops, and his violet eyes become a bit colder. Aerion’s lips thin as he stares at him, taking the change in demeanor as both a challenge and a threat. “She has made much progress and has begun to make real steps toward happiness, partly on account of your presence here. You might remind her how much she once enjoyed burning things, which isn’t a bad thing, within reason, but I would hate for you to also be the reason she regresses back into that miserable shell she was.”

Aerion isn’t sure if he’s referring to his attempts at making you jealous or the fact that one day he will leave Lys and return to Westeros. He hates that his stomach flips at the idea of it being the latter. He hates you.

“Is that a threat?” Aerion asks coolly, gaze flicking over the boy, suddenly not amused at all.

The boy smiles sweetly back. It does not reach his eyes. “It could be,” he replies, and Aerion blinks at the sheer gall of this silk boy to threaten him, but he inclines his head before Aerion can spit out a threat of his own. “Have a good evening, my prince.”

————————

Aerion does not immediately return to the dinner. Your whore slips away and shuts the doors to the balcony behind him, and Aerion lingers on the terrace, looking out over the Summer Sea, toward the west, toward home. 

It’s an odd feeling, he thinks. 

The past two moons, all he has felt is fury—at his father, at the humiliation of exile, at being caged on this island of vipers and pillows. Every sunset had only exacerbated the same bitter thought in his chest: that he should be across the Narrow Sea, with his family, where dragons belong, where he belongs.

Now, for the first time, the thought is… complicated. 

Aerion exhales slowly through his nose.

He can still hear the faint noise of the dinner behind the doors—voices rising and falling, goblets clinking, someone laughing too loudly. Somewhere inside that room, you are still playing your part, smiling and flirting and charming men who would slit each other’s throats for a handful of coin.

He straightens slightly, jaw tightening as he drags a hand through his hair. It’s grown longer now—too long, he needs to cut it, but he has grown fond of the feeling of you running your fingers through it, so he has been putting it off.

Two moons ago, he would have left this city without a backward glance. He would have boarded the first ship that carried him west and never thought of Lys again—not its feasts, not its courtesans, not its endless games.

Certainly not you.

Now the idea feels less clean, less certain, and that, more than anything, unsettles him.

Aerion scowls out at the dark water, the sea wind tugging at the loose strands of his silver hair.

Gods, he thinks irritably, you are a problem. Since his exile began, the thought of leaving this city has filled him with uncomplicated relief, and yet now he finds himself hesitating. Aerion drums his fingers once against the stone railing, irritated with the direction of his thoughts, irritated with you. It is ridiculous. You are nothing more than a distraction—an entertaining one, certainly, but still only that. Lys is full of distractions, and you are the most persistent of them. 

But distractions are meant to be forgotten once they cease to amuse. They do not linger in a man’s thoughts when he is alone. They do not change the shape of a city from something miserable to something enjoyable. They do not worm their way beneath his skin until he finds himself measuring time in the span between your smiles and laughs.

Distractions do not make him hesitate.

So, why is he?

He presses his hands against his face, letting out a heavy sigh. When his eyes slide shut, he sees your breathless smile—your real one, not the coy one you wear for silk boys and magisters, the one you tossed in his direction when he had the gall to claim you as his own after refusing you the same—he hears your voice spinning tales that make his head ache, feels your fingers brushing against his skin, smells the rose oil you wear on your neck and wrists, tastes firewine on your tongue.

Fuck.

He fucking hates you.

He hates you, and he does not want to leave you behind.

The thought sits heavy and sour in his stomach. He imagines returning to Westeros without you, and all he can think of is how dull and agonizing the days will be without your irritating laugh and taunting smiles around every corner. He will be back home, yes, surrounded by hard-packed earth and steel and cold halls and men who understand his name and blood, but there will be no footsteps skidding across the roof tiles outside his chambers in the middle of the night, no ridiculous hunts through the markets because you decided he looked bored, and no arguments that end with the two of you half-laughing and half-ready to strangle each other.

He will be bored without you. Dangerously, restlessly, agonizingly bored. And it infuriates him, because there was a time before you, and Aerion was not bored then, but now that he’s had a taste of you, he can’t imagine himself being content in a future without you.

He leans over the railing with a deep sigh. He stays there for a long moment, staring down at the black water shifting beneath the lanternlight of the harbor. Ships rock lazily in the gentle waves, and somewhere farther out, a lantern sways along the deck of a late vessel coming into port. Aerion watches it without really seeing it at all.

He has never been a sentimental man—dragons are not meant to be. He learned early enough that attachments are weakness, and the moment someone knows you care, they own a blade to your throat that can be pressed in at any time. He does not know how he allowed you to slip through the cracks.

He grits his teeth.

He tells himself that you are not irreplaceable. 

Lys is full of beautiful women and clever tongues and dangerous games—Westeros less so, but still, not void of them. If you vanished tomorrow, another would take your place by nightfall, and if he returned to Westeros, he’s sure he could manage to find one by morning. Some other bored noblewoman or cunning courtesan would decide that the risk of the dragon prince’s ire is worth the potential rise in station.

The thought makes his mouth twist, because he already knows the truth of it: they would not be you.

None of them would laugh the way you do when he bares his teeth. None of them would run across rooftops simply to see if he could catch you. None of them would look at him like he is something worth provoking rather than something worth fearing. None of them are fire and steel and blood, sharp enough to cut, reckless enough to dare to actually do it. And none of them would have been able to drag him into this ridiculous, intoxicating tangle he now finds himself in.

Aerion presses the heel of his hand against his temple.

Gods.

He sounds like a lovesick fool.

The realization is enough to sour his mood completely.

He hates you. 

He hates most of all that when the balcony door creaks open, he hopes it is you coming to join him. 

“My prince,” the green-haired Archon’s daughter says softly as she paces over to him, and Aerion barely stops himself from rolling his eyes, jaw tightening when he feels her hands slide around his waist as she presses herself against his back. “I was wondering where you’d run off to. Did that Volantene whore scare you off? I’d been hoping she’d have left Lys by now, but alas…”

Aerion goes very still. 

For a moment, he thinks he must have misheard her. The words echo unpleasantly in his mind, and his first instinct is violence—his fingers twitch against the stone railing, the familiar urge to turn and bare his teeth, to remind the girl exactly who he is and how little patience he has for careless tongues. For a heartbeat, he even imagines the sound her skull might make striking the marble if he shoved her hard enough, because how dare she refer to you in such a way? How dare she imply that Aerion could be scared off by you? Who does she think she is? He isn’t sure which infuriates him more, and that infuriates him more than anything.

But he does not move, teeth grinding together as he shoves down the fire burning in his veins before he can find himself in the middle of a diplomatic disaster. He stiffens. Her arms are still looped loosely around his waist, her cheek nearly brushing the back of his shoulder. He can feel the warmth of her breath through the velvet of his doublet. He turns her head just enough to look at her over his shoulder.

“Scare me off?” he echoes coolly. 

The girl laughs lightly, as though this is all very amusing. “I only meant—”

“A dragon does not scare easily,” Aerion says coolly, cutting across her words without raising his voice. His gaze drifts briefly to her hands still resting at his waist before lifting again to her face. “Least of all by a woman.”

“I am a son of House Targaryen,” he continues lazily, though there is steel beneath every word. “A prince of the blood. Men have tried to poison my wine and cut my throat in my sleep.” His head tilts slightly. “I assure you, I do not flee to balconies because a woman tosses a cutting gaze my way, and you would do well not to insult me by implying such a thing ever again.”

Aerion studies her for a moment longer, then slowly reaches down and removes her hands from his waist. The girl’s ever-present smile finally falters, gaze lowering to the ground. He speaks again before she can stammer out an apology that would only serve to grate his ears.

“Tell me something,” he says, eyes narrowing faintly as he regards her. “Are you familiar with her?”

“I am, my prince,” she replies, speaking more carefully now. “I had the, ah, pleasure of meeting her a few moons after she arrived in Lys. My father and I came to attend a festival with some other noble Tyroshi families.”

“Ah,” he drawls. “I have heard she was something of a delight back then.”

The girl gives a strained laugh, expression pinched. “My father wished to greet her properly,” she says. “She was already a curiosity by then. A Volantene noblewoman—a Triarch’s daughter—living in the First Magister’s manse, refusing invitations, insulting half the city. People were… interested.”

Aerion raises his eyebrows, already fighting a roll of his eyes as soon as she utters the word curiosity. That’s all you are to them, all he is—a curiosity from across the Narrow Sea, a curiosity from within the Black Walls. Something to be spectated and poked at and taken advantage of. He thinks whatever is said next is justified. 

“And?” he asks, tilting his head to the side as he waits for her to continue.

“My cousin was the one who tried to… establish rapport. He approached her at a feast, wagering that he could make her smile before the night ended. He grabbed her wrist when she tried to walk away from him.”

“Bold of him,” Aerion drawls.

“She seemed to think so, too, considering she shattered his hand in front of half of the city,” she replies, voice clipped. “Stood there while he screamed and told him if he ever touched her again, she would take the whole arm.”

Aerion’s lips curl faintly. “Merciful of her.”

The girl does not smile. She says coolly, “No one found it merciful. My father spent the rest of the evening apologizing to the First Magister while she sat there drinking like nothing had happened.” Then, she adds with faint disdain, “So, yes, my prince. I know exactly who she is.”

An unpleasant feeling coils in Aerion’s chest, recalling the casual contempt in her voice when she called you a Volantene whore, how easily she spits words as though they are obvious truth. He does not like it. Aerion has never been a man particularly concerned with reputation. People whisper about him constantly—the mad prince, the volatile dragon, Prince Maekar’s embarrassment. He has heard every version of the story, every embellished account of his supposed madness, and it has never troubled him much. Fear is a useful currency anyway.

But hearing someone speak of you that way… It needles him in a way he cannot easily dismiss. Makes him think of long nights spent tangled in silk sheets, chases across rooftops, lounging in the sand in a hidden cove that is only yours and only his. Reminds him of the wistfulness in your eyes as you spoke of Volantis, how casually you spoke of your own near-execution, from future Triarch to a prince’s whore. 

He hates it. Hates you. You are intolerable. You make him feel things he should not be feeling, anger over things he should not be angering over. You are intolerable, and he hates you, and you are his, so he should have the tongue of this green-haired whore for speaking of you so poorly and ignorantly. 

He turns back toward the sea again. “You do not,” he says coldly. 

The girl blinks, reaching out to brush her fingers against Aerion’s back. “My prince?”

Aerion’s gaze remains fixed on the dark water below the terrace. “You met an angry exile five years ago and think that tells you who she is.” His lips tilt faintly. “It does not. It only tells me that you are impressionable and rather dull.”

Then she laughs softly, though the sound is strained.

“You seem very certain of that, my prince.”

Aerion finally turns his head slightly, just enough that his violet eyes cut toward her. “I am.”

Silence stretches between them. The girl shifts her weight, clearly recalculating, not having expected him to defend you. He supposes he cannot blame her—he did not even expect it himself. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, a careful sweetness creeping back into it.

“Well,” she says lightly, “I did not mean to offend you.” She steps a little closer again. “If I have spoken out of turn, I am sure there are ways I could make it up to you.”

Her hand slides once more along his arm, slower now, coaxing. Aerion fights another roll of his eyes, becoming increasingly irritated, but he doesn’t have to slap the girl’s hand away, because your familiar voice comes cutting from the balcony.

“My, Viserra, you have some nerve likening me to a whore while attempting to crawl onto my prince’s cock after he’s already dismissed you once.”

My.

Aerion’s breath catches. You have said it before—carelessly, mockingly, usually when trying to provoke him into lashing out—but hearing it now, the cutting possessive nature of it, sends a sudden, vicious thrill through him that he does not expect.

For the briefest moment, he forgets the Tyroshi girl entirely.

His gaze cuts to the balcony door where you stand, arms folded over your chest, eyes cold in spite of the way your lips tilt up into a smile. Your attention is fixed solely on the girl pressed into his side.

Aerion feels something hot and satisfied unfurl in his chest, tongue pressed to the back of his teeth as he fights a victorious smile. He fucking won. All evening, you have been laughing with those Myrish peacocks, leaning close to hear their whispered nonsense, letting their hands linger where they should not. He had thought the game a miserable one—thought himself the only fool foolish enough to care—but he has won. You made the first move. You are making the scene.

Aerion feels so gleeful he almost wants to laugh. Usually, he would snap at you for trying to lay claim on him publicly—he hates it, he is a dragon, not a creature to be claimed, least of all by some reckless Volantene exile who spends her days playing games on rooftops, but tonight, it feels different. Feels hot and pleasant and tastes like the sweet, sweet flavor of victory.

The Tyroshi girl—Viserra, you called her—stiffens, as though only now realizing that she has stepped into a game she does not understand.

Aerion finally turns to you, smugness impossible to hide. You raise your eyebrows at him pointedly, and he gives you a sharp smile in return.

“My lady,” Viserra says through her teeth, voice riddled with derision and sarcasm. “I see Lys has done wonders for your manners.”

Your smile does not falter.

“On the contrary,” you reply lightly. “Lys has improved them greatly. Five years ago, I might have thrown you from the balcony instead of speaking to you. As you’ve been eager to tell the dragon prince.”

Viserra’s mouth tightens.

Aerion watches the exchange with open interest, leaning one shoulder against the railing like a man enjoying a particularly good performance. The sea wind lifts the edge of your cloak behind you, red silk flashing once before settling again.

“You always did have a flair for dramatics,” Viserra replies coolly.

Your smile sharpens.

“And you always had a flair for desperation,” you say mildly, “pursuing a man who has already declined you. I suppose Tyrosh teaches persistence if not dignity.”

Aerion lets out a short huff of laughter before he can stop himself.

Viserra shoots him a quick glance, clearly hoping for support, but the look she finds on his face is anything but sympathetic. The girl straightens, chin lifting.

“I was merely speaking with the prince,” she says stiffly. “He seemed quite capable of deciding for himself whether my company was welcome.”

“I’m sure,” you agree, and though you don’t look at Aerion, he knows that this is your way of beckoning him over, your way of ceding this game to him. 

His lips lift up into another delighted smile, making his way over to you, intent on rubbing his victory in your face. You instantly curl your gloved hand around his bicep and raise your eyebrows tauntingly at Viserra. Aerion leans down to brush his lips against your ear as the two of you make your way back into the hall.

“I win,” he breathes out, relishing in the sting of your grip through his doublet. He expects you to shoot something back at him, but you press your lips together, and Aerion gives you a side-long glance.

His gaze slides across the room to where the Myrish boys you were entertaining are still sitting, uncertain expressions crossing their faces when they see who you’re with. Aerion thinks that you’ll drag him over to the empty cushions on the far side of the room, but ends up raising his brows when you instead lead him out of the hall, down exorbitant halls in the direction of your chambers.

“Someone’s eager,” he drawls lazily, mimicking your mockery from this morning. “Perhaps I was not done entertaining our Tyroshi guests. The lady Viserra seemed quite keen on continuing our conversation somewhere private.”

You do not slow.

If anything, your grip tightens on his arm as you pull him farther down the corridor, the heavy doors of the hall swinging shut behind you and muffling the music and laughter inside. Your boots strike the marble with sharp, decisive clicks, the red lining of your cloak flashing behind you with every stride.

Aerion watches you with growing curiosity and glee, choosing to keep his mouth shut and observe rather than to further antagonize, curious to see just how much you’ll let yourself slip.

For a moment, he feels viciously jealous of everyone who was here in Lys during your first year of exile. The Tyroshi girl, that whore you like so much, the magisters—this is barely a taste of what you once were like, and it isn’t nearly enough for him. The silk boy’s words instantly slip from mind. He doesn’t care how much he has to antagonize you. He needs to see it, hear it, taste it, feel it for himself. 

You push open the door to your chambers a smidge too rough to be casual, and you pull Aerion in after you, ignoring the smug expression on his face. You shut the door behind you, gaze still cool as you look over him, and there’s a snide comment on his lips that he bites back when you finally speak.

“Se riña Viserra,” you finally drawl as you shove him hard onto your bed. Caught off guard, he goes sprawling, indignance flashing across his face as his gaze cuts to you, and you tilt your head to the side as you look down at him. You unclip the cape from your shoulder and toss it to the side as you continue, “Iksis beri nyke gōntan daor gūrogon zirȳla ondos syt renigon skoros iksis ñuhon.”

The lady Viserra is lucky that I did not take her hands for touching what is mine.

Aerion hates that your words make his cock twitch.

“Iksan daor aōhon,” he hisses. He props himself up onto his elbows to look at you, but you only stand at the edge of the bed, staring down at him. Your gaze drags down his body to where his cock is already half hard in his pants, and his face feels hot when you look back up at him pointedly

I am not yours.

“Iksā ñuhon,” you say firmly, reaching out to grab his ankle and yank him closer to the edge of the bed. Aerion gapes, flabbergasted by how you manhandle him like he’s some maid. 

You are mine.

“You dare—” he starts to spit out, flustered, instinctively kicking a foot out at your thigh, but to his mortification, you catch his ankle. “Release me now, or—”

“Ñuhon naejot mariz, ñuhon naejot gaomagon, ñuhon naejot qogralbar, ñuhon naejot pryjagon, lo nyke kostilus,” you finish, ignoring his protests as you echo the words he spoke to you at the cove right back at him. It steals the breath from his lungs. His eyes are wide, jaw half ajar, at a complete loss for words. 

Mine to claim, mine to keep, mine to fuck, mine to ruin, should I please.

Aerion is painfully hard. Heat floods up his neck when he realizes how obvious it is—how him trapped beneath you on the edge of your bed, your hand still wrapped tight around his ankle, has him straining in his trousers, breath unsteady.

He stares up at you, chest rising and falling faster than he would like, mind still caught on the words you threw back at him—his words, twisted into your mouth with that same infuriating certainty. You press your gloved thumb into the bone of his ankle hard enough to edge on painful before you finally release it, and his leg drops back down to your bed limply. 

He should be fucking furious. Every instinct he has as a prince, as a dragon, tells him to snap back, that you’ve gone too far, that he needs to stand up and remind you exactly who you are speaking to, but—but his pulse only pounds hard in his ears, his limbs remain uncooperative at his sides. He cannot bring himself to move, does not want to move.

“Nādīnagon aōha grēze,” you tell him coolly. 

Remove your clothes.

Aerion bares his teeth at you furiously, but you are undeterred, tilting your head to the side as you stare down at him as though he’s an unruly child throwing a tantrum. Aerion hates you. Aerion wants you dead. Aerion has never wanted someone the way he wants you. He wants to fumble for the dagger lying at your bedside and stick it right into your throat. He wants to press your face down into the mattress and fuck you until you’re begging for him to stop. He wants both at the same time, to watch you bleed out while his cock is still buried deep in your cunt, wants to be the last thing you see, the last thing you feel, his body on yours, cock dragging against your walls, tongue lapping at the blood he’s spilt. He wants you to do the same to him. He’s so filled with want and need and all of these filthy, all-consuming emotions that Aerion cannot think, not nearly, not even slightly. 

“Mazverdagon nyke,” he spits out, breathless.

Make me. 

Your head falls to the side, lips curved up into a small, mocking smile, and Aerion hates you. Aerion hates you. Aerion hates you. Aerion wants you so badly that he might die if he doesn’t have you. This isn’t enough, he realizes—it will never be enough, if there comes a day he has to part from you. He refuses. He will not allow it. You are his, and he will drag you with him by force if necessary.

His breath catches when you slip a small dagger from where it was hidden in your sleeve, eyes bulging when you immediately take it to the collar of his tunic, and before he can think to protest, you’re cutting through the material. The cool tip of the blade drags against his abdomen, not quite breaking the skin, but putting enough pressure for him to realize that you’re threatening that you could.

“You—” he starts to say, enraged, but quickly shuts his mouth when you press the blade next to his cock. 

His nostrils flare, mouth dry, and eyes wide as he stares up at you.

“You would not dare,” he says through his teeth, and you give him another taunting smile, as though prepared to follow through with the unspoken threat. 

Inexplicably, fire spreads through his abdomen, breath shuddering as you drag the tip of the knife down the length of his cock. Aerion fights a whimper, throat bobbing as he feels the sharp point of the blade pressing through the fabric of his pants. You’re pressing firmly enough that if his hips jerk even a little, you might end up cutting through the fabric and breaking skin. Your gaze lifts to meet his again, pausing one long moment before you finally bring it to the waistband of his pants, cutting through it just enough so that you can easily yank them off and toss them to the side.

He feels uncharacteristically timid, lying before you bare while you’re still fully dressed. His jaw tightens as he glares up at you, scrambling for some pride to hide behind.

“Undress,” he demands, glaring at you.

You stare at him for a moment and then say, “No.”

Aerion hates you.

Furious, Aerion pushes himself to his elbows, and you press your gloved hand against his chest, knocking him back flat against the bed. He bares his teeth at you once again, livid, but you only give him that same indulgent smile, mocking him.

“You forget who—hah!” Aerion starts to snap, but before he can even finish the sentence, you wrap one of your hands around his cock. The leather of your glove is somehow smooth and coarse at the same time, and the friction makes his head fall back against the mattress. 

“Hm?” you say, too amused, and Aerion can’t stop himself from choking over a moan as you start to stroke his cock, slow rolls of your wrist that make his mind go blank. “Say that again.”

Aerion doesn’t—can’t. He’s not sure how he’s so far gone already when you’ve barely touched him, his cheeks burn, and his throat is tight with mortification, breath hitched and wobbly as your hand glides up and down his cock. He feels the bed dip next to him as you kneel at his side, free hand sliding up his abdomen. 

He hates how easily his body responds—how quickly the heat coils tighter in his stomach, how the strength seems to drain from his limbs the longer you loom over him like this. Bare, stretched across your bed, while you remain fully dressed in black leather and red jewels.

It should enrage him.

It does enrage him.

A prince of the blood—a dragon—should not be pinned beneath anyone, least of all you. Every instinct drilled into him since childhood screams that he should throw you off, stand up, remind you exactly who you’re dealing with.

Instead, he lies there, breathing harder than he would like, cock heavy and twitching and leaking in your hand, barely biting back moans.

You run your thumb over his tip, and Aerion’s hips rock up into your hand, teeth ripping through his bottom lip to stop a pitiful noise from escaping it when your free hand drops to his hip to hold him in place. 

He fucking hates you. He hates you. He hates you. 

This is supposed to be his victory—his victory. You were the one who made a scene, who had a tantrum in a room full of people because some stupid wench touched him—he won the game, so why does he feel like he lost? Why is he beneath you, bare and exposed, while you kneel fully undressed above him? Worse, why does he like it? 

He almost sobs at the last question that flutters through his mind, not understanding the way heat pools swift and consuming in his stomach, not understanding the way his thighs are trembling and his breath is shuddered, not understanding the strange, dizzying thrill running through his veins when his gaze meets yours. It’s like standing too close to fire—dangerous and wrong, but the warmth is addicting, alluring, he cannot get enough of it, even as his pale skin reddens and blisters.

He is flooded with shame so intense that it almost feels crippling, and yet, his cock leaks steadily, staining the black leather of your gloves, twitching with desperate need for more. He throws an arm over his face so that he does not have to look at you, so you cannot notice the heat pressing at the back of his eyes or the way they’re already starting to roll back with every snap of your wrist. 

Instantly, your free hand leaves where it’s pinning his hip to pull his arm from his face. His breath hitches in complaint, trying to yank it back, so he is at least hidden in this manner, even if he is exposed everywhere else, but your grip on his wrist tightens, and you shift so that your face hovers above him.

“Jaelan ao naejot jurnegon rȳ nyke,” you murmur, letting go of his wrist so that you can grab his chin, tilting his face toward you when he tries to hide it in the mattress. His pale lashes flutter when you pinch his chin between your fingers, the violets of his eyes slivers around blown wide pupils as he stares up at you. He hates you. He hates you. His lips part as you work your wrist faster, thumb gliding over his tip, his abdomen tenses, a ragged breath rips from his lips.“Sīr gevie, sīr ñuhon. Nyke yenka emagon ossēntan bona orvorta syt otāpagon ēdas mirre paktot naejot renigon ao.”

I want you to look at me. So beautiful, so mine. I should have killed that cunt for thinking she had any right to touch you.

Aerion chokes on air, eyes knocking back, head lolling against the mattress. Your free hand cradles the side of his face, gloved thumb running along his bottom lip, swiping the drool that pools at the corner of his mouth before slipping your index and middle finger between his lips, the taste of leather and the metallic ting of your rings flooding his mouth as you press down lightly on his tongue.

Aerion hates you, he thinks as his hips jerk into your hand one last time, as you squeeze the base of his cock lightly, picking up the pace of your pumps. He’s unraveling quicker than he can think, quicker than he can put himself back together. He’s moaning around your fingers like a bitch in heat, he’s fucking your hand, he can feel wetness streaming down his cheeks and smeared on his chin. He’s never felt like this before, never felt so out of control. 

It’s fucking humiliating, and he hates you, he hates you, he loves—

He gags around your fingers as he accidentally jerks his head up when he cums hard, mind blanking, thighs tensing, body numb and prickly. You slide your fingers out of his mouth to cradle his face again, leaning down to press your lips against his. His lashes flutter shut at the familiar warmth of your mouth, the softness of your lips on his, the taste of firewine on your tongue as you drag it against the roof of his mouth, tilting his head back. 

He can hardly even bring himself to kiss you back, reeling from the intensity of it all. His heart races in his chest, pulse roaring in his ears as you kiss him deeply, slowing the rolls of your wrist to stroke his cock lazily as he comes down from his high.

You hum into his mouth, rolling his bottom lip between your teeth as you shift down to lay on the bed with him, one leg sliding between his, fingers wrapped loosely around his cock, stroking slowly until his breath is hitching into your mouth and his cock is soft and twitching, and even then, you still hold it in hand, thumb rubbing circles over his tip. His body is too sensitive, abdomen spasming and narrow hips squirming slightly against your soft sheets, but he doesn’t slap your hand away, sighing against your lips as your tongue traces the inside of his mouth. 

It doesn’t even hit him what almost crossed his mind until a few long moments later, and his eyes shoot open and his body goes rigid.

You pause, immediately sensing his shift in demeanor, pulling back slightly to look down at him.

“What is it?” you ask, voice low, frowning as you scan his face.

Aerion’s throat works once, but no sound comes out.

For a moment, he simply stares at you.

The haze that had swallowed his thoughts only seconds ago is beginning to recede, leaving behind something cold in its wake. His chest still rises too fast, breath uneven, body heavy against the mattress, but his mind has finally caught up to what nearly slipped through his thoughts.

His fingers twitch against the sheets.

“Nothing,” he says quickly.

The word comes out too rough and too fast. Not convincing at all. He fights a wince.

Your eyes narrow slightly, unconvinced.

Aerion can see the calculation behind your gaze as you search his face, reading every small shift in his expression the way you always do. It has always irritated him how easily you seem to do that—how quickly you notice the cracks before he can seal them.

His jaw tightens.

“I said nothing,” he repeats, a little sharper now.

You study him for another moment.

Then your thumb slows where it had been idly tracing circles against his skin, your expression shifting into something more thoughtful than amused, as though you caught onto exactly what he was trying to hide. Gods, he hopes not.

Aerion turns his head away, staring up at the marble ceiling instead of meeting your eyes. The rush in his veins is finally settling, leaving a strange heaviness in its wake, something too close to vulnerability for his liking.

It is foolish. 

He does not love you—just the idea of it irritates him. You are impudent and disrespectful and you would make a terrible lady wife. You challenge him at every turn and would embarrass him in front of his father and brothers; you are restless and out of control, running across rooftops and cliffsides at night during storms, making him chase after you even when common sense screams for him to return to his chambers and sleep. You infuriate him, and you make him feel like a fool, and you go out of your way to antagonize him just to see how he reacts, and you make sure that his lapses of temper never get back to Westeros, and you cover for him when he slips up, and you give him something to look forward to each morning, and you make sure he is never truly alone, and—and you make him laugh, really laugh, and Aerion never laughs, not really, not like how he does with you.

Aerion’s throat tightens as he shifts his gaze from you, head falling to the side as he looks away.

You are intolerable, reckless, loud, impossible to manage, and yet somehow you have turned this miserable exile into something dangerously close to enjoyable, to the point where he now hesitates at the idea of going home when he once eagerly anticipated it, if it means you will not be there with him.

His first few days here were agonizing, he remembers—he paced like a caged animal in Vyrano’s manse, counted ships in the harbor, and wondered how long it would take before his father decided he had suffered enough humiliation. Every day had been the same dull stretch of feasts and silk-draped vipers and pillows and incense and sweetness—he was drowning in a decadence that he did not want to indulge in, could feel his edges being blunted, and then—

And then you came along. 

You came along, and suddenly there are rooftop chases and games and arguments that end in fucking and laughter. There are storms over the sea and coves that you insist belong only to the two of you. There are nights he finds himself grinning like a fool, laughing to himself as he remembers something you said hours earlier. 

Aerion grinds his teeth together so furiously that it almost feels painful. His eyes feel hot and his throat feels tight. Somewhere along the way, he had allowed the games and the fights and the endless provocation to stop feeling like torment and start feeling like something else entirely—something far more dangerous, because he can deal with anger and irritation and frustration, but he cannot deal with—

“You are thinking too much, dragon prince,” you drawl, dragging your fingers lightly across his chest and ghosting your lips to his jaw. He shivers at your touch and is aggravated when he feels your lips curl up into a smug smile. “You will hurt that puny mind of yours.”

“I’ll have your tongue, wench,” he snaps, though the words lack the usual heat behind them, left unsteady by the realization he’s come to. He exhales through his nose heavily. 

Your tongue darts out to lick the underside of his jaw. He shivers again. He hates you. “You will not.”

“Do not test me,” he warns, lifting his hand to curl his fingers in your hair, just enough to threaten, and you have the nerve to smile. He hates you, and he hates your impudence.

“I am testing you, dragon prince,” you say, leaning in to lick his lips teasingly before shifting down his body. He visibly shudders as you lap up the cum staining his chest and abdomen. “What will you do now?”

“I hate you,” he hisses, but the words die in a gasp as you nip at his side, and then his hip bone. “You are intolerable.”

He hates you, and he hates your impudence, and he hates most of all that hate is the furthest word to describe what he feels for you, and the only thing that is truly intolerable is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to pretend otherwise.

“Iksan aōhon,” you correct as you kiss bruises into his toned abdomen, pale skin already blooming dark beneath your mouth. He should push you away—you are marking him again like he’s some boy of silk and pillows, not fire and blood. He should. He does not. He knows he will not before the thought even crosses his mind. “Iksā ñuhon.”

I am yours. You are mine.

The words hit him harder than they usually do. For a heartbeat—one reckless, treacherous heartbeat—a dangerous sentence nearly follows them from his lips.

Then you will come with me.

He almost says it, almost asks you to.

The idea flashes through him so clearly he can nearly see it: you standing on the deck of a ship beside him as Lys disappears behind the two of you, your cloak snapping in the wind, your sharp laugh cutting through the salt air as you argue with him about something stupid while the Narrow Sea stretches east and Westeros draws closer; you lounging with him in Summerhall or the Red Keep or wherever his father sends him once he’s called home, spending his days hunting and chasing and his nights with you warming his bed. There is a forest trail in Summerhall along a river that leads to a vast, glassy lake that Aerion used to fish at. He thinks you would like lounging on the rocks that line the area; he hasn’t fished in years, but he thinks he might enjoy it again while you bask in the sun like a lizard beside him.

The image is so vivid that it makes his chest tighten.

And that—that is unacceptable.

He is a dragon, a prince of the blood, and he does not ask, and he does not beg, and he certainly does not invite reckless Volantene exiles to follow him home like some lovesick fool. He could not imagine his father’s reaction to him bringing someone like you back to Summerhall or, worse, the Red Keep—he might just exile Aerion again as soon as he sets foot on Westerosi soil.

Aerion bares his teeth slightly and shoves the thought away, fingers tightening in your hair as you bite his hip bone again.

“You grow far too comfortable,” he mutters darkly, voice rougher than he intends. Your only response is a quiet hum against his skin. “You are a plague.”

You laugh into him. “You are becoming more creative with your insults, dragon prince,” you purr, eyes glittering as you rest your chin on his abdomen and look up at him. “Regretfully, I must cede today’s game to you. What would you like for your prize?”

Aerion’s jaw tightens. For you to stop your torment. For you to stop taunting him with a future that is not promised. For you to—

For you to come with him back to Westeros.

Instead, he says, “What I wanted this morning. Bend over, wench.”

You laugh, delighted. “As you wish, zaldrītsos.”

Aerion’s throat feels tight as you do as he asks without complaint.

You are avoiding him again. 

Aerion paces the length of his solar irritably, waiting for Magister Vyrano to arrive. He has worn a groove into the mosaic floor these past three days, stalking from balcony to hearth and back again like a caged beast. The torches along the wall gutter in the late afternoon light, their flames bending in the draft from the open arches. 

One moon.

One entire moon of relative peace.

A month of wild laughter and biting kisses, of stolen afternoons on sun-warmed rocks and nights tangled in silk and sweat, of games that have begun to feel less like battles and more like something dangerously close to companionship. He had almost grown accustomed to it—your voice at his shoulder, arms around his waist, fingers threaded through his hair, the infuriating smile when you won whatever invisible contest you’d devised for the day and the softer one when you think he’s not looking. 

He had almost grown accustomed to you.

And now, you are gone. Again. 

You did not attend the feast at Magister Aeripharos Stassah’s manse two nights ago, despite the fact that you’ve been attending most all recent ones just to walk in on his arm, so he was left alone to make conversation about the seasonal spices and the troupe from Braavos that has recently arrived in Lys for a show. The First Magister claims you have taken ill, but refuses to let him visit you in his manse. Your whores claim not to have seen you, and he thinks they are being honest this time. The harbor brats flee whenever he approaches.

Aerion knows the truth: you are avoiding him. Again.

His knuckles whiten against the railing of the balcony, staring out at the pale domes of Lys, anger flaring hot and fast. He had done nothing wrong—not this time. He had not driven you off. He knows it. There were no beachside declarations of independence or grand speeches about how dragons belong to no one. 

He has been tolerable. More than tolerable—more than you deserve, since you’re clearly ungrateful. He lets you curl against him in Vyrano’s gardens while musicians play softly and lanternlight paints gold across your skin. He indulges your games and chases and hunts, and your smug little smiles while you slip between tongues mid-sentence just to watch him react to your High Valyrian. He walks beside you through the central market like some common lord escorting his betrothed, ignoring the looks the two of you received. He wears the steel you gifted him openly at his throat, letting people look, and whisper, and make assumptions. 

And now, you are gone. Again.

He had thought it another one of your hunts at first when he’d woken up to a cool bed and you nowhere to be found. He wandered down to the square like a fool with mild irritation and the faintest hint of anticipation, expecting to feel your eyes on him from some rooftop perch, expecting a harbor boy to scatter too quickly or a courtesan to smirk too knowingly. But he was met with nothing—no trails, no whispers, no glimpse of silk vanishing around the corner. 

By midday, he was seriously irritated, and by evening, it had curdled into something darker, but he told himself still that it was just one of your games, even as he returned to Vyrano’s manse alone. He expected you in his chambers, lounging in his bed with a maddening smile, pleased with yourself for having outmaneuvered him.

But you were not there, and when the next morning came, you were still gone.

Now, on the third day, this game no longer feels clever, and no longer feels fun. The irritation and anticipation have shifted into something vile and churning, and he is aching with a need to release his frustration onto something.

If you think you can vanish at whim—if you think you can toy with him like one of your silk boys, he thinks furiously, then you seriously forget who you are dealing with.

The doors creak open at last. Aerion will not accept evasions and half-answers this time.

“My prince,” Magister Vyrano begins cautiously as he enters the solar, rings glinting in the torchlight. “You requested—”

“Where is she?” Aerion cuts in without turning.

Silence stretches.

“I am not certain to whom you refer,” Vyrano says smoothly.

Aerion pivots sharply, violet eyes burning. “Do not insult me.”

The magister inclines his head faintly. “I would never insult a prince of the blood.”

“You insult me every time you lie.”

The magister’s smile tightens. “My prince, Lys is full of women.”

“There is only one who concerns me.”

Vyrano studies him, calculating. He hates the way the man measures him—he is always measuring him—looking for cracks and leverage, wondering if there’s something between you and Aerion that he can use against him. He forces his shoulders to settle, temper leashed by sheer will. He hates this fucking island of snakes and hyenas; he almost forgot how agonizing it was dealing with these people during the past moon he’s spent with you. It’s all so much more bearable with you at his side.

“She has not been seen at courtly functions,” Vyrano says what Aerion already knows, and his eye twitches. “Her household claims she is indisposed.”

“Indisposed,” Aerion repeats mockingly.

“A seasonal fever, perhaps.”

Aerion hates Lys. 

“If she is ill,” Aerion replies, voice cold, smile poisonous, “then the First Magister would have sent for the finest physicians. Yet no such summons has been issued.”

The magister does not reply, and Aerion’s skin itches as the silence draws on.

“Is she being sent away?” Aerion demands abruptly, and he hates that he feels as though there’s a lump in his throat, an ache in his chest just at the thought. Damn you, he should’ve just fucking killed you and been done with it. He doesn’t like whatever this is that has him feeling so bothered by your absence. He should not care—he should go find a whore to fuck and bide his time until you return, not pace his solar agitatedly for days on end. “Well?”

Vyrano frowns. “Sent away?”

“Back to Volantis?”

The words taste bitter in his mouth.

“I have heard no such arrangements,” Vyrano replies, only partially putting him at ease, because if you haven’t been brought back home, that means you really are avoiding him, and Aerion is at a loss as to why. “If the Old Blood intended her return, the harbor would not be quiet about it.”

His teeth grind together. Aerion turns his back on the magister, facing the balcony again, mind assembling all of the possibilities whether he wishes it to or not: Volantis recalled you and word has not spread yet, you’ve left for a new Free City to spend your exile in, you grew bored of him and you found a better dragon to toy with. The last thought sends heat surging through him so violently that he nearly laughs—impossible, there is no other dragon, only him, he’s the only one enough for you.

And yet, it is not enough to quell the uncertainty that suddenly spreads through him, mind tracking back to the last few days he spent with you before you disappeared. Searching for some careless word he might’ve said, or some shift in your expression that he might’ve missed. You had seemed more restless than usual, gaze tracking out toward the east whenever conversation lulled, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. You laughed at something trivial in Vyrano’s garden three nights ago as you lay between his legs, and you argued with him over nothing the day before that, insisting that ghost grass has begun to spread across the Dothraki Sea and is soon to consume the world, so it’s good that the two of you are confined to this island—so earnest that Aerion had started to believe you until you burst into laughter. Nothing out of the usual, nothing that might have indicated you were tiring of him.

“You may go,” he says abruptly, dismissing Vyrano in his own manse, but the man does not move, and Aerion gives him an irritated look over his shoulder.

“My prince,” Vyrano says after a moment, clearing his throat. “It is not… unusual for her to disappear this time of year. I am sure she will return soon.”

Aerion’s head snaps around. “What does that mean?” he demands, furious that the man didn’t lead with this. 

Vyrano exhales through his nose, as though weighing how much to say, and Aerion has half a mind to put a blade against his throat just to show him the consequences of lying to and stringing along a prince of the blood. He refrains, if only barely.

“Five years ago, to the day, she arrived in Lys,” Vyrano says after a moment, and Aerion blinks once, “on a ship that did not fly Volantene colors, though every magister in this city knew precisely whose daughter stepped onto our docks.” His gaze flicks briefly to the Valyrian steel resting at Aerion’s throat before returning to his face. “She has never attended a feast during this week, but she always returns on the seventh day as though nothing occurred. You need not fret.”

“I am not fretting,” Aerion scoffs, teeth grinding together, ignoring the curious looks Vyrano directs toward him. He then prods, tone clipped, “She isolates herself?”

“She withdraws,” Vyrano corrects. “She dismisses her attendants. Refuses visitors. Even the First Magister does not intrude.” A pause. “It is… understood.”

As though it were a ritual. As though the entire city knew to let the Volantene dragonling lick her wounds in private. It does not suit you. It does not suit you at all, and it makes him furious. 

Aerion bristles at the implication. “She does not seem so burdened as to need to withdraw.”

He thinks of you lounging on the sun-warmed rock. He thinks of you curled at his side. He thinks of your taunting smiles and antagonizing laughs, the way you provoke him like it’s sport, have him hunt you through the day and chase you through the night, and kiss him like you can’t decide if you want to fuck him or kill him. It does not suit you. The idea of you needing to withdraw, of the whole island being aware of this weakness. Aerion hates it. Aerion hates you. 

“Appearances,” Vyrano says mildly, “are a specialty of hers.”

His eye twitches, and then he asks clipped, “Why was she exiled?” 

Vyrano presses his lips together. “That, my prince, is not my story to tell.”

Aerion scoffs, turning away again, teeth grinding together as he tries to process what he’s just been told. He does the calculation without meaning to—five years ago, you would’ve been seven and ten, a year younger than he is now. Young and freshly furious, he imagines. Not yet polished into the languid creature who lounges on velvet cushions and laughs at princes.

He imagines you stepping onto the docks—alone, angry, proud enough not to show it. He imagines the whispers that must have followed you, the same way they do him. The calculation and the measuring and magisters trying to pawn off sons and brothers. He imagines you alone in a foreign manse, on the first night, with no one to mock and no one to spar with; the bored expression on your face as you let a magister’s son kiss you and courtesans paw at you just to pass the time. 

He thinks of the day in the market when the merchant tried to slip him poison under the guise of flattery, and the way you diverted his lapse of temper on a holy day so he could avoid the consequences of it, and he wonders if you had someone to look after you in your early years of exile, or if you had to sharpen your own claws through trial and error. 

“She was seven and ten when she arrived,” the magister adds, as though to appease his curiosity. “Whatever occurred in Volantis, it was not a trivial matter. Even we only know whispers and rumors, they have been careful to keep the story within their walls. The Old Blood does not cast out daughters lightly, especially ones of her standing.”

Aerion presses his tongue to the back of his teeth, curiosity eating him alive. What could you have done? Why is it so under wraps? Aerion is pretty sure the whole world must know why he was exiled—certainly all of Westeros, and certainly all of Lys—but Aerion hadn’t even heard whispers of a Volantene noble being exiled from the Black Walls. His first instinct would be to assume that it’s because you’re not a high-standing noble, but he knows very well that’s not the case.

Still, he fishes for more information with: “Her standing?”

For a second, Aerion thinks that Vyrano will only hit him with another evasive answer, but the man finally sighs and says, “Her father is one of the Triarchs.”

———————

The manse had not yielded easily.

The First Magister’s guards had attempted civility first—polite refusals and bowed heads as they told him that you were not receiving visitors. Aerion had dispensed with civility after the third repetition. Steel speaks more cleanly than Lysene riddles, and he learned, valuably, that the Lyseni have been instructed not to draw their weapons on him, which will be useful in the future.

Now, the doors to your chamber hang open behind him, one hinge cracked from the force of his irritation over this whole situation. Aerion stands in the threshold, chest rising and falling rapidly, the last of his temper still burning hot in his veins.

You know he’s there—he was not subtle in nearly bringing down your door—but you keep your back to him, looking out over the balcony to the east. To Volantis, he recognizes after a moment, lips thinned as he presses them together. He figures you’re not going to say something until he does, but he assumed that you would speak first, angry that he’d interrupted your isolation, that he’d fought past guards and servants to get to you when you do not want to be seen. 

Instead, you are just silent, and he is left uncertain, words forming on his tongue and falling away because he isn’t quite sure what to say. 

Look at me. 

This is unbefitting of you.

Why didn’t you tell me? 

The last one tastes sour, feels too desperate, so he shuts it down with a more vile: you look pathetic, on his tongue, but you speak before he can let it loose.

“Do you know how the Volantene execute traitors?” you suddenly ask from the balcony, back still facing him. Aerion stares at you once, blinking, but you continue before he’s even processed the question. “It is considered the most grievous crime in Volantis—to betray the old blood. Worse than murder. Worse than rape. Those crimes stain a single life. Treason stains a lineage.”

Aerion is not sure if he likes the direction of this. “No,” he answers after a moment, voice level and wary. “I do not make a habit of studying Volantene punishments.”

“The Triarchs do not soil themselves with the blade,” you continue as though he hadn’t spoken at all. “Execution by sword is too clean. Too quick. It leaves the traitor with dignity in death. Instead, they are brought to the Ivory Yard, before the assembled houses. The family stands present on the dais and does not intervene. The blood must witness its own correction.”

Aerion does not move. “And then?”

“They bind the traitor to the ground. Ankles and wrists shackled with chains thick as a man’s arm. Each limb is fastened to a separate elephant. The beasts are goaded,” you continue, voice steady in a way that unsettles him more than if it trembled. “Slowly at first. They strain. The chains pull taut. The body resists, until it can’t anymore.”

Aerion’s fingers curl at his sides.

“It is considered fitting,” you finish quietly. “The body is divided, as their loyalty was. I watched it happen for the first time when I was ten. The man—boy—was seventeen, from a rival house. He refused an arranged marriage because he fell in love with a slave girl. She was with child, and he wished to marry her.” There’s something wry in your voice as you continue. “Sullying the blood—a very grievous form of treason. They killed the girl in front of him before they forced him to his knees in the Ivory Yard. The elephants walked for so long that the boy’s blood and entrails stained the marble for a mile.”

You exhale, and then you turn to look at him. There’s a smile on your face, but it is much like the ones you cast toward courtesans and magisters’ sons when you are indulging their attention, when you wish to be anywhere but. His stomach inexplicably flips, tongue pressing to the back of his teeth. 

He finds that he dislikes it when it is directed toward him.

“Magister Lorento is hosting a revel,” you say. “Let’s attend.”

Aerion blinks, half wondering if he misheard you. “What?” he asks flatly. “But—”

“Let’s attend,” you say again, making your way over to him. Aerion only stares at you as you grab his bicep, pulling him along with you out of your chambers. “It’ll be fun. I think this is the first one the island has had since you arrived. You ought not miss it.”

Aerion does not move, brows furrowing, because you must have some play right now, and he can’t figure out what it is. Why were you prattling about Volantene execution methods for traitors, and now you’re talking about going to a revel? Gods, you don’t ever make any sense, and Aerion is always struggling to keep up with you, but he has a feeling he’s made a mistake somehow; he just doesn’t know how or what. 

“Aerion,” you say when he doesn’t seem keen on joining you, and he almost startles at the sound of his given name on your tongue—not a teasing prince or little dragon. He thinks this is the first time you’ve said it, and he would like the sound of it rolling off your tongue were it not for the severity behind it. “Let’s attend.”

His teeth grind together as his gaze meets yours, and he lets out a sharp breath through his nose.

“Fine,” he agrees. “Let’s attend.”

———————

He was separated from you soon after your arrival at the revel. 

Bitterly, he realizes that must have been your plan—you were cornered in your chambers, had nowhere to go but to answer to him, so you manufactured a situation where you’d be able to escape him. He doubts you’re even still here; you probably slipped away from Lorento’s manse as soon as the two of you were separated.

He swats a hand off his bicep as he makes his way to the back of the manse, doing one final sweep to find you, just to make sure, before he storms back to the First Magister’s manse in a fit of righteous fury. 

This whole place reeks, and Aerion can hardly push through the crowds of intoxicated nobles and courtesans to move around. Incense hangs thick enough in the air to make him dizzy, clinging to the back of his throat with every breath. Even when he steps out of the building into the night air, he cannot seem to find fresh air. 

Where the fuck are you?

His gaze scans the back of his manse. Men lounge on low cushions strewn across mosaic floors, bracelets chiming as they reach for grapes and skin, and courtesans draped in gold and feathers drift between rooms like fucking peacocks, jewels glittering at their temples, their throats, between their breasts. He has half a mind to rip them off and shove them down their throats. They laugh loud as they press goblets to noble lips, fingers trailing deliberately over silk sleeves and rings heavy with gemstones, and it gives him a headache.

It is fucking suffocating, and Aerion feels eyes on him everywhere he turns, agitated and on the verge of losing his temper. The only thing that stops him is that they can all see him losing control. 

The eyes on him feel like blades poking at his skin, cold water to his face, even as something hotter coiled in his chest—humiliation, maybe. He is hyperaware of the tightness in his jaw and the jittery feeling spreading through his body. Aerion does not lose control, but he can hear their whispers now, wondering how long it’ll take for him to snap, each one wishing to be the one to send word back to his father. They’re all waiting for the famed temper, waiting for the mad dragon to bare his teeth and give him a story to send back across the Narrow Sea. He will not give them the satisfaction. 

He hates them, he hates Lys, he hates—

Paranoia flares hot and bright; his gaze sweeps around again, inexplicably seeking you out. It enrages him.

He hates you. He hates you. He hates you. 

He desperately needs to settle down, but his thoughts are plagued with the thought of you. How dare you bring him here just to leave? How dare you make him grow accustomed to you and then disappear as though he were nothing more than another toy to be set aside when you tire of it? How dare you make him feel as though he isn’t alone on this perfumed prison, only to abandon him in a room full of enemies?

He hates himself most of all, because why did he ever allow himself to grow comfortable? Why did he let the edge dull? He knew what you were from the first day—quick and restless, a bird that refused to be caged. He should’ve kept you at arm’s length, should have treated you as he treats everything else, useless and amusing, but most of all, disposable. 

Instead, knowing what you are, he still grabbed your face and told you that you were his. 

Instead, somewhere between hunts and chases, nights tangled in silk sheets and bodies pressed together, he had let you close enough to matter. 

Fuck, he thinks furiously. If it’s distance you want, he should give it to you—give you distance so vast it chokes, so vast that when you come crawling back at last, there’s nothing left. 

His teeth grind so hard his jaw aches, and he has to force himself to stay still. A prince does not stalk like a jilted lover. A prince does not allow a woman to make him look foolish before a hall full of silk-clad vipers waiting to stick their venom into him. A prince is above it all—above you. A prince can bed a woman and walk away untouched. A prince can laugh and drink and indulge and never feel the weight of it after. He had done so before. He could do so again. He could. 

If you think you can ruin him with a disappearance—if you think he will rage and roar and tear down half of Lys because you slipped through his fingers—you misjudge him.

But gods, he wants to, and he hates that most of all. 

He swats another feathered hand from his arm, irritation simmering dangerously close to the surface. He lied—he hates the fucking feathers most of all. He wishes to pluck them and stick the quills into their eyes. He hates Lys. He hates you.

“I have no interest,” he says sharply when a woman with gold dust brushed across her cheek attempts to loop herself around his waist.

“Let me please you, my prince,” the woman insists, and Aerion’s eye twitches as her fingers slide down his abdomen. This would never happen in Westeros. No one touched him unless he gave his express permission. “You seem tense.”

For a heartbeat, he considers snapping the offending digits—just to remind this perfumed court that he is not one of their silk-draped ornaments, that he is a dragon and should not be pawed at as though he’s anything less, but he refrains and opts instead to grab her wrist hard enough that her laughter cuts off abruptly.

“I said I have no interest,” he says, voice low and edged with something that makes her smile falter at last. He releases her with a shove that sends her stumbling back into a cluster of giggling companions. They whisper as he turns away, but none reach for him again.

He pushes deeper into the rear of the manse, past the open archways and trailing silks, past the last ring of musicians whose drums thud heavy and slow. The incense thins the farther he goes, replaced by night air, and Aerion can finally breathe again, temper cooling at last. He rolls his shoulders once, jaw unclenching as the suffocating press of bodies finally loosens its grip.

Where the fuck are you?

Why is he still seeking you out?

He makes his way into the garden, following the paths between tall hedges, sandals crunching over fallen leaves and white petals that release a faint sweetness beneath his feet. The noise of the revel dies behind him, swallowed by the hedges' height, and the garden shifts as he moves deeper—the paths narrow, and the cypress grow taller, the lanterns cast long, distorted shadows that make the carved marble nymphs almost look alive.

He realizes once he comes to a split in the path that this is no open garden—it is a maze.

His eyes slide shut in irritation, and he bites back a heavy sigh. He will find you at the center of it. He knows that for certain. You and your fucking games. He should turn and leave, shouldn’t give you what you want, shouldn’t chase, but his feet move before he can turn in the opposite direction. He doesn’t hesitate long at the split, turning left and not giving himself the chance to second-guess his decision. The air is cooler here, at least, damp with watered earth and flowers from Yi Ti that only bloom in the night. 

It doesn’t take long for him to find where the maze opens, and he considers whether it’s just a simple maze, sheer luck, or if he’d been drawn to where you were waiting. He doesn’t like the idea of relying on luck, but he knows Magister Lorento well enough to know that nothing about this man and his manse is simple, and he likes the idea of being instinctively drawn to you even less.

You are there at the center, as he expects.

Aerion pauses at the threshold, gaze trailing over where you’re lying against the marble, fingers tracing through the pool of water on your left. You look beautiful beneath the moonlight, and something catches in the back of Aerion’s throat the longer he stares at you, anger slipping away. Your head falls to the side when you hear his arrival, and your lips curl up as though you expected him. 

Of course, you did, he thinks bitterly, half-inclined to storm back the way he came, knowing he won’t. 

“Took you long enough, dragon prince,” you say after a moment, voice distinctly lacking the playful tease he’s become used to. “Come.”

“Do you think it’s amusing to leave me to suffer through that alone?” he asks, voice tight, making his way over to you. His temper should still be blazing, he thinks, furious at the betrayal—it had been, moments ago, hot and vicious and clean, but now it feels muddled, tangled up with something far more infuriating.

“I think,” you say, turning your head back up to look at the night sky, “that you look particularly murderous when surrounded by feathers. That amuses me. I have never seen a man with such a strong aversion to them.”

A faint twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays him before he can suppress it. 

He hates you.

“This place is suffocating,” he mutters, coming to sit near you, back against one of the marble statues decorating the small pavilion, an arm draped over his knee, head tilted to the side as he looks down at you. “Why did you run off?” 

You don’t answer right away. Then, instead of answering his question, you ask, “Why did you come to find me when everyone told you I wished to be alone?” He stares down at you for a moment. Your gaze finally shifts over to him. “To mock?”

He doesn’t like the way his stomach inexplicably twists at the accusation.

“You think I came to mock you for it?” he scoffs. He’s not sure why the idea of you thinking that bothers him so much, but he shoves it away.

“You enjoy provoking me,” you say at last. “I thought perhaps you wished to see what I look like without teeth.”

“You are the one who provokes. I did not come for games,” he mutters. “I came because you were gone.”

“And?” you prompt softly.

His pride rears, furious at the trap he’s walked into, but he does not retreat.

“And I did not like it,” he finishes, blunt and unpolished.

You exhale, as though considering his words, and you turn your gaze back up to the night sky. After a moment, you admit, “I do not like being seen when I am… less.”

Aerion scoffs again, harsher this time. “You are not less. You are as infuriating as you are any other day.”

You laugh at that, and Aerion hates most of all the way it makes the tension bleed from his shoulders. You’re looking at him again, an unreadable expression on your face, and then you hold your hand out to him. You say quietly, “Come closer.”

“I am already close,” he mutters, but he shifts anyway, drawn in despite himself until his legs are brushing yours. 

A part of himself rears in disgust at the casual touch, at how easily his body answers to yours. He is accustomed to proximity only when it serves a purpose—when it ends in teeth and kisses and silk twisted in fists. This feels much like that night you brought him out to that cove in the storm, knee-to-knee beneath the moon, skin pressed for no purpose other than closeness, and it feels much more dangerous, like a blade pressed to his throat, but not quite breaking skin but threatening to. 

“Closer,” you say again, and he hesitates, staring at you, trying to determine what it is you want from him, but he can’t figure out what you’re plotting. He exhales through his nose and shifts closer still, watching as you reach out to him once he’s close enough, fingers wrapping around his wrist to pull him nearer still.

“What is it that you want? Haven’t you put me through enough torment tonight already?” he asks, a bit on edge as your hand slides up his arm to the back of his neck, dragging him until he’s half hovering over you. His gaze instinctively slips down to your lips when he feels your breath on his, and he notices that you’re smiling slightly—it still does not reach your eyes.

Your free hand moves over to the marble ledge at your side. He watches, suspicion flickering back to life as your fingers find a small carved dish half-hidden in shadow. White-gold powder rests within it, fine as sifted flour, faintly shimmering in the lanternlight.

“What are you doing?” he asks suspiciously, but he doesn’t pull away.

“Something very Lysene,” you reply.

“That inspires no confidence.” His gaze sharpens as you gather some of the powder on your fingers. “If this is an attempt at poisoning me, it is a poor one. I would be disappointed.”

“It is not poison,” you say mildly. “It is indulgence.”

He squints at you, unconvinced.

“It will make you warmer,” you elaborate. “Looser. Less inclined to bite.”

His brow arches. “I do not require assistance in that regard.”

“I beg to differ,” you say dryly, “but I digress. I require it tonight, and I would prefer not to take it alone.”

He exhales through his nose, but when his gaze meets yours again, he nods, and you lean up, one hand still cradling the back of his head, lifting the other with the fine powder scooped onto the tips of your fingers. You lift it to his mouth, and Aerion’s lips part; two fingers brush his lower lip as you press the powder to his tongue, and he closes his mouth around your fingers, tongue dragging against your skin, swirling around the digits, tasting the sickly sweetness of it, pointedly holding eye contact with you.

Your breath catches, and Aerion likes the way your eyes widen slightly, likes the way that the dullness in your eyes finally slips away. His lips curl up smugly around your fingers before he releases them, licking up the length of them one last time as he sits up again, looking down at you. 

Your pupils are larger than they usually are as you look up at him, eyes glittering prettily beneath the moonlight, and Aerion’s chest feels tight. He blames it on whatever you just made him take, not on the way you’re looking at him. 

“You are playing a dangerous game,” he murmurs.

“You always say that.”

“And you never listen.”

It’s already working its way through him—he didn’t anticipate that it would hit him so quickly. He can feel his shoulders loosening, the slowness of his heartbeat, the way his gaze involuntarily slips down to your body and the sheer chiffon you wear, lingering on your chest, your hips, the way the silks shift as you move closer to him. He can feel the warmth of your body through the fabric, and his fingers reach out before he can stop himself, recognizing the shape of your body before he’s even realized he’s moved, tracing up your thigh, palming the curve of your hip. His throat bobs as he swallows, fingers tightening, heat fogging his head. 

“Is it dangerous,” you ask lightly, “to ask questions tonight?”

His brow furrows faintly. “That depends on the question.”

His gaze flicks up to you, calculating, watching as you hum lightly. You shift closer to him, and Aerion stiffens as you rest your shoulders and head in his lap, eyes sliding shut as you nuzzle close to his hip. He inhales sharply, jaw tightening as he tries to steady himself. His hand is still curved around your waist, fingers flexing involuntarily when you shift. He is far too aware of the warmth of you through the thin chiffon, of the slow drag of your breath against his skin. 

The powder you gave him burns hot in his veins, aching, and he’s hardly breathing as you slide his silks to the side, letting them slip off his shoulders, kissing slowly up his toned abdomen until you’ve shifted so that you’re sitting in his lap, legs loose around his hips, arms draped around his shoulders. He shudders when you drag your tongue against his clavicle, hips rolling languidly over his stiff cock.

Shit, he thinks, breath already too ragged for his liking. Your skin feels like flame on his, hands sliding up and down his abdomen; his head lolls back instinctively to give you better access, lips parting as you graze your teeth over his pulse.

“How long?” you finally ask, lips brushing the crook of his neck. His lashes flutter, barely processing the question, too consumed by the fire rapidly spreading through his body, how his cock twitches in his pants.

“For what?” he asks after pausing a moment, blinking hard to try to focus. Irritably, he notices that you look much more present than he feels, and he wonders if you even took the powder you gave him, or if your excuse of needing it was just a trick to get him to take it.

“For this,” you say. “Lys. Your exile.”

His jaw tightens, anger flaring hot, tangling messily with desire. He hadn’t even realized his hand drifted up to your hair, but he grips it hard, pulling your head back to force you to look at him. He does not want to think about that—not his father, not his exile, not the Trial of the Seven. You are a conniving whore, he thinks furiously, drugging him with that powder so you can pry into something he would ordinarily not want to discuss.

He hisses,  “That is not your concern.”

“How long?” you ask again, more insistently this time. “Humor me.”

Aerion’s nostrils flare as he inhales. “I was not given a number,” he says through his teeth. “I will return when it suits my father, when my absence has proven its point, and I am more useful at his side than discarded across the sea. Why does this matter now?”

Something flashes across your face that he can’t quite catch, lips pressed tight, gaze sliding to the side—disappointment? Gods, he doesn’t even know how you’re thinking right now—his body feels so wound tight and lax at the same time that he feels as though he’s going crazy. His attention flicks to the bowl on your left, accusingly.

“I was only curious,” you finally tell him. “It doesn’t matter.”

His gaze cuts back to you, assessing. You are lying—he can tell—but he doesn’t know why you’re lying, why you’re asking. Paranoia briefly takes hold again, wondering if you’re some sort of spy of his father’s, or worse, one of the Blackfyres’. He knows the bastards are still out there biding their time—are you in league with them? Trying to get more information on what’s happening in the inner workings of House Targaryen to report back to them? 

Aerion isn’t accustomed to being wanted without motive. He has been desired, yes—coveted, chosen for advantage, and spectacle, and proximity to the Iron Throne. He was raised in a court where affection is currency, and loyalty shifts with the wind. Women have smiled at him because of his name, and men have bowed because of his blood, but this is not that. And it would make sense, he tells himself—the way you latched onto him, the way you do not flee when he bares his teeth. No one stays simply because they enjoy the heat of him; no one likes being burned. There is always something to be gained from standing near a dragon.

His heart is racing in his chest, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the way you’re kissing his neck and rolling your hips or if it’s the dawning realization that all of his initial suspicions about you might have been correct.

He hates you. He hates you. He wants you—

His breath catches, teeth clamping down on his bottom lip to bite back a moan that nearly rips from his lips when one of your hands slips beneath the waistband of his silks, fingers wrapping around his cock. His eyes roll back slightly when you run your thumb over his tip, stroking him slowly as you kiss under his jaw.

“You do not seem half as affected as I do,” he spits out, accusatory, pride and embarrassment and anger rearing when his hips jerk and he lets out a choked noise. He reaches haphazardly for the bowl, dipping his fingers in and holding it to your lips. “Suck.”

You only look amused. “I cannot take more,” you say. “I will—”

You choke when he shoves his fingers into your mouth, deep into the back of your throat. Your eyes prick with tears as he presses down hard on your tongue, making you gag slightly. Your hand comes up to his wrist, trying to pull out his fingers, but he holds you in place, raising his eyebrows, waiting for you to swallow. 

After a few long moments, you do, and he finally releases you, fingers sliding from your mouth. Instantly, you slap him so hard that his head snaps to the side. He stares at the hedges, so stunned by the taste of his own blood in his mouth that he can’t even muster anger.

“Idiot,” you spit furiously. “I already took it.”

He is still staring at the hedge when your words register.

Slowly, he turns his head back toward you. You’re blinking rapidly now through a wrathful glare, chest rising and falling at an erratic pace. Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, throat spasming.

“I told you,” you hiss, “I required it. Not you.”

He sneers, still shocked. “You seemed perfectly clear-headed,” he bites back, pride still stinging more than his cheek. “Forgive me for assuming you meant to dull only me.”

“I have been taking it for five years,” you snarl. “I am more used to its effects than you. That does not mean I am less affected, only better in control of it.”

Aerion finds that there’s something fascinating in your anger. He should be indignant at the way you are speaking to him, furious at the fact that you dared to lay hands on a prince of the blood, but all he can manage is a slow, heated exhale.

Your chest is heaving, and your eyes are bright and full of rage, lips still slick with spit from how he’d shoved his fingers in. He has never seen you angry before—teasing, taunting, playful, bored, amused. You have been the bane of his existence wrapped in fine silks and dangerous smiles, but never angry. Aerion had almost thought you incapable of it, and yet, here you are.

His tongue presses to the inside of his cheek where you’d slapped him, and he finds himself almost—is he smiling?

He should remind you of who he is, who you just struck, but instead, he finally says slowly, “You struck me,” voice riddled with disbelief, tasting the truth of the words as though he still can’t believe it.

“Yes,” you snap, “and I would do it again.”

The heat in his blood surges, breath leaves his mouth in ragged pants. Aerion wants you—Aerion hates you. Aerion has never felt so strongly about anyone in his life; his fingers twitch for the dagger he keeps hidden on his forearm and for your body at the same time.

“You asked about my exile,” he forces out, defensively. “You drug me. You press. What would you have me think?”

“You are an idiot,” you spit again. 

Before he can take insult, you press your lips to his, hands coming up to hold his cheeks, tilting his head back to deepen the kiss. Aerion lets out a low moan into your mouth, tasting the sweetness of the powder he forced you to consume before he bites down hard on your lower lip, drawing blood as you did to him. His hands find purchase on your hips as he drags you impossibly closer, until your chest is flush to his and your cunt slides against his cock. 

Shit, he thinks, eyes snapping open when his tip slides between your soaked folds, thighs tensing, heat spreading through him so rapidly that he’s not sure if he’ll be able to stop himself from teetering over the edge. 

One of his hands immediately flies to the base of his cock, squeezing hard. He breaks his lips from yours to look down, eyes wide and something too close to a whimper spilling from his lips before he can catch it when he sees that your cunt is dripping, slick leaking down your thighs, staining the silk of his pants.

“Fuck—” he breathes, gaze snapping up to meet yours, but you grab his wrist when he’s not expecting it, forcing his grip off his cock. A wave of panic hits him, “Stop, I’ll—”

Aerion’s voice breaks over a sob, abdomen spasming and shoulders curving inward. He presses his face into your chest, jaw agape as he finishes after barely having been touched. His cheeks burn with humiliation—he doesn’t even want to look up from where he’s hidden himself, but he feels your fingers knot in his hair, yanking his face from your chest. 

He can’t hold your gaze. He doesn’t even want to know what he must look like—he can feel the blood and spit smeared on his lips, the heat in his cheeks, and they only burn hotter the longer you stare at him. Did he seriously just—

After a moment, you tilt his face down, forcing him to look down. He feels dizzy at the sight of his cum painted all over your cunt, dribbling down your thighs, and then—

Is he still hard?

His gaze flicks up to you, incomprehensive, and then slowly over to the bowl he spilt in his frantic attempt to force it down your throat. You grab his cheeks and make him look you in the eye. 

“I had taken enough for it to wear off at the same time,” you say through gritted teeth. “I hope you are ready to put that vicious tongue of yours to work once it wears off for you, because I will not nearly be sated.”

Aerion doesn’t respond, still panting, still processing, and his mind goes blank when you press your lips to his again, not quite as violently this time. He sighs lightly into your mouth as you kiss him slowly, tongue dragging against his inner lip. His hands drag up your sides, fingers pressing into your skin as you finally sink down on his cock—you let out a breathy noise into his mouth, and Aerion’s jaw falls partially slack at the feeling of your tight heat wrapped around him.

You kiss him again, again, nipping at his bottom lip before kissing him deeper, you do it over and over and over again, until he’s dizzy from the taste of you, the feel of you, until that pleasant heat has him so fogged that he can’t even think. Your nails scratch lightly against his scalp, and he lets out a low moan against you as you start to roll your hips.

“Aōha orvorta iksin vēttan syt nyke,” he groans, eyes rolling back when he feels your walls flutter around him. “Sīr ȳrda—bāne—qrugh!”

Your cunt was made for me. So tight—warm—shit!

His hips jerk when you gasp abruptly into his mouth, back arching into him, thighs tensing, body trembling beneath his touch. Aerion is almost lightheaded at the feeling of you falling apart on his cock so quickly, grip tightening on your hips as he maneuvers you onto your back, forearms braced on the cool stone at either side of your head.

You stare up at him, whatever the powder is clearly in full effect now—sharp, playful eyes uncharacteristically hazy, unfocused as you trace along his face, chest rising and falling rapidly, saliva pooling at the corner of your lip. Aerion leans his weight on one arm so he can grab your cheeks, fingers biting into your skin, thumb pressing against your lower lip until your lips part for him. He slides it into your mouth, and Aerion thinks he might have finished a second time the moment your lips close around the digit, lashes fluttering and eyes rolling back as you swirl your tongue around his thumb.

He snaps his hips against you hard, breath ragged as he finally takes control of the pace. He can feel your thighs trembling around his waist, and the vibrations of the soft, helpless moans you let out around his thumb, and Aerion hates you—Aerion wants you, Aerion has you and it isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. He needs this, needs you, needs it like he needs air to breathe, needs it like the fire in his veins and the steel around his throat.

“Emā pryjata nyke,” he accuses through hitched pants and moans. He means for it to come out sharp and angry, furious at how he reacted to your absence, furious at how you make him weak, furious at how he cannot be furious at you, but his voice is too pitched, too drawn, he’s drowning in the slaps of skin on skin, the sloppy sound of your cunt sucking him in deeper and deeper, the noises spilling from your lips. He says again, voice breaking over the words, “Emā pryjata nyke.”

You have ruined me.

He hates you, he thinks as he pulls his thumb from your mouth to kiss you, hips stuttering when he feels your cunt spasming around him again, wetness splattering against his thighs and pelvis. 

He hates you, he thinks as he kisses you like he wants to consume you, as he fucks you like he can’t bury himself deep enough into you, as he hikes your leg up to his shoulder just so he can reach deeper inside of you. 

He hates you, he thinks furiously as your back arches off the stone and his hand drops from your face to slide his arm beneath you, because he can’t get close enough to you, because his tongue in your mouth and his cock in your cunt isn’t enough, because he needs to feel you everywhere, your skin pressed to his, every part of him against every part of you, until he doesn't know where he ends and you begin. 

He fucking hates you, he thinks as he lets a broken moan into your mouth, dizzy and hot and unable to think anything beyond want and need and your body and his, as he realizes that there’s no coming back from this, that if he had it his way, you would never leave his side again, because you are his—only his, always his, he will never be satisfied with anyone else, not as long as he lives, as long as his heart beats and his lungs breathe. 

He hates you, he hates you, he hates—

Your hands cradle his face, and Aerion’s entire body feels numb and prickly, thighs aching with every thrust, dots spotting his vision. He kisses sloppily up your neck, breath ragged as he presses his lip against your ear, and his eyes roll back when he feels your nails drag from his scalp, down to the nape of his neck, across his shoulders, his back, and Aerion’s whole body gives out on him. 

He chokes over something caught between a gasp and a moan, biceps trembling before he collapses, and his body weight drops onto yours. He buries his face into the crook of your neck, lips still parted into a silent moan, shuddering as he feels you writhing beneath him, clawing at his back, still trying to rock your hips, but Aerion only twitches, body heavy and lax, breathing hard against your skin, pulse still racing, sweat dripping from his temple. The powder settles from raging fire into a deep, molten warmth, spreading through his limbs, loosening every tense muscle. His thoughts blur at the edges, not with frenzy anymore, but with a dangerous, languid contentment. 

The world beyond the maze feels impossibly far away—no revel, no politics, no feathered whores or jeweled vipers—just him and you, the warmth of your body and the sound of his heartbeat echoing in his ears.

His face remains buried at your throat, breath hot and uneven against your skin. He exhales long and slow, murmuring into your skin, “You are ruin.”

“And you are not done yet,” you spit at him, still worked up. Aerion groans into your skin, not wanting to move. His body still feels heavy and feverish, breath slowly starting to even out, the haze melting his thoughts and humming beneath his skin. You jerk your hips, and Aerion hisses, cock sensitive and twitching, softening inside of you. “Do not groan at me, dragon prince—this is of your own doing.”

He forces himself off of you, rolling onto his back, limbs heavy as he props himself up on one elbow. He lifts his hand to your face, fingers tracing over your cheek, and there’s something heavy in his chest as he watches your lashes flutter, seeking out his touch. Your skin is hot to the touch, lips swollen and slick with saliva and the blood he drew. He hates how his thoughts mellow, hates the way his chest physically tightens. He blames it on the powder, and he hates most of all that he knows he’s lying to himself.

“I do not like this,” he says quietly, fingers trailing down your chest and stomach, watching raptly as your body responds to his touch.

“This?” you echo, breath still shaky—he likes this at least, that he’s coming down from what you gave him while you’re still in the thick of it. Likes how responsive you are to his touch, likes that you can’t hide behind teasing grins and calculating eyes. 

“This feeling,” he clarifies, “like I have been disarmed.”

“Hah—” you gasp, the back of your head pressing against the marble as Aerion’s fingers glide between your slick folds. His gaze slips down your body, nostrils flaring when he sees how much of his own cum he fucked deep into your cunt, enough that it dribbles out of you, pooling onto the white marble beneath you. His throat spasms as he gathers some with two of his fingers, smearing it as he slides his fingers through your cunt to your clit, circling the bud so slowly that you rock your hips against his hand to try to get him to move faster. “Iemnȳ!”

Inside!

Aerion has half a mind to deny you just to make a point, and he blames the way he immediately indulges you on the boneless feeling in his limbs and the pleasant warmth that makes his head dizzy and his chest fluttery. He keeps his thumb pressed to your clit as he sinks two fingers into you, hissing at the feeling of your heat wrapped tight around him, the stickiness of his cum stuffing your cunt. Your lips part into a silent moan, the whites of your eyes as your back arches off the marble, and Aerion watches raptly as one of your hands darts down to his wrist, nails digging into his skin, and the other fumbles for something to hold on to.

He blames the powder again for the way he immediately slides his fingers between yours, letting you cling to his hand as he slowly fucks his cum deeper into your cunt. 

“Kesan dōrī jikagon lenton,” you gasp after a moment, and it takes a moment for the words to process. I will never go home. Aerion’s gaze drags back up to your face from where he’s watching his cum ring around the base of his fingers with each snap of his wrist, blinking away the haze when he sees the way you’re looking at him, gaze tracing his face with a type of desperation he’s never seen on you before. “Nyke jeldan naejot gīmigon skorkydoso bōsa eminna ao. Konir sagon skoro syt nyke eptan.”

I wanted to know how long I will have you. That is why I asked.

Aerion’s throat suddenly feels tight, pausing in the steady rolls of his wrist, only for you to hiss and tighten your grip on it, beckoning him to continue. 

“Dōrī?” he echoes, voice hoarser than he intends.

Never?

“Dōrī,” you confirm, breath hitching, and Aerion’s mouth goes dry when you let out a low moan of his name and squeeze his fingers hard, a shiver running through his spine. “Lo jān lenton, kesan sagon ossēntan.”

Never. If I go home, I will be killed.

Aerion’s jaw tightens at your words, trying to focus on unraveling you again instead of the pit that forms in his stomach. He curls his fingers deep inside, lashes fluttering at the keening whine you let out as your hips stutter against his fingers. Your walls tighten and flutter around him, and he lets out a breath to steady himself when you stare up at the sky, chest heaving, gaze lidded, body limp on the stone.

“Skoro syt?” he finally asks.

Why?

Your gaze shifts to him, voice cutting despite the haziness in your eyes. “I thought I said I wanted your tongue.”

Aerion manages to bare his teeth at you through the pleasant haze. “You do not order me, wench,” he says coolly, but he shifts to kneel between your legs, pulling his hand free from yours and slipping his fingers out of you, gnawing at the inside of his cheek as he watches cum dribble from your hole and join the mess on the ground beneath you.

His gaze flicks up to the bench on your left, and he ignores the surprised yelp you let out when he hooks his arms under your knees and shoulders to move you onto it. Before you can kick out your leg to catch him in the shoulder, he presses his hands to your slick thighs to spread them, leaning in to drag his tongue between your folds.

He blames this on the powder, too, he decides—the fact that he’s on his knees, face buried in your cunt, your legs draped around his shoulders. Aerion would have to gouge out the eyes of anyone who saw him like this—might gouge out yours later just to make a point. He lets out a low groan into you as he sucks your clit lightly, toying with the bud with his tongue before lapping at the mess of his cum and yours between your legs. 

“Did you know—” you start to say, voice pitched and breathy, fingers twisting in his silver hair as you rock your hips against his face. The sting at his scalp makes him hiss, offended, and he digs his nails into the skin of your thighs in response, but you don’t seem to care. His gaze flicks up to through pale lashes. You are not looking at him. Your chest rises and falls in quick breaths, your expression strangely distant as you stare past the hedges toward the slice of night sky above the maze. “—that from the top of the Black Walls, you can see Old Valyria?” 

Aerion falters, eyes widening as he pulls back slightly to look up at you more directly, and you instantly glare down at him. He sneers at you out of sheer instinct, because he will not be cowed like some trembling Lyseni boy, but lowers his mouth again all the same, tongue dragging lazily through folds as though nothing has changed, teasing at your entrance as he waits for you to continue, listening far more intently now. 

“On clear days, when the wind blows the smoke thin, you can see the black towers of the old city touching the sky,” you continue. Your hand begins to stroke through his hair now, absentminded, as if you have forgotten you are holding him there. Aerion should resent it. He should bare his teeth and remind you that he is not some pampered pet to be stroked while you speak of things that belong to his blood, but he’s too focused on your words to push away the pleasant feeling that rises in his chest—he blames that on the powder too. “I would spend hours sitting there staring at them, from dawn to dusk. It’s… a different type of cruelty to be so close and yet so far from everything that could’ve been. In that regard, I’m almost jealous of your house. At least you are not taunted by the ruins.”

Aerion doesn’t answer, though he thinks he would beg to differ. 

He was raised on the stories all his life—the Doom, the Smoking Sea, the towers that once ruled the world. For most men, it is a myth, something distant, more legend than history. For him, it is an ancestry forever out of reach. For you, it had been something you could see from a wall. 

He ignores the green feeling that curdles ugly in his chest, willingly leaning into the pleasant warmth still weighing him down instead. He relishes the way your breath hitches when his teeth graze your clit. 

“When we were young, we would sail to the shores at the outskirts of Valyria,” you tell him after a moment. “It was a rite of passage, so to speak, for children of Tiger families. We would bribe a captain bold enough—or foolish enough—to take us out past the merchant routes, to the northern shores. Take a small rowing boat to the sand and wander along the shore, daring one another to go into the forest. None of us ever went very far. The trees there grow wrong—twisted, blackened things that creak even when there is no wind. They say there are creatures that live in the ruins that are neither human nor animal, scaled things that look like men but feast on flesh and bone.”

Aerion watches your face as you speak, the heat settling into something heavier as he rests his head on your inner thigh. This time, you don’t glare at him to put his mouth back on your cunt—he wonders if this is why you made him take the powder, to loosen yourself up enough to speak of this. His chest inexplicably tightens. 

“I went farther than the others,” you say, giving him a smug smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes. “I was always the one who went the farthest.”

Aerion snorts quietly. “Yes,” he says dryly. “You strike me as the sort who would.”

“Half a mile inland, there’s a ruined outpost off the shore, on one of the old dragonroads,” you tell him. “Half-collapsed, choked with vines, but I climbed through the stones because I wanted to see the carvings up close. That’s where I found this.”

Your hand lifts slightly, brushing the Valyrian steel you put around his throat a moon ago, fingers tracing the metal reverently. Aerion goes very still—this is not some relic passed through markets and merchants, hoarded in vaults like you led him to believe. You found it in the ruins of Valyria itself, amongst the broken stones of the old empire, pried from the bones of a city that once ruled the world. His fingers rise unconsciously to the metal at his throat, swallowing thickly as he looks up at you.

“I wasn’t allowed to bring any of the family heirlooms with me to Lys—my armor, sword, jewelry, they all went back into the vault. But since I found this, they couldn’t take it from me,” you say with a wry smile, lashes fluttering before you look away again. Why did you give him this? he wants to demand again, furious, indignant, a lump in his throat he can’t push away. You continue before he can spit out the words. “I wanted to go further. The forest beyond the tower was… it was strange. Too quiet. But my brother ruined the moment.”

“You have a brother?” Aerion asks, blinking, trying to remember if you ever mentioned it to him before, but he doesn’t think you have. He’s not sure why it catches him off guard so much.

“A twin,” you confirm. “When he realized how far I had gone, he started shouting from the beach—crying, screaming at me to come back before something in the forest came out to eat me. I laughed at him, but he sounded so scared that I turned back around. He wouldn’t stop crying until we were halfway back to Volantis.”

You exhale suddenly, looking away, a wistful expression on your face, but there’s a tightness in your jaw that wasn’t there before. 

“It was a tradition,” you say after a moment, hands fisted in your lap. “Children of the Tiger families have done it for generations. It is known. Everyone in the East is aware; ask anyone here in Lys, and they will tell you. Before we come of age, we sail to the northern shores of Valyria and step onto the sand. It is meant to prove that the blood is still brave—that the blood remembers. Five years ago, nine of our children left to sail to the northern shores, and their heads were delivered to the Black Walls in sacks.”

Aerion stills. The warmth of the powder lingers in his limbs, heavy and slow, but the words cut clean through it. For a moment, he only watches you, waiting for the smirk that would turn it into one of your strange jokes, but it never comes. 

“How would you respond if your enemies delivered the heads of Targaryen children to the Red Keep?” you ask him.

“I would burn their city,” he says without hesitation. “And when the fires died, I would find whoever thought to send such a gift and make certain the rest of the world understood what it cost them.”

Your lips curve up into another smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. “The Elephant families called for inaction. They said the matter should not escalate. That the loss of nine children was tragic, but a war would be worse. Trade must continue, alliances must remain stable, Volantis must appear… reasonable.”

“Reasonable,” Aerion echoes, voice riddled with disbelief. He almost laughs, thinking that this is one strung-out joke, but the expression on your face makes it die in his throat.

“I doubt they would have been so lackadaisical if it were Elephant children killed, but I digress,” you say with a bitter scoff. “The Tiger families didn’t agree with them, of course, but the Elephants have held majority power since the Century of Blood, and they declared that no military action will be taken against the offenders—that they will settle the dispute through gold, as if any amount of gold can replace the lives of sons and daughters.”

You shake your head, rubbing at the lower half of your face as you look away, and then you look down at Aerion again. 

“So, the Tiger families decided to go through with it anyway, knowing that whoever led it would be branded traitor and dragged to the Ivory Yard,” you say. “My father is the Tiger Triarch—our family controlsl the military, so it had to be one of us who led the unsanctioned attack.”

“So it was you,” Aerion realizes. “This is why you were exiled.”

“It was supposed to be my brother,” you say with a wry smile, “because he was the spare, so my father could afford for him to be killed. Volantis follows the old Valyrian tradition of power over gender. Whoever is most fitting to rule will rule. My brother is… soft. Sensitive. He hates fighting and politics—all he wants is to drink and play music and read books, whereas combat and strategy and politics came to me more naturally. By the time I was five and ten, my father was preparing me for elections; he was supposed to step down when I turned twenty, and I was supposed to take over the Tiger party. My brother barely knew how to properly swing a damn sword, much less command an army—how the fuck was I supposed to let him march off to war, knowing that if by some fluke he managed to survive, I would have to watch him be ripped apart in the Ivory Yard?”

You exhale heavily, looking away, and Aerion does not know how to respond, does not have a quick remark or a comment that would feel appropriate, so he presses his lips together, waiting for you to continue.

“He and I—people cannot tell us apart when we have our hair styled similarly. Same build, same face, same voice. So, I took his armor, and I went myself,” you say, and then you give him a sidelong smile. “I had a similar idea of retribution to you, dragon prince. I told you way back when—birds of a feather, you and I.”

Aerion lets out a breath through his nose, eyes sliding shut when you reach out to brush his hair from his face.

“I was taken to the Ivory Yard and chained, and my father and the other Tiger families said that if I were executed, there would be a civil war. They never would have done the same for my brother, but because it was me, the matter suddenly became… complicated. They could not afford to let the Elephants make an example of someone who was supposed to be the face of the future of the Tiger party.”

“And so you are here,” Aerion drawls, but there is a tightness in his chest that he cannot quite push away. 

He presses his lips together, trying to reconcile the languid creature he has known with the past you just described. He half expects you to laugh loudly and tease him for falling for your elaborate tale, but he knows in his gut that this is the truth, and he thinks that he has seen it all along. 

You have longed for blood and steel on this island of pillows and silk just as he has—the boredom in your face when you are surrounded by whores and vipers is not the careful calculation of someone who enjoys decadence and gorge, it is the look of someone who is starving. The laughter, the flirting, the games you play across rooftops and through markets—the endless teasing smiles and practiced languor. It is distraction, because you are restless—violently, dangerously restless. The same as he is, just more skilled at hiding it.

“And now I am here,” you agree dryly, drawing him from his thoughts. “From future Triarch to a prince’s whore. How the mighty fall.”

You say the words carelessly, as you always do, but they land somewhere in his chest with a weight he does not expect. You’ve said this countless times before, deliberately to provoke him into one of his usual quick retorts, but this time, he cannot muster the energy for it, fingers brushing the steel on his neck, and the image of the wistful expression on your face as you told him of your past flashes through his mind. 

He swiftly pushes it away and exhales, forcing his mouth into a sharp smile. “If that is what you are, then you chose your prince very poorly,” he says wryly. “I have no court, no favor, and no patience for the sort of arrangements Lys seems to enjoy.”

“Poorly?” you ask with an amused smile. You shift off the bench so that you can sit with him on the ground, and this time, when you kick his legs apart, he doesn’t protest as you settle between them, resting your back against his chest. “I believe that means we are quite perfect for one another.”

Aerion snorts, though the sound lacks its usual bite.

He tells himself the tightness in his chest is the powder.

The warmth spreading through his limbs is also the powder.

The way his arm slips around your waist, drawing you closer without thought—that is certainly the powder.

He rests his head back against the marble pillar behind him, looking up at the sky. The stars are bright here, and the music and laughter from the revel sounds far away. He breathes out through his nose and says after a moment, “Your city is full of fools.”

He feels your shoulders shake as you laugh lightly. You agree wryly, “That, it is.”

“Why do you remain here if you hate it so much?” he asks after a moment. “Surely, you are not confined to this singular city—”

“I do not hate it,” you interrupt. “I was quite content before you arrived.”

Aerion does not like the way his stomach flips at your words—he blames this on the powder, too, even if the warmth and boneless feeling have finally started to subside. 

He forces a scoff. “You were bored.”

You scoff right back. “Boredom is survivable.”

“And I am not?”

You do not respond for a long while. Long enough for him to understand what your answer is without you having to say anything at all. For a fleeting moment, he tries to imagine the raven he will receive when his father inevitably summons him back home. One of Vyrano’s servants will send for him to return to the manse, and there will be a letter waiting on the table in his solar, sealed with the three-headed dragon in red wax. He pictures the ship waiting in the harbor, the sails unfurling as Lys fades into a smear of pale domes behind him. The revels, the markets, the coves and sea wind—gone, as though they had never been real at all.

And you.

You would be gone with it.

​​Unless—

“Tomorrow, we will pretend as though this conversation never happened,” you say after a moment, tilting your head back and to the side so that you can look at him directly, halting his train of thought before he can even properly consider it. You lift your hand to turn his face so that he’s looking at you—Aerion does not find himself protesting, even though he should. This is the powder’s fault as well. “We’ll return to your chambers once the revel begins to die down, and I will be gone by morning, and you will find me by midday, or I’ll have won the day’s game.”

He sneers. It feels forced. “You do not order me, wench.”

“I do as I please,” you reply a sharp curve of your lips, shifting around so that you’re facing him, leaning in to ghost your lips against his. If he shivers, he blames that on the powder too. Everything tonight is that wretched powder’s fault—your fault. Perhaps it is best to forget it happened at all. “And you have yet to satisfy me since you forced me to take double what you did. So what I please to do is you.”

Aerion grimaces slightly, still sensitive, but that only seems to delight you from the way you burst into laughter.

Your hand is wrapped around his cock, delicate as a flower, but cunning as a snake. Your pace is methodical - slow, enough to give him the friction he craves, but not nearly enough to quench the everlasting fire that burns within him.

You hadn’t really intended for it to go for this long, or like this at all. When your lord husband came storming into your joint chambers, pacing with all the grace of a petulant child, complaints spilling from his snarling lips - curses, vows to burn, vows to kill - what choice did you have?

You’d only wanted to offer him some release, Seven know he needs it. You’d only meant to let him have his way with you this night, as he had many nights gone by. Leave you satisfied and battered. Warm and shaking. But when you’d lay back against the pillows, spreading your legs like you knew he preferred, that restless glint in his eyes did not diminish. Not a slight.

You’d considered flipping him, then. Straddling his narrow hips and claiming him like the true dragon he was - yes, that’d ought to get it done. The position was new for the two of you, still as riveting and un-navigated as it was the first.

But tonight, you found you had your own desire for release. As a wife, you silently accept that many of your own desires are to be buried in favour of your husbands. And so, dutiful as you were, you’d indulged him many a time - when he’d bent you so steep you’d broken, when he’d had you until you fell unconscious, even when he’d unsheathed the dagger from his belt once, bringing it into your bed.

However, since the newfound discovery of his enjoyment of relinquishing control, no matter how begrudgingly, your own tastes had been satisfied along with his. And you long for more. Mayhaps being a new princess of the realm has infected you with all the greed expected of a royal.

At first, he’d protested the idea. Of course he had. “Riding your dragon is enough,” he’d spat, brows furrowing, eyes glaring at you incredulously - as if you’d uttered the most heinous request ever. “I am no inexperienced bachelor needing the guidance of a woman.”

But you know him better than he knows himself. Though, you’re certain he’d have your head in a second for thinking so. After all, no fondness he holds for you could compare to the high regard he holds himself to.

So you respected that regard.

You’d agreed with his ranting on the insipid courtesans. The expectations of a prince. The unbearable glances he is sent from serving girls and his own father, as if he would flip at any moment. Not entirely inaccurate. But you’d agreed nonetheless.

You’d reassured him that he, your dragon, is superior to all of them. That they are mere men in the presence of a god - an embodiment of magic beyond their feeble comprehension.

And with that, he let you guide him back against the pillows with you.

“Speed up.”

You huff a laugh at that, your lips curving against his temple as you brush your lips over his skin. “Is that how you request something of a lady?”

You could practically feel his scowl. “You are no lady. You are— fuck.. a witch.” He spits the words at you, anger bubbling in his chest. He’s humiliated, torn between his pride and desire to succumb to you completely.

“Do not make poetry of it, Aerion,” You roll your eyes, pressing a soothing kiss to his hair. His breath comes in quiet pants, his eyes flicking between your slow, languid movements on his cock, to the other hand that rubs his side softly. Lovingly.

It’s all too gentle for his liking.

His hips buck up roughly, pushing his cock harder into your fist. A grunt punches itself out of his lungs, and if you listen close, the end of it almost trails into a whine. He thrusts up again, and again, and again.

You indulge him for a moment.

“Is my poor dragon so desperate he needs to conduct himself so filthily?” You tease, your voice dim with lust. Your cunt throbs at the way he pulls his swollen lip between his lips at your voice. “Am I not giving him what he needs? Hm?”

He shakes his head sharply, brows pinching when you slightly tighten your hand around him. He’s already nearing the brink, he realises with dread, likely due to your relentless teasing. He moans quietly, his hips twitching. His head lolls back to your throat, despite how he tries to hold it up with dignity. “Fuck, that’s..”

His tip, flushed a deep red, is leaking more excessively now - your hand growing slippery, needing more concentration to keep it wrapped around him. You smile, toothily and smug, pressing more soft kisses to his hair as you begin to flick your wrist in time with his thrusts.

He gasps at the feeling. He bites his lip again hard, embarrassed at the sound - his face flushing. You want more.

His pace grows sloppier, stones growing taut with his imminent finish. His eyes flicker shut, losing himself in the sensations of your hand stroking his cock, your fingertips stroking his ribcage and leaving goosebumps in their wake, your lips offering kisses in abundance. Before he can catch himself, a high-pitched moan leaves his lips.

“I’m going to..” He tries to warn you, though it’s likely you know already, based on his harsh panting and uncoordinated pace. His words trail off anyway, drifting into a guttural groan as he nears the edge - and it’s good, so fucking good, he could cry—

You stop.

Your hand leaves his twitching cock. Your free hand wraps around his stomach, having clearly predicted how he’d shoot up, ready to strike you, finish himself off, do something. His hips buck up uncontrollably, and his cock leaks onto his pelvis. He feels hot, overwhelmingly so.

He fucking growls at you. It rumbles deep in his chest. Unbridled fury flashes in his blown eyes as he glares at you, incredulous and murderous. The hand that’s gripping your thigh grows impossibly tighter, fingers digging in agonisingly deep, and you bite back a wince.

His chest rises and falls hard. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say. There is nothing he could say that could convey how he feels.

“You stopped.” He settles for. His voice is shaky, the words cracking. Your cunt clenches around nothing.

“I stopped.” You hum, still offering that fucking smile.

He exhales sharply, as if in pure disbelief at your audacity. He seethes quietly, yet he makes no move to remove his hand from you and tug at his cock.

“You are my wife,” He mutters, voice firmer now, his anger bubbling beneath the surface, barely. “That is why I will spare you one more chance. Continue. Now.”

You blink at him, feigning offence. “I believe that is how you ask service of a whore, husband, not your lady wife.” You will yourself not to grin at the mad look that crosses his features.

“You are no better than a whore,” he spits with disgust, frown growing deeper. He sputters on his words out of pure aggravation. “You are— scheming, and cruel, and fucking sadistic. In fact, a whore might at least do the job better. Mayhaps I shall make a visit to the Street of Silk tonight-”

You’ve heard quite enough of this farce.

Your hand wraps around his cock again, feeling it throb instantly at the slightest friction. He gasps, disarmed, and you seize the moment to start pumping him - quickly. Like what he truly needs.

He groans, head falling back against you. His hips practically thrash under your touch. His violet eyes roll back into his skull, and he almost smiles ear to ear - satisfied, spoiled. Assuming. You smirk.

Your hand is unrelenting in the pace it sets, no matter the ache in your wrist and the numbness of your leg as he grips it to ground himself.

He’s already approaching the brink. So worked up, from the day’s endless responsibilities, from your nightly tortures.

“Fuck— yes, yes… that’s it..” He encourages, his voice carrying a whiney lilt. He is growing desperate, perhaps even fearful that you will deprive him of finish as you did before. His hand leaves your thigh, making you bite back a sigh of relief. His hand flies to his own mouth, slapping over his lips to try and muffle the whimpers that he simply cannot hold back.

You tear his wrist from his face immediately, tutting disapprovingly.

He grunts, snarling at you. You just tighten your grip, and his jaw falls slack, eyes fluttering.

“Are you close?” You whisper sultrily, teeth nipping at his earlobe. He nods, breath catching in his throat.

You grin, and double your efforts. He groans, deep and guttural, back slightly arching from your chest as his hips buck to meet you. “Fuck.. I’m- you’re going to make me-”

His orgasm hits him like a bull, quicker and more overwhelming than before. His eyes roll back so far it borders pain, and his mouth opens into a silent scream.

His seed spurts from his tip in silky ropes, painting his stomach and your hand. Some shoots so far it coats his chest, his collarbones. He grunts harshly, the sound forced from him with the pleasure consuming him. Subconsciously, one of his hands reach blindly for yours, fingers gripping yours painfully as he rides his high.

But for a dragon, he certainly grows sensitive quick.

When your hand doesn’t cease its ministrations, let alone slow, his breaths grow quicker. Panicky.

His eyes don’t open, but his brows pinch together, head lolling back against you. He’s burning hot, his sweat dripping from him to you, and he’s panting like he’s been underwater for hours.

“Is this what you wanted?” Your voice is no more than a murmur amongst the lewd sounds of your hand stroking his soaked, overstimulated cock, and his own noises.

You wonder a moment if he hadn’t heard you, but then he shakes his head roughly. You tut. “Words.”

He chokes on the sound that leaves him. “No.” His voice is strained, higher than usual, breathier and uneven.

He’s much more agreeable like this.

“No?” You feign confusion. “I thought you wished for me to continue.”

He thrashes, overwhelmed, never having felt anything like this before. “Seven fucking— I can’t, I can’t think-” He swallows dryly. “That’s enough!”

His voice raises at the end, frustrated and disoriented as his cock twitches in your hold. You act like you don’t hear him, your lips softly brushing his damp, pale hair as your hand continues to stroke him mercilessly.

He whimpers. You drip into your smallclothes.

“I can’t take- fuck.. I’m going to-” He doesn’t shy from letting the noises spill out now, likely he can’t even think to. He garbles out moans as his hips begin to twitch into your hold now, and not away.

And when he cums again, thoroughly spent, he groans so loudly that he’s surely heard all across the realm.

His cock offers two ropes, stones utterly emptied.

Finally, your hand slows. He collapses against you, muscles finally un-tensing as he goes limp. You let go of his softening length, lifting your wet fingers to your mouth. Warm, slightly bitter, him. He doesn’t bother to open his heavy eyes to watch you.

His breathing has quietened. Release, indeed.

“Good.” You praise quietly, and he hums back at you, on the verge of sleep. He will deny this ever happened, and will be most reluctant to relinquish his control so drastically for a time - but he will. Because even dragons need to forget themselves at times.

he tugs at your skirts while you lick your hands free of his spend, a sight that punches the air from his lungs and has his cock throbbing with the need to be inside you. 

he sends you eyes over the fire when egg’s asleep, but either he’s not doing a very good job, or you’re ignoring him, when you simply yawn and rub at your own eyes, sending him a soft smile over the flames. 

he wants more, though he knows he shouldn’t. he should take what you give and be happy with that. and he is happy, so unbelievably fucking happy that the woman of his dreams seems to actually feel the same. 

the mere thought of you sends dunk’s heart fluttering and he finds himself wondering about you when you’re apart, what you’re doing and how you’re faring. aches to have your pretty eyes trained on him, and him only. dunk yearns to listen to you talk for hours, wants to carve a hole within himself to make a home for you, so he can better keep you safe, and with him always. 

you start to notice how dunk seems permanently glued to you, standing with your back pressed to his chest whenever he gets to. doesn’t care about the odd looks thrown by villagers, or egg, who’s begun catching on to dunk’s clear-as-day pining. 

he assumes the role of your man, and if anyone asks, he’ll claim the title, too. he can’t run the risk of a stronger, more capable knight swooping in and stealing you away. not ever, but certainly not before dunk has made you his in every way. 

so, your hedge knight watches over you. makes sure you’re fed, gives you his cloak when you’re cold, listens when you need an ear — all with only the slightest ulterior motive. 

things come to a head in king’s landing, of all places. you’d simply been passing through, heads down and hoods up, but egg’s rotten luck had him running headfirst into ser donnel of the kingsguard by the town square. 

the prince had quickly been called back to the red keep for a… reunion with his father, the first ever since he’d snuck off (the second time) from ashford meadow several moons ago. 

“probably best if i wait for you out here, egg,” dunk says as two city watch knights flank the boy. in his tattered, patchwork cloak and tunic, he looks less like a prince and more like a peasant about to be shackled and taken away. 

egg makes a face of protest, just as dunk shoots you a look, pleading for your interruption — brows raised with pretty blue eyes so wide it almost makes you laugh. 

“he’s right, love,” you pat egg’s shoulder placatingly, and the young prince directs those puppy dog eyes at you. dunk’s glad for it, because all three of you know he would’ve fallen victim to the pitiful look.

“well, then, why don’t you join me? i could show you around the castle, and you might even meet my brother, prince daeron –” egg’s eyes knowingly cut to dunk. and, easy as he is, dunk takes the bait. 

“that is if daeron has not already drowned in his cups,” dunk mutters quietly, mindful of the white cloaks a few paces away. he glares at egg when the boy snickers, exchanging an amused look with you. 

“as fun as that sounds, i reckon i shall stay with ser duncan,” you sigh wistfully, “he’ll need one of us to keep his head on straight.”

egg nods solemnly, lips pursed as dunk makes a sound of offence. the knight’s indignation falls upon deaf ears as you bid egg goodbye with a hug and a fond pinch to his cheek. with one last stern ‘be good’, egg leaves with the gold cloaks and ser donnel, then it’s just you and the hedge knight in the bustling streets of king’s landing. 

it’s your first time in the capital, and the sights and sounds are near overwhelming. when you finally tear your eyes away from the sloping orange roofs, you find dunk already watching you. 

wordlessly, his hand cups your elbow, drawing you close just as a crowd of children — their heights barely reaching your knees — rush past where you’d once stood. he sees the cogs turning in your head as you catch up, eyes darting from the giggling children and back to him. he zeroes in on the way your lips spread wide into a grin. 

“stay close,” he says, fighting his own smile when your hand slides down his arm and into his. he lets you lace your fingers together, and nod up at him to lead the way. 

—

the inn is quaint. those were your words, as dunk’s had been a grumbled curse of how he swears he’s been overcharged. 

the building is a rickety old thing, one that probably hasn’t ever seen nicer days. the woman at the bar’s eyes squint between you and the hulking man plastered to your side. 

dunk flushes at the head-to-toe examination, wondering if the innkeeper might have the wrong idea of you. his jaw tightens at the notion of anything untoward on your behalf, as if he hasn’t spent half his days with you imagining the untoward in great detail. 

then, as if she remembers she doesn’t care–

“i’ve got the one room.” the woman says, dropping a key onto the splintered surface. 

dunk goes stock still beside you, chest caught on an inhale, aborted as he sorts through the thoughts running through his head. 

one room. one bed? with you. only you. 

his sharp exhale empties his lungs to the point he has to grip the counter to remain upright.

“wonderful,” you chirp, exchanging your coin for the key. 

dunk follows you up the stairs in a daze. 

the door opens with a creak, and there, under a low ceiling, sits a lone bed. the sight of it taunts him. dunk has force himself to hold off on the lecherous ideas he knows he’ll conjure up of you on this bedm — at least until later. 

to his credit and — unbeknownst to him — your dismay, he does not gather you up to the bed and kiss you silly. 

a true testament to his willpower as he molds himself to the wall, watching you get comfortable. going through the motions — draping your cloak on a hook, lighting the single candle on the end table and cracking the window with a small sigh — tortuously domestic, wreaking havoc on dunk’s heart.

“dunk?” you turn towards him, eyeing him strangely, as one would a man pressed into the corner of a room. 

“yes, m’lady.” dunk nods, standing at attention, ready for anything. 

“is the corner you’ve claimed more favourable than sharing a bed with me?” you question him as you perch yourself comfortably upon the mattress. his throat bobs as he swallows, mouth ajar in a silent response. 

it’s so quiet, dunk can hear his own heartbeat. worries you can hear it, too. 

your head tilts curiously, smiling because you know too well what the issue is — you just like seeing your hedge knight squirm. 

“come to bed, ser,” you pat the covers beside you. dunk doesn’t know if he’s imagining the sultry lilt to your voice, “it’s been a long day, has it not?”

you begin unlacing your corset like it’s nothing to blink at, as if it’s not sending dunk to an early grave to watch you undress before him.

dunk’s eyes squeeze shut, and in the sudden darkness, he hears your teasing giggle. he shakes his head, both at your brazenness and his own hesitation. he’s seen you in your shift times before. he’s slept beside you in your tent and hasn’t fared any worse — hasn’t accidentally mounted you in his sleep yet. 

but he worries things will be different within these four walls. he can’t remember the last time he slept on a bed, least of all next to someone he already struggles to keep his hands off of.

“relax, dunk,” you sigh, long and amused. there’s a soft ruffling as you slip under the covers. the man dares a peek, shoulders sagging in relief — disappointment? — when he finds you curled up with the blankets pulled over your shoulders, tucked beneath your chin as you blink up at him.

the other half of the bed — his side — remains empty. dunk sucks in a sharp breath.

“m’lady, please, i can take the floor–” for his own good, and yours.

“that would be foolish, even for you,” you giggle through a yawn, burying your face deeper into the pillow. dunk’s chest deflates, all fight leaving him at the lazy flutter of your lashes, how your eyelids droop with the weight of keeping them open — of keeping your attention on him even in your last waking moments. something warm tugs at his heart.

you’re fast asleep when he finally decides to get in bed. he sheds his belt and his scabbard with practiced discipline, deliberately lightening his footsteps so as to not wake his lady in bed. 

he takes a deep breath before joining you under the covers. the wood of the bedframe creaks under the added weight, moreso when you wiggle closer, unconsciously drawn to the warmth radiating off his skin. 

dunk scarcely dares to breathe, entirely unsure of what he’s supposed to do when your leg is thrown over his hip, pulling close by your arm around his waist — clinging to him in your slumber. 

dunk tries not to think about how the new position has you opened up for him. he tells himself that’s not your core warming his abdomen, and he really ought to go to sleep. tries his utter hardest to tamp down the heat simmering in his belly, because he can’t do this — not now, not like this, when you’re at your most vulnerable. he would never do that to you, not until you allow it.

dunk falls asleep tracing your features, counting your breaths and matching them with his own.

—

the candle has burned itself out when he wakes again. dunk blinks groggily in the darkness, still too out of it to piece together what had pulled him from sleep. 

he smells you, the familiar notes of your skin makes him breathe deep, wanting to burrow closer to the source. your hair tickles his chin with every steady breath, your parted lips puffing humid air against his chest. 

dunk’s pulse stutters when the dull ache between his legs registers in his half-awake state. he’s so hard it hurts, everything pulled up tight as his cock drools a mess within his trousers. 

he groans, low and raspy, when the ache flares once more. it’s instinctual, his hand slipping between your bodies to cup himself, hoping to relieve the pressure. in his sleep-deprived haze, he doesn’t realise until it’s too late, the cause of it all. 

your hips grind long, slow circles against his navel. with your arm and leg latched around him, he has nowhere to run except towards the feeling. 

the back of his hand drags against the front of your shift, gasping when he feels the soaked-through fabric. he wonders how long you’ve been this way — are you always this wet?

dunk thinks he hears angels sing when he brings his hand back up and he can see traces of you glistening on his skin by the pale moonlight. mind fuzzy with sleep and rotten desire, his tongue darts out, intending to lick your slick off his skin the way you’ve done to him times before, when he hears it. 

a quiet whimper of his name. muffled by his tunic to your mouth, but he hears it like you’ve shouted in his ear. 

he freezes with his hand to his lips. here he’d thought you’d still been asleep, unaware of his torment. but you’ve been awake, chasing your own pleasure in utter disregard of the agony you’re putting him through? this whole time, he’s been worried for your propriety, when the concern should’ve been for his own. 

dunk frowns, hand dropping to your hip to still your movements with a firm grasp. only when you make a confused sort of noise, and lift your head from his chest, does he realise that, oh, you were asleep. 

“hm- dunk? what-” your voice cracks when it hits you, and he doesn’t know why he expects you to pull away, to roll over and go back to sleep. 

your clit throbs in time with your pulse, just as a rivulet of slick runs down the inside of your thigh. you make a sound, doused with need. you press even closer to dunk, your centre just brushing the tip of his bulge.

dunk exhales shakily, fingers curling at the bunched-up fabric draped across your thighs. your head tilts back, finding his blue eyes turned black in the moonlight. 

“please,” he whispers. not sure what he’s asking for — all of it, most like. 

you hear his breathing, strained as the fabric stretched between his fingers. your own hand comes up to curl around his jaw, a thumb brushing over his cheek and the day-old stubble there.

dunk forgets to breathe at the first press of your lips to his. he holds it until your tongue brushes at his bottom lip, and he parts his mouth in a shocked gasp. lets you guide him, angle his face this way, suck his tongue that way. 

he kisses the way you’d expected. sloppy, unsure and infuriatingly earnest. it drives you crazy, the way he chases your lips each time you withdraw for breath, as though he wishes to use his own to sustain you. 

your hands tremble with the eagerness to get his tunic off, whining when he’s too slow to lift his arms for you. dunk would tease you for it, but your lips are trailing down his neck, sucking and biting as your hands roam his exposed torso. 

scratching at the dusting of hair across his pecs, your nails scratching parallel lines down the softness of his belly. that light layer of pudge under your palms makes you moan into his neck, pushing him to roll onto his back. 

the sight of you atop him is one he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over. the sleeve of your shift has slipped off one shoulder, baring the swell of your breast. he glances up for permission and sees the spit slicking your lips — his or yours, he’s unsure. 

his clumsy hands tug at the other sleeve, freeing your breasts. he takes one in a calloused palm, burying his face into the softness of the other, mouth already opened as he goes to take it into his wet mouth.

the sound you make goes straight to his cock, and he’s sure you can feel the way he twitches beneath the cleft of your ass.

the salt of your skin is addictive, and he’s already scheming how he can get your perfect tits in his mouth again. dunk grips you tighter when you try to pull back, arms looped around your waist to crush you against him. 

he sighs in contentment when your hands bury in his hair, paradoxically holding him in place where he suckles at you while trying to squirm away.

you keen his name, hips gyrating on his clothed length to snap him out of his stupor, a reminder of where you really need him.

“will you let me touch you?” dunk asks, panting, his voice rough. your answering nod is but a dip of your head, already leaning forward once more to kiss him. 

“need to hear you,” he murmurs against your lips, smoothing your hair out of your face. “say it.”

you press your forehead to his, whisper your assent. “do whatever you wish to me, ser duncan.” 

so he does — he lays you under him, spreading your legs wide to accommodate the breadth of his shoulders, and drags your shift the rest of the way off your body. 

when your pussy, bare and glistening for him, clenches around nothing, dunk dives in, and what he lacks in experience (or knowledge, at that), he makes up for in ample enthusiasm. 

he follows your hiccuped instructions without question — higher, slower, right there — sucking your pearl into his mouth, flattening his tongue and letting you buck your hips against his face. 

“dreamed about this,” he speaks against your folds. “been wantin’ to do this since i first saw you.”

warmth floods your belly when you recall how he’d barely been able to look you in the eye for the first moon cycle after you’d met. 

“oh?” you sigh, voice giddy as light bubbles in your chest, “why didn’t you?”

dunk groans. his chin is soaked with you, and he loves it. he shoves his face in deeper, his nose nudging at your clit while you cry out above him. 

“didn’t think you’d want me to,” dunk admits, made candid by the slick he drinks from you. his thumb draws tight circles on your clit. “big oaf like me could only dream.”

your head shakes vehemently. “not an- oh, gods- oaf,” you pant, fingers curling in the sheets and in his hair. he whines at the sharp tug and your impassioned reassurance. 

“is this– is it better than your dreams?” you gasp on the last word, eyes rolling back in your head at the tension building in your pussy.

“aye,” dunk simply shakes his head, chuckling as he turns his head and presses a kiss to your thigh. “nothin’s better than this” 

satisfied with how you’ve gone speechless, he gets back to work. tongue dipping into your hole as his thumb rubs at you steadily, hurling you straight past the edge. your back arches when it hits you full-force, anchoring your fingers in his hair like a lifeline. 

dunk moans loud and unabashed when your juices flood his mouth. the vibrations only serve to make your legs shake, thighs attempting to clamp shut around dunk’s head but he keeps you open with those big palms. 

he peeks up at you from below, eyes squinted as he smiles up at the bewildered look on your face, staring up at the ceiling with your hand still in his hair, cursing yourself for not letting him do this sooner. 

dunk takes your hand from his hair, draws it to his lips, pressing a kiss to your palm, dotting a line up to your fingers. the pad of your index pulls at his bottom lip, and you watch with blown-out pupils as he sucks them into his mouth, tongue curling around your digits the way they’d done your cunt just minutes before. 

you clench around nothing, and the emptiness hurts. his hips visibly twitch against the bed when you grab his wet hand, desperate to even out the playing field, cleaning his fingers of your release with your own tongue. 

his eyes go wide, barking out an astonished laugh. folds himself over you as he takes you in a kiss, sighing in satisfaction at the taste of you on both your tongues.

your hand trails a familiar path down his stomach. squeezing at the shape of him through his trousers, grinning at the blooming wet patch that greets you each time you’ve touched him like this.

dunk’s shoulders tense where he holds himself up. he shivers, but his body reads hesitant — his face tilted away though his hips betray him, pushing into your touch. 

“have you done this before?” you ask him gently, playing with the sweaty hair at the nape of his neck. dunk’s eyes peel open, lips a set line when he shakes his head. he doesn’t want to see the disappointment, the ridicule that he thinks is coming.

“you may mock me,” he sighs, averting his eyes, though everywhere he looks on your naked body seems to send another twitch to his pulsing cock.

you calm him with nails scratching up and down his bare back. “i wouldn’t. though i do wonder how a man as handsome as you has made it this long without a lover.” 

dunk scoffs, and you feel the way the tension melts from his muscles. 

“you need not flatter me,” he kisses your cheek placatingly, as if entertaining some outlandish claim. 

“you don’t believe me,” you accuse, pinching the fat of his ass and ignoring his hiss of protest. “i suppose you’ll just have to see.” 

dunk nods, eyes heavy as he finds his way to your mouth again, entirely addicted to the way your tongue feels sliding against his. “yes, please.”

you let him kiss you messily for a moment longer, before he stands to shuck off his ruined trousers. his cock is a pretty shade of red, heavy and standing against his belly. you find yourself wondering, not for the first time, how it’ll fit. 

he’s back on you before he lets himself grow shy beneath your gaze. slots himself between your legs, his cock dribbling a sticky trail atop your mound. with his broad chest pressed to yours, he, too, wonders if it’ll fit. 

dunk’s fat cockhead nudging your clit with his little twitches is nearly enough to have you rolling him over and fucking yourself onto him, but the blissed-out, wonderous look on his face stops you. 

you want to see how he does it. how he looks when he lets go, when he realises you’re offering yourself up to him. 

“fuck me, ser,” you bat your lashes, lips curling sweetly around his title.

dunk notches himself at your entrance with a shaky hand. the first snug inch of your wet, hot walls has him doubling over. he knows he’ll never be able to go back to using his hand after this.you hide your wince at the stretch in his chest, breathing fast and deep through the initial burn. 

“oh, gods,” dunk whimpers like he’s in pain, gritting his teeth at the urge to shove all the way in. but he knows he’s bigger, and he has eyes to see the tears gathering at your lashline.

“am i hurting you, my lady?” his voice is strained, and it only makes you wetter to have him still concerned for you even at this moment. 

dunk blinks at the answering surge of wetness around him, and finds little resistance pushing the rest of his way in. he groans, loud and surprised, because you feel like heaven wrapped around him like this, and he can see the imprint of his cock within you.

he rests a gentle hand atop the bump, stroking his length through your belly. it shouldn’t be as erotic as it is, but the sight of it has your walls clenching down like a vice. the sensation of you gripping him has his hips jolting, thrusting into you sharply before he can control it.

the needy moan that tears out of your throat has him doing it again. and again, and again. until he falls into a toe-curling rhythm that has you crying out his name for the whole inn to hear, that is if they can’t already hear the filthy sounds of his balls slapping against your ass and the way your pussy weeps for him.

“fuck,” your sob is wet when dunk’s pistoning thrusts turn to deep grinds, the wiry hairs at the base of his cock catch on your clit. he wants to see how deep you can take him, how much space he can take up in your body. 

“gods, you’re perfect,” he grunts, dropping to his elbows to lick into your mouth. he grins when you can barely kiss him back, mouth agape as he ruins you for everyone else. 

you cum with his lips on yours, eagerly claiming all your sounds for himself. the delicious fluttering of your walls and how you clamp down like a vice has his hips stuttering. honourable as ever, he manages to stutter out–

“w-where, m’lady? where can i–”

your ankles cross at the dip in his lower back, cunt still twitching with the aftershocks as you drag him down so his entire weight is laid over you. “spill inside me, ser,” you gasp, tits bouncing from the force of his thrusts, “‘m yours.”

for a moment, dunk’s vision whites out, and he sees what he thinks is a prophetic vision of you, swollen with his child, tits heavy with milk to feed his babe. chasing after a smaller version of him, only with your hair and his eyes–

dunk cums with a broken moan of your name, flooding your womb with hot spurts of his seed as his hips follow the instinct of pushing it further into your pussy. you sigh at the feeling of being so wonderfully full, fingers carding through his hair to soothe him on the comedown. 

he’s still cumming, so much it spills from the seal formed by his cock, trickling down the crease of your thigh. dunk pants like he’s run a marathon, lifting his head the same time he gingerly withdraws from the loving heat of you.

he looks like he’s about to speak— probably profess his undying love, knowing him — but the sight of the white ropes leaking out of your hole has his brain go quiet.

he collects what’s escaped of your mixed releases, and you watch lazily as his features contort in pleasure when it reaches his tongue. his digits shine when he pulls them from his mouth.

he repeats the motion, in a trance, this time bringing his sticky fingers up to your lips. with nothing more than a scandalised huff, you clean him off, moaning low at the briny taste and the feeling of his thick fingers in your mouth. 

“y’know, it won’t take if you keep that up.”

dunk’s brows furrow, seeming to thoroughly think it through, not even questioning how you’d managed to guess what he’d been so caught up in — he’d accepted long ago that you’re some kind of mind reader. 

“hm,” dunk hums thoughtfully, hand pausing in its path along your spine-