Or maybe the problem was something else entirely, something that smelled like Chanel No.5 and worked the front desk on the forty-second floor of Targaryen Group and had absolutely no business being the reason your three year marriage was falling apart.

You had tried for longer than you wanted to admit, not to believe it. Had told yourself it was nothing, that you were merely just being foolish, that Baelor Targaryen was many things but he was not that, he had never been that. You tried telling yourself that he was just busy, that the acquisition was demanding, that the late nights were the industry and not the woman, that the business trips were exactly what he said they were. You had told yourself that story so many times it had almost started to sound true.

And then there was the office party.

He had wanted you there, had said it was expected, had kissed the top of your head and said he didn't want to go alone, and you had gone because you loved him and because saying no to Baelor when he looked at you like that had never been something you were particularly good at. 

The venue was the kind of place that made you very aware of your own posture, all clean lines and open bars and people who wore their money, and you had been standing beside him, his hand at the small of your back, feeling almost like yourself, until she appeared. 

She had smiled at you first, which was the thing you remembered most. That smile, bright and deliberate, her red lipstick immaculate, her eyes moving over you with an assessment so quick and so thorough you almost missed it. “You wouldn’t mind if I steal your husband for a few quick minutes,” she had said, and her hand had gone to his upper arm as she said it, her red nails against his sleeve, easy and familiar, the touch of someone who had done it before. “Something just needs to be checked in the office, urgently.”

Baelor had given nothing away. He had looked at you, said he’d be right back, and followed her, while you stood there with your drink and your smile, and your very well-practiced composure and told yourself it was nothing.

Seconds became minutes, minutes became an hour.

You had found daeron at the bar, Baelor’s nephew, who was good company in the uncomplicated way of someone who wasn’t trying to be anything other than he was, and you had drunk more than you intended to and not questioned out loud why an hour was somehow still a few minutes, but when Baelor eventually reappeared you had let him put you in the car, and take you home and you said nothing, because what were you going to say, because you had no proof, because you were his wife and you trusted him.

You told yourself that too. For months.

There were always secretes, you had come to understand, in lives like this one. Wealth like Baelor’s didn’t come clean, it never did, and you had known that when you married him, had chosen it anyways, had told yourself that the way he looked at you when it was just the two of you made up for everything else that came with his name. 

But now you weren’t sure you still believed that.

And so you sat in the dark, and you drank, rethinking the choice of getting married to a guy who was a widow for years, and waited for the sound you had gotten very good at waiting for.

His key in the door. 

It came at two forty-seven am, because you had been watching the clock the way you had started watching everything lately, tracking the evidence, and the lock turned and the door opened, the light from the hallway came in first, a rectangle of it falling across the floor, and then Baelor, still in his suit blazer, his tie loosened, looking down at his phone as he came in, the way he always looked down at his phone.

He reachedd for the light switch without looking up.

The lamp came on. 

He saw you.

“What–” He stopped. Looked at you properly for the first time, at the glass in your hand and the bottle on the coffee table and whatever was on your face, and something shifted in his expression, the phone coming down to his side. “What’s going on?”

You looked at him from across the room, this many you had married, this man whose shirts you wore on a regular basis, whose coffee order you could recite in your sleep, whose laugh you had not heard properly in months, and felt the words that you had been repeating sitting in your chest like stones.

“Where have you been,” you said, and your voice came out softer than you intended, the kind of soft that wasn’t calm at all, the kind that came from trying very hard to hold something together.

He heard it. You could tell he heard it by the way something in his face settled into a careful expression, the one he put on when he was deciding how to manage a situation.

“Work,” he said. “I told you I had a late meeting, I sent you a–”

“You sent me a text at seven saying you’d be home by nine.” You kept your eyes on him, and kept your face as still as you could make it, “It’s nearly three in the morning, Baelor.”

He set his phone down on the console table by the door with quiet deliberateness, and came further into the room, loosening his tie the rest of the way, and you watched him move through your home like a man with nothing to answer for and felt something tighten in your chest.

“How much have you had,” he said, glancing at the bottle.

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I’m asking you something first.” He said it the way you said things to children, patiently, reasonably, and you felt your jaw tighten. “How much wine have you had tonight?”

“Enough,” you said.

“Clearly,” he said, the word landed with a lightness that was worse than if he had shouted it, and he draped his jacket over the back of the chair and turned to look at you with a patient expression, one that made you feel like a problem he was calculating how to solve. “Come to bed.”

You felt something flicker across your face that you couldn’t quite stop– something between disbelief and the exhaustion of a woman who had been having this conversation in her head for months and was only now having it out loud. “I don't want to go to bed.”

"You've been sitting in the dark drinking by yourself," he said, evenly, "which means you've been in your head all evening, which means whatever you've decided to pick a fight about is going to seem considerably less significant in the morning." He said it like he was being reasonable. He said it like he was doing you a favour. "Come to bed."

"The phone calls," you said. Your voice was steady. You were proud of that, how steady your voice was. "The ones where you leave the room."

He looked at you and said nothing, and you looked back at him and kept going.

"Every time," you said. "You look at the screen, you get up, you go to the kitchen or the hallway or wherever it is that you go, then you come back, kissing me like nothing happened and sometimes you say you need to go back into the office and you leave. Every time." You swallowed. "Who are you talking to."

"Work," he said, simply, like the word was self-evident, like you were being slow.

"At ten o'clock at night."

"I'm the CEO of a private equity firm with holdings across three continents," he said, still in that patient voice that was going to make you lose your mind, "yes, sometimes at ten o'clock at night. You know this."

"The business trips." You pressed on because if you stopped you would lose your nerve. "Four in the last two months. You used to go twice a year."

"The Essos acquisition–"

"The dinners." Something in your face shifted, something you couldn't help, the particular look of a person trying very hard not to feel what they were feeling. "Date night, three weeks ago, you cancelled an hour before. Our anniversary dinner, you were two hours late and you smelled like–" your voice caught on the word and you pushed past it, "you came home and you kissed me and you smelled like her perfume, Baelor, and you said you needed to go back in, there was something you forgot, and you left, and I sat here–"

"The wine," he said, "is clearly getting to you."

You stopped.

You looked at him, at the calm of his face, at the patient set of his mouth, and felt something that had been soft in you go very quiet and very cold.

"I'm serious," he said, and his voice had gone gentle in the way that made it worse, the way that said I am the reasonable one and you are not, "you've been sitting here alone for hours working yourself up into something and I understand that you're–"

"Don't," you said.

"I understand the last few months haven't been easy, I know I've been distracted, I'm not dismissing that–"

"You're doing it right now." Your voice came out harder than you planned. "You're making it about how I'm feeling instead of what I'm asking you. You're making me the problem."

“Because how you’re feeling is relevant,” he said, and glanced at the bottle, “when you’ve had most of that by yourself and you’re sitting in the dark waiting to–”

"I'm waiting for my husband," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, just enough, and you saw it land on his face, saw something move through his expression that you could not name, and you looked away from him because you were not going to cry in front of him tonight, you had promised yourself that, "who told me he'd be home hours ago."

The room was quiet.

He crossed to the coffee table and sat down in front of you, close, closer than you wanted, close enough that you could see his eyes clearly in the lamplight, one brown and one blue, both of them on you with attention that had made you fall in love with him and was now making you feel like a witness being cross-examined, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and said, low and even, "I am not cheating on you—”

"I want a divorce," you said suddenly.

Something moved across his face. Raw, just for a moment, before the composure came back down like a shutter.

"No," he said.

“Baelor–”

"No." Flat, absolute, the voice of a man who had made a decision and was not interested in discussing it. "We are not doing this."

You stood up. Your legs were steadier than they had any right to be. "I'm getting a lawyer."

He stood too, and he was broader than you forgot sometimes, his bearded jaw set, something in his face that was no longer the patient composure, no longer the careful evenness, it was something that had dropped its mask, and his hand closed around your arm, not hard but firm, and he said, "Stop. Just– listen to me for one minute–"

"No." You pulled your arm away, sharply, and the sharpness of it surprised you both. "I have listened to this bullshit for months! Every single excuse, every single reasonable explanation, I am so done with listening, I'm getting a goddamn lawyer–"

“A lawyer.” He let out a short sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You think it’s going to be that simple.” His voice had gone low again, and he looked at you with those mismatched eyes and said, “I know every lawyer in this city. Every single one. You think one of them is going to take a case against me because my wie has had too many glasses of wine and decided I’m cheating on her.”

You went still.

You looked at him, at the cold certainty of his face, and felt something move through you that was not quite fear and not quite fury but lived somewhere between the two.

You let out a short laugh, humourless, and shook your head. "Of course," you said, quietly, more to yourself than to him.

“I’m serious–”

"So am I." You turned away from him and started toward the bedroom. "I'll find someone. I don't care how long it takes, I'll find someone who will make you sign the papers."

"You're drunk out of your mind." He was following you, his voice behind you, still with that controlled edge that was unravelling at the seams. "You're not thinking straight. I'm telling you it won't go the way you think, I'm asking you to stop and talk to me properly, we are not getting a—"

You slammed the bedroom door in his face.

The force of it shook the frame, and you turned the lock before the sound had finished echoing, and stood there with your hand still on the handle and your chest heaving and the silence on the other side pressing back against the door like something solid.

"I'm getting a lawyer, Baelor." Your voice came out steady, which was the only thing you had left. "I mean it."

Nothing came from the other side. Then, after a long moment, his footsteps, slow and deliberate, moving away down the hall.

You stood there in the dark for a long time after that. 

Eventually you lay down on the bed, still dressed, and looked at the ceiling, and did not cry, because you had been crying alone in this penthouse for months and you were finished with it. You were so finished with it.

He had started coming home early.

That was the thing you hadn't anticipated, the thing that made the week after considerably harder than it should have been, because you had built your anger on a foundation of absence and he had removed the absence, which left you standing on something that felt less solid than it had.

You avoided him at all costs. You lay in bed and listened for the sound of the front door closing, and only then, only when you were sure he was gone, did you come out. You padded around the flat in one of his shirts, which was too big for you and which you had grabbed in the dark one morning without thinking and then refused to acknowledge the irony of, and you made yourself coffee and ate whatever was in the fridge then moved through the rooms like you were the only person who lived there.

He had tried to talk to you the morning after. You had heard him outside the bedroom door, and when you opened it he had looked at you with something on his face that you didn't want to name and started to say something careful and measured and you had cut him off before he got three words in.

"I want the divorce," you said. "It's not changing."

He had looked at you for a long moment and said nothing, and you had closed the door again, and that was that.

The days that followed had their own particular shape. He came home earlier than he had in months, which you noticed and did not comment on. The late calls stopped, or became shorter, or moved somewhere you couldn't track them. He left coffee for you one morning before he left, made exactly the way you liked it, and you stood in the kitchen in his shirt looking at the cup and felt something complicated move through your chest and then put it away and went back to looking for lawyers.

Because that was what you spent your days doing. Searching, calling, being passed from one firm to the next, each one either conflicted out or quietly unwilling the moment you said the name Targaryen. He had not been exaggerating about that, which made you furious in a way you had not expected, a cold and very specific fury that had nothing to do with the perfume or the late nights and everything to do with the fact that even trying to leave him was something he could make difficult without trying.

You found one on the ninth day. His name was Gerold Hightower, a small firm, old school, the kind that had been around long enough not to be impressed by anyone, and he listened to everything you said without writing anything down and then looked at you over the top of his glasses and said he'd take it. 

You had explained everything– the trips, the calls, the hours, the perfume, the office party, the hour that was supposed to be a few minutes– and he had listened to all of it and nodded and handed you the papers and told you they needed Baelor's signature, and that if Baelor declined, they were going to court.

You had signed your name on the line and felt, for the first time in weeks, like you could breathe.

You did not go home first. You drove straight to Targaryen Group.

The building sat in the middle of the city the way everything Targaryen sat– like it had always been there and always would be, like the city had been built around it rather than the other way around. You had walked through those lobby doors on Baelor's arm more times than you could count, had smiled at the staff and taken the private elevator and sat across from him at his desk while the city spread out below the floor-to-ceiling windows and thought, more than once, that you would never entirely get used to the scale of it.

Today you walked in alone, in a baggy tracksuit, your hair barely done, the red folder under your arm, and you didn't care even slightly about the way the lobby staff clocked you and looked away. Who were you trying to impress? You were here to end a marriage, not attend a board meeting.

You pressed the button for the lift and waited, and that was when you heard it. The click of heels on marble, and underneath it, the obnoxious rhythmic sound of someone chewing gum, and you turned your head and there she was.

Elizabeth. You had learned her name somewhere along the way, in the particular grim investigative way you had learned a lot of things over the past months. She was dressed the way she always seemed to be dressed, like she had given the morning a great deal of thought, her red lipstick already immaculate, and when she saw you her jaw slowed on the gum and something moved across her face that she recovered from quickly but not quickly enough.

"Mrs Targaryen," she said, and her voice came out bright and smooth, the voice of someone who had done customer-facing work long enough to smile through anything. "What a pleasure, I wasn't expecting you–"

"Can't say the same," you said pleasantly, and watched the smile flicker.

The silence that followed had an uncomfortable quality that she tried to fill. "How have you been lately?" she asked, and she was clicking the heel of one shoe against the marble now, a small unconscious tap, her eyes moving briefly to the closed lift doors and back.

"Honestly?" You tilted your head, like you were considering it. "Really quite good. Better than I've been in a while, actually. I'm getting a divorce, which I think is going to suit me very well."

Her mouth opened then closed, then the hell stopped clicking. “You’re–”

The lift doors opened.

You stepped toward them and then stopped, and turned back to look at her, and held out the red folder. "You're going up to his office, aren't you."

"I have some paperwork to– he didn't say anything about a–"

"He wouldn't." You pressed the folder to her chest, and she grabbed it before it could fall, both hands closing around it with a startled instinct, and you looked at her very directly and said, "Be an angel. Before you get up to whatever it is you both love getting up to after everyone else goes home– tell him to sign those papers. Tonight. Or I'm dragging him to court, and I have a very good lawyer who is very much looking forward to it."

"Mrs Targaryen, I genuinely don't know what you think is–"

You left her alone as you walked back out from where you came from, and ignored the doubt that settled into your gut, as you recalled her confusion.

You did not look back, you didn’t dare to.

You came home later than him.

You knew before you even opened the front door, some animal awareness of the changed quality of the air, the particular stillness of a space that had someone in it waiting, and you turned your key slowly and pushed the door open and reached for the light.

He was sitting on the couch. Just like you had, days ago, except he had already turned the lights on, and his blazer was off, his tie was loosened all the way and he was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, with the red folder that was open on the coffee table in front of him, the papers spread out, looking at them when you walked in.

He looked up at the sound of the door. 

"You signed them?" The surprise in your voice came out before you could stop it. Maybe Elizabeth had finally gotten what she wanted. Maybe the mistress had made her case in person and he had decided the easiest thing was to just let you go, so that he could finally be with her, without any complications.

He looked at you for a long moment, his expression giving nothing away, and then looked back at the papers.

"No," he said.

Something dropped in your chest. "Baelor–"

"I'm not signing this." He sat back, unhurried, and looked at you, the corner of his mouth moved into something that was almost a smile, small and certain, and the sight of it made your blood run hot. 

The absolute audacity of him, sitting there smiling at you like this was amusing, like you were amusing, like three years of marriage and a week of silence and a folder full of divorce papers were something he found faintly entertaining.

"Just sign the damned papers." You let your bag slide off your shoulder and drop to the floor, as you looked at him across the room and felt the desperation of it, how tired you were, how much you just needed this to be over. "Please. Sign them and let us both out of this."

"Let's talk about what happens if I don't." He tilted his head, still with that smile, and there was something in his eyes that was cold in a way you hadn't let yourself see before, or hadn't wanted to.

"You take this to court. These people, in this city, outside of this city– they kiss the ground my family walks on, the ground I walk on. You know that. You've seen it. You think a judge is going to look at you, at where you came from, at what you had before me, and side with you?" He paused, letting it land. "You leave me, you leave with nothing. Your family leaves with nothing. Everything you have, everything they have, it all came through this name. You know that's true, beautiful, so stop playing stupid."

"Sign the papers," you said, and your voice had gone flat.

"And then there's the other thing." His voice dropped into something quieter, and he picked up one of the papers and looked at it like it mildly interested him, like he was reading the weather and not dismantling your life. "The video."

You went still.

"Few months back. You came to the office after hours." His eyes came up to yours, slow and certain. 

"Security cameras in that building are thorough. Very thorough that they got a clear shot of you coming in. Got a clear shot of you going to my office. Got a very clear shot of you on your knees under my desk with your pretty mouth wrapped around my cock." He said it the way he said everything, evenly, without drama, like it was simply a fact he was presenting. "My face isn't in the frame. The angle never catches me. But yours is. Every second of it, your face, perfectly clear." He set the paper back down. 

"You want to think about what a courtroom makes of that. The Targaryen heir's wife, caught on her own husband's office security footage, on her knees for someone whose face the camera never caught." The smile returned, small and dark. "They won't know it's me. That's the part that's going to be very difficult for you to explain."

"You sick–" Your voice broke on it and you hated yourself for it, hated the burn behind your eyes, hated that he could still do this to you, that after everything he could still make your hands shake. "You would actually use that. You would stand there and threaten me with that."

"I'm not threatening you." He looked at you patient and cold and entirely focused. "I'm telling you what exists. I'm explaining the situation clearly, the way you've always said you wanted things explained." He stood up slowly, and crossed to the coffee table, and looked down at the papers spread out across it. "You walk into that courtroom and I promise you, you will walk out with nothing. No settlement, no name, no dignity, and that video somewhere it cannot be recalled. And I will be very, very sorry about all of it." The corner of his mouth moved. "Seems like a great deal of trouble for a divorce you don't actually want."

"It's blackmail!" The word tore out of you and your voice cracked on it and your tears fell and you didn't even try to stop them, because you were past that, you were so far past that. "That is blackmail, that is a threat, you are threatening me, and you have the absolute audacity to stand there and do this when you've been the one–" your voice broke again and you pressed your hands over your face, your fingers shaking against your cheeks. "When you've been cheating on me. You've been cheating on me this whole time and you're standing there threatening me with a video of me and acting like I'm the problem–"

"That," he said, and something shifted in his voice, the coldness dropping out of it entirely, replaced by something that sounded almost like frustration, like genuine frustration, like a man who had reached the end of something, "is where you are completely wrong."

You looked at him through your hands.

"I never cheated on you." He said it simply, without the performance of it, without the careful evenness, just the words. "I never did. Not once. Not even close." 

He stood and walked toward you slowly, and you watched him come and couldn't make yourself move, couldn't make yourself do anything, your hands still pressed to your face and your tears still falling and all of it, the whole terrible weight of the past weeks, sitting on your chest. "I know how it looked. I know what the late nights looked like and the calls and the trips, I know exactly how it looked, and I should have–" he stopped. His jaw tightened. "I should have seen what it was doing to you and I didn't, and that's on me. That is entirely on me."

He reached up and took your hands away from your face, gently, and held them, and then his hands moved to your face, cradling it, his thumbs moving across your cheeks and catching your tears, you looked up at him with all of it written on your face, the hatred and the hurt and the desperate exhausted want for any of this to make sense.

"I'm not lying to you," he said, low and close, his eyes on yours. "I have never lied to you. This–" he glanced briefly toward the papers on the coffee table, "this is how far I am willing to go to stop you from throwing away something real because of something that isn't. You made me come to this point. You pushed me here."

"Don't you dare," you said, and your voice came out wet and furious, "make this my fault–"

"I'm not." His hands tightened slightly on your face. "I'm saying I love you. I'm saying I am not letting you go. Those are not the same thing."

You looked at him, at those mismatched eyes close to yours, at the particular quality of his certainty that had always undone you and was undoing you now in a way you resented completely, you felt something pull in your chest that you did not want to feel, and so you reached up, pushed his hands away from your face and stepped back and shook your head, you turned and walked to the bedroom with fury carrying your feet because if you slowed down you were going to fall apart.

"Do whatever the fuck you want," you said, shoving the bedroom door open hard enough that it swung back against the wall. "I'm leaving."

You went straight to the wardrobe and grabbed the first bag you could reach and started pulling things off hangers, off shelves, underwear, shirts, whatever your hands found first, not folding anything, not thinking, just moving, because moving was the only thing that was holding you together.

"I'm talking to you." His voice from the doorway, and then his footsteps behind you.

"I'm not listening," you said, and grabbed another handful of clothes.

"Look at me."

"No."

"Look–"

His hand closed around the bag and yanked it out of your grip and threw it across the room and it hit the floor with a dull thud that landed in the silence like a full stop.

You spun to face him. He was right there, closer than you'd realised, and he looked at you with something that was past cold now, past the boardroom composure, past all of it, something that was just raw and furious and desperate all at once, the face of a man who had run out of patience and hadn't found anything calmer underneath it.

"You're not getting this," he said. "Are you? You genuinely don't understand that I am not letting you walk out of here."

"Just let me go!" Your voice came out ragged, and you meant it, you meant every word of it, and you tried to move past him but his hands found your arms and held you, not hard, just immovable, and he walked you back slowly, step by step, until the backs of your knees hit the edge of the bed and you sat down hard and looked up at him.

"Tell me what you need," he said. "Anything. You name it, it's done. You want me home every night, I'm home every night, no exceptions. You want the trips stopped, they stop. You want Elizabeth out of that building by tomorrow morning–" something moved across his face, "she's already gone, I'll call it in tonight, I don't care." His hands tightened around yours. "You want me to prove it to you, I will spend however long it takes proving it. Whatever it is. Just tell me."

You looked at him, at his face this close to yours, and felt your chin tremble and hated it.

"You can't just say that," you said. "You can't just say whatever I want and expect–"

"I'm sorry, sweetheart." His voice was low against your skin, as he laid you back against the bed slowly, his hand pressing into the mattress beside your head, and pressed his lips to your jaw, your neck, moving down with unhurried patience, the patience that had always undone you, that you had spent months missing without letting yourself name what you were missing.

"Baelor–" His name came out unsteady and you hated how unsteady it was, hated what it gave away.

He didn't stop. His mouth moved to your collarbone, your neck, and then lower, to the neckline of the shirt, his shirt, one of the many you had been wearing around the flat for a week without acknowledging why, and he paused there with his lips at the edge of the fabric and looked up at you, and his eyes in the low light of the bedroom had that quality they sometimes had, the one that made you feel like the only thing in the room worth looking at.

You tried getting up, but it was to no avail as he pushed you further into the bed, his weight shifted and you weren’t going anywhere, and some part of you that you weren’t proud of didn’t entirely want to.

"Have I not given you everything," he said, his voice dropping against the slope of your neck, his lips finding the skin there, slow and deliberate. "Have I not given you all of it."

You had no answer for that. Because the honest answer was yes, and you both knew it was yes, and the yes of it didn't make any of the other things less true– the manipulation, the threats, the cold certainty of a man who had decided you belonged to him and acted accordingly– but it sat in your chest anyway, heavy and real and deeply inconvenient.

"You did– and I know that," you said, and your voice came out shaky in a way you couldn't help, and your eyes were burning again, and you were so tired of your own tears at this point, so tired of how easily he could bring them out of you.

His hand found your throat.

Not hard. Not hurting. Just the weight of it, warm and certain, fingers curving lightly at your jaw, and your hand came up without thinking and rested over his, and his eyes moved to yours and stayed there. His breathing had changed. Something in his face had dropped every last layer of the composure, every last bit of the boardroom and the cold and the careful patience, and what was underneath it was something rawer and considerably more dangerous.

"You say that, my love," he said, very quietly, "and then you spend a week locking doors and walking around in my shirt like I'm supposed to pretend I don't notice." His thumb moved once along your jaw. "I think it's time I reminded you what you keep trying so hard to forget."

"Baelor–" His name came out wrong again, too soft, not enough warning in it.

His lips came down on yours and it wasn't gentle. It was hungry and certain and relentless, the kiss of a man who had been patient for a week and was completely finished with patience, and you felt it move all the way through you, your hands coming up to his chest without quite managing to push.

 He followed when you turned your face, his mouth finding your jaw, your neck, and then back again, and his hands were warm and certain on your skin, pulling the shirt over your head before you had entirely decided not to stop him.

The cold air hit you and you pressed into him without meaning to, and he was already there, arms pulling you in, and his lips were at your throat and his hands were everywhere and you felt your thoughts go quiet one by one, the lawyer and the papers and the week of locked doors and all of it dissolving under his hands until there was nothing left but the warmth of him and the dark of the room and the specific, devastating patience of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had all night to do it.

"Baelor," you said, against his shoulder, and it didn't sound like stop anymore.

"I know," he said, low against your skin. "I've got you."

You hadn’t even realised when your pants had been pushed down and discarded somewhere on the floor. The only thing that made it register was the sudden pressure of Baelor’s knee sliding between your thighs, forcing them apart with a quiet insistence that made your breath catch.

He didn’t rush.

That was the worst part of it.

Baelor moved slowly, deliberately, like he had all the time in the world. His mouth trailed down your body in unhurried kisses, each one lingering just long enough to make you tense, waiting to see where he’d go next. There was something restless in the way he touched you, an impatience buried beneath control, like he was holding himself back by sheer force.

You watched him through a haze as he straightened briefly, unbuttoning his top and letting it fall somewhere beside the bed. The movement was quick, careless, his attention never really leaving you.

When he leaned over you again, his gaze was darker.

“Look at you,” he murmured, voice low and rougher than usual. His hand slid up your side, slow enough to make you shiver. 

The shift of his weight stole the breath from your lungs. Your vision blurred again as you clutched at his shoulders, tears slipping past your temples from the intensity of it.

Baelor let out a strained groan under his breath, the sound deep in his chest. For a moment he pressed his forehead to yours, jaw tight like he was trying to keep himself composed.

“God,” he muttered quietly, almost to himself. His hand tightened slightly where it held your hip. “You’ve no idea what you do to me.”

The restraint didn’t last.

His grip grew firmer, movements more certain, like the control he normally carried so carefully was beginning to slip. Each breath he took sounded heavier than the last, his composure unraveling piece by piece.

“You want to leave?” he said quietly, his voice rough now, but still controlled enough to cut. “You think you can just walk out and untangle yourself from me like I’m a bad investment?”

His hand slid down your side, slow, deliberate, possessive. 

“You don’t understand,” he continued moving inside of you, eyes locked on yours. “There is no version of this where you and I end separately.”

Your heart was beating too fast. Too loud. You hated that your body still reacted to him, hated that even now he could make your thoughts blur.

His forehead pressed to yours again, but this time there was no softness in it.

“I’ll never let you go.” 

“I promise I’m going to be good to you,” he said softly, like he was offering you something generous. “It’s going to be us… and a baby.”

Your eyes widened instantly, panic breaking clean through the haze.

The word landed heavier than the threats had. He felt it. You knew he did.

“Baelor, no what are you talking–” you said, your voice sharp with fear now, hands pushing at his chest.

He caught your wrists easily. Not hurting. Just immovable.

“Yes,” he corrected, calm as ever.

“You wouldn’t leave then,” he continued, quieter now, studying your face like he was already seeing the future play out. “You wouldn’t take my child away from me. You wouldn’t drag this through court when there’s something tying us together.”

His hand slid up to cradle your jaw, thumb brushing under your eye where tears had gathered again.