January 23, 12:00 A.M.
The bones of the Columbia University dormitory were soaked in a stagnant chill; it seeped through the cracked window frames, scorning the damp metallic groan of the radiators. Beyond the glass, the Upper West Side drowned in a smoky haze: blurred silhouettes of amber streetlamps and a distant, drawn-out hum—dull, like a moan. In room 712 the light was meager, almost nonexistent; an old desk lamp turned toward the wall cast only a narrowed cone of yellowish glow that never reached the corners.
The air was stale, heavy with the scent of book dust, old mold, and the faintest trace of dry lavender.
A wishbone lay in her palm. Fragile, just over five inches long, carved from willow wood dried to an ashen pallor. The shopkeeper on West 4th—where the very air smelled of dust and biting clove—had smiled with teeth of obscene whiteness. “One wish. Irrevocable,” he had dripped the words. “But the universe loves cruel irony.”
To others it was a joke trinket, a way to beg the universe for a passing grade. Not to her. The wood bit into her skin, leaving a thin red groove like a cut from sedge. She pressed harder, until the dry crack sounded naked and mournful in the silence.
“Aemond Targaryen must love me. More than anything in the world.”
The stick gave way. Two lifeless halves settled on her lap. The radiator’s monotone drone merged with muffled music leaking through the walls like water through limestone. And in that moment the bitter realization of her own absurdity struck her—that she had clung so desperately to scraps of feeling for a man who had never once looked her way. Yet his platinum hair caught the light softly in every lecture on political theory. Watching him, she always felt something viscous and aching coil beneath her ribs, and his name settled on her tongue like bitter medicine—sweet and poisonous at once.
January 23, 3:15 A.M.
The Targaryen ancestral estate lay wrapped in thick pre-dawn silence. In chambers sunk in half-darkness, Aemond Targaryen stood frozen before the mirror—naked torso, cold lamplight warping his features. His fingers traced the old scar that ran from brow to cheekbone, a pale thread across pale skin.
A nagging thought pulsed in his head—sharp as a splinter under the nail. He replayed the day: reports on rare-earth metals, irritation at a dry conversation with his mother, the hollow walls of the gym. Everything had gone according to plan, correct and precise. And yet…
The air in the room was motionless, thick with the scent of sandalwood—cloying, ecclesiastical.
He pressed harder on the scar, seeking the familiar anchor in pain, but the irritation only deepened, spreading beneath his skin in a dull heat. A name. Someone’s image. An elusive gaze that for weeks had been fixed on him from the third row of the lecture hall he no longer attended. What had he missed? The question gnawed at him all night, a herald of coming ruin.
January 23, 9:21 A.M.
Aemond was a man whose memory functioned like a finely tuned instrument. By the time he crossed the university threshold he was already searching for something he could not name. The sky over Morningside Heights hung low and damp, heavy as felt, pressing down on the city in anticipation. Students wrapped in scarves blurred into a faceless stream: hunched shoulders, chilled fingers clutching paper cups of coffee, detached eyes. Aemond moved through the crowd differently—confident, without a single wasted motion, and space itself parted obediently before him.
Black cashmere, lambskin gloves, shoes whose price could have fed a hundred of these people. Platinum hair swept back, exposing the sharp line of a jaw carved as if from Carrara marble. His usual gaze, aimed at results, was off today. He scanned faces, every wrong movement; a stranger’s shoulder curve, a random gesture—each only drove the splinter deeper.
The air was raw, smelling of wet stone and rotting leaves, and through the dampness barely pierced the bitter scent of cheap coffee from paper cups.
Aemond Targaryen did not acknowledge madness. He was a man of control and cold calculation. Yet, frozen on the steps of Low Library, he felt something tug him by an invisible thread.
The sensation was almost physical—a heat pressed against his shoulder blades. He turned, sweeping the space with his gaze, until he caught the lone figure sitting on the bench by the sundial. A girl. Alone.
His breath caught—an involuntary spasm he immediately hated. He did not know her. And yet his legs faltered, as if the ground had vanished. Her features refused to settle into a familiar shape, and this ignorance became unbearable, almost tangible. Aemond, accustomed to being a detached observer, suddenly realized he could not look away.
Who are you? The silent question burned inside him as he stood on the steps, understanding that something in the structure of his smoothed life had irreparably cracked. The girl tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, hiding her eyes. Full of that awkwardness belonging only to those who do not realize their own power. For Aemond the motion was a blow. He watched her palm slide over the strands—an ordinary, everyday gesture lost a thousand times in the void. Yet here, on the library steps, it acquired weight. Beneath the heavy fabric of his coat something clenched painfully, echoing with a spasm in his forearms.
She looked away. She broke the barely formed connection.
Strange irritation flared in his chest. Look. Look again. The irrational thought, so alien to his usual restraint, frightened him. He turned sharply. His boots struck the stone steps with measured force—the gait he had long used to conceal everything unbecoming to an unshakable heir. But his teeth were clenched in pain.
At the massive oak doors he paused for a moment, gripping the cold brass. In the dull gleam of the metal his own profile reflected back: a distorted streak of platinum hair, sharp facial lines. Did he still feel her gaze on his back? Or its absence, felt as a gnawing emptiness?
Who is she? The question, once harmless, now sank its teeth into his mind and refused to let go.
January 23, 9:35 A.M.
Aemond entered the library without looking back. To admit that something had gone off plan would mean admitting error, and he never erred. The boy once pinned face-down in the ancestral stables had long been left behind. What lived now was a precisely calibrated mechanism, patiently awaiting the hour when every debt would be collected in full.
Inside, a deep, almost palpable silence reigned, broken only by the faint rustle of pages—dry, like the whisper of autumn leaves underfoot. He walked to a table set against the wall with a full view of the entrance, sat down without removing his coat. The laptop stayed in the bag.
For seventeen minutes Aemond stared at the wood grain, trying to resurrect the face he had seen for less than thirty seconds.
And therein lay the horror.
He could recall analysts’ reports in minute detail, could name the license plate of the car that cut him off on the highway a year ago. But the girl on the bench—her image slipped away the moment he tried to seize it. Dark hair? Chestnut? Perhaps another shade entirely? Eyes whose color shifted like water in a restless pond when the wind touches its surface.
A muscle twitched in his cheek. He took out his phone, opened the university social page—methodical, habitual analysis that had long become part of him. But today the search was pointless. He scrolled through hundreds of faces, and none was hers; the splinter sank deeper.
The question arose on its own, uninvited, and for the first time in many years Aemond Targaryen found no answer. The library air smelled of old wood dust and something faint—dry wax from the tall window frames. He sat motionless, fingers gripping the phone until they whitened.
January 24, 11:30 A.M.
Aemond stood outside the journalism building, clutching a coffee cup he did not remember buying. He had not been listening as his classmate—Ethan or maybe Reitan—droned on about deadline extensions. Suddenly something made him turn his head. There was no sound, no movement, yet he felt a shift in the very density of the winter air—an almost imperceptible tear in the everyday that tugged straight beneath his ribs.
Cream-colored sweater, artful imitation cashmere. Aemond’s eye, trained since childhood on luxury, instantly read the fabric’s quality. The sweater sat a fraction looser than it should, and the excess volume only emphasized her fragility. Black denim: unremarkable, dull, ordinary. Thousands of girls on this campus dissolved into the crowd dressed exactly the same. Which made it twice as strange that his attention locked onto her. She walked alone. Bag over her shoulder, head slightly tilted to shelter from the wind tearing across the quad. January sunlight froze in the cream wool. A strand of hair—chestnut? dark blond?—kept slipping from behind her ear, and she kept tucking it back with an absent, almost childlike motion. The gesture tightened something in Aemond’s throat.
Aemond blinked, returning to reality.
“No,” he cut off, not even glancing at the other. “I’m not.”
He did not wait for an answer. He was already moving.
He did not know where he was going. That was the most honest realization in the last twenty-four hours, and it frightened him less than it should have. His stride was swift, slicing through clusters of students, coffee cooling rapidly in his hand. Aemond was not pursuing her. Pursuit implied intent, plan, cold calculation. He simply walked in the same direction. At a distance that from the outside might look like coincidence.
Why do you need to see her again?
The question was a sharp shard of rationality in a mind rapidly losing control. He had seen her yesterday. She was no one. The girl on the bench. A glance that lingered a second too long. A hand tucking hair. None of it justified the frantic pulse, none explained why he had lain awake until three, turning those thirty seconds over in every conceivable angle.
She was no one, yet he needed to see her again.
The wind sharpened. The strand slipped once more; she tucked it back with slender fingers. With cold astonishment Aemond realized he had come close enough to notice details: a tiny pill on the sweater’s collar, scuff on the left boot’s heel, the way she thoughtfully bit her lower lip, lost in thoughts he had no access to.
The desire struck suddenly—cruel, disproportionate, almost hungry. He wanted to slip inside her mind, trace the curves of her thoughts, know what music she listened to and which side she slept on. He wanted to know whether she had remembered him even once since that moment or whether he had already become a forgotten, erased image for her.
The mere thought that she might have forgotten him sent something scorching flaring beneath his ribs.
A group of laughing students passed between them. When they parted she had stopped at the entrance to Butler Library and was rummaging in her bag—looking for her ID, probably. Aemond froze too, ten meters away, still gripping the cup.
He poured every ounce of his will into the thought, as if sheer desire alone could compel her body to obey. Turn around and look at me.
Their eyes met. She lifted her index finger to her lips, lightly biting the pad—a gesture filled with that frightening, almost primal innocence. Bitten fingertip. Full lips. She looked at him without looking away, and the openness was as accidental as it was disarming. Something inside Aemond cracked. The hum of the crowd, the distant noise of Broadway—all collapsed into a low, barely audible drone and then vanished entirely. Only she remained. The way her teeth gently pressed into her skin. The way her lips parted slightly, accepting his gaze.
Do you even understand what you’re doing to me?
Of course she did not. How could she? She was simply a girl—nameless, elusive. A maddening silhouette biting her finger and looking at him as if waiting for something. Waiting for him.
He was still crushing the cooled coffee cup. His fingers had gone numb, and with absurd clarity he understood the full ridiculousness of his position: Aemond Targaryen, frozen in the middle of the walkway like a statue, devouring a stranger with his gaze as though she were the answer to a question he had never dared ask. An heir reduced to this.
He should leave. He should approach. He should say something, but his voice had betrayed him, hiding deep in his throat, useless and mute.
Instead he simply stared. His single eye traced the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the way the cream sweater had carelessly slipped off one shoulder. He memorized these details with the obsessive precision of a man accustomed to hunting weaknesses, exits, vulnerabilities. But now he was not searching for flaws. He was searching for proof that she was real.
Because part of him—the part rapidly losing touch with reality—had begun to suspect she was not.
People did not look like that. People did not make him feel like this. Her face refused to resolve into a whole image—it shimmered and rippled like heat haze above sun-baked asphalt in high summer.
Someone bumped his shoulder, muttered an apology, and walked on. Aemond barely noticed. But time tore for only a moment, long enough for him to realize how indecently long he had been standing there, crushing the cup.
His lips moved, yet no sound came.
You’re frightening her. You stand here like a beast and she’s afraid.
But there was no fear in her eyes. Only curiosity. Expectation. Bitten finger, parted lips—in that gesture there was a hint of coquetry, or perhaps his mind was twisting her innocence into something darker, something he could understand and classify.
The thought struck with the force of an order, overriding caution, strategy, the patience that had been the foundation of his life. He needed her name. Now. He would learn who she was, where she lived, what she dreamed of at night. Whether she dreamed of him.
The certainty settled in his bones like lead.
He took one step. Just one. A test. Expensive boots creaked against the asphalt, the sound deafening in the muted silence of his private madness.
His fingers gripped the coffee cup so tightly the cardboard dented. In the depths of his skull a voice suspiciously like his own, stripped of all pretense, whispered three words he had not dared consider.
“Hi? You’re Aemond, right? It is you?”
Her voice was sweet, intoxicating, and completely disarming. She knew his name. Of course she did—the Targaryen name was known—but to hear his own name in that shy, barely perceptible intonation… It was something else. Something that made the bones in his fingers ache with the need to touch.
He did not smile. Aemond Targaryen had never learned how. But something in his face shifted: the gaze of his remaining eye softened, his lips parted slightly. That fleeting shadow of warmth was the gentlest thing he had ever allowed himself to show others.
The word left his lips lower than intended—hoarse, ragged, torn from the depths of his chest. He was still crushing the ruined cup. Suddenly aware of its absurdity again, he released it; the cardboard fell into the trash bin with a dull thud, yet he never tore his gaze from her face.
Do not look away from her.
“I… yes, that’s me,” he paused, tilting his head to the side. A slow, almost inhuman movement that carried an innate danger. “And you—who are you?”
The question hung in the cold air, binding them. He watched awareness bloom on her face—tension impossible to hide: pupils widening, a faint stiffening of shoulders beneath the thin knit. She was afraid. Or stunned. He could not tell, and the ambiguity made his heart race.
The thought arose from nowhere, and his body reacted faster than thought: he shifted his weight almost imperceptibly. Not blocking her path, but making it clear on the most primal level—she could not leave now. Not until he understood.
“What’s wrong?” His voice came out soft. Too soft. The deceptive caress he usually reserved for the moments before destroying someone’s life. But there was no strategy now. Only hunger. “You look…”
He searched for the word, found it, allowed it to be spoken:
“…distressed.”
A gust of wind cut across the quad, catching her hair; this time she did not tuck it back. One night. You have known her one day. But it did not feel like a day. It felt like eternity. It felt as though she had always been there, somewhere on the periphery, patiently waiting for her moment. And now she stood before him, yet her face still refused to fix, becoming a ghostly image.
“Have we met before?” he asked, and this time the question was sincere, painfully real. “Before yesterday? Before that bench? Us?”
He let the sentence break off. His eye—piercing blue—never left her face. The scar along his cheek tightened as he clenched his jaw in painful anticipation.
“No, I mean yes, I mean… you’re acting strangely. You’re always so… strong. Unshakable. I don’t know… and now you’re looking at me like…”
“Always.” She had said “always.”
The word sank into him—first almost painless, then a hot, sharp realization spread through his chest. “Always.” She had been watching him. This was not a chance glance, not fleeting curiosity, but a chronicle of his life. How long? Weeks? Months? The entire fall semester while he sat in lecture halls and cafés, completely unaware of her existence?
Aemond’s breathing grew shallow. His pulse thudded dully in his ears, drowning out the campus noise.
“You’ve been watching me.”
It was a statement, and his voice was quiet, even, yet something lurked beneath the surface—like the hum of wires before a storm. He took another step. They were now so close he caught her scent. Something clean. A light floral trail—remnant of perfume applied many hours earlier.
“Long enough to know how I usually look. How I usually behave.”
Another step. The distance shrank to something unforgivable, and he did not care.
The question came out wrong. Too fierce. Too hungry. He saw her flinch, pull back. The rational part of his brain screamed: retreat, soften, act human, but he could not. Once his mother had tried to teach him, before she gave up and redirected her anxious control onto Aegon. Be pleasant, Aemond. Smile. People do not trust those who do not smile. But people had never trusted him, and he had stopped needing their trust at twelve, realizing that fear was a far more valuable resource than love.
He was frightening her. He saw it in the too-rapid rise of her chest, in the way her hand slipped from her lips to clutch the strap of her bag convulsively. Yet an unknown force, raw and terrifyingly untamed, longed to touch her face, to erase that fear with his fingers.
Don’t be afraid. Never be afraid of me. I would never…
He did not know how to finish the sentence. What exactly would he never do? What lines would he not cross if given sufficient reason? He was a Targaryen. He ruined lives and lost not a single hour of sleep doing it.
“You said I’m acting strangely,” his voice dropped, almost gentle, meant only for her despite the noise of the square. “Tell me. What changed? It seems you know me better than I know myself.”
The last word carried a flavor he could not name. Hurt? Admiration? His vocabulary—so rich in politics and law—was useless here. He could no longer name anything.
“That’s not what I meant. You’re a Targaryen… everyone knows… please… I don’t know.”
She still had not given him her name. With a sudden, almost convulsive movement he snatched her student ID. The plastic slid across cool skin, nearly scratching her fingers, but Aemond had already lifted the card to his face. His warm breath fogged the lamination as he stared at the printed name.
He blinked. Once, twice. He jerked his head sharply—almost feral, painful—and stared again. The photograph was there: her features, proof she existed in the university archives. But the moment he tried to hold the image, everything turned into trembling haze. The name—unreadable. The face—blurred. Number, barcode, expiration date—all the rest remained painfully sharp. But what made her her slipped through his fingers like water cupped in palms.
“What…” His voice cracked.
Aemond Targaryen did not crack. His voice had not trembled since he was twelve, when he swore he would never again show weakness. Yet now the sound tore from his lips, and horror pierced straight through his chest.
A flash. For that brief instant he saw himself from the outside. In the middle of campus. Ripping a stranger’s belonging like a thief. Breathing too fast, pupil blown wide. Students whispering, yet still afraid to raise their phones. His family name, his name—trampled into public disgrace.
What the hell am I doing?
He saw her—not an illusion, but a frightened girl pressing a hand to her chest. He saw her fingers tremble. He saw himself through her eyes: monster, Targaryen, mask discarded.
Obsession crashed over him again, erasing every trace of clarity. He crushed the card until the plastic cracked. A low, choked sound escaped his throat. He shoved the ID back into her palms.
“I can’t read it,” the admission came full of anguish.
He looked at her, at that elusive, flickering face, and her fear only sank deeper under his skin. The air between them smelled of frosty damp and the faintest trace of her—like a distant memory of spring in the depths of January frost.
“I can’t read your name. I can’t see your face clearly. Do you understand? Every time I try to remember what you look like—” He pressed his fingers into the bandage covering his prosthetic eye in a gesture of consuming despair. “It doesn’t stay. You don’t stay. And I want you to stay.”
The whispers around them grew louder. Someone laughed nervously. Aemond did not care. The world had narrowed to the trembling space between them; everything else became static noise.
It was not a request. His voice dropped to a guttural, almost inhuman growl.
“Say your name right now, or I swear—I will buy this university just to get into your file.”
“My name is…” but he did not hear. “I’m… I’m an exchange student. Please. Please. Let’s just talk. Let’s go to a café? I… just, don’t touch me like that.”
She had said her name… her name was…
Her name. She had just spoken it—he was certain he had heard—but the syllables melted the instant they reached his mind. Stolen by something that had taken root deep inside his skull.
“Again,” he breathed. “Say it again. Please.”
“Please sounded desperate—a word he had not uttered sincerely since childhood. Since he knelt in the stables with dirt in his mouth and blood in his hair under his nephew’s mocking laughter. Now he was begging. Aemond Targaryen, pleading for a name from a stranger in the middle of Columbia’s campus. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was already calculating the damage of this public humiliation.
She is afraid again. Because of him. Because he had grabbed her. Because he was acting like a wild animal. You are hurting her. You are becoming exactly what they always warned you would become.
“No,” the word slipped out almost soundlessly, addressed to no one but the voice in his head that did not belong to him.
He forced himself to step back, then another, creating distance. The effort was monumental. Every cell in his body screamed to close the gap, to touch her and never let go. But she had said “please.”
“Yes,” his voice sounded dry as cracked glass. “Yes. Café. We’ll talk.”
He squared his shoulders—a painful attempt to gather the shards of dignity. The crowd was still watching. He felt their gazes, sticky as someone else’s sweat on his skin. Later he would compile a list of every person who had dared stare and decide what to do with them. But right now only she existed.
“I’m sorry,” the words came out awkward, the apology of a man who had never learned to apologize sincerely. “I shouldn’t have touched you. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I’m not—” He swallowed; his single eye met hers, and in that gaze something frighteningly genuine lay bare. “I would rather cut off my own hand than let you be afraid of me.”
He meant it. That was the horror of it. Every word was true.
He held out the ID; his fingers trembled visibly. A tremor he could not control, one he had never encountered before, turning him into a stranger inside his own body. The wind stirred her hair again, and the faint floral scent—like the breath of a flowering garden in dead winter—brushed his face.
“There’s a café on 116th. We could—” he searched for the simplest word a normal person would use. “We could talk. I’ll listen.”
January 24, 6:15 P.M.
“And then,” she said, “my classmate Richard told me: ‘Whoever ends up with you will be a lucky man.’”
Their fingers were entwined. Aemond stared at their joined hands on the table. She had long finished her caramel latte and tiramisu; only his untouched, cooled espresso remained. Her skin was warm, her slender fingers sliding between his knuckles as if designed exactly for him to hold, as though someone had engineered her hand specifically for his. Could he feel her pulse? Or was it his own? He could no longer tell. Everything blurred, becoming meaningless.
“Whoever ends up with you will be a lucky man.”
Richard? She had spoken the name Richard. A classmate. A man who had looked at her, spoken to her, and allowed himself to pay her a compliment. She had repeated his words as if they mattered.
Something tightened inside his chest.
“Richard,” he repeated. It was not the voice of a man who had suffered a complete psychological collapse in the middle of campus only hours earlier. Only his hand betrayed him: fingers tightening on hers with possessive strength.
He asked it as if showing ordinary curiosity.
He wants her. He is trying to take her. They all try to take her.
His free hand under the table dug nails into his own thigh; the sharp pain was the only thing keeping him sane.
“What else did Richard say?”
The question sounded dangerous. His thumb slowly stroked the back of her hand, gentle, in defiance of the rage unfolding in his mind. He was already picturing Richard’s face, a composite of every smug student he despised. Imagining how that face would look after he found him. After he explained that this girl was already claimed. That she had always been claimed. That Richard would do well to change universities, countries, disappear.
“You should be careful,” he said, still stroking softly. “With people like that. Men who say things like that. They always want something from you. They’re always looking for their own advantage.”
He leaned forward, his single pale eye boring into her ever-shifting, blurred, maddening face.
“I am the only one who wants nothing from you. Do you understand? I am the only one who simply wants you. Not something from you. Only you.”
It was a lie. He knew he was lying even as he spoke. He wanted everything from her. Her attention, her touch, her fear, her love, her body, her soul, every breath in her lungs and every thought in her head. He wanted to swallow her whole and be swallowed in return. He wanted to crawl beneath her skin and live there. His thumb kept stroking.
“He’s just a classmate, he didn’t mean anything. Have we really been sitting here six hours? I should probably get back to the dorm.”
Aemond blinked, and the panorama confirmed her words. The pale winter sun that had filtered through the glass when they entered had vanished; it had been replaced by the sickly yellow of streetlamps and the deep blue haze of oncoming evening. Six hours. He had no memory of their passage. He had only watched her lips move, her hands gesture, her throat flutter when she swallowed her latte.
“No,” he said too quickly. “Stay.”
The word hung naked and desperate in the air. He watched her reach for her bag, begin to say goodbye, adjust her sweater, check her phone. Something inside him cracked again. She was leaving. She was returning to the dorm. To a dorm whose door he had no key for, to a room he could not enter, to a bed where she would sleep without his supervision. Without him. The very thought felt wrong.
“Just…” He leaned across the table and gently caught her wrist. His fingers encircled her slender bones like a bracelet of pale flesh. “Five more minutes. Please.”
Please sounded raw. Tonight he had said the word more times than in the previous twenty-four years of his life. It felt foreign on his tongue, like a language learned solely for her.
“I’ll walk you,” it was not a suggestion but an order not open to discussion.
“It’s dark. Cold. The campus isn’t safe at night.”
A lie wrapped in concern. Columbia’s campus was safe; he knew the crime statistics by heart. But she did not need to know. She only needed to say yes.
“Let me walk you. I need to know you got there safely.” His fingers still held her wrist, thumb still stroking. “I need to know where it is.”
The words escaped before he could think, too painful, too exposing. His single eye met hers, and for a moment the mask slipped again: only raw, devouring hunger remained—the hunger of a man who had stopped pretending to be sane by the second hour of conversation.
“Your dorm. I need to know exactly which one. Which floor. Which room.”
Each detail worsened his position, yet Aemond was clever. “So I can send you gifts. Flowers. Jewelry. Let me take care of you. You don’t even have to let me in. Just let me know you’re safe.”
January 24, 7:04 P.M.
By the time they reached the dorms Aemond had already sent a message to the family chat: “Not coming back to the estate tonight, staying at the penthouse—business requires my presence in the city.”
He was obsessed with one thought: to stay. To find any pretext to spend the night inside her space.
“We’re here…” she whispered.
She had led him not to her own building but to the neighboring one. The structure loomed above them—old brick, dark windows. She was about to step inside. To leave him. Unacceptable.
Aemond’s thoughts shifted with frightening clarity. He had sent the chat message back at the café while she was in the restroom. “Business.” “Not returning.” Mother would see diligence. Father would not notice the absence. Only she existed now.
This time he did not grab her. He had learned the lesson and filed it in his constantly growing collection “How Not to Scare Her.” Instead he simply stepped closer, closing the distance she had managed to rebuild. His body loomed over hers, warm breath dissolving in the cold air.
The lie was polished, laced with apologetic inconvenience. He had crafted it on the way, discarding others one by one: “I feel sick,” “I forgot something”—but the bathroom was the right choice, human. Refusing it would make her seem cruel.
“Just for a minute. It’s the coffee, I won’t make it back to the estate, traffic.” He waved vaguely toward the next street where someone’s black Audi was parked—an accidental prop turned stage dressing for his lie. “I won’t be long. I promise.” His voice dropped, acquiring notes of vulnerability.
“Am I asking too much for a first meeting?”
In the darkness, under the lantern light casting long shadows across his face, he looked almost beautiful. Almost safe.
“Five minutes. Then I’ll leave. You’ll barely have time to remember I was here.”
The last part was a lie. He would do everything so she could never forget him.
“Aemond, that’s not your car… it’s parked by my… dorm. And you don’t drive an Audi. You have a personal driver, don’t you?”
The slip was amateurish. Unforgivable. The kind he had stopped making as a teenager. Yet his expression did not flicker; he could not allow himself to show doubt, though for a second his jaw tightened and the white line of the scar stood out sharper.
“My driver uses whatever car is available.”
The lie rolled off his tongue smoothly. Convincingly. The Targaryen fleet was enormous, cars were constantly added, and nothing was impossible about the Audi being his. Even if it was parked by her dorm when it should not be… but her remark—“you don’t drive an Audi”—implied knowledge she should not possess. Knowledge of his habits. His preferences. She had watched him long enough to memorize what he drove?
The thought should have alarmed him. Instead a hot rush of satisfaction flooded his veins. She remembered his cars. They were two sides of the same coin.
“That car is parked by… my building.” Wait.
His gaze returned to the building she had indicated, then to the neighboring one where they had actually stopped. Two different buildings. Two different addresses. She had said “my building” while looking at the other one.
“You don’t live in this building,” the words sounded accusatory.
His head tilted in that wild movement he could not control while his mind sifted consequences.
“You said we had arrived. You stopped right here. But your building—” he looked at the neighboring structure, then back at her. “You live in that one. You brought me to the wrong door.”
Silence, broken only by a distant siren and the hiss of bus brakes on Broadway.
The question was quiet. Too quiet. He stepped forward, closing the distance until she could catch the scent of his expensive, woody cologne, barely noticeable through the frost. Close enough to see how widely his pupil had dilated.
“Clever,” he whispered, and his voice held almost tender admiration. “You’re smart. I knew you would be. I knew it.”
His hand rose, hovered, then tucked the strand behind her ear. His fingers lingered on the shell of her ear long enough to memorize every curve.
“But I still figured it out. You understand that? In time I will know everything about you.”
He spoke it like a promise.
“Bathroom. Please. In your real building,” a hint of a smile.
It was wrong, awkward, belonging to someone who had studied smiles from textbooks but never grasped their essence. “I still need to go, then I’ll leave. I swear.”
She brought her fingers to her full lips, sliding them into her mouth to the first knuckle and biting hard. Blood rushed to the skin, staining it crimson. The movement was unconscious. She had made the same foolish mistake he had.
“No… Aemond, you’re a guy. Just go on the street, I don’t know.”
The sight of her fingers in her own mouth—wet with saliva, bitten so hard the skin blanched then bloomed with blood—froze Aemond. His eye locked on the glistening sheen of her lips stretched over her fingers, on the faint red pressure marks from her teeth, and something primal roared in the deepest abyss of his mind.
Do that to me. Bite me like that. Leave that mark on me.
The thought was obscene. He did not care.
Then the meaning of her words reached him. Just go on the street. And the casual tone with which she said “you’re a guy,” as if having male anatomy gave him the right to unzip and mark territory like a dog at a hydrant. As if she did not understand that before her stood Aemond Targaryen, who did not piss on the street. It was so absurd.
He saw himself: standing on the sidewalk beside the dorm, lying about the bathroom and the Audi, hair tousled by wind, pupil blown, half-hard simply from watching her bite her own fingers. He saw her—an ordinary, probably terrified girl—and with nauseating clarity understood: he was exactly what mothers warn daughters about.
What the hell am I doing? Call Otto. Call security. Take a sedative. Pull yourself together. This is not me. This has NEVER been me. I waited fourteen—twelve—years to avenge the pig for what he did. Twelve years of patience. And now I’m lying about BATHROOMS?
Obsession crashed down harder; what emerged was worse than before—an desperate need to be completely consumed by her.
The sound came out unpleasant. Torn from the depths, it suited him as poorly as that awkward smile. He laughed because she had suggested he “just go on the street,” and it was funny, and she was funny, and he loved her so much it was destroying him from the inside.
“You’re special,” he said, tone almost reverent. “Do you realize that? You’re the only person in the world who could say that to me. ‘Just go on the street.’” He repeated her words like scripture, slowly shaking his head in confirmation. “My family owns seventeen buildings in this city. I could buy this dormitory right now, tonight, with one phone call. And you’re offering to let me piss on a tree.”
He stepped closer. His hand found her wrist again and, very carefully, drew it away from her face. He turned her palm. Studied the bite marks on her knuckles, the imprint of teeth, the faint bruise already blooming beneath the skin.
“Don’t do that,” he murmured, thumb tracing the marks. “Don’t hurt yourself. If you need something to bite, bite me.” His gaze rose to her eyes, and there was no pretense. Only hunger. “I’m serious. Just don’t ruin what belongs to me.”
What belongs to me. The words hung.
“Please, let me go. Five minutes. I’ll use your bathroom and leave. I’ll be perfect. You can lock yourself in the bedroom while I’m there. Text a friend. Set a timer. Anything to feel safe. But please, don’t make me leave right now. I’m not ready to stop looking at you.”
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