gcldie

aerion recalls the exact moment he overstepped. you’d been your poised self all evening, nodding politely at the mindless chatter in the banquet hall as was your duty; your husband, on the other hand, had remained insolent as ever.

he’d spent a better part of the night regaling his captive audience with stories of his favourite ancestors, entirely aware he was surrounded by families whose allegiance to house targaryen was thin at the best of times.

“maegor,” he mused, swirling his wine. “now there was a great targaryen. he understood the importance of legacy.”

the lords and ladies around the table tensed visibly at mention of the cruel king. aerion’s blue eyes shifted to you, and a wicked smirk curled his lip.

“he kept many wives. a testament to his ambition, i think.” he noticed the way your jaw tightened at his words, delivered like a blow of valyrian steel. “a sensible precaution, wouldn’t you agree? dragons are known for their…appetite, after all.”

silence befell the table as your guests glanced between you and the princeling with unease, goblets and forks stilling in half-raised hands. eventually, your eyes met your husband’s; to the courtiers watching on, your expression seemed bafflingly serene.

to aerion, it was a promise that he would yet answer for your humiliation.

your nails carve crescents into the prince’s chest, drawing a pained hiss from his lips as you pin him to the tufted bed beneath you. his fingers dig into your hips with intent to bruise, but you do not relent, grinding down onto him forcefully until his cock is fully sheathed inside you.

aerion moans, the sound deep and rumbling as his head lolls back. a snide smile blooms on his face when his eyes meet yours again, your expression caught between contempt and lust.

“all that composure, gone in an instant,” he coos, his voice tight from the feeling of you on top of him. “i much prefer you like this, little wife.”

you roll your hips against him, gasping at the girth stretching you open, but your pace only quickens.

“you forget yourself, husband,” you spit, biting back a whine as the head of his cock grazes the sensitive spot in your walls. “i am not some lowborn whore for you to toy with.”

“no?” aerion’s hand slips between your bodies, his thumb finding your clit to rub circles in time with your thrusting. “you certainly fuck like one.”

a breathless whimper escapes you at his touch, but you refuse to yield; your fingers weave through his silver hair, tugging harshly until another low moan rattles out of him.

“tell me, my prince,” you hiss, lowering your lips to his ear, your hips never once stilling, “if you are a dragon, what does that make me?”

your head dips lower until your teeth are grazing his throat, and you feel aerion tense beneath you, a satisfied grin settling on your lips. now you’ve got him.

“answer me,” you command, releasing his hair to wrap your hand around his neck. you level your face to his, taking in his blown-out pupils that gaze up at you through pale lashes.

“fuck—a dragonrider,” he manages at last, his voice wavering as you squeeze his throat gently. “you’re a dragonrider.”

you feel him twitch inside you at his own words, his fair skin flushed and his voice thick with desire; his hands clutch at the flesh of your ass, desperate for purchase as you ride him closer to his release, the pressure around his neck increasing his sensitivity tenfold.

“and dragons obey their riders, do they not?” your voice is firm, but your cunt clamps down on aerion’s cock, signalling your own impending climax. you sense him resisting, but the words tumble out of him anyway.

“y-yes, my princess,” he breathes, his eyes fluttering shut. with a final snap of your hips, aerion spills into you, swearing loudly in high valyrian as his body jolts beneath yours.

you come undone soon after, collapsing on top of the dragon prince in exhaustion. moments pass in silence, aerion’s fingers absently tracing your spine as he catches his breath. finally, you lift your head, taking in his dazed expression. he looks at you, and his face is laden with something new—not quite affection, but recognition, perhaps, of an equal at last.

“shall i expect you to begin collecting wives, then?” you ask, resting your chin on his chest. you don’t miss the amused smile that ghosts over aerion’s lips as he speaks.

Those sheets were twisted now. 

Knotted at the foot of the low bed, half-dragged onto the marble floor, damp at one corner with sweat of a high treason you had willingly committed. The light finds them and turns them amber, and you lie in that amber suspension with your eyes half-open as you catalogue the room the way you have learned, these past seven days, to catalogue everything.

Above you, the ceiling boasted King Daeron II’s expensive fantasies. An artist from the Free Cities—a man with trembling hands and extraordinary eyes—had filled the plaster with dragons. Not the fire-breathing monsters of the tapestries in the Red Keep's tapestries, but courtly beasts, elongated and formal, their scales coiled around the molding in elegant repose. 

You had spent considerable time staring at that ceiling in the dark and in the intervals between. You know the dragons well enough now. The largest one, positioned directly above the bed, has its head turned at an angle that gives it the appearance of watching the room below with great interest.

You watch it back as you grow conscious of the gravitas holding you down.

Aerion's arm lay across your hip.

It is not a gentle thing, that arm. It has a warden's weight—as heavy the grip of a man who takes hold of objects until he decides they are no longer worth holding. 

The weight of his hand rests heavy against your hip bone, long fingers curled inward like a dormant claw, and though the grip is slack, your skin hums with the ache of what those hands are capable of.

Morning light spills across the twisted sheets, gilding his forearm in strokes of molten gold. It feels like a bitter jest of the gods to make a nightmare so beautiful to look at. Everything about Aerion Targaryen is drenched in the agonizing colors of excess, entirely too much for one mortal man to wield. A sprawl of silver-gold hair spreads across the pillow above your head, while his sun-bronzed skin stretches flawlessly over lean musculature. With those terrifying violet eyes finally shuttered, it would be dangerously easy to mistake him for a simple man.

Breathing softly, his chin slightly tucked into the shadow of his collarbone, his expression has settled into something eerily blank. It is the closest to neutral his face has ever been. But studying him now, you know better than to mistake this stillness for peace.

You do not move.

You look at his chest instead—the part of it that is visible above the loose drape of his own arm. There are marks on it. Four of them, parallel, running from his left clavicle down across the slope of his pectoral, and they are red at the edges and dark in the center, the particular dark of dried blood on fair skin. 

You are aware of this fact the way you are aware of all the facts you have accumulated this week. You had made them on the second night, when his hands had tightened at your throat and you had reacted without thinking, with pure reflex—your nails dragging down through the skin, and he had laughed. 

He had actually laughed a short, delighted sound, and said something in High Valyrian that you had translated in your head: you have teeth after all—and then, he had proceeded to demonstrate that he too had teeth of his own.

The dragon on the ceiling watches you count your bruises.

There is one bruise high upon your left shoulder. Though obscured from this angle, you can feel it—a dull, blooming pressure chafing against the silk shift of his that you are wearing. Somewhere upon the marble floor lies your own discarded nightgown, utterly forgotten; and beneath the fabric you now wear, the contusion boasts a livid blue at its center and the outer edges have bled into a twilight-purple, creeping toward your collarbone. 

Three others complete this brutal tally. A dark band shadows the delicate skin at the inside of your right wrist where he had held you still. Another stains the high, soft curve of your left waist.

As for the fourth—it is a vivid, throbbing ache that you refuse to pay any heed.

Beside you, Aerion draws breath in the slow, heavy rhythm of sleep. Each exhale blooms hot against the nape of your neck.

Beyond the tangled silk, the light has already surrendered its fragile dawn. The tentative blushing pinks of the horizon have completely burned away into the hard gold of full morning. The Dornish Marches are merciless in summer, and Summerhall, for all its painted dragons, remains but a castle of pleasure. It may drape the world in velvet but it can never truly lock the cruelty out.

The heat stews in the room even now, thick as a wool mantle and impossible to fight. A single sheet is enough to leave a body drenched by dawn in a place like this.

…Or rather, it would be, if you had slept much at all this week.

You have existed, instead, in a state that is adjacent to sleep but is more properly described as a kind of sustained wakefulness—a physical state rather than a mental one; as if your body is running at a frequency that ordinary rest cannot touch. 

Lying tangled in the sheets beside Prince Aerion, you are made aware of every point of contact between his body and yours  with startling clarity. His arm rests heavy across your waist; his bent knee presses intimately against the back of your thigh. Then there is the sheer heat of him flush against your spine. He runs hot—hotter than any man you have ever been beside. He seems wholly unconscious of this, as his body seems to generate warmth without effort as a simple property of what he is.

Your eyes lay fixed on the painted dragon coiled across the vaulted ceiling. Tracing its scales offers a fleeting reprieve from the truth, but eventually, your heavy eyelids flutter shut to face the grim calculation you have been avoiding since you first opened them: 

Today is the seventh day. 

Come midday, your husband’s hunting party will return.

There is a moment, in the interval between sleep and full waking, when the mind is honest.

You have learned to dread that moment. It is a fleeting window—perhaps two seconds, maybe three—that has become a profound source of dread. For those brief heartbeats, all good sense lay dormant; and the raw, unmediated truth sits heavy in your consciousness, stripped entirely of the elaborate justifications you’ve meticulously constructed over the past seven days.

Within that terrible, lucid stillness, the reality of the morning strips bare: Prince Valarr Targaryen, third in line to the Iron Throne, is your husband. Yet the bed you currently occupy belongs to his dear cousin.

Thankfully, the clarity passes. Once the mental scaffolding snaps back into place, it becomes bearable, and then it becomes something else entirely—a sensation that defies every neat, polite word available in the Common Tongue. Obsession is far too imprecise. Recklessness sounds like the scolding of a septa. It carries a moralistic weight that wholly ignores the intelligence with which you have carried behind the affair; because make no mistake, this choice was made with open eyes and a clear mind.

On every single morning of this past week, the path down the east corridor back to the rooms assigned to you and your prince lay open. Each time, the choice was made to stay. 

You are not a woman given to foolishness either. 

Foolishness has never been a trait tolerated by your bloodline as competence was the bread and salt of your upbringing. Marrying the prince was an inevitable outcome thereof—a flawless political maneuver that yielded a very good match. Playing the role of his devoted wife came easy. You have been, by every external measure, content.

What a pale lifeless thing contentment turned out to be. The difference between that polite satisfaction and the fever occupying your flesh these last seven days… It is the gulf between the safely banked embers of a winter hearth, and a wildfire meant to consume the castle stone itself.

Even now, you feel it in this morning stillness: a residual heat in your skin, accompanied by a heavy, thoroughly pleasant sourness. It is a particular hyper-awareness of your own body that Aerion summons without seemingly exerting any effort. 

Sleep renders him entirely oblivious to you, a fact that somehow deepens both the thrill and the ruin of it all. There is no conscious performance at play. He simply breathes, and the wild nature of his blood disrupts the ordered cadence of yours. You turn a word over in your mind, a word trained into you since childhood, and the only one that fits the upheaval: necessary. 

It is a terrifying thought. Never before has necessity applied to anything outside the protection of your marriage bed.

Your lord husband offers a fortress. He provides wealth, standing, and a considerate tenderness that far exceeds the standard lot of noble wives. He anticipates your needs. With his diligent instructions, your morning cup is always steeped with honey and no milk, no matter whose keep lays host to you. He reads your books; he debated them by the hearthside with genuine interest. To put it simply, Valarr is the very picture of steady, even-tempered grace—and that is precisely what induces this sudden, sickening vertigo.

Beside him, you were a perfect mirror. Faultless, even, and correct.

Here, you are none of those things; not in this bed with this arm across your hip. Here you are unpredictable in ways that startle you when you catch yourself—reaching for Aerion before you have decided to reach, or speaking in High Valyrian when you have always been careful to keep your fluency private. You find yourself laughing at his cruelties, at a dark and jagged humor that possesses no conventional grace. 

You do not recognize the shape of yourself here and you have spent considerable time trying to untangle the madness of it. Does it represent an authentic self breaking free from its cage, or a dark reflection he is casting upon you?

The answer escapes you and you are not even sure the question matters.

Three seconds of clear-eyed honesty fade at the edge of your consciousness, leaving you anchored in the amber morning light with his arm draped heavy across your hip. The truth of the matter is simple enough: regret has not come.

Though you have hunted for it with the ruthless diligence of a maester seeking out a plague-spot, pressing mercilessly at the tender spots of your conscience, the answer is clear. What lives in your chest now is far too complex to be called mere guilt. It contains regret as an element among several but is not reducible to it. The consequences of this treason are arrayed before you—yet they pale the moment your gaze falls to the angry red half-moons your nails left clawed into his skin.

You remain there with the knowledge that your reputation and your future will be irrevocably scarred by this single act, yet you do not feel any desire to change what has happened. 

The pressure in your chest is a simple acknowledgment of a fact, a recognition that you have prioritised your own immediate needs over the standards of behavior that others expect of you, and you accept that your current situation provides you with more individual satisfaction than any concept of righteousness or purity.

Aerion’s breathing breaks its steady rhythm. He is not waking, not quite yet, but drifting back toward the surface. His grip tightens fractionally, fingers pressing into the crest of your hipbone in an unconscious claim. Closing your eyes, you remain perfectly motionless. The reckoning will come, but for now, you only want to breathe in this suspended amber morning.

You want to keep the world at bay, just for a little while longer.

One moment he is asleep; the next he is awake, and his eyes—strikingly violet in the morning light, framed by pale lashes—snap open and fix upon the ceiling. 

He does this every morning. 

You have observed it four mornings now. He takes a few seconds to account for the room; then he sits up. The arm draped across your hip lifts, and the sudden absence of its weight is wholly physical as an abrupt emptiness not unlike the jolt of a missed step on a dark stair.

Without so much as sparing a glance at you, he rolls from the mattress. The motion carries the fluidity of a man in peak physical condition—narcissistically, rigorously, consciously so. Summerhall sees him at his training yard daily, a fact casually dropped by your husband in recent weeks. The fruits of that discipline show in how Aerion crosses the room. 

Dressed only in linen sleeping trousers, he steps into the sun. The morning light spills over the half-moons scratched into his chest—your marks—illuminating them with the same indifferent thoroughness with which it applies to dust motes.

There is a paradoxical languidness in how he approaches his own reflection.

The mirror in this room is a long looking glass from the eastern Free Cities, floor-length, framed in gilded bronze. No doubt Aerion himself ordered it placed here upon arriving at Summerhall, perfectly angled to catch both the bed and the dawn from the eastern window. He stands before it, radiating entitlement. The carved stone dragons above the main gates, the ornamental fountains in the gardens, his own striking reflection—they are all the same to him. Mere aesthetic objects in which he holds a proprietary interest.

His hand finds the scratches marring his chest and traces them slowly with two fingers, expression caught between satisfaction and cruel amusement. That minute expression is perhaps the most legible thing he ever allows the world to see.

He turns to where his own discarded cup of wine sits from the prior evening on the nightstand—dried dark at the bottom now, the color of old blood—and he picks it up and examines it as though the residue contains some interest for him. He holds it a moment; then, with no change in expression, with no more effort than a man swatting a fly, he drops it onto the floor and watches it shatter against the marble with a crack that rings through the morning quiet. Unfazed, he steps right through the wreckage. Not a single shard dares to catch the sole of his bare foot.

Already, the broken thing is forgotten. This, it seems, is the shape of Aerion’s violence when boredom takes him. It is the casual, reflex erasure of anything that no longer entertains a prince who has never once been forced to sweep up his own glass.

Propping your back against the carved headboard, you draw his discarded shift around your shoulders. The coarse fabric reeks of him—a scent of cedar resin layering something fundamentally, undeniably his. Watching him watch himself, you offer no pretense of sleep.

After a time, a servant knocks at the outer door. Aerion does not raise his voice; he simply says enter. 

A servant from the Summerhall household slips inside, pale and meticulously careful. Without once daring to lift his eyes to either the prince or the bed, the young man sets a breakfast tray on a low table near the window. It is an act of practiced invisibility, perhaps a testament to the fact that Aerion has undoubtedly used these chambers for this exact purpose before. That little detail gets filed away in your mind alongside the rest.

Cold meats and summer fruits weigh down the silver tray. There are sliced figs, a cluster of pale green grapes, and the dark red southern plums currently in season, alongside soft cheese, warm bread, and carafes of water and thinned wine. With an effortless, throwaway wave of his hand, Aerion dismisses the boy like a hound that has performed its trick. He wanders to the table without rushing, plucks a grape, studies it against the sunlight, and eats.

Pouring a cup of wine, he drifts to the window. With his back to the room, he stares out over the grounds of Summerhall.

"Your lord husband," he announces, his tone flat, "was seen in the lower stables last night."

Beneath the silk sheets, your fingers remain perfectly still. "The hunting party camped at the river," you murmur, recalling the itinerary.

"So it was believed." Aerion turns the cup slowly. "A man I trust brought word at midnight. The party cut their camp early, it seems—if my man's eyes did not deceive him in the dark. Either may be true."

Genuinely, he sounds unbothered by the threat of discovery. It is exactly what should be expected; Aerion Targaryen is simply not troubled by the petty fears that plague ordinary men. Obstacles that breed terror in others spark nothing in him but a kind of interested contempt.

"I see."

"You are not alarmed." Turning from the window, he pins you with that fixed, appraising stare. A look that carries a particular quality—fixed, assessing regard, the sense of being catalogued—that you have become addicted to in a way you cannot fully account for this week. It is not comfortable to be looked at by Aerion. It is not a comfortable sensation, in that regard, but you have noticed that the discomfort is not the kind that drives you away from it.

"I am aware of the facts," you state, keeping your voice perfectly level.

A sound escapes him—short, amused, not quite a laugh. "Your prince will go to your rooms and he will be there," he says, "waiting." 

The word cousin comes out of him clipped and cold. "He is very patient with the things he believes are his. He will tell himself that you are with the ladies of the court, or walking in the gardens, or at your prayers. He will furnish your absence with a virtuous occupation." 

Taking a slow pull of his wine, he smirks. "—because that is what my cousin does with facts he finds inconvenient. He gives them softer, more flattering shapes. Valarr has always lacked the stomach for the truth of things. It is the great deficiency of good men."

Holding his gaze across the span of the room, you tip your head. "You have been considering this."

He sets the cup down and crosses to the chair beside the low table, and sits, spreading his legs, resting his elbows on his knees with the ease of a man entirely at home in himself at all hours. The morning light falls full across his face and it is, as it has been every morning, a face of extraordinary construction—the sharp lines of it, the pale brows, the wide mouth that can be pleasant or terrible in the space of a breath. 

"Your dear lord husband," he repeats. This time, the phrase carries a weight of saccharine contempt—the word dear doing a great deal of work, none of it charitable—"has always been incredibly confident in your loyalty. He said so at dinner, the first night of this retreat." He pauses. "While you were sitting beside him."

"He said that to you?"

"To the table at large. He was recounting your qualities." Aerion picks up a sliced fig, turning the soft flesh over in his fingers. "It was a solemn parade. Your virtues, listed off the way a Pentoshi merchant haggles over his wares. Loyal, gracious, composed… accomplished in all the womanly arts." His violet eyes flick up, latching onto yours. "He did not mention the other things."

The room is stiflingly warm. That hard, golden light refuses to soften the sharp cruelty of his features, and part of you is glad it does not.

"He does not know the other things," you reply.

"No," Aerion agrees, his smirk returning as he pops the sweet fruit into his mouth. "He does not."

Scraping the heavy chair right to the very edge of the bed, he settles in.

Rearranging rooms, furniture, and people is simply in his nature. He claims authority as though it were a divine right, perhaps it is, and lately—specifically over the last seven days—the sharp objections that ought to rise in your throat remain stubbornly absent. That was before, of course—before you learned the exact weight and warmth of his hands.

With one knee brushing the mattress, he deposits a tray upon the bedside table and plucks up the silver blade left by the servants. It is a delicate fruit knife, narrow and wickedly bright, the hilt forged into the shape of a wingless serpent. From the silver platter, he selects a southern plum. Four deliberate, effortless cuts quarter the dark fruit.

A single piece is offered on the flat of the blade.

He doesn't offer the point, nor does he offer a single word, merely holding the metal steady between you. Meeting his gaze, you let the silence stretch for a heartbeat before plucking the fruit from the steel to eat it.

The plum is cold and very sweet, the flesh carries a sharp, tart edge. As a stray drop of juice escapes down your chin, dashed away quickly by the back of your hand, his eyes track the movement—a thoroughly proprietary look and the deeply invested expression of a man watching a favored possession perform a parlor trick.

He cuts another quarter and holds it out—then another. 

Cut by cut, he feeds you the entire plum from the flat of his knife, a mute ritual accepted without a breath of protest. Beyond the heavy doors, you could hear the castle stirring to life. A muffled clatter echoes from the kitchens below, servants murmur in the corridors, and from the eastern gardens comes the shrill cry of King Daeron II’s decorative peacocks—a dreadful noise that always sounds precisely like grief poorly performed.

You understand—eating from his blade—that this is a particular thing he is doing. It is not care in the way that your husband's consideration for your tea preferences is care. It is a form of control administered through the vocabulary of service—he is feeding you with the implicit understanding of who holds the meat and who merely opens their mouth to receive it. Recognizing the snare, however, does absolutely nothing to cool the sudden, electric flush racing along your forearms as you swallow another bite.

What your husband offers is compassion. The word anchors itself in your head. From your prince, there is unfailing consideration, enduring affection, and the steady benevolence of a fundamentally good man who chose you deliberately.

What Aerion gives you is not care for your comfort nor is it interest in your ease. What he gives you is an acute, consuming focus—a quality of focus that is almost violent in its concentration. Pinned beneath that stare, you feel yourself existing with an intensity under that gaze that you have not felt before.

A husband sees his wife through the soft, benevolent haze of courtly affection. Aerion, however, observes much like the painted dragon coiled upon the ceiling. It is a comprehensive, unblinking scrutiny that strips the world to its bones, judging every flaw against some inaccessible, sovereign standard; and gods help you—that merciless judgment is intoxicating! Never in your life have you craved something safe the way you crave that dangerous scrutiny.

Across the table, Aerion is carving a cut of cold meat with his dagger, entirely unhurried, though his heavy gaze never wavers. At the corner of his eye rests a subtle crease. It appears when he is pleased in the particular way that thrills him. It graces his features when the Valyrian tongue rolls perfectly off your lips, or when you match his temper without retreating. It appeared the first night, in the dark, when you had stopped performing the careful deference of a well-raised noblewoman and had been simply, entirely present instead.

The look appeared just as the sweet fruit was swallowed—a heavy frown of focus as his gaze dropped to the plum juice lingering on your lips. It painted a mark he looked seconds away from tasting. 

Anticipation was a familiar ache by now. You knew what came next, learned in the stifled heat of these stolen mornings and in the press of his body against yours. Then his hand rose to the loose collar of the borrowed shift. Grazing the material with unhurried, possessive certainty, his touch made the air hum against your skin. Aerion pulled it down carefully, the shift sliding over your shoulders and pooling at your waist before you shrugged it off entirely, letting it fall away. 

Resistance had long since become a hollow gesture, one that served only to heighten the tension coiling in your belly.

His eyes dropped to your body then, tracing the bruises on your body. The livid blue on your shoulder bloomed under the morning light, a dark flower of pressure and color that he touched first, his thumb pressing into the center with just enough force to make you draw in a sharp breath, the sensation radiating outward like a pulse of heat through your veins. 

It wasn't exactly pain—more a throbbing reminder of how he'd gripped you last night, his fingers digging in as he drove into you—but the way he watched your reaction, his lips curving into that same amused crease, made your skin flush with a mix of nausea and something deeper, a slick heat that pooled low in between your legs. You didn't flinch away; instead, your body arched slightly, unbidden, the soreness in your wrist surfacing as he shifts his touch there, tracing the faint purple rings where he'd pinned you down. 

He presses harder, his thumb and forefinger squeezing just enough to elicit a soft gasp from you. He looks at you with unblinking regard, as if he were mapping every twitch and throb, every bead of sweat that gathered at the base of your neck. You feel it in the heavy throb of your cunt, the way your nipples harden under his stare, leaving you aching and exposed.

Aerion leans closer then, his breath warm against your skin as his other hand moves to the curve of your waist, where another bruise lay hidden, his fingers splaying over it.

"Your lord husband," he murmurs, his voice dropping into that saccharine-contemptuous drawl, "would weep if he could see you now, wouldn't he? All marked up like this, your pretty little cunt still dripping from me." 

He says it not to hurt you—not in the way that implies anger nor jealousy—but as if the idea of Valarr’s devastation was a fine wine he savored on his tongue, his eyes gleaming with genuine delight at the thought. You could hear the truth in it, the way he relishes the contrast, and it twists in your gut, not as remorse but as an insistent heat that makes your thighs clench. 

His words slithers over you, crude and unfiltered, painting pictures of Valarr's imagined grief—him kneeling in some shadowed hall, tears tracking down his face while you lay here, spread out and willing under Aerion's hands—and the vulgarity of it only made the ache between your legs more insistent, your cunt throbbing with a wetness that you couldn't ignore.

You don’t think of love; there was no room for it in this moment, only the physical weight of Aerion’s attention, the way his fingers now trailed lower, brushing over the soft swell of your tits, pinching one nipple hard enough to draw a low moan from your lips. The sound was guttural, escaping before you could swallow it. 

His hand slides down to the juncture of your thighs where you were already slick, your folds swollen and sensitive from the night's exertions. Your legs are parted with a firm press of his knee, his fingers stroking your cunt with unhurried circular motions that made your hips buck involuntarily. 

"Look at you," he says, his voice low and rough, "so fucking eager, even after I've wrecked you. He could never make you feel like this, could he? He'd fuck you gentle like the fragile thing you are, but we both know what you need." 

His words were a taunt, laced with contempt, but they fuel the fire in your blood. The soreness from his cock pounding into you last night flaring up as he slides two fingers inside you, curling them deep to hit that spot that made your vision blur. You gasp, the intrusion stretching you, your cunt clenching around him in greedy pulses, and the wet sounds of his fingers working in and out filled the room, obscene and rhythmic.

Satisfied with your reaction, Aerion shifts closer, his other hand gripping your hip to hold you steady as he adds a third finger, thrusting them in with a slow, punishing rhythm that had you arching off the bed. Your breath comes in sharp, ragged bursts. 

The fullness was overwhelming, your cunt stretching around him, the slick heat building until it was all you could feel—the pounding in your core, the way your clit throbbed under the heel of his palm as he ground against it. 

"That's it," he growls, his voice dropping to a crude whisper, "take it like the greedy little slut you are. A dutiful wife by day, but my filthy whore in the dark." 

The words were brutal, designed to degrade, yet they only stoked the fire. Your body responds with a surge of wetness that coats his fingers, making each thrust easier and deeper. 

You could feel the sweat beading on your skin, the salt tang mixing with the remnants of plum juice on your lips, and your moans grew louder, unrestrained, as he works you harder, his thumb circling your clit. 

There was no escaping the raw intensity of it, the way his cruelty bled into intoxicating pleasure, and you surrendered to it, your hands fisting in the sheets as the pressure built, coiling tighter in your belly until it threatened to shatter you.

His free hand moves to his own trousers then, pushing them down just enough to free his cock, already hard and thick, the head glistening with precum that he smears along your thigh. 

"Look at this," he says, wrapping his hand around his shaft and pumping it once, twice, the vulgar display makes your mouth water despite the ache still lingering from how he'd fucked you before. 

"This is what you crave, isn't it?" He positions himself between your legs, the tip of his cock pressing against your entrance, not entering yet, just teasing, making you whimper with need. 

The heat of him was palpable, his balls heavy and full as they brush your ass, and when he finally thrusts in, it was with a force that steals your breath, his cock filling you to the hilt in one smooth stroke. 

You cry out, your cunt clamps down around him as he sets a brutal rhythm, pounding into you with deep, grinding thrusts that hit every sensitive spot inside. 

The room echoes with the wet slap of skin on skin, your moans mingling with his grunts, and you lose yourself in the sensation, the physical dominance of him overwhelming everything else. 

He doesn’t let up, his hands bruising your hips as he drove deeper, faster, the cruelty of his words fading into the background as the pleasure built to a fever pitch, your body trembling on the edge of release.

The aftermath is a harsh return to the waking world, the heavy silence of the bedchamber broken only by the ragged tempo of your own breathing. 

Tangled in the damp sheets, the cooling air felt like a sudden admonishment. Aerion had already abandoned the ruin of the bed, crossing to the low oak table where a platter of roasted game awaited.

"You are thinking of him." Rising to carve a thick slice of meat, Aerion keeps it for himself. 

He chews slowly, his dark gaze pinned upon the bed, watching over the gleaming steel of his blade. He laid the carving knife down—aligning it perfectly parallel to the rim of the silver tray.

"I am thinking of the difference," you tremble. This is true and it is also, you realize as you say it, the most honest you have been with him—perhaps with anyone—in recent memory.

"There is no difference worth your contemplation." Reaching for a silver goblet of wine, he merely cradled it in his palm, making no move to drink. "Valarr is a painfully routine man."

He looks at the cup for a moment, rotating it in a single, slow turn. "He shall provide you with a routine life. Heirs, courtly affairs, and the grinding machinery of duty executed to the letter, hour upon hour."

Lifting his chin, he locked onto his target with eyes terrifyingly certain.

"You shall grow old within it… performing."

"It is what you were doing when first I saw you across the feast table. You played the entirety of that first day with an admirable, sickening rigor." A heavy pause descended into the room. "Tell me—does he know how thoroughly you have studied the art of appearing satisfied?"

Gripping the rumpled edge of the bedsheet, there was nowhere to hide from that penetrating stare. Meeting it took every ounce of your remaining pride. 

"And now..?" came your whispered challenge. "What is it you see now?"

He weighed the question, his gaze raking over the messy, bruised reality of what he had left in his bed.

"Now," Aerion murmured softly, "you perform nothing at all."

The balcony of the east guest wing looks out over the lower gardens of Summerhall, and beyond them, over the long, pale brown expanse of the Dornish Marches stretching to the horizon.

Early morning in the Marches possesses a ruthless sort of beauty. Beyond the balcony, summer has bled the scrubland into a bruised canvas of tawny golds and parched greens, beneath a sky already shimmering with a white-hot, oppressive heat. The land is flat and enormous and it goes on to the edge of visibility with a kind of indifference to human habitation, to the summer castle set upon it with its painted ceilings and its peacocks and its careful aesthetic program of royal enjoyment. The Marches do not care about Summerhall. They simply continue.

You are standing at the balcony railing with your hands on the warm stone, the sun already heavy on your upturned face. Draped over your shoulders is his silk shift—a men's garment too wide at the shoulders that smells faintly of cedar. Heat rises through the soles of your bare feet planted on the flagstones. In the dry heat of the Marches, your unbound hair catches in the arid wind, drifting aimlessly, while your hand rests on the balustrade and the other hangs loose at your side.

Aerion is behind you, somewhere in the shadowed room. You can hear him dressing without looking back.

You look out at the land.

The High Valyrian phrase arrives in your head with the casualness of a thing you have known for a long time, which you have: Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon. Your governess—a woman from Old Volantis, thin-fingered and precise in her pedagogy—had drilled the words into your twelve-year-old mind, preaching it as a proverb from the glory days of the Freehold, long before the Doom.

Back then, you had taken it as a stern, unimaginative lecture on the value of present diligence. You understand it differently now, standing bathed in the summer heat, in a lover's silk and the echoes of a dead language, the past week lies behind you—leaving every single door flung recklessly open in your wake.

Flesh for the night, grave for the morrow.

How clean the language feels on your tongue… High Valyrian never softens the blow with pretty sentiment. It states the fact—the living moment is always teetering on the absolute precipice of its own destruction. You respect this about the language. Perhaps that was why the old Volantene woman had always looked so apprehensive when you conjugated those ancient verbs perfectly. She must have known, even then, that a talent for wielding truths could be turned toward things far more dangerous

Parting your lips, you offer the dead words to the living sky.

"Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon."

The words fall into the blistering air, snatched by the dry wind until they are utterly gone.

You know what this week is. By the second night, any pretense of an accident or a fleeting loss of control had evaporated—it is an undoing willfully chosen and re-chosen with every sunrise. You are the wife of an heir to the Iron Throne. Yet for seven days, the bed you have occupied belongs to a Prince of the Blood. Here is a man exiled from court for staggering cruelties, and welcomed back simply because his father demanded such—and because the King lacks the political spine to excise the rot from his own grandson.

Aerion Targaryen. He was the Prince Who Thought He Was a Dragon, yet his inner fire brought only cold terror to those of his own blood. His younger brother, Aegon, has told you how his pet cat vanished into the damp dark of a well; that Aerion had watched the water swallow the small, struggling creature. To Aerion, his brother’s terror was nothing more than a plaything, a soft thing to be broken by his whims. 

He was a man who had a stablemaster beaten to a pulp on his word alone. There was no documented offense, no witness to recount the slight; there was only Aerion's word, and Aerion's word in any household is supreme and final.

You know all of this.

Every grisly detail of it was known to you long before that very first night.

You look out at the Marches and you think about what a death sentence feels like, and you discover it feels like the sun on your face and cedar resin in your lungs and a bruise at your shoulder—the one currently being pressed, fractionally, against the edge of the balcony railing just to coax out a wince. The pressure is a highly useful, intoxicating reminder of the prior evening.

Hardly the inventory of a sane woman, admittedly.

You take it anyway.

Aerion joins you at the railing. He is dressed—properly dressed, in a light linen shirt and trousers appropriate for the heat. His pale hair is swept back, though the arid breeze is already teasing strands loose from the discipline of the comb. He comes to stand beside you at the railing, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

"You said something,” he remarks.

"It is nothing but an old Valyrian proverb," you answer.

"I heard it." He is quiet for a long moment. "Say it again."

The words feel like smooth stones in your mouth. 

"Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon."

He does not turn. His profile is a jagged silhouette against the bleached white sky—the uncompromising line of his nose, the arrogant tilt of his chin. In this light, his face is simply what it is: extraordinary, and harder than the carved stone of the balcony railing, and without the softness that the common understanding of beauty tends to prefer.

"That is accurate," he says.

"Does it disturb you?"

"I am never disturbed by accurate statements." He finally turns his head, his violet eyes locking onto yours. "Are you?"

The question requires a certain gravity, and you consider this with the seriousness it deserves. "No," you say at last. "I am disturbed by inaccurate ones and I have been living with several for quite some time…"

He moves then, turning from the railing to face you fully. You mirror him, two figures standing dangerously close on the scorching stone with the Marches behind you and the castle at your backs.  His hand moves to your face, fingers find the hinge of your jaw with a grip that demands your gaze, tipping your head back.

You let your face be held.

"You are not what your prince believes you to be," he says as a statement of fact. "He believes you loyal."

"I have been loyal," you reply, keeping your voice steady. "For three years, I have been nothing but loyal."

"Yes," Aerion concedes. "You may have." There is no admiration in the word, nor is there contempt "And you have been bored. You have been correct, and you have been impeccable in your performance, and you have allowed his gratitude to slowly extinguish you."

"That is not a kind observation."

His thumb shifts, pressing harder against the bone of your jaw.

"I have been aching," he says—and the word aching is incongruous in his mouth and it is more unsettling than anything he has said this week—"to take you from him."

His gaze remains anchored, scouring every line of your expression as he speaks.

"Not because of what you represent as his consort, nor simply for the drama of the theft—though I confess, it has always called to me when the audience is my dear, dull cousin. There is a certain poetry in taking from him," he pauses. "But because you are the only thing he possesses that he did not receive through the accident of his birth. Everything else he owns—his standing, his title, his future throne—fell into his lap by the mere accident of his father's seed." 

His hand is still at your jaw. 

"You he chose," he continues, his voice dropping into a low rasp. "He had the standing to acquire you, and so he did, and he has spent every moment since being insufferably grateful in that solemn, gracious way of his. He prizes you."

"He spoke of it at that first dinner, ensuring every soul present understood the staggering quality of his contentment."

Silence stretches between you, heavy and thick with the scent of dust and impending rain.

"My nature is such," Aerion says, "that I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a prize in another man's keeping. It gnaws at me to see a spectacle of my cousin handling something so far beyond his meager understanding."

A hot, restless wind snakes between you, tugging at your hair.

"...that is an honest answer," you manage to say, your own voice sounding foreign.

"I told you I would be honest with you," he reminds you. He had. It had been his first declaration—before the night had been what it became. He had stood by the window of the shared sitting room while your husband was occupied elsewhere, standing with a glass of wine and his back to the room and his face to the gardens, and Aerion had said it as a kind of preemptory declaration: I shall be honest with you, because the alternative would bore me. You had stayed in the room when you could have left it. That was your first choosing.

"And the other part?" you ask.

He looks at you for a long time. The hand at your jaw does not move.

"You know what I am," he says.

"Tell me what you mean by it," you say.

Aerion does not answer immediately. He is considering—genuinely considering, which is rare for him in your limited experience. He looks at the marks he can see on your shoulder, above the collar of the borrowed silk shift, the bruise that has gone twilight-purple at its edges.

"You are equal in blood," he says. "Equal in the understanding that the world is a set of facts to be managed, not a set of sentiments to be indulged. You are the only person in this castle—in this court, perhaps in this kingdom—who has looked at me without the veil of pretty delusions and without fear wearing the mask of composure."

Your heart hammers a frantic rhythm against your ribs as you look at him.

"...I know the ruin you bring," You say softly.

"Indeed," he agrees, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw. "And that ruin is the only thing that has ever truly woken you.”

The words hang in the air between you. It is a confession stripped of warmth, but it was the closest his jagged heart will ever get to what ordinary men call love. Reaching out, your fingers find the fabric of his shirt, pressing against the marks your own nails left in his flesh just hours before. He does not flinch, nor does he move to break the contact.

"Valarr is coming back today," you say, the reality of the court closing back in. "Yes," he says. "So he does."

The horns come from the west.

Its brassy cry shatters the silence of the third hour past midday. They arrive at the third hour past midday, when the sun has claimed its full authority over the March landscape and the gardens of Summerhall lie heat-stunned and brilliant below the balcony where you have been standing, on and off, through the long morning. Two long blasts and one short, the standard signal of a returning royal party. The call slips through the open window to mingle with the dry heat of the room.

You are standing at the window when they sound. Aerion is at the table, reading; and even as the signal of his kinsman’s return vibrates in the air, his silver-gold head does not lift.

At the table behind you, Aerion remains entirely unmoved. A servant—the one that accompanied the morning’s breakfast tray—had brought him a book earlier. His long fingers lazily trace the edge of the parchment. The blaring of the horns doesn't so much as warrant a flicker of his violet eyes; the world outside his immediate interest simply ceases to exist.

"That will be the western gate," escapes your lips, the words tasting faintly of ash.

"Yes." A dry rustle of paper is his only other reply.

You stand at the window and you look out, though you cannot see the western approach from this vantage—seeing the procession would require a walk down the corridor to the gallery, or a descent into the main courtyard. Because of this, the reality of the horns remains agonizingly abstract. You know the hunting party is out there, loud with horses and hounds, boastful with trophies and fellowship; and at the head of it all rides your husband. He will be present, checking on the welfare of the men sweltering in their leathers, ensuring the hounds are watered. He is so hopelessly, wonderfully good.

That goodness twists like a dagger in your gut when you think of what he is returning to. What would Valarr do when the truth finally caught up to him? Unlike the man sitting at the table behind you, your husband is not prone to fiery, destructive rages; if he discovered his wife had spent the last seven days burning in the bed of his cousin, he wouldn't set the castle alight. He would simply break. You can almost picture those earnest, trusting eyes clouding with a quiet, devastating grief as he grappled with a betrayal profound enough to shatter the honorable foundation he built his life upon. Worse still, Valarr’s nature dictates that he would search for a way to blame himself for your wandering heart. The sheer cruelty of what you have done threatens to choke the air from your lungs.

A frantic arithmetic begins playing out in your mind. 

The western gate is perhaps four hundred yards from the main house, and from the inner courtyard to your private apartments takes several minutes more. Fortunately, knowing Valarr’s predictable courtesy, he will not rush straight to your chambers. He is thorough and considerate in his transitions. First, he will hand off his horse, speak to the stablemaster, greet whatever members of the court have assembled to receive the party, and exchange words with the household steward about the evening arrangements. Thirty, perhaps forty minutes remain before he opens the door to the rooms you share.

You have been absent from those rooms for seven days. The court is not blind, and the ladies of the royal party have spent the last seven days noting your absence from the morning meals, the afternoon sewing circles, and the evening garden walks. Valarr does not know yet. But soon, whether through a servant's nervous report or a lady's poisoned pity, the truth will be dripped into his ear.

He will know it, at some point, in some form.

Aerion turns another page. Without raising his eyes from the text, he says, "He will speak to the stewards before he comes to your rooms. He considers it a point of courtesy to the household." His tone carries no heat and no interest. It is the tone of a man relaying the contents of a document he finds mildly beneath his attention. "Even as a boy, Valarr was so tediously burdened by the feelings of servants. It makes him tragically slow."

"How long..?" 

Finally, he looks up from the book. Aerion pins you with a paralyzing stare. "Long enough."

Eight inches. That is the approximate distance between your lips and his.

You know this because you have been standing in the center of the room for three minutes utterly motionless, and he has been watching you from his chair. Neither of you has spoken. Three years as a dutiful, courtly wife and seven days as a creature utterly ruined have formed in your mind the ability to hold competing truths without collapsing into madness. How easily one life bleeds into the next, crosses your mind as you watch him watch you from the comfort of his high-backed chair.

The western gate is a few hundred yards from the main house.

The main house's southern corridor, which leads to the private apartments, is approximately another hundred long.

Aerion's guest wing is at the eastern end of the private apartments, separated from the marital suite assigned to you and your husband by the length of a corridor, two antechambers, and a set of carved doors through which you have not walked since the second night of the retreat.

Exactly thirty minutes remain. 

Every passing moment is a finite quantity of stolen opportunity, bleeding out into the ether at a rate of one minute per minute.

Eight inches.

Yet your feet remain rooted to the woven rug, pointed entirely away from the corridor. Meeting Aerion’s gaze, there is a knowing amusement in his expression but he makes no move forward. His hands remain open, resting casually on the arms of his chair, because the act of surrender must be yours alone. To him, the prize is only worth taking if the prize begs to be taken. Cruel, beautiful bastard, your mind whispers. This twisted psychological warfare feels far more intimate than the illicit week of nights behind you. The choice was yours to make.

So the eight inches are crossed.

You take his face in your hands—both hands. Standing over him offers an intoxicating novelty and the sudden shift in power registers in your blood as heat. His hands come up to your waist and they do not gentle themselves, which you expected and for which you are grateful, because you need the sharpness of this moment. You need it to have edges.

You pull him to his feet by his collar.

"Careful," Aerion murmurs, a low, gravelly hum that vibrates through your wrists. "You’ll tear it."

He lets himself be pulled upward. The book tumbles from his lap, hitting the floor with a dull thud.

The illusion of submission shatters as his sheer size overtakes the space. Towering over your frame by a head and more, he forces your chin up, your arms drawn taut as the bunched fabric in your fists becomes a set of reins impossible to control. His hands find your waist the instant he's fully upright, fingers digging into the soft flesh just above your hips.

The heat of his palms seeps through the thin fabric of the shift you're wearing—his shift, still carrying the faint scent of sweat from the night before—and it radiates outward. A possessive burn travels down your thighs, pooling low in your belly, causing your breath to snag in the dry air of the chamber. 

Faintly, through the open windows, the distant blast of hunting horns echoes from the wood. But Aerion does not rush, even with the horns fading in the distance. If anything, the urgency of that sound only sharpens his resolve to ignore it. Let them come, a dizzying recklessness takes hold of your senses. Let the whole damned world burn outside this door.

His hands slide up your sides, thumbs tracing the curve of your ribs through the fabric. The weight of his unblinking stare strips away whatever courtly pretense remains, pulling a violent shiver from your spine despite the relentless afternoon heat. 

Prickles of anticipation break across your skin as his fingers curl around the hem of the oversized shift, tugging it upward. 

The fabric rasps against your skin as it rises, exposing your thighs first, then your hips, the cool air of the room brushing against the dampness between your legs—a wetness that's already building, your cunt throbbing with the anticipation.

He watches your reaction, and when he finally leans in, his mouth meets yours. Lips parting under his ruthless possession, his tongue thrusts deep and demanding.

The kiss deepens, and you can feel the hard line of his cock pressing against your belly through his trousers, already stiff and insistent, the bulge thick as he grinds it slowly against you in a rhythm that matches the steady beat of your heart. 

Aerion breaks away just enough to speak, his breath hot against your lips.

"My cousin thinks he holds you," he says, voice low and even, like he's stating the inevitable turn of the seasons, no trace of mockery or sugar-coated disdain. "But he's been grasping at air for seven days, hasn't he? All that careful affection—smoke, dissolving in the heat of what's real." 

His hand moves then, sliding down to cup your ass, fingers squeezing with that same possessive grip, pulling you harder against him so you can feel every inch of his erection, the way it throbs through the fabric, demanding to be noticed. 

The words hit you as a confirmation, a stark recognition that slices through the haze; he's right, and you've known it all along, chosen it with every breath in this room, every mark he's left on your skin. 

It's not guilt that flares in your chest but a fierce, clarifying heat, your cunt clenching at the truth of it, at the way his declaration mirrors the ache building inside you, making you wetter, your slickness starting to soak through the shift as you press closer, your hands fumbling at the laces of his trousers, needing to feel him bare. 

He lets you undo them, his hands steady on your body as you work, but he doesn't hurry the process; instead, he turns you slightly, guiding you back toward the edge of the bed with that same deliberate slowness, as if the horns' call is nothing more than a distant irritant, beneath his notice. 

When his trousers finally fall open, his cock springs free, thick and heavy, the head already glistening with precum that beads at the tip.

You wrap your hand around it instinctively, feeling the hot, velvety skin stretched over the rigid length, your fingers barely meeting as you stroke him once, twice, the motion drawing a low, approving hum from his throat. 

He doesn't thrust into your grip; he lets you feel the weight of it, the way it pulses in your palm before he pushes the shift up and over your head entirely, leaving you naked under the golden light filtering through the curtains. 

His eyes rake over you then, taking in the bruises and the sweat-slicked sheen of your skin, and without another word, he lowers you onto the bed, his body following yours down, pinning you with his weight. 

His cock presses against your thigh and when he shifts his weight to align himself at your entrance, it's with excruciating slowness, the head of his cock nudging against your soaked folds, teasing the sensitive flesh without fully breaching you. 

You're aching for it, your cunt throbbing with need, the wetness dripping down to your ass as he holds back, making you wait, his breath steady against your neck as if to prove he controls even this.

Finally, he thrusts in, but not with the frantic urgency you might expect. His cock fills you inch by inch, stretching your cunt around his thickness until you're gasping, the sensation a burning mix of fullness and friction that makes your walls clench greedily around him. 

He doesn't start slow. Each stroke long and powerful, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in, the wet slap of skin echoing in the room as your juices coat him, making every thrust smoother and filthier. 

A second volley of horns bleeds through the heavy stone walls—distant, yet loud enough to announce that the riding party has reached the inner gates. The sound drifts into the bedchamber, washing over the tangled linens. Your mind shuts it away.

Out there, breathing the dust of the road, is the man you married. To dwell on him is to invite the grayscale back into your life. He represents an even, steady warmth, and a patient regard that has defined three years of perfectly measured, entirely bloodless contentment. 

A good, safe man, you remind yourself, though the thought tastes horribly like ash on your tongue. Eventually, of course, that is the life you will resume. For rebellion is only a temporary indulgence for women of your station, and the ironclad laws of blood and highborn obligation will always come to collect. A grim understanding of what the realm demands will drag you back to his side, and you know this surrender is already etched deep into your marrow.

You know you will return.

But you are here, now, on the eastern side of the heavy carved doors, the world dissolved into the stifling, the amber heat of Summerhall's deepest afternoon.

"Are you listening to the horns, sweetling?" Aerion murmurs, his breath a sudden, scorching ghost against your collarbone. His eyes, bright and volatile as wildfire, dare you to pull away or show even a sliver of regret. A cruel smile plays on his lips. "Let him blow his horns. A dragon does not concern himself with the bleating of sheep."

Perhaps not, you think, your fingers twisting into the damp, silver-gold silk of his hair, but the sheep's wife certainly might. Still, the cynical retort goes unspoken. Let the dutiful wife stay dead for just a few hours more. 

There is no need for sundials in this blazing little purgatory with Aerion above you; time has simply ceased to matter.

Stepping back onto the balcony, you find the world has shifted.

The sun sits lower now, stripped of its midday tyranny, its colors bleeding toward the west where the hunting party has already vanished through Summerhall’s gate. The Marches in this light are amber and ochre and a dark, almost wine-colored red at the horizon where the dust of the day has caught and held the declining sun.

Standing at the railing, the warm breeze presses the fabric of his oversized shift against your thighs. Your hair hangs loose, heavy and unpinned, while the sun-baked stone scorches the bare soles of your feet. This marble has hoarded the day's heat and will stubbornly refuse to relinquish it until well past midnight, if it does at all. At your shoulder throbs a dark, blooming bruise. Hours ago, you pressed your own fingers into it, deliberately coaxing the ache, and now it is a fixed presence on your body.

You look out at the Marches.

Down in the lower gardens, a lone figure moves along the manicured gravel paths. There is no need to discern his features from this height; that deliberate, unhurried stride and streak of white hair betrays him instantly. His head is tilted in that habitual posture of his. He has the bearing of a man who is forever making room for the world around him. He still wears the same dusty riding jacket he departed in five days ago, its fabric creased and stained with the reality of a week's camp in the Marches. 

Predictable to his very bones, he has not changed. He would have ridden through the gates, spoken a gentle word to the steward, and sought out your chambers. Finding them empty—exactly as you had thought he would—he has retreated to the gardens. Because he is who he is, you think, watching him. A quiet stroll among the roses is what a good man does with his wife's absences.

Pacing the gravel with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, he studies the flower beds in oblivious solitude.

He has not looked up.

You stand at the railing and you look down at your husband. Your husband whose kindness is genuine and unfailingly consistent. Whose warmth he shares with equity to every lord and servant within his sphere. 

He is a good man. 

You look at him for a long time. 

Behind you, Aerion is lounging somewhere in that velvet dark. You do not need to look over your shoulder to know exactly where he rests.

"He paces like a penned," his voice slithers out from the gloom. You can hear the smirk twisting his mouth. "Shall I call down to him? Ask my dear cousin if he enjoyed his time in the mud?"

You do not turn around. You can feel the heavy, suffocating quality of his attention pressing against your spine.

"Leave him," you murmur, though the words lack any real venom.

Down below, your husband’s pacing ceases. He stands motionless on the pale gravel.

Then, he looks up.

He finds you immediately—directly, as though he knew the angle, as though he had looked at this particular balcony on purpose, with a destination in mind. The distance is considerable, and the dying sun glares directly into his eyes while casting you in silhouette. Yet, you are standing in a man's shift with your hair wildly undone in the middle of the afternoon. None of this paints a picture he does not already possess some silent, unvoiced awareness of. Your prince is a good man, after all, not a blind one.

He looks at you.

You look at him.

Between the two of you, the gardens remain indifferent. Peacocks drag their iridescent tails across the paths, pacing with the oblivious, mechanical elegance of creatures bred only to be looked at. The central fountain babbles its continuous, cool song, a mocking soundtrack to the stillness of the afternoon. And beyond it all, the Marches stretch out in their vast, indifferent amber.

From this height, his face is a blurred oval, its finer lines illegible. 

But you do not need to see his eyes to know the expression they hold. You know the way he processes information he does not want—the compression of his jaw, his grief wearing the costume of composure. You know this face. You have lain beside it for three years, in public and in private, in the morning and in the dark.

He looks at you for a long time.

Then he looks away. 

His gaze drops back to the gravel. He unclenches his hands from behind his back and places them at his sides, and he begins to walk again along the gravel, at the same unhurried pace, with the same attentive tilt of the head. He walks as though he has simply been admiring the flora all along. As though that agonizing upward glance was entirely ordinary. As though it contained nothing.

A bitter, rueful smile touches your lips. There it is. This is what your prince does with facts he finds inconvenient.

He gives them more flattering shapes.

Long after your husband breaks eye contact and disappears down the garden path, the stone railing remains warm beneath your palms.

The sun continues its descent toward the horizon. The Marches go darker gold, then ochre, then the deep wine-red you had watched them approach.  Peacocks shriek their twilight complaints as they retire to hidden corners of the gardens, while the fountain babbles on. Far below, your husband has turned the corner of the path and is gone from your sight, absorbed back into the belly of the castle and the machinery of the day—the feasts, the endless social pleasantries, the steady, metronomic rhythm of a life conducted with suffocating virtue.

He knows. He looked right at you, his eyes catching the truth, and he deliberately chose blindness. But feigned ignorance is a fragile shield in a world governed by vultures. Summerhall is built on whispers, and a prince’s averted gaze cannot hold back the tide of court politics forever. Eventually, the dark will spit this secret out into the harsh daylight. The realm will demand a sinner, and it will be your absolute undoing.

You stand at the railing and you think about what you are choosing. There is no desire to dress this treason in comfortable, poetic garments: not passion, nor a temporary madness, nor the romantic tribulations of a neglected woman. 

You are choosing Aerion Targaryen. You are choosing the bruises and the cruelty and the narcissism and the blade with the fruit on it and the quality of attention that is violent in its concentration. Who has told you, stripping away all chivalric nonsense, that he has taken you from your prince not for anything so pedestrian as love, but for the greedy, singular satisfaction of possessing the only thing his cousin prizes unconditionally. Who would not hesitate—not for a breath, not for a prayer—to destroy every comfortable and considered thing your husband has built around you, if the destruction served his appetite for a given moment. And when the truth inevitably breaches the walls of your husband's willful deafness, a prince of the blood will not take the fall. It will be your head on the block.

Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon.

You turn from the railing.

Aerion is still in the room, in the shadows. He has not moved—he is at the far wall, in the angle where the fading light does not reach, and he is watching you with that full-weight regard. His shirt is open at the collar and the marks on his chest are in shadow but you know the exact position of them. His face in the shadow is the face he has when no one is watching: the hard, sharp structure of it, the pale eyes, the complete and unperformed absence of any social masks he wears in public.

You cross the room.

Crossing the distance between you makes you aware of every element of the space around you and the sheer weight of the doom you are inviting. You carry the awareness of your husband's deliberate absence, the intoxicating poison of the last seven days, and the absolute certainty of the reckoning that waits at the end of this road. You do not shed a single ounce of this dread, because a choice made in ignorance is merely a mistake. This is a treason committed with open eyes, possessing the dark dignity of a true choosing.

When you offer your hand, his fingers close around yours with a warden's grip. His thumb drags across your knuckles, a slow, abrasive friction.

"He saw," Aerion says, his voice low and scraping.

"He did," was all you could reply.

He looks at you for another moment, hand tight around yours. "And?"

Meeting that pale, shadow-darkened gaze, you hold the entirety of the inevitable fallout in your mind. The whispers, the trial, the disgrace, the cold stone of a black cell, and the final swing of the executioner's blade. 

"And he will continue to look away, until the day the realm forces him to see," you say, your voice perfectly steady. "Until then, it means nothing."

Aerion turns the statement over in his mind, picking at the seams of your composure, hunting for the fragile, terrified prey he so loves to break. But there is no prey here tonight. Only a mirror to his own consuming fire.

A faint crease of amusement appears at the corners of his eyes. He forces your hand over, exposing the pale skin of your wrist. His thumb finds the dark, blooming bruise where he had constrained you earlier, pressing directly into the center of the ache. He watches your pupils dilate, reading the pain in your face with satisfaction.

"Then you stay," he says. It is not a question.

"I stay."

Outside, the sun finally surrenders Summerhall to the night, dragging the Marches into complete darkness. Standing in the shadows of King Daeron II's summer castle, your hand locked in the grip of a man who believes he breathes fire, there is only a serene, terrifying clarity. You have weighed the cost of your soul, dimensions of the tragedy that will destroy your life, and willingly stepped into the inferno.

The doom is certain. 

But until the flames finally consume you, the grave will keep.

Summerhall, in the years to come, will be spoken of in the histories as a place of beauty and catastrophe—a castle built for joy that became a site of ash. There are scholars who will note the irony of this. There are women who will understand, reading the accounts, that certain choices have always smelled of cedar and a summer afternoon. That certain choices are made with perfect clarity, in the full light of their own consequences, and are made anyway. Not despite what they cost. Because of what they are.

The grave kept.

You consider striking him, if only to shut him up. You’ve done so before, your hand still remembers the shape of his face, the burn after, the satisfaction. Instead, you loosen the strings of your gown silently, ignoring him as you do so. Something in the air shifts as you shed layers, warps, growing heavier by the moment. 

From the corner of your eye, Aerion’s head tilts, and you can almost hear the eye roll in his voice, “Ah, yes, the wolf’s growler. Give me the order to leave if my presence irks you so much. Or are you afraid I’ll bite the hand that tries to tame me?”

The heavy woollen dress you wear slips down your body, pooling at your feet, leaving you in nothing but a loose robe. You back curves as you straighten, and you hear the hitch in Aerion’s breathing behind you. You cross the room slowly, robe already slipping from one shoulder, and stop just out of arm’s reach. Your voice comes out low, icy around the edges.

“On your knees, Aerion.”

For one heartbeat, his violet eyes flash with pure, vicious amusement. He straightens, crossing his arms, that mocking smile widening into something almost hateful in its open delight. He expected much from this attempt to catch you off guard, sneak into your room in the dark, but it’s clear he didn’t expect this. 

“Make me,” he dares softly, dangerously, eyes dragging down your form. His tongue absently slips against the spot where you bit his lip last time, the wound long since healed now, even if the heat of your last kiss clearly still haunts him. “Or are you going to stand there pretending you don’t want to see me bleed for you? Daeron would have dropped the moment you snapped your fingers. He’s pathetic like that. I want to hear you earn it.”

You step closer and push two fingers between his parted lips without warning, and slide them deep. “Open for me.”

His eyes widen, then narrow into slits. For a moment, you see him considering something violent, something that would draw blood. He could close his teeth, could draw blood, could flip this entire game in a heartbeat, but instead, Aerion obeys with vicious enthusiasm, because it’s you. Because there's something sick in him that can't quite resist this dance between you.

His mouth closes hot and wet around your fingers, tongue swirling greedily, cheeks hollowing as he sucks them deeper. The obscene, wet sounds fill the solar: soft, filthy pulls, the faint click of his tongue against your knuckles, a low growl vibrating up from his chest that makes your cunt throb. He stares up at you the entire time, violet eyes burning, daring you even as he hollows his cheeks harder, saliva and the faint copper of his earlier self-inflicted cut coating your fingers and dripping down his chin in thin, glistening strands.

You let him suck for a long moment, watching the way his throat works convulsively, the way his cock strains visibly against his breeches, already leaking a dark wet spot through the wool. Then you pull your fingers free with a wet pop, strings of spit connecting them to his swollen lips, and smear the mess across his sharp cheekbone. Aerion’s mouth stays parted as he watches you, his stare glazed while you pop your wet fingers in your own mouth and suck on them. The taste of him explodes across your tongue. Aerion hisses a furious breath at the sight, his hand snapping out to grab your nape, burning fingers sinking deep into the flesh as he jerks you to him, your foreheads almost knocking together. 

Releasing your fingers, you lick your mouth, and tilt your chin, “On your knees. Now.”

He laughs—low, vicious, practically silk—because you didn’t hesitate, because you’re matching him and pushing further than he ever thought you’ll allow. He might never get a chance like this again, and he doesn’t waste it. With deliberate, near-theatrical slowness, Aerion sinks to his knees on the white-bear fur, eyes never leaving yours, the challenge still flickering in his gaze even as his chest rises and falls faster.

“Happy now, wolf?” he murmurs mockingly, but his voice comes out too breathy, too starved. “Or do you need me to beg prettier?”

You stand over him, robe already slipping from one shoulder, and look down at the vicious, silver-haired prince on his knees for you. Your voice comes out and rings through the room with far more steadiness than his. “Open your mouth.”

Aerion’s head snaps up. He still thinks you’ll falter, that the wolf will hesitate at the edge of the abyss he has always dared you to cross and fall into with him, consequences be damned. His lips curl into a sharp, mocking half-smile, tongue darting out to wet them again like he can still taste your fingers there.

“You think you can give what I take?” he murmurs, his voice taunting, the words edged with something almost hateful. “Careful, pretty wolf. I bite back. Daeron never could have handled you like this. He no doubt knelt and begged for scraps. I was the one who always wanted to devour you whole, exactly as you are.”

You don’t falter.

You step closer, push two fingers back between his parted lips, and slide them deep, deeper than earlier, pressing on the warm, fleshy pulp of his tongue. “Then swallow your pride and suck. Daeron had no problems showing me how badly he needed me, and he earned me, which is more than you can say.”

His eyes widen, then narrow when realisation sinks in. You see the hatred burning there, coiling like snake, the need to step out of the visual you presented him with. That his drunken, fool of a brother got what Aerion craved for so long, that Daeron had you, and you gave yourself to him willingly. 

This time, Aerion doesn’t hold back, doesn’t entertain you with goading little licks. He sucks your fingers down until you’re practically hitting the back of his throat, his hand wrapped around your wrist to keep you in place. You think, stupidly and wildly, that he means to swallow you whole. That now that you’ve given him another taste, he will eat you alive. But he doesn’t. He sucks, the wet heat of his tongue curling around your digits in masterful, lazy curls. 

“Strip,” you order, your voice husky, pulling your fingers back, “And keep your mouth open. I want to hear how much you hate that I’m right about your brother.”

Aerion tongues his bottom lip, his breath heavy, but his hands move fast, tearing the tunic over his head, shoving the breeches down his hips until his cock springs free, erect and already flushed dark. He kicks the fabric aside and returns to his knees, chest heaving, his head angled in open challenge that says what now?

You drop to your knees in front of him without a word, and for a split second, his expression cracks, like he didn’t expect this closeness, for you to meet him as equals, forever expecting a fight instead. You cup his face with both hands, that devilishly handsome face, and Aerion’s long lashes flutter at the contact.

You use the lowering of his guard to lean close and kiss him hard. Teeth clashing, tongues sliding against each other, the taste of blood and spit mixing with raw want, flooding both your mouths. Aerion’s hand grabs the back of your head, unwilling to let you go as he threads his fingers through your hair with a low, pleased growl. He kisses you like you’re his last meal, and he intends to savour every last brush of your lips, eat you alive one nibble at a time. There’s no shyness in the kiss, no uncertainty, only animal hunger, and despite your best attempts to remain unaffected, the steadily building ache between your thighs pulses for him, urging you on. 

When you finally pull back, you whisper against his lips, voice heady with heat, “You’re already dripping for me, Aerion.”

His answer is a snarl, his fingers sinking against the back of your head, teeth bared. “Then make me bleed for it, wolf. Or I’ll remind you exactly why Daeron never stood a chance.”

You push him onto his back on the white-bear fur. The silver strands practically blend into the thick pelt beneath him. You straddle his chest and rake your nails down his torso—hard, possessive, leaving eight perfect red lines that bead instantly. Aerion bows beneath you, spine arching clean off the fur, a harsh, vicious hiss escaping between clenched teeth. You lean down and lick each scratch with slow, thorough strokes of your tongue, sucking dark bruises into the pale skin between the lines until Aerion’s breathing turns ragged and his hips jerk helplessly beneath you, cock twitching against your thigh. 

You slide lower, grasping him with one hand. Aerion snarls, leaning into the firmness of your grip like he’s chasing the edge of pain beneath the pleasure. His length sits heavy and flushed in your palm, pulsing against the heel of your palm, the tip already glistening. His fingers claw at your hips impatiently, and you can’t tell if he’s urging you on, or trying to tear your cloak and finally bare you to him. You don’t give him the satisfaction of succeeding, instead sinking down onto him in one slow, owning glide. The stretch burns beautifully; every inch of him fills you until your hips are flush, and Aerion is buried to the hilt. He groans—low, broken, pride cracking as his head angles back—as your walls clench around him, slick heat swallowing him whole.

There’s no patience in you for anything gentle; neither of you has ever been good at that, anyway, at anything other than bloody, raw need. You ride Aerion slow and deep, one hand braced on his scratched chest, the other feeding him your fingers again. He sucks them greedily, tongue swirling, moaning around them while you grind down harder, rolling your hips so the head of his cock drags relentlessly against that perfect spot inside you. His eyes never leave yours—wild, glassy, so dark you can see him memorising everything, every inch of you, every sensation.

Then you lean in close, voice a soft, goading purr against his ear, “Daeron could never fuck me like this. Never make me this wet. Never make me want to ruin him the way I ruin you. Say it. Tell me how much better you are. Or are you still jealous that I let him try first?”

The words hit like dragonfire.

A low, feral growl tears from Aerion’s throat around your fingers. In one sudden, fluid motion, he surges upward, flipping you beneath him on the white-bear fur, his body caging yours completely. He looms above you, eyes shining with something dark and dangerous, a type of animalistic gleam that’s usually preceded by his cruelty, by blood. He’s still inside you, still buried to the hilt, but now Aerion is the one setting the pace—deep, desperate, rutting thrusts that slam the head of his cock against your cervix with every stroke, hips snapping forward with bruising force that works a pleased moan out of your lips. 

Aerion keeps your fingers in his mouth as he fucks you, sucking harder, tongue laving between them, teeth grazing the pads while his hips piston. Only when the need becomes too much does he release them with a wet pop, strings of spit connecting your fingers to his swollen lips. He bites your throat instead—hard, possessive, teeth sinking in until the skin breaks and blood wells hot against his tongue, making you squirm beneath him, fingers grabbing at the silky silver strands. He sucks the mark like a man dying of thirst, growling against your skin while his hips snap harder, the wet slap of flesh loud and obscene in the quiet tower room.

His hands pin your wrists above your head, fingers digging in as his thrusts turn erratic, cock swelling thicker inside you with every brutal stroke. He bites your shoulder next, harder, then your collarbone, then the soft swell of your breast, leaving dark, bleeding bruises that will darken by morning. Each mark is followed by a slow, reverent lick, as though he can’t decide whether to devour you or worship the wounds he leaves behind. Aerion’s hot breath burns against your skin, silver strands brushing your cheek as he buries his face in your neck, panting, biting, sucking, listening to your strangled moans.

“Daeron could never do this,” he rasps, voice raw, blood from his own lip and yours mixing on his chin. Your legs tighten around his waist, your insides clenching around him so tightly that Aerion closes his eyes, a snarl twisting his face at his attempt to control himself. He leans down to kiss you again, and again, tearing at the soft flesh of your bottom lip with his teeth. “Never make you shake like this. Never make you bleed and beg and come apart the way I do. I would carve your name into my ribs right now if it meant you’d keep… looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world worth wanting.”

He’s practically coming apart at the seams, you feel it. Trembling, sweating, hips snapping with desperate, all-consuming need to bring you together, fuse you together in some undeniable way. His fingers flex around your wrists, short nails digging crescents into your skin as his thrusts lose rhythm, cock pulsing violently inside you. The wet, filthy sound of your joining fills the solar, slick and loud, the white-bear fur damp beneath you both.

You feel him beginning to come undone, his thrusts turning more and more erratic as he buries himself to the hilt one final time and spills deep, flooding you with hot, endless pulses while he bites down on your shoulder hard enough to draw fresh blood, hard enough to send you over the edge so hard it’s like he’s shoved you off a wall. Near animal howl tears from your throat, leaving it bloody as your vision goes white, your back arching and muscles locking. Yet even then, Aerion doesn’t stop moving—slow, grinding rolls that keep him buried inside you, keep every drop exactly where he wants it, his violet eyes find yours, wild and shining with something softer, consuming, too fond around the edges before he wipes it away.

He licks the blood from your shoulder with slow, reverent strokes, blood shining on his lips, then presses his forehead to yours, breathing ragged, bodies still locked together in the firelit dark.

“I am yours,” he whispers, voice hoarse and dangerous, fingertips tilting your chin to him. “And you are mine. Forever.”

Dawn in Aerion’s chambers was pale, filtering through the narrow gaps in the heavy crimson curtains. You’d been there for hours, watching the slow ripple of the fabric with each breeze that came up from Summerhall.

The maesters had come and gone twice, fretting over your brother’s state, though they always offered the same careful words. "He’ll mend, my lady. The body’s strong. Just give it time." But you scarcely heard them. Your eyes hadn’t left the bed since they’d brought him from Ashford, since you’d watched your youngest brother, your Aerion, carried from the field of ash and blood where the Trial of Seven had left him.

Daeron had tried to take you away. Your twin, always so drunk he was near enough useless, but still your twin, still the only person in the world who shared your age, your birth, your blood. "He'll be alright", Daeron had said, his hand heavy and clumsy on your shoulder. "You need to rest".

You'd ignored him. Like you ignored everyone when it came to Aerion.

Now, with the sun already high, you were alone. The servants had been dismissed by your own hand. The maesters had left with a promise to return at nightfall. Even Daeron had given up, stumbling out with a mutter about finding something to drink.

And you were there, watching.

Aerion slept. His face, even bruised, even too pale, was still the most beautiful you'd ever seen. The short silver hair, still dirty with strands of dried blood and sweat, but lovely nonetheless. His chest rose and fell slowly, rhythmically, and that movement was proof he was alive, proof the gods had chosen to spare him.

You rose from the chair where you'd spent the night and day, legs numb, body tired, though the tiredness mattered little. Nothing mattered but your Aerion.

Your bare feet made little sound on the stone floor as you approached the bed. Your hand reached out before you could think, fingers touching his silver hair.

"Always so far away," you thought. "But always so close."

Aerion had always been like that, distant, treating you with the same courteous indifference he showed everyone else. You were just the sister two years older, the twin sister of the useless drunk, the princess who arranged banquets and smiled at lords and never, ever caused trouble.

You were boring to him. You knew that.

Though you also knew you weren't boring, not like he thought you were, not like he thought he knew you. There was something hot in you, intense and obsessive that no one saw because you hid your desire to devour and be devoured so well. Hid it all so well behind polite smiles, carefully pleasing words, and the perfect posture of a dragon-blooded princess.

Hid it because Aerion never really looked at you, but now he was here. Vulnerable, defenceless, and for the first time in his life, he couldn't turn away from you and couldn't ignore you.

You sat on the bed, slow and careful. The mattress dipped under your weight, and you held your breath, waiting for him to wake, but he didn't.

So you did something you'd never done before. Something you'd imagined in secret, in the darkest hours of the night, when the castle slept and you could think of things you shouldn't think.

You lay down beside him.

Moving slowly, sliding into the empty space on the bed, pressing your body against his, feeling the skin of his bare chest, wounded, against your skin that the crimson dress barely covered. Your heart beat so hard you were certain he could hear it, even unconscious.

Your arm went over him, your hand finding his silver hair again, fingers sliding gently, stroking. You felt the warmth of his body against yours, his breath against your neck, and a fire you'd fed for years but never let burn openly stirred.

The strands of hair were soft between your fingers, softer than you'd imagined. You stroked slowly, repeating the motion, hypnotised by the softness, by how his face seemed calmer in sleep.

Then his eyes opened.

You stilled the caress. Aerion's eyes — purple like amethysts, hazy with pain and sleep — found yours. There was a moment of confusion, and then his voice came out, rough and weak:

"What do you think you're doing?"

Your heart stopped. Your whole body screamed at you to get up, run, make up an excuse: you were checking his fever, you were fixing his pillows, you were...

But you didn't move, and instead, you tilted your head, a soft smile — sweet, seductive — curving your lips. The same expression you wore at banquets, in hallways, when you needed something.

"Looking after you," you murmured.

Before he could answer — before any word could drive you from the room — you leaned in and pressed your lips to his neck.

His skin was warm, alive. You felt his pulse quicken under your mouth and something primal, something triumphant, roared inside you. Your lips moved slowly, kissing, sucking gently, marking him, claiming him in the only way you could.

His hand — the one not bandaged — lifted, weak, and came to rest on your shoulder. For a moment you thought he'd push you away, but his fingers just gripped, holding, allowing.

You smiled against his skin.

Your left hand kept stroking his hair, soft, comforting. Your right, though, began to slide lower, over his chest, over his stomach, feeling every tense muscle beneath the covers. He shuddered when your fingers found the waistband of his smallclothes, when they started to slide inside.

"You-" his voice faltered, a sound caught between shock and something else. Something you'd never heard from him.

"Shhh," you whispered against the curve of his shoulder. "Let me take care of you, Aerion."

Your hand found what it was looking for.

The breath caught in his lungs was as satisfying as any word. More. You moved your hand slowly, with a skill that surprised even yourself, years of imagining, years of wanting, and now finally. Finally you could touch, could feel, could have.

He was already responding, his body betraying what his mind might still be processing. You squeezed a little tighter, the movement rhythmic, and the sound he let out — a low, lost, needy groan — was the sweetest thing you'd ever heard.

Your mouth found his jaw, kissing, nibbling.

"Always wanted this," you murmured, the words slipping out before you could stop them. "Always wanted you. You never looked at me, Aerion. Never saw."

His hand on your shoulder tightened. His eyes — Gods, his eyes — were wide, dark, fixed on you as if he were seeing you for the first time. As if something had shifted, something had clicked into place.

You kept going, the movement steady, rhythmic, and then, with a courage only desire could give, you took his free hand and guided it down. To the heat between your legs, to the dress you'd worn since the night before, to the proof of what you felt.

"Feel..." you whispered. "Feel what you do to me."

His fingers — trembling, weak, but there — touched you through the fabric. And you moaned softly, the sound lost against his shoulder, as you kept moving your hand.

The room was silent, save for the heavy breathing of you both. Save for the small sounds escaping him. Sounds you'd keep forever, that you'd replay in your mind on lonely nights.

The silence in his chamber seemed to pulse with something that had always been there, latent, waiting to break through the indifferent surfaces you both maintained. Aerion stared at you as if you were a fever dream brought on by the pain and infections the maesters so feared, but you were real. Your hand around his cock was real. The heat of your cunt radiating to his fingers was utterly real.

"You shouldn't be… here," he managed, but his hand didn't leave where you'd placed it. If anything, his fingers pressed, trying to explore beneath the fabric.

"No?" you laughed softly, a velvety sound against the skin of his shoulder. "Lying beside my brother while he slept, imagining this for years, that only ever happened in my dreams." You emphasised the words with a firmer, deliberate squeeze, and watched, satisfied, at the tremor that ran through his body. "This is everything I've ever wanted… and what you wanted too, you just didn't know it yet."

Aerion's free hand — the bandaged, immobilised one — was the only part of him that still resisted. His good fingers, though, began moving with more intention, trying to find the hem of your dress, trying to reach the skin you offered.

You helped him. With a languid movement, you shifted, guiding his hand beneath the fabric, to the damp, soft heat between your thighs. The gasp he let out when his fingers found your cunt was nearly as loud as the moan you gave when one of them slid inside.

"Slowly," you murmured, but it wasn't a request. It was an instruction. You kept moving your hand around his cock, in a slow, torturous rhythm that matched the hesitant exploration of his fingers inside you. "You're weak. Let me take care of everything."

His purple eyes, though hazy with pain and burgeoning desire, studied you. A question lived there. "Why you… why now?"

"Because you nearly died," you answered.

You stopped kissing his shoulder to look at him closely, your face inches from his. Your warm breath mingled with his.

"Because I spent the whole night imagining you cold, imagining you broken, imagining you dead in the fields of Ashford. And I realised I couldn't bear it. That I'd rather have you like this, wounded, confused, mine, than not have you at all."

Your hand quickened its pace, a little firmer, a little faster, and Aerion's body arched slightly, a hoarse groan escaping his parted lips. He was losing control, you could see. His body, even wounded, responded to you with an urgency his mind was still trying to process.

His fingers, inside you, grew bolder, more rhythmic, perhaps instinctively. He touched you as if learning a map, and you moaned softly, whispered approvals against his lips.

"There," you encouraged him. "Feel how wet I get just thinking about you?"

The curse Aerion muttered was muffled when you took your brother's lips in a kiss. It wasn't sweet or sisterly. Your tongue invaded his mouth with a hunger years contained, tasting him, mingling with both your ragged breaths. You bit his lower lip as you pulled back, tugging it with your teeth.

"You're enjoying this," you stated, not asked. "Seeing me like this. Feeling me like this. All yours."

His hand gripped your hip, pulling you closer, a gesture of frustration and desire. He wanted more, but his body wouldn't obey as it should. You knew. And that was exactly what kept you so in control.

"Don't worry, my love," you whispered, the endearment dripping like poison. "I'll give you everything you need. I'll take care of you forever."

You moved, straddling his thigh, keeping your hand firm around him, but now rubbing the damp heat between your thighs against the skin of his leg. The friction was delicious, torturous for you both. Aerion's breathing grew more uneven, his half-lidded eyes fixed on where your bodies met, where your hand worked tirelessly.

"Look at me," you commanded, your voice sweet. He obeyed, finding your gaze. "You're mine, Aerion. My brother, my blood, mine. And I'm yours. Always have been. However you want me."

You quickened the rhythm, bringing him closer to the edge, while simultaneously rubbing against him, building your own climax. His fingers were buried in you, a desperate reflex, and you guided them — faster, deeper.

"Come," you whispered against his mouth. "Come for me, Aerion. Now."

It was the combination of your voice, the grip of your hand, the sight of you moving atop him, that undid him. He moaned your name — not "sister," not a title, but your name — in a hoarse, broken sound, as pleasure took him. You kissed him again, swallowing his groans, feeling every spasm in your palm.

You didn't stop. You kept moving — slow, drawing out the sensation for him — while the friction of his thigh and the pressure of your own fingers pushed you toward the edge. You pulled away from the kiss only to bury your face in the curve of his neck, biting down on his skin to muffle your own sharp moan as the orgasm hit you, waves of heat coursing through your body.

For long minutes, only the sound of your ragged breathing filled the silent room. You lay still atop him, your hand still loosely wrapped around him, your face still buried in his neck.

Eventually, you rose onto your elbows, looking at him. His face was flushed, his eyes still dark and dazed. He looked dizzy, not just from his injuries, but from what had just happened.

"See how good it is?" you murmured, wiping the sweat from his brow with a gentle touch. "You'll never want another woman, brother. I'll make sure of it."

You cleaned your hand slowly, carefully, and then nestled against him again, your head resting on his shoulder, your fingers returning to stroke his silver hair.

He didn't speak. He just lay there, breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, processing.

You smiled, satisfied, and closed your eyes.

You woke to the morning sun streaming through the windows and the bed empty, and you wondered when your brother had found the strength to get up, to leave without you noticing.

For a moment, panic gripped your chest and you looked to the side where he'd slept, to the floor, to make sure he hadn't fallen out of bed and was lying there dead, but then you heard his voice.

"You're going to marry me, sister."

You turned your head so fast your neck cracked.

Aerion was sitting in a chair by the hearth, his body still clearly sore, his bandaged chest visible beneath his open shirt. But his violet eyes were fixed on you with an intensity you'd never seen.

"What?" Your voice came out rough with sleep.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, gaze burning.

"You heard me. You're going to marry me."

You sat up in bed, your dishevelled hair falling over your shoulders, your dress crumpled.

"Aerion, our father…"

"I don't care."

The simplicity. The certainty.

He rose — slowly, limping a little — and crossed the room to you. Stopped in front of the bed, looking down at you, and for the first time in his life, he was truly seeing you.

"Spent years thinking you were just another one," he said, grabbing your jaw firmly, squeezing, hurting you. And you were… liking it. "The good sister. The perfect princess. The dragon without scales." He shook his head. "But you're like me, aren't you? You're not good," he murmured, almost with admiration. "You're like me."

Your heart stopped.

"I spent my whole life looking for someone who understood," he continued, his thumb tracing your cheekbone. "Someone who burned the same way. And you were here the whole time."

His eyes darkened, he leaned in and kissed you.

It wasn't a soft kiss, it was claiming, the same thing you'd done hours before, but now he was awake, present, participating. His hand gripped your hair, pulling, and you moaned against his mouth, your hands coming up to clutch his shirt.

When he pulled back, your eyes met — purple meeting purple — and Aerion smiled. It was a smile you'd never seen before. Something predatory. Something pleased.

"You're going to be my wife," he said. "And I'm going to satisfy you until you regret this."

You should have been afraid. Should have pulled back, refused, called it madness. Instead, you smiled back — the same sweet, seductive, inviting smile — and pulled him back into bed.

"And you're going to find out I'm worse than you," you whispered against his lips, your hand finding its way again to the stiffness in his smallclothes. "But first… let me take care of you again."

And he let you.

In the weeks that followed, the corridors of Summerhall whispered.

"Prince Aerion's going to marry his own sister." "They say he doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't talk of anything else." "She's bewitched him." "Or maybe they've always been like this."

You heard the whispers and smiled. Let them think what they wanted. Let them invent stories of spells, of madness, of corrupted dragon blood.

No one needed to know the truth.

No one needed to know that, in the silent nights, Aerion sought you with the same obsession you'd always felt for him. No one needed to know that he looked at you as if you were the only fire in a world of ashes. No one needed to know that, finally, after years of being invisible, you were seen.

More than seen.

You were wanted. You were needed.

And when, on the night before the wedding, he pulled you into a dark corner of the library — when his hands found your body with the urgency of someone who'd spent too long away — you whispered in his ear the words you'd kept for years:

"Always yours, Aerion. Always."

And he answered with a smile that matched your own:

"And now you're mine forever, dearest sister."

And for the first time in your lives, you were both home.

Her room smelled of burnt-down candles and you were lying in bed, your fingers still trembling slightly, your breath short. The curtains were drawn — always drawn — and the darkness was an embrace, a confessional where no one could see what you did when you thought the world slept.

But you didn't sleep. You never slept without thinking of him first.

Your hand slid down again, because once was never enough, because the emptiness he left in you was a bottomless well. Your fingers found the heat, the dampness, and you closed your eyes, letting the image of him fill your mind.

Aerion.

Not the Aerion of the corridors, the one who passed you as if you were part of the furniture. Not the Aerion who laughed at Daeron's jokes and ignored your attempts at conversation, but the Aerion you imagined, the Aerion you knew, in the darkest corners of your mind.

The Aerion who looked at you the way you'd always wanted to be looked at.

The Aerion who touched you.

Your fingers moved faster, and a low moan escaped your lips, muffled against the pillow, hidden like everything about you was hidden. You imagined his hands — long, pale, elegant — in place of yours. Imagined his mouth on your neck, biting, marking. Imagined him saying your name — not sister, not princess, but your name — in a tone you'd never heard.

You imagined him wanting you back.

The climax came fast — always came fast when it was him — and you bit the pillow to keep from crying out, your body arching, your legs trembling. Afterwards, you lay there, breathless, your heart beating so hard it hurt.

Wedding night had come, and the ceremony had been small — intimate, the servants had called it — held in the private chapels of Summerhall with only a few required witnesses. The king had agreed with a weariness that bordered on indifference. Maekar Targaryen, tired of wars and losses, hadn’t the strength to oppose anything else. And Daeron... Daeron had shown up drunk, as always, but this time with a crooked smile you couldn’t quite read.

None of it mattered. What mattered was now.

You were in the chambers that would be yours — theirs — from that night on. The wedding gown, heavy red and black brocade, had been removed by maids who barely dared to breathe near you. Now you wore only a thin shift, silver silk that slid over your skin like water, and you waited.

The door opened without warning.

Aerion stepped in and closed it behind him with a click. He still moved carefully — the wounds from Ashford hadn’t fully healed, though the maesters assured he’d survive without lasting scars. But his eyes... his eyes showed no weakness at all.

They showed hunger.

"So," he said, his voice low and measured. "We're married."

You tilted your head, a slow smile curving your lips. "We are."

He crossed the room slowly, like a predator testing its prey's limits. When he stopped before you, so close you could feel the heat of his body through the thin silk, he raised a hand and touched your face.

The touch was surprisingly gentle, his fingers tracing your cheekbone, down your jaw, stopping at your chin. But his eyes... his eyes weren't gentle. They were dark, intense, burning with something that made your stomach clench with want.

"You did it," he murmured. "Made me drag myself to the altar. Made me beg our father. Made me want something I didn't want."

"You begged?" you teased, your voice sweet as poisoned honey. "Don't remember hearing that."

His hand tightened on your chin, firm enough to make you catch your breath.

"Don't play with me now," he warned, but the tone wasn't threatening. It was... needy. "Spent weeks thinking about what you did. What you said. The way you touched me when I couldn't fight back."

"You liked it."

"Yes."

His honesty stole your breath. Aerion never admitted anything. Aerion never surrendered. But there, in the dimness of the wedding chamber, he was looking at you like you were the only truth he believed in.

"Liked it more than I should have," he continued, his thumb tracing your lower lip. "Liked not being able to do anything but feel. Liked waking up and finding out you were the one I'd be fucking every night of my life."

Your lips curved beneath his touch.

"And that means...?"

"You're mine."

The claim came with a kiss, hard, possessive, devouring. His mouth took yours without ceremony, without gentleness, and you answered with the same intensity, your hands rising to grip his hair, pulling, demanding.

When he pulled back, you were both breathless.

"But you still haven't begged," you reminded him, your voice rough.

Aerion laughed, a surprising sound that vibrated against your skin.

"You want to see me on my knees?"

"I want to see you need me," you corrected, your hands sliding to undo his shirt. "I want to see you lose control. I want to see you crawl."

His eyes darkened further.

"Married the wrong woman," he murmured, but his hands were busy—one finding your hip, the other rising to tangle in your hair. "Should've married the version everyone else saw. At least she was safe."

"You don't want safe," you whispered against his lips. "You want this."

And you kissed him again, but slower this time, a kiss of control, of quiet domination. Your hands finished opening his shirt, sliding inside, feeling the heat of his skin, the bandages still covering parts of his torso.

He groaned against your mouth — low, lost — and you smiled.

"Take this off," he ordered against your lips, his hands finding the hem of your shift. "Want to see you."

You obeyed, but at your own pace—slow, torturous, deliberate. The silk rose up your thighs, your hips, your waist, and you watched his eyes follow every inch of revealed skin. When the shift finally fell to the floor, you stood naked before him, and the look on Aerion's face... Gods.

It was like he'd never seen a woman before.

"Look at you," he murmured, his voice rough. "Look what you hid from me."

"Didn't hide," you corrected, stepping forward, pressing your naked body against his half-clothed one. "You just never looked."

His hand found your back, pulling you closer, and the contact of skin against skin — even with the bandages in the way — was electric. You felt his cock hard against your thigh, felt his breath quicken, felt the control you'd so desired slipping through his fingers.

"I'm looking now," he promised, and his mouth descended to your neck — biting, sucking, marking — exactly as you'd always imagined.

You moaned, your head falling back, offering more skin. His hands explored your back, your hips, your arse, squeezing, stroking, learning every curve like it was a map to treasure.

"Aerion..."

"My name," he murmured against your skin. "Like hearing you say my name, sister."

"Then make me say it more."

He laughed again — that rare and precious sound — and suddenly you were moving, stumbling toward the bed, bodies pressed together, mouths finding mouths, hands finding skin. He laid you down on the sheets, his body covering yours, and for a moment you just looked at each other.

Fire meeting fire.

"You're mine," he said, and it wasn't a question.

"Always was," you answered. "Now prove you're mine too."

His eyes burned.

He went down — literally — crawling down your body, his mouth tracing a path of fire from your neck to your breasts, where he paused to taste, lick, bite. Your fingers buried in his hair, pulling, guiding, while moans escaped your lips without control.

"More," you demanded. "Aerion, more."

He obeyed.

His mouth kept moving lower — stomach, hips, thighs — and when he finally reached where you needed him most, you held your breath. He looked up at you for a moment, dark eyes fixed on yours, his mouth inches from your centre.

"You wanted me to beg," he reminded you. "But who's begging now, sweet sister?"

"Aerion..."

He licked.

The moan you let out was too loud, too desperate, and you didn't care. His tongue found your clit with a precision that suggested he'd spent nights imagining this too, and when he started moving; you lost all capacity for thought.

"Like this?" he murmured against you, the vibration of his voice sending waves of pleasure through your body. "Is this how you want it?"

"Yes... Gods, yes!"

"Beg"

You arched your hips against his mouth, but he held you steady, pinning you in place.

"Beg," he repeated. "I want to hear."

"Aerion, please!..."

"Please, what?"

"Please don't stop."

He smiled against you — you felt it — and obeyed.

His tongue worked tirelessly, alternating between long, slow strokes and quicker, more precise movements that made your vision blur. His fingers found your entrance, sliding inside — one, then two — and the moan you released was almost a sob.

"Look at me," he commanded, and you obeyed, forcing your eyes open to meet his. "I want you to see who's making you feel this."

"You," you moaned. "Always you. Always."

He quickened the rhythm — his mouth, his fingers, everything — and you felt the orgasm building like a wave, growing, pressing, demanding.

"Aer... Aerion, I'm going to..."

"Come," he whispered against you. "Come for me. I want to feel it."

And you did; a muffled cry against your own arm, your body arching, your legs trembling, while he kept going, prolonging it, drawing out every spasm of pleasure until you couldn't take any more.

When you finally stopped shaking, he crawled up your body, his face wet, his eyes gleaming with something like pure triumph.

"Now," he murmured against your lips. "Now you're mine."

You laughed and pulled him into a kiss. The taste of yourself on his lips was strangely intimate, and you loved it.

"Not yet," you said against his mouth. "You're still missing."

He raised an eyebrow. "You think I don't want to?"

"I know you do." Your hand slid between your bodies, finding his cock, hard, pulsing, ready. "But I want to watch you lose control. I want to watch you beg."

His eyes darkened.

"I married the demon."

"You married yours."

He laughed — that rare laugh — and suddenly you were moving again, him on his back, you straddling him, his body beneath yours. The bandages still covered part of his chest, a reminder that he was still vulnerable, still healing.

But his eyes... his eyes showed no weakness. They showed devotion.

"Then take," he said, his voice rough. "Take what's yours."

You leaned down, kissing him slowly — a kiss of promise, of possession — while your hand guided his cock to your entrance. When you sank down, when he filled you completely, you both moaned in unison.

"Gods," he murmured against your lips. "You're so... so tight... so warm..."

You started to move watching the expression on his face. His half-lidded eyes, his parted lips, his fingers buried in your hips with a strength that would surely leave marks.

"Like this?" you teased, echoing the tone he'd used with you. "Is this how you want it?"

"Faster," he demanded. "Faster."

"Beg."

His eyes burned.

"Please."

The word surprised him as much as it did you. You saw it in his eyes, the shock, the shame, and beneath it all, the desire to surrender.

You smiled and quickened the pace.

The room filled with the sounds you'd always imagined — his moans, yours, the sound of bodies meeting, the hiss of ragged breath. You rode him with a hunger years in the making, each movement bringing you both closer to the edge.

"Look at me," you commanded, echoing his words. "I want you to see who's making you feel this."

He obeyed and what you saw in his eyes made your heart stop.

It wasn't just desire. It wasn't just lust. It was need.

"You," he murmured, his voice breaking. "Always will be you."

The orgasm hit you both at once, a collapse, a surrender, a fire that consumed everything. You heard him cry your name, heard your own voice raw and screaming his, and for a moment there was nothing else beyond it.

Beyond them.

Afterwards, when their bodies finally stopped trembling, you collapsed onto him, your head resting on his chest — carefully, avoiding his wounds — and felt his heart beating against his ribs.

"Still alive," you murmured.

"Still," he confirmed, his hand finding your hair, stroking with a gentleness that contradicted everything that had just happened. "And you?"

"More alive than ever."

The silence that followed was filled only by their ragged breathing, by the distant sputter of candles, and by the warm pulse of blood still racing through their veins. You felt his heart against your cheek, and the hand stroking your hair was such a cruel contrast to the violence of what they'd shared that it almost hurt.

It was then that you felt his lips brush the top of your head, a kiss so light it might have been accidental.

"If you ever try to leave," he murmured, his low voice tinged with a sweetness that made the threat all the more terrifying, "I'll burn every ship in King's Landing. I'll lock you in the highest tower of Summerhall, and I'll tear out the tongue of anyone who dares look at you."

His fingers tightened slightly on your scalp, a possessiveness you knew all too well.

"You'll be mine until our flesh rots and our bones turn to dust."

You lifted your head slowly, meeting the violet eyes that stared back at you with an adoration so twisted, so complete, that any sane person would have recoiled. Instead, a slow, satisfied smile, as corrupt as his own, curved your lips.

You leaned in, pressing your mouth to his in a kiss, and when you drew back, it was to whisper in return.

"And I'll love every second, brother. I'll love watching you hate yourself for loving me so much, and I'll love loving you back with the same madness. You're mine, Aerion. And I'm your worst curse."

The smile he returned was a mirror of your own, and as he pulled you closer, they both knew this wasn't about love, nor about sanity. It was about possession. It was about blood. It was about two equally warped hearts beating in unison in the darkness, knowing that the hell they'd built was, for them, the only home possible.

________________________________________________________________

You did not particularly enjoy the company of Maekar's children.

Daeron was a drunk.

Aemon was absent.

Aegon would have rather been born a commoner than a prince.

Rhae was spoiled.

Daella was quiet.

And Aerion... He was as cruel as he was pretty. A temperamental thing, really. But so fun to watch.

You served the sisters, as a lady-in-waiting. It was an easy enough task. They were much younger, however. And you found yourself unable to relate to some of their fancies, at times. They were tolerable, compared to their brothers.

The drawing room was empty, save for yourself. You sat at a mahogany table, a stack of letters in front of you. Princess Daella was having you sort through them.

It irked you slightly. You were not some common-blooded handmaiden. You were noble born, from a filthy rich house. You were above replying to birthday party invitations.

Still, you slit another envelope open with a ruby colored letter opener, sliding the parchment free with a quiet sigh.

Another invitation. Another tedious pleasantry. You set it aside.

The door behind you slid open, without so much as a knock. You did not look up immediately. Both princes and princesses had a dreadful habit of entering rooms as though they owned every inch of them.

Which, unfortunately, they did.

"Is there something else you need done, Princess Daella?" You guessed, tone a little flat. Your eyes still on the pile of ivory letters.

A haughty scoff answered you, and footsteps dragged closer. Wrong princess, then.

"You mistake me, for my soft-handed sister, wench?" Aerion Targaryen hovered by the windowsill.

His silver hair was still cropped. You assumed he had cut it to make himself more menacing.

But you liked to believe he'd accidentally burned most of it off, and cut it out of embarrassment.

"Apologies, my prince." You said, smoothly, "I did not mean anything by it." You let you gaze linger on him for just a moment longer, before averting it.

He hummed in reply, his head cocking to the side slightly. Always watching.

"A mistake I can forgive, I suppose." Aerion ran his tongue over his teeth, "An error made by the less observant."

You almost rolled your eyes, "Indeed." You agreed, "The family resemblance is to blame, perhaps."

He scowled, unsure if you meant to insult him or not. Aerion pushed off the sill, and wandered closer to your side, ".... What are you doing? I've been looking for you. Daeron makes for hardly amusing company."

"Reading letters." You answered, turning your cheek to the side.

He glanced down at the pile in front of you, mildly disgusted, "Your prince is in the room with you, and still, you choose to read letters? Are you truly that insolent?"

"I am speaking to you now." You replied, keeping your tone even, "... And it was your sister and father who instructed me to do as such." It wasn't technically a lie.

He looked slightly disappointed. No doubt at the thought of not being able to torment you further.

"They are just invitations." Aerion's lips curled downward, as if thoroughly unimpressed.

“Your sister’s admirers are relentless.”

“Daella has admirers?” He rolled his eyes. He plucked one letter from the stack before you could stop him, scanning the contents briefly.

You reached to snatch it back, "I have yet to see your name mentioned. It seems you've been omitted from some guest lists."

"I should be. It would improve the entertainment. " He murmured. “.... It matters little to me. I do not concern myself with the irrelevant tea parties of girls."

Aerion set the letter down again, though not in the correct pile. Deliberately, you suspected.

"You're doing it all wrong." He had the audacity to snark.

“Then by all means, your grace,” you said dryly, “take over.”

You slid another envelope toward yourself and pressed the letter openers blade beneath the wax seal.

The paper resisted, so you applied more pressure. Your hand slipped, and the blade sliced cleanly over the pad of your thumb.

“... -Damn it.” A thin line of crimson welled instantly. You held your hand up limply, resisting the urge to strangle someone. The closest person, preferably. Which happened to be Aerion.

"You should be more careful." Aerion said, feigning worry. He looked delighted at your discomfort.

"Thank you for the concern." It was your turn to scowl now, "There is no need for it, though. It's hardly a mortal wound."

"You should lick it. The spit closes the wound faster."

"...What?" You scoffed, looking up at him, slightly bewildered.

Aerion's hand caught your wrist before you could wipe the blood off on your skirts. The movement was quick enough to surprise you.

"Like this." Before you could pull away, he turned your hand slightly, examining the cut with a strange sort of fascination. Then he leaned down, and licked the blood from your thumb.

If you had half a mind, you would have slapped him. Or maybe shouted. But the way his tongue moved was almost mesmerizing. Warm and slow. It flicked away the swell of blood.

You could feel a flush crawl up your neck, and you swallowed thickly. Your eyes followed him, taken with his movements.

He dragged the pad of your thumb over his lips, letting it linger for a second more than necessary, before dropping it.

Aerion lifted his head slowly, running his tongue over his lip, "Disappointing. I thought it might have tasted sweeter. But that was foolish. You lack the blood of the dragon, after all."

"You are demented." Your voice returned with a snap, "That was hardly-..."

"But I liked it, all the same." He interrupted, without a care in the world.

You stood from your seat. And you should have stormed out of that room. But there was a challenging glint in his eyes. Like he was waiting for you to run away scared.

That pissed you off more than it ignited fear.

Your hands found the collar of his velvet doublet, and without a regard for consequence, you pushed him against the stone wall. Harshly.

His breath hitched, a little surprised. You almost missed it. Aerion's eyes zoned in on you, his pupils dilating.

"mmnh..." He leaned in before you could, pressing his forehead against yours, rather like a cat, "... I should have expected as much, wench."

"Talk to me in such a way again..." You hummed, almost sickeningly sweet, "And instead of letters I'll be opening, it will be your throat."

You would not grace him with the dignity of a response. You closed the distance between you, your lips finding his.

Aerion's hand found the back of your neck, pressing you closer. He licked at your bottom lip, with a surprising gentleness. But the moment lasted only a second longer, he soon gripped your lower waist with his free hand and pushed you against the cold wall.

In slight retaliation, you bit at his flip. And your mouth filled with a shared faint metallic taste.

Aerion's head tilted, before he broke away. His breath was warm, and heavy, as it fanned over your jaw. He bared his teeth.

"You believe yourself so worthy to taste the blood of a dragon?" He mocked, pulling away slightly, so you'd look him in his eyes

You did not glance away. You matched Aerion's defiant gaze, "You tell me, my prince."

"Perhaps, after I finish tasting you..." He mused, pressing a tentative kiss to your throat, "I might have an answer."

Your fingers threaded through his short hair and gave it a sharp tug, "Then by all means... Be my guest, your grace." You cooed, your gaze half-lidded.

He made an odd noise, between a choke and a moan. But he hid it quickly, by biting at your collarbone, "... Gods...-fuck." He breathed.

Aerion tugged at the front of your gown, displeased by the lack of access to your breast. You scoffed slightly, and made no move to unlace it. It was too much of as hassle for a rendezvous in a drawing room.

His hands slid down your sides, Aerion would have to make do somehow. He nosed down your stomach, planting kisses on your abdomen.

Eventually, he was on his knees in front of you. Never, in this lifetime, or future ones, would you have ever imagined this would be happening to you.

A faint smirk tugged at your lips. And he scowled up at that, "You should not look so pleased with yourself. You bring shame upon your house."

"As do you." You replied, "A dragon on his knees for a... how did you put it again? A wench."

"A wench." He repeated, looking pleased despite himself, "A pretty one, at that."

"Should I feel flattered?" You rolled your eyes, watching him press a kiss to the inside of your wrist.

"Very." He leaned into your touch, as if savoring the attention, "Lift your skirt up."

You obliged him, and he wasted no time in gripping a thigh. He pressed his face against the inside of your thigh, biting at the soft flesh there. His teeth were sharp enough to make you gasp, but not enough to be painful.

You felt him grin, as he smoothed his bite over with his tongue. He had refrained from biting down too harshly on your neck. It did not seem he held that same restraint with your thighs.

Your back was flat against the wall, one hand gripping his hair still, the other running over your collarbone. An almost nervous gesture.

He left more marks, leaving indents of his teeth behind, almost gloatingly. Slowly, he made his way to your core. He was panting, you could feel it through your damp undergarments.

"You are too easy." He scoffed, pulling them down to your calves with a lazy finger.

"Then go seek out more of a challenge. I have little reason to keep you around." You said, hoping you sounded more threatening than you looked.

Aerion didn't seem convinced, but he didn't press. He was distracted by your musk. A sweet perfumed-oil, and something else. It was frustrating. He liked it.

You let a gasp slip, when you felt his tongue flick at your pearl. Warm and soft. Your head hit the wall gently, your lashes fluttering shut.

"...gods." You sighed, as he moved his head slightly for a better angle.

You could have sworn you felt him grin, almost knowingly. You clamped your jaw shut. Not wanting to give him the luxury of a victory.

You swallowed another moan; your thighs began to tremble. Aerion's fingers pressed into the plush of your leg, "...don't." He said, so softly you almost missed it, "... you sound so pretty."

It was almost sweet. But you knew better. If anything, it was an ego boost. Something he'd mock you about later.

Still, it was getting hard to stay quiet. Your stomach was coiling, and your skin felt hot as dragon's fire. His tongue swirled strangely, almost reptile-like. It was all the more pleasurable for you.

"It must not be a sound you hear often, then." The quip quickly fell from your lips however, as he ravished you more deeply.

"Gods... there-..." You sighed, your head thrashing around, "...please-..!"

Aerion hummed, pleased, "... since you asked so politely." He humored you, his eyes flicking up to look at you.

Your eyes were shut still and your brows scrunched, focusing on the intense feeling building up. Your cheeks were flushed, and thin beads of sweat gathered along your neckline.

"...ah-..." You could hear him pant softly. You could feel his heavy gaze on you. And you opened your eyes slightly.

His expression was nothing short of hungry. And he only gripped your thighs tighter.

The coil within your stomach snapped, your back arched off the wall slightly. Your cunt grinded into his face slowly, and Aerion did not pull away.

He lapped at your release, eagerly.

You tugged his head back, the stimulation almost too intense. Aerion's eyes were clouded, with a certain lust.

He stood slowly, his head tilting to the side, assessing you. He stepped closer, his leg between your thighs. He gripped your chin with his hand, before pressing a kiss to your lips.

You could taste your slick on him. And you supposed that's why he kissed you. Like a fool, your arms wrapped around his neck. His hands found your lower waist, fingers pressing into the plush of your ass.

You parted your lips for him, a little too desperately for your liking. You bit at his lip, drawing blood. And this time, he let you.

You felt him press into you. Hard. And aching, you'd wager. From the way he whined, not even bothering to hide it.

For some reason, that made reality come back to you. And you suddenly realized how dangerous of an idea this was.

You pulled away quickly, and his lips chased yours, almost needily. But he quickly caught himself, and furrowed his brows.

"I can't." You cleared your throat, "... your sister... She is expecting me. I cannot linger."

Aerion stared at you for a beat, chest still rising a touch too quickly. His eyes dark with something ugly and hungry and offended all at once.

"You can't be serious." He drawled, dryly, "Cannot? Or will not."

You stepped back, smoothing your skirts with fingers that were unsteady, "Does it matter?”

“Yes." He answered quickly.

“How unfortunate. for you, then.” You furrowed your brows and tried to clean up the slight mess of your hair.

His mouth twitched. You hated that he looked prettier with blood on his lip.

"You have quite the mouth on you." Aerion tilted his head, studying you with the same unnerving attention he gave to those he meant to humiliate, "Such insolence would usually go punished. Should I remind you, that you kissed me?"

He took one step forward, then another. Not enough to crowd you, though the room suddenly felt stuffy.

"You needn't be so smug about it."

"I am smug, because I am usually correct." He said, with an unsettling softness, "It inspires confidence."

You snorted despite yourself, then immediately regretted it when his smile sharpened.

“There she is,” he murmured. “I thought I had frightened you.”

“You should aim higher, my prince. I am not so easily frightened.”

“No,” he said. “I noticed.”

His gaze dropped briefly to your mouth, and you hated the answering heat that crawled up your throat.

You turned away first, gathering the scattered letters into a neat pile if only to have something to do with your hands.

"This was merely a lapse of judgement." You said, "It does not mean anything."

“Mm.” The sound was infuriatingly unconvinced.

You glanced at him over your shoulder. “You agree?”

“No.” Aerion reached for one of the letters, breaking the seal with his thumb and scanning it with deliberate insolence. “I simply enjoy hearing you lie.”

You snatched it from him, "For a prince, you are illiterate in social graces.”

“For a lady, you are remarkably eager to be found alone with one.”

"I had not intended for you company." You grit your teeth, growing both flushed and annoyed. A horrible combination.

Aerion licked at his lips, slightly swollen from your kisses, "Perhaps I sought you out."

You hated how calm he sounded. How utterly assured. As if scandal were a game built for his amusement, and not a blade that could be laid across your throat.

"Then you'd be a fool, my prince."

“Would I?” he asked, low and amused. “For seeking out the company of a woman who does not cower when I enter a room?”

You lifted your chin. “No. For thinking that makes you interesting.”

That, at last, earned him a pause. A small one. But you saw it.

You stepped around him before he could recover, gathering the last of the letters to your chest. His hand caught lightly at your wrist, more instinct than force.

“Stay.” The word came rushed.

You looked down at his hand, then back up at him, "How sweet,” you said coolly. “You almost sound sincere.”

He scowled. Something you noticed he did often. “Do not mistake indulgence for weakness.”

“And do not mistake curiosity for devotion.”

You slipped free before he could tighten his grip, smoothing your sleeve where he had touched it.

Aerion watched you like something half-starved, all violet eyes and wounded pride, blood still bright against his lower lip.

You stopped at the doorway and glanced back, letting your gaze drag once, to his mouth.

“If you mean to hunt me down again, at least learn to hide it better.”

And with that, you swept out, leaving him standing in the middle of the drawing room, high and dry.

The corridor beyond was blessedly cooler.

You had scarcely made it three steps before Princess Daella rounded the corner, a small bundle of bright ribbons in hand. She blinked when she saw you, all soft eyes and quiet surprise.

“There you are,” she squeaked. “I was beginning to think you’d been stolen away.”

You steadied your expression at once, “Only delayed, princess.”

Daella’s gaze flicked briefly to your mouth, then to the letters clutched too tightly in your hands. Her brow furrowed, curiously.

From somewhere behind the half-open door, there was the sound of something being knocked over. Or tripped over. You chose to believe the latter.

Daella looked past you.

You did not.

“Shall we?” you asked lightly.