perxsphone

You stared at the screen for a few seconds. You were wide awake, and you definitely didn’t have the energy to start on your own work.

You giggled at your own message before hitting send.

YOU: I sold it oops

The reply came before you could even exit the app.

UNKNOWN: stop fucking around man im not in the mood

YOU: I dont think this is the right number lol

A minute passed with the typing bubbles flickering on and off a couple times.

UNKNOWN: the fuck

YOU: If ur stuck on his class just check the 2022 archive

There was no response after that. You eventually drifted off to sleep, figuring that was the end of a weird interaction.

Four days passed, and you completely forgot about the random text until friday when you received a notification from the same number.

UNKNOWN: it worked

You blinked at the message, trying to remember who it even was.

YOU: Yeah

UNKNOWN: howd you know about that

YOU: I saw his desktop open with that site and took my chances

UNKNOWN: youre actually not michael?

YOU: No im pretty sure im not a guy

You thought the conversation would end there, but about ten minutes later, you got another text.

UNKNOWN: any other shortcuts u know about

YOU: Maybe

Over the next two weeks, the texts became a weird regular thing. It wasn’t a constant back and forth, but it turned into a daily routine.

You’d get a text in the middle of the afternoon about whatever, or you’d send a quick message about random things in your life.

You didn’t know each other. There was no pressure. You didn't have to put on a performance to try to impress whoever it was you were talking to.

UNKNOWN: what were u saying

UNKNOWN: just got to the gym

YOU: Tf didnt you just leave ur room

UNKNOWN: yeah

YOU: Is the gym right next to ur house or smth

UNKNOWN: the gyms downstairs

YOU: Oh you live in an apartment??

UNKNOWN: no

UNKNOWN: i have a gym in my house dumbass

YOU: Oh!!!!!

YOU: Different tax bracket

UNKNOWN: funny

You found yourself looking forward to those short, blunt messages. He was definitely arrogant, but he was always honest and that pulled you in.

By the third week, the conversations started stretching later into the night. You’d be lying in bed, messaging your friends, and a text would pop up at 1 AM.

👻: why the fuck are you awake

YOU: Im readingg

YOU: why are YOU awake

👻: driving

YOU: Ur gonna die

YOU: Get off ur phone

👻: You sound like my dad

👻: He’s the reason im driving

YOU: Shit is he at the hospital??

👻: no im clearing my head

YOU: Oh

YOU: You okay?

👻: family dinner was so fucking annoying

👻: just micromanaging my schedule like im some kid

YOU: I feel that, my parents keep controlling my life its so stupid

👻: exactly its pathetic

👻: honestly its weird talking to you

You: Ok whyd i catch a stray hello

👻: no i mean its off talking to someone who isnt trying to get something out of me

YOU: idek who u are so theres nothing to get

👻: keep it that way

Then during one morning, you walked into the lecture hall for Professor Davis’s class.

The room was already buzzing with students and you took your usual seat next to Tanselle who was busy drawing sketches on her paper.

“Did you finish the reading he gave last week?” Tanselle asked, not looking up from her page.

“Barely,” you muttered, pulling your laptop out of your bag. “I read like two pages.”

Down in the fourth row, right near the aisle, Aerion Targaryen was slouched back in his seat. He had his dark leather jacket slung over the back of his chair and was surrounded by his usual crowd.

One of them said something, and Aerion let out a short laugh. The guy looked around the group with triumph all over his face, proud that he managed to impress Aerion.

Just then, your professor began talking and it didn't take long for you to lose focus.

Bored out of your mind as Professor Davis started droning on about the text you guys were supposed to read, you pulled your phone out under the desk.

YOU: Im bored entertain me

You hit send.

You kept your eyes on your screen, but then out of habit, your gaze drifted back down toward the front of the room.

Down in row four, you watched Aerion reach into his pocket. He pulled out his phone, a small smirk tugging on the corner of his lip.

His jaw set as he read something, and his thumbs immediately typed out a fast response before he shoved the phone face down on his desk.

Your phone vibrated in your palm.

👻: go entertain yourself

Your breath hitched. You stared at the screen, your heart doing a weird thud against your ribs.

No way, you thought. The lecture hall is massive. At least forty people were on their phones. It’s a coincidence.

Your fingers hovered over the keyboard. You needed to be absolutely sure. You typed out a reply, keeping your eyes glued directly on the back of his silver head.

YOU: Ok unkind

YOU: So ur actually paying attention to class?

The exact moment your text delivered, you watched as Aerion’s head tilted down. He picked his phone back up, scoffing under his breath. His thumbs moved around the screen, typing quickly.

Buzz.

👻: no im looking at my phone because a dumbass is texting me

A cold wave of panic hit you.

Your eyes darted from the screen to the back of his leather jacket. Your mind was short-circuiting, trying to connect the dots.

Aerion Targaryen.

Aerion Targaryen who had a reputation for being, well, himself— was the exact same person who had been texting you until midnight.

You spent the remaining minutes of that lecture staring into the wall. Every time Aerion shifted, your eyes snapped straight to him.

When the bell finally rang, the sudden noise of chairs scraping against the floor made you jump.

“Thank god,” Tanselle muttered, slamming her notebook shut. “You coming to the library?”

“I don’t think so,” you replied after a beat, shoving your things into your bag.

At the front, Aerion was already walking. One of the guys threw an arm over his shoulder and Aerion swatted him off with a grin.

He didn’t look back once. He had absolutely no idea.

For the next three days, every time your phone buzzed, your stomach did a flip. You knew exactly who was on the other side of the screen now, while he remained clueless.

During a late saturday night, you were eating with your friends when your screen lit up.

👻: this movies terrible

👻: why would you recommend this

You stared at the text. Knowing it was Aerion, reading the texts felt completely surreal.

YOU: Ok my bad ill just die

YOU: Its good tho idk what ur on

👻: its not

You: Lol turn it off then

👻: im already an hour in

👻: wouldnt wanna hurt your feelings

YOU: Aww how sweet

YOU: Stubborn bitch…

You bit your lip as you sent the second message. No one would dare to call him that in person, it was thrilling.

👻: lmao

👻: what are you doing anyway

YOU: Eating cheesecake

YOU: Wait have u done the assignment due next week

👻: nah im dreading the partner assignment on monday

👻: if i get paired with one of the idiots im doing it alone

You swallowed hard, grabbing your glass to drink the strain away.

YOU: Maybe youll get someone decent

👻: doubt it

You closed your phone and pressed it onto your chest. He was so different in real life.

When monday came, the room was silenced as Professor Davis tapped his microphone, turning on the massive projector behind him.

“Alright, I’ve randomized the pairings for the research,” he announced. “Check the board, find your partner, and spend the rest of the period discussing with them.”

Your eyes scanned the list, stopping as you found your name near the center column.

Your lungs locked up.

Aerion Targaryen was written right next to it.

“Oh, jeez,” Tanselle said, looking at you with worry. “You got Aerion… Good luck babe.”

Down in row four, Aerion didn’t even bother looking back to find his partner. He simply opened his laptop, ignoring the rest of the room while his friends started moving around. He clearly expected whoever his partner was to come to him.

You took in a deep breath, grabbing your bag.

Walking down the steps felt like walking a plank. As you got closer to his seat, a couple of his friends looked up at you. One of them nudged the guy next to him to clear a seat for you, leaving an empty chair next to Aerion.

You gave them a light smile before sliding into the seat, setting your laptop on the desk. Up close, he smelled like expensive cologne and musk.

“You’re my partner?” he asked, his voice a careless drawl. He still didn’t look at you, opening a blank document.

“Yeah.” You kept your voice as even as possible.

“Type in your email,” he said, turning the laptop just an inch so you could see the screen. “I’ll do the body and everything else. You do the outline and introduction.”

You blinked at him, the contrast hitting you like a physical punch. No jokes, no banter, no casualty.

You were aware he had a reputation for being a ‘womanizer.’ So why was he so cold to you?

“Okay,” you mumbled as you awkwardly reached out to type in your email.

He didn’t say another word to you for the rest of the hour. You sat right next to him, occasionally looking at the side of his sharp profile, realizing this was the same guy who had texted you about the miserable movie you recommended to him just two nights ago.

By 10 PM that same day, you were sitting on your bed, staring at the shared Google Docs. He had already finished his sections before you did.

Your phone buzzed on your blanket.

👻: just wrapped up that history project early so i dont have to deal with it later

You read his message, a sour feeling building up in your chest. You picked it up, your expression hardening.

YOU: Lucky, im still doing mine

You lied.

👻: thats sad

Chewing on your inner cheek, your thumbs moved before you could stop.

YOU: Hows ur partner

The typing bubbles appeared immediately.

👻: its some girl in my section i didnt pay attention

👻: she didnt mess anything up, shes whatever

She’s whatever.

Your eyes fixed on his message until they blurred. You had spent weeks listening to him, laughing at his texts, sharing personal concerns to each other—and yet in real life, you were just a boring, insignificant whatever to him.

The irritation flared up. You tossed your laptop onto your bedside table and sat back against the headboard of your bed.

YOU: Cool

A minute passed without a response.

👻: just cool?

YOU: Yeah

👻: youre acting weird

You left the text on read. Not like it mattered, his read receipts were off. Throwing the phone somewhere in your bed, you didn’t reply.

For the next few days, you struggled returning to how you normally were.

He didn’t text you the morning but eventually did at night, and you left it unreplied for two hours before sending a short answer.

👻: you alive?

YOU: Yes

👻: ok whats wrong then

YOU: Nothing

👻: ???

YOU: What

👻: fine

It felt petty, but each time you looked at your phone, you remembered him sitting right next to you and not even glancing your away. You felt stupid, but his words hurt too.

If you were just a blank space to him in person, you figured it would be better if you were that way on every platform.

By the end of the week, the silence between your texts was heavy. He didn’t text you back after the last chat, and you definitely weren’t going to break first.

You were sitting in class when Tanselle walked in, settling in the chair beside you.

Professor Davis cleared his throat before speaking. “Alright, before we start today’s lecture, I’ve set up a group thread for the upcoming peer reviews. Click on the link and make sure you’re in it by the end of the day.”

You opened your phone to join the chat, then automatically shoved the phone back into your bag. You had no intention of participating.

The period of the lecture ended with a few minutes remaining and your phone started vibrating nonstop.

You tried to ignore it, but the constant noise was getting frustrating. You reached into your bag and pulled it out, looking to mute the group.

A new message popped up at the bottom of the chat. A classmate tagged your number directly because you hadn’t put your name on the sheet yet.

Too annoyed with the whole class to care, you swiped the app and locked your screen.

Then, your eyes subconsciously drifted toward Aerion. You watched as he pulled his phone out.

He was scrolling through the mass text thread when suddenly, he froze.

His head tilted slightly. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at the only text tagging a number. The number he’d been texting every day.

Up front, the classmate who had sent the message lost his patience. He turned around, looking up at where you and Tanselle were sitting.

The guy called out your name, his voice turning multiple heads in the quiet room. “I just tagged your number in the group, you need to upload your topic.”

The sound of your name echoed through the lecture.

Aerion’s head snapped up.

He didn’t look at the guy talking to you. His eyes darted straight up until they locked dead onto you.

The usual expression on his face dropped away. His eyes searched your entire face, his brows drawing in closer.

He saw the phone in your hand before going back to your face.

It clicked.

You stilled under his gaze, the blood rushing loud in your ears.

Beside you, Tanselle nudged your shoulder. “Babe. Babe? He’s talking to you?”

“Yeah,” you managed to choke out. Your fingers felt like wood as you uploaded the topic into the sheet. “Done. It’s in there.”

The classmate muttered a quick thanks and turned back around.

But Aerion didn’t.

He stayed shifted in his seat, his body turned toward your row. One of his friends said something, laughing and clapping him on the shoulder, but Aerion blindly shrugged the guy’s hands off without looking at him. His dark gaze remained on you.

You looked down at your screen, pretending to type, but you could feel the weight of his stare.

A quick glance back down confirmed it. He was staring at you like he was seeing you for the first time, his mind putting the pieces together.

Some girl in my section, she’s whatever. He finally understood why you had iced him.

When the bell rang, you instantly stood up, already packing your bag.

“Why are you in such a rush?” Tanselle asked, shaking her head with confusion.

You gave her a tight smile. “I just need to get back.”

You wanted to wait out the crowd, hoping he’d leave first, but Aerion was already standing by the row exit.

He leaned his back against the desk, ignoring his friends as they stood confused as to why he was still there.

Panic flared in your chest. You didn’t think this through properly.

Without thinking, you threw yourself into the small crowd shuffling through the other exit at the top of the hall.

You basically sprinted across the stone of the parking lot, your keys already clutched in your hand. Unlocking the car, you threw your bag into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

You slumped on the headrest, gripping the steering wheel as you finally let out a breath.

Then, your phone lit up with two notifications.

There were two missed calls and above them another notification popped up. It was a text.

“Oh my god, you’re pretentious.” You say, rolling your eyes at the girl sitting across the table. She frowns, biting the end of her pen as a blush stains up her neck and across her cheeks. She’s not going to voice another of her shitty takes, but you can’t seem to let it go anyway. Her stupid, drawling voice as she explained her completely wrong opinion on the author’s intention has pissed you off, and you keep digging at her. “I mean seriously, you think Steinbeck gave a single shit about the suffrage movement when he wrote women like little kids or fuck toys or sometimes both?” The girl is beet-red now, and she shrinks down in her seat like she wants to disappear.

You roll your eyes again and slump back in your own chair, dropping your prey. She’s boring, anyway. And you made your point. That’s when you hear it, the barely audible huff of a laugh from somewhere behind you. You turn your head to the side, eyes meeting electric green. Roman Godfrey. He smirks and drops his gaze to his desk when you catch him, but he drags his eyes back up your body, appreciating the relaxed, effortless way you’ve poured yourself into the seat. It’s not like he hasn’t noticed you before, you’re a female with a pulse so of course he has. But he had no idea you could be such a fucking bitch, and it’s hot.

He catches you after class, cutting in front of you in the corridor so you have to actually stop to avoid crashing into him. He wouldn’t mind if you did, your tits look insane in your tight babydoll tee. “You lost?” You ask, raising an eyebrow at him.

Roman is tongue-tied and delighted. “In your eyes.”

You scoff, your own eyes rolling, and Roman can almost picture what you look like when you cum, eyes rolling back and drooling all cock-drunk.

“Let me get you a map, Godfrey.” Roman feels a little twinge of pleasure that you know his name, even as you stick your hand into the tiny back pocket of your jeans before pulling it out again and flipping him the bird. He briefly considers snatching your hand and sucking your middle finger into his mouth, but he figures that might earn him a kick to the balls he could do without.

“Oh you’re rude.” He says with a smirk. It’s a compliment.

You bite your bottom lip, letting your eyes rake over him. He’s tall, but he slouches a little bit like he can take up less room. Not that it makes a difference. Heads turn when he passes, always have. A Godfrey thing. “Don’t like being hit on when I’m this sober.”

Roman considers offering you something from the little pillbox in his jacket, but you’re already turning, dismissing him like he’s nothing. Like he’s any one of the mouth breathers polluting the school hallways with their teenage angst bullshit. He’s seized with an intense desire to make you see him, and his hand is sliding into his pocket before he can think better of it.

Roman’s cock jumps the moment he slides the needle into the plump flesh of your ass. He waits for your squeal, but it doesn’t come. He withdraws his tiny weapon as you spin, your eyes flashing. “You better have fucking sterilized that thing Godfrey or I swear I’ll castrate you with a rusty butter knife.” And that shouldn’t be hot, but Roman is broken in a way he doesn’t like to think about and his cock twitches and leaks at the thought of you anywhere near his balls, wielding a rusty weapon or not.

He twirls the needle expertly between his thumb and forefinger. “You knew about this?”

Your face slips into a condescending smirk. “Girls talk, you know.”

Roman hums, “Not to you, I thought.”

You nod reluctantly, accepting this. “No, but they talk loud in the bathroom and I have ears.”

Roman jabs the tip of his needle against the pad of his thumb, relishing in the pop of pressure as the blunt tip pierces his skin and pushes the tiny residual drop of your blood into his own body. “So you must also have heard that I’m an exceptionally good lay.”

You drop your eyes to his crotch, licking your lips at the substantial bulge pressing against the front of his dark jeans. “I think they’re all just scared of you.”

This pleases Roman immensely and his cock pulses and strains to reach you. To kiss your pretty mouth and slick through your lips. “Are you scared of me?”

“No. I think you’re kinda pathetic, actually.” You answer effortlessly, no hesitation, and Roman’s a little surprised by the flutter of butterflies in his stomach.  He really must be sick, to think that you dismissing him like this is hotter than if you flirted with him like everybody else does. He doesn’t know what he has to do to earn your affections. Hell, he’d settle for something more than your indifference, at this point.

*

It doesn’t feel like completely the wrong move, but Roman realizes within about ten seconds that he’s fucked up. He thought maybe you’d find it funny. Or at the least you’d roll your eyes and tell him it was dumb. What you do instead sets a lump in his throat. You look at him, past him, through him as you toss the plushie rabbit into the trashcan beside your locker, and you walk away. Roman is gutted. Maybe you didn’t get the reference? He’s kicking himself over and over all the way to his car at the end of the day. A plushie? He’d put a fucking plushie in your locker and thought it’d grant him a little more of your attention, like you were just some girl and not the fucking antichrist. Fucking idiot.

There are people by his car. Roman stops a few paces away, spine straightening. Not because of the rubberneckers, he can deal with them. It’s the smell. There’s fur and fear and blood. Above all else, blood. The sharp, iron scent of it smeared over his windscreen in the crude shape of a heart. The broken body of the rabbit, the real fucking rabbit sits on the hood.

Roman chews on the inside of his cheek, tearing the puffy flesh to shreds and filling his mouth with copper to stop himself from running a finger through the mess on his windshield. People knew he was weird, but he was the hot, acceptable kind of weird. That’d change if he licked animal blood off his car, for fucking certain. He gets in and drives with purpose, streaky gore smearing his vision as he leaves the town limits behind and pulls into the disused quarry a couple miles outside of Hemlock Grove.

“That was fucked up.”

You raise your eyes to his, tongue darting out to wet your bottom lip. “You’ll really need to narrow it down.” You’re pleased he found you so quickly. It proves what you’d already suspected – that Roman Godfrey has been stalking you. There’s no way he’d have known to look here, otherwise.

“What you did to my car.”

A lazy smile spreads across your face. “You didn’t like my present?”

And Roman swallows, because he sort of did like it. “It was fucked up.”

You shift, pushing up to your knees and looking up at him through your lashes and shit you’re doing it on purpose. He can’t think with you looking up at him like that. “That’s not a no.” Your voice is low and soft.

The strangled whine is out of his mouth before he can stop it, and your eyes widen as a feral, predatory grin splits your face. You’re so pretty. Roman hates it. “You didn’t need to kill it.”

You curl your lip in disgust. “I don’t go around murdering house pets, Godfrey. I found that, it was roadkill.”

“Oh.” The surprise softens some of the tension rolling through him, and Roman’s shoulders drop a little.

“So don’t eat it. Don’t know how fresh it is.”

Roman scoffs, even as blood seeps under his skin and heats his cheeks. “I wasn’t gunna eat it, what the fuck.”

You hum, rising slowly, too slowly to stand in front of him. “You want to though, don’t you? Thought of all that blood and muscle and sinew gets you…” you reach down and your fingers curl around the traitorous bulge in his pants and Roman’s vision goes white at the feeling of you cradling his stiff cock. “Hard.” You breathe, tilting your face up like you’re daring him to kiss you.

But he can’t kiss you. If he kisses you, it’ll be over. The game, the chase. It’ll be cards on the table and it’ll be this was fun, but I don’t like you, Roman. Who would? And he isn’t ready to shatter it like that yet. “You’re touching my cock, of course it’s gunna get hard. Don’t read into it.” He tries to sound dismissive, but his hips tilt forward, rutting his cock into your palm, and by the spark in your eyes as your pupils expand he knows he’s failed miserably.

“It was cute, you know.”

Roman tenses. “It was lame.”

“Truuuuuue,” you drag out the word, tilting your wrist down to cup his balls and Roman’s eyes shutter closed. “But I got it. Just one thing I couldn’t figure out though.” Your nails scrape against his shaft and Roman’s mouth falls open as his head drops, watching the way you grope against his pants through hooded eyes. “Were you saying I’m obsessed with you? Or…” You release his cock, and Roman almost protests but then you reach for his zipper, tugging it down and sliding your hand right into his boxers. The feel of your bare skin against his cock is akin to a religious experience, and Roman sinks his teeth firmly into his bottom lip, hard enough to puncture flesh as you squeeze him at his base and then glide your hand up and down, rough and full of searing friction. “Are you…” You press up on your tiptoes, crushing your mouth to his and tugging his bleeding bottom lip into your own mouth. You suck hard, hard enough to make Roman wince and his cock thickens in your hand as he feels his blood drawn out of his lip and over your tongue. “Obsessed…” you whisper, letting a thin trail of pink-tinged spit roll out of your mouth and down your chin. “With me.”

And Roman folds. He gives up all pretence of control, abandons the lie of indifference. “Yeah.” He breathes, bucking into your hand. “Think I am.”

You pull your hand out of his pants and step back, spitting the globule of saliva and blood onto the ground at his feet. “Like I said.” You flash him a grin and there’s blood on your teeth and Roman takes half a step toward you. “Pathetic.”

*

There’s a boy pressed against the wall, his fingers rubbing clumsily against the front of your panties, up your skirt. His tongue keeps licking into your mouth, saturated with cheap beer, and you have to focus really hard on the rough friction of your underwear dragging against your clit to resist the urge to knee him in the balls just to see whether he’d cry about it. But it’s not enough, and you close your eyes, picturing his bitten, full bottom lip dragging against his sharp white teeth, and his enormous, hungry green eyes. And you’re close. So, so close to coming against the pressure of the clammy, shaking hand of the starry-eyed jock who can’t quite believe his luck, when the arousal just… gutters out like a smashed bulb. Nothing to be done about it. You shove the boy away, running a hand through your hair and wiping your mouth with the back of your hand. “Go.”

“But-“

You hold up a finger to silence him. “Don’t fucking finish that. I promise you won’t like what happens next.” The boy pouts, his bottom lip wobbling like he’s gunna cry about his neglected cock, and you shake your head. “I’m fucking serious. Think blue balls hurt? Try black and blue, you’ll pass out from the pain every time you even think about getting hard.” You tap your toe against the ground. “Steel caps.”

His eyes drop to your shoe and he swallows, before making maybe the first really smart choice in his short life and slinking off, back into the party. The beat of the bass thumps out of the open kitchen door for a moment before he disappears into the house and you’re wrapped in muted quiet again.

“You can come out, you know. I won’t bite.” That’s a complete lie, and he knows it. Roman flicks the dying embers from the end of his cigarette as he steps around the side of the house, not trying at all to hide the bulge in his pants.

“You sound like a real little slut when you’re getting fingered, you know that?”

You scoff. “He wasn’t fingering me. The fact that you can’t tell the difference is… disappointing.”

Roman quirks a brow, letting smoke curl lazily out of his mouth. “I can tell you didn’t finish.”

You take the cigarette from between his fingers and drop it on the ground, crushing it deliberately under the steel toecap of your boot. “Not even close.”

Roman’s eyes drop to your foot and then trail up your bare leg to the hem of your skirt. “I could get you off.”

This takes you by surprise, actually. You didn’t know the boy had it in him. “You flirting with me, Godfrey?”

His answering smirk is a little too close to making you feel something as he leans in, breath fanning against your face. “Shamelessly.”

You feel the shift, the tilt as he claws the upper hand out from underneath you, and you just can’t have that. So you grab his hand and yank him closer, shoving his slack fingers into your underwear and half-burying his arm under your skirt. “Go on then.”

Roman freezes for a second, his fingers fluttering against the searing slick heat of your skin. You suck your bottom lip into your mouth, watching him through half-closed eyes, your dark lashes fanning against your cheeks.

Roman doesn’t wait for you to change your mind. He slides his fingers down, collecting the slick of your arousal before gliding them back up to circle your swollen clit. He’s good at this, and he knows it. He presses the pad of his thumb against your clit as his fingers slip down to push against your hole, dipping inside just enough to make your walls clench around nothing. You whine, and Roman can’t help the smirk that curves on his mouth. Finally he’s in control. You huff and reach between your legs, holding his hand still and baring down to impale yourself on his middle and index finger. You squeeze violently around him, stilling his movements and holding his fingers inside your body, and Roman grits his teeth to stop himself from moaning. His thumb rubs against your clit and you release his hand, pressing your palms to his shoulders instead. “Don’t fucking tease me. I’m not in the mood.”

Roman wants to tease you. He wants it so bad, but not at the risk of you deciding this isn’t worth your time and handling it yourself. Or, worse going inside and finding someone else to do it. Roman would lose his damn mind if you did that. So he pumps his fingers in and out of you obediently, his thumb rubbing circles against your sensitive bundle of nerves until your legs are shaking and you lift your head to press your lips against his, muffling the little mewls and whimpers that threaten to fall. You bare down against his hand, grinding into his palm as you cum. Your release rolls through you like a wave, soaking Roman’s hand, and he kisses you through it. It’s the closest to affection you’ve ever given him, and Roman doesn’t really care that you’re only kissing him because he’s made you cum. He’ll make you cum every fucking day, no problem. Your panties are around your ankles, the elastic pulled tight, and you step out of them, crouching to retrieve the soaked fabric and tuck it into Roman’s pocket like a reward.

His fingers are wet with your release when he links them through your own and half-drags you back into the kitchen. It’s almost sweet, holding his hand like you’re together and not rivals in a ‘who can be a bigger, sexier asshole’ competition. That you’re winning. Girls watch him. You’d known it already, but it’s a little thrilling to see it in action, the slide of hungry eyes over his long torso as he slips through the crowds, tugging you along behind him. A girl steps into his path, and Roman’s fingers tighten around your own.

“We’re gunna go play truth or dare in the basement, Roman.” She says, eyes raking up and down. “You in?”

“No.” Roman doesn’t even really look at her as he steps around, eyes fixed on the stairs, on finding a bedroom and locking you inside it.

“It’s clothing optional.” She says, hand lifting to run over Roman’s chest. His eyes drop to her hand, to the curl of her fingers in his shirt.

“If you want to keep your fingers attached to your hand, you’ll take it off him right fucking now.”

Roman’s stomach flips over as you step out from behind him, eyes narrowing on the girl’s fingers as they toy with a button. “Sorry, who asked you?”

You scoff, dropping his hand and hooking your fingers into his belt buckle. “C’mon, Godfrey.” And you walk away, hips swaying, bare cunt just inches away from the hem of your skirt. Roman couldn’t stop himself following you if he wanted to. And he doesn’t. He pulls easily out of the girl’s grasp, not sparing her another look as he follows you up the steps. He stays at least two steps down, so he can peek at the rounds of your ass cheeks every time you lift a leg.

Finding an empty bedroom is harder than you thought it would be. Roman’s on the verge of throwing a couple hundred dollars at one of the horny couples and demanding they give up a room when you push open the door at the end of the hall and say ‘bingo’.

Roman’s barely inside when you drop to your knees and yank his cock out through his zipper. His head thumps back against the closed door as you wrap your lips around his tip and suck, flattening your tongue against the underside of his cock. “Jesus fuck,” he groans, fingers lacing into your hair and tugging lightly.

You hum, looking up at him through your lashes, and Roman rolls his eyes and fixes his gaze on a tiny imperfection in the plaster above his head to avoid cumming down your throat and ending the best fuck of his life before it’s even begun. His free hand opens and closes into a fist at his side, and his hips lift, rutting against your face and slipping his cock into your throat. It’s too much and it’s not enough, and Roman digs his nails into his own thigh before he catches onto an idea that just won’t quit. He slides the needle out of his pocket without letting himself think too much about the fact that you’re a goddamn bitch and you might well bite his cock off if you don’t like this. He drags the needle over your jaw, not hard enough to draw blood but with enough pressure to leave the shape of it against your skin. You hum against his length, sending vibrations through him, and Roman’s grip tightens in your hair as he drops the needle lower, over the soft flesh of your throat. The angle is all wrong, he can’t see it against your skin, and he huffs, dropping his hand back to his side.

You release him with a pop, and Roman almost protests until he sees the dark look in your eyes. “C’mere.” You mumble, lips tingling and a little numb from the rough in and out drag of his cock against your mouth. Roman helps you rise to a stand and follows you to the edge of the bed. You crawl onto the surface, giving him a painfully good view of your bare ass, before you roll down onto your back and hang your head off the edge of the bed. And oh. Oh. Roman knows what you’re offering him, and his knees are weak with the grateful, giddying pleasure of shared depravity as you part your lips and let him thrust into your mouth. He can see the blunt head of his cock in your throat, and you make choking, gagging sounds as he fucks into you over and over again. He twirls the needle between his thumb and forefinger before pressing it to your flesh again, pressing it against the bulging point of his cock until your flesh gives under the pressure and blood bubbles up around the sharp point. You groan, eyes fluttering shut as you swallow, throat contracting around his cock with such wet, hot pressure that Roman can’t stop himself from cumming. He shoots down your throat, grinding his hips against your face roughly.

You wait, more patient than he deserves, for him to jerk through the aftershocks of his orgasm before he pulls his cock out of your mouth and runs the needle over his tongue. You lick your own lips before you roll onto your stomach, tilting your head to the side as you relish in the absolute ruin you’ve made of Roman Godfrey.

“That was… quick.”

Roman scoffs, seizing his cock in his fist and jacking himself roughly. “You want more?”

“Obviously.” You drawl, eyes fixing on the blur of his hand against his cock as he pumps himself. You push up onto your knees, lifting your shirt over your head and reaching around to unhook your bra. Roman’s eyes fix to your chest as your breasts are exposed, and he sucks on his bottom lip. “That help?”

He huffs a laugh. “Yeah it fucking helps. Jesus Christ.”

He doesn’t let go of his cock as he approaches, shoving his jeans down to his knees and climbing onto the bed to sit back against the headboard. His thighs are spread and you climb into his lap, grinding your bare pussy against his leg. “You’ve got a nice cock, Roman. I can’t wait to ride it.” Roman almost doesn’t hear the second part, his brain is too busy short-circuiting over the fact that you’d kinda given him a compliment. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to him. Then his brain catches up with his ears and he groans, letting his cock fall against his stomach so he can grip both your hips and drag you against him. His cock slips easily into the slickness of your folds, the oversensitive head nudging against your clit, and you hum as you roll against him. Roman holds you against him, rutting his hips up and bumping your clit over and over. A little groan spills from his lips, and he reaches down to position the head of his cock at your entrance.

“Stop.”

And Roman does, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to combust. “What?”

“I don’t know if I feel like it anymore.” This is a lie, a blatant, absurd lie. Your hips roll down against him, dragging your pussy up and down the length of his cock and coating him with your arousal. Roman hums, pressing his lips together as he feels every soaking inch of your silky skin dragging over him. You lift up enough to nudge the head of his cock against your entrance, and his hands seize on your hips.

“Yeah, you do.” He mumbles. “You’re so fucking wet.”

“Yeah.” You groan, sinking down just enough to suction the head of his cock inside yourself and squeeze. “But I could just fuck my fingers. Or any one of the guys downstairs. Why should it be you?”

Roman’s brain isn’t actually engaged anymore. He’s hyper-focused on the way your muscles grip around the sensitive head of his cock. “Why…” he whines. “Why shouldn’t it be me?”

You sink down another inch, rocking back and forth against him. Your thighs burn, but it’s worth it for the actual, physical pain contorting Roman’s features. “Beg me for it.”

Roman’s eyes snap to yours at the word. Beg. He doesn’t beg. People beg him. Girls beg for his time. People beg for his money or his influence or a ride in his car. And you’re sitting on the head of his cock and smirking and telling him to beg for it like a fucking dog? He slips the needle from the pocket of his pants. The angle’s a little awkward, but it’s practically an extension of his hand at this point. He drags it down your spine, relishing in the way you arch your back and push your tits into his face. But you don’t drop down onto his cock, so he finds the meat of your ass cheek and pierces your skin. Just barely, not even enough to draw blood. You huff out a little sigh, but you still don’t fucking move.

“You wanna stick it to me so bad, just fucking do it, Godfrey.” Roman’s brows furrow and you roll your eyes before grabbing his wrist from behind your back and dragging his hand around. You drag it over your stomach, and lower. “Wanna give me a new piercing?”

Roman’s cock throbs insistently inside you. Oh, he likes that. You’re not going to let him stick that dirty used needle through your clit, but it’s so fun to watch his pupils expand and feel the meaty throb of his cock inside you anyway.

You’re so easy.” You mumble, sitting down a little, sucking another agonising inch of his cock inside yourself. Roman moans, tossing the needle onto the bed and using both hands to grip your hips. He’s about to impale you on his cock when he feels the bite of sharp steel against his cheek and he freezes. You’ve got a razorblade against his face and a chilling smile on your face. “Needles are so middle school,” you drawl, dragging the blade against his skin hard enough to bite but not to bleed.

“Careful,” Roman mutters, though he really wouldn’t mind if you cut him.

“Oh don’t worry, it’s not for you.”

Roman doesn’t have time to register your words before you’re sinking down onto his cock, your hot, wet pussy squeezing around him so tight he thinks he’s going to cum in about three seconds. Then you moan, drawing the razor blade across the soft flesh of your bare tit, just inches above the stiff peak of your nipple and Roman loses his mind. He lunges forward, mouthing messily over the cut, smearing the blood against your skin as his tongue drags over your skin and he kisses along the clean seam of your skin as blood beads. His hips rut upwards, the head of his cock bumping painfully against your cervix, and you tilt your hips away to force his cock to drag against the spongy, sensitive flesh of your g-spot instead.

Roman doesn’t care. He’s pussy-drunk, blood-drunk, drunk on you and your taste and your smell and the feel of you riding his cock. Your blood fills his mouth and he swallows, warm and rich before sucking greedily at the wound. “Shit, Roman.” You moan. “You’re such a fucking freak.”

Roman can only whine against you, blood dribbling out of his mouth and down his chin and splashing sticky against the point where his cock is disappearing in and out of your body. You lean back to watch him fuck up into you, biting the corner of your lip as your walls flutter around him. Roman’s thumbs dig against your hipbones before his hand skates up your spine to wrap in your hair, dragging your face to his so he can push his bloody tongue into your mouth.

He pulls away with a wet smack, his hips slapping up against yours with brutal precision. “You’re a goddamn psychopath.”

You grin, licking his spit from your teeth as you squeeze around his cock as hard as you can. “And you fucking want me.”

Roman laughs, a breathless, pained sound. “Shit yeah. Shit.” He buries his cock as far into you as he can and holds it there, grinding into that sensitive spot inside you. “Fucking damn.” He whines. He almost misses the glint in your eye as you roll forward, knees meeting the mattress and leveraging yourself off his cock. You push to a stand, your pussy glistening an inch from his mouth, and Roman’s cock twitches after you before dropping sore and neglected against his stomach. “Shit,” he mumbles, eyes fixed to your cunt.

“Look at me. Eyes up here, Godfrey.”

Roman drags his gaze reluctantly from your pussy to look at your face, and it’s exactly as hot as you thought it would be. He’s so pretty all swollen and sweaty and desperate. “Beg for it.”

Roman groans, even as his cock twitches. “I don’t fuckin beg.”

“You’ll beg me.” You say, reaching to smear your finger through the blood congealing on the cut across your breast before pushing your finger into his mouth. “I can give you everything you ever wanted. I’m not asking for much in return you know.”

And Roman does know. He swallows a lump of pride or desperation or mindless lust, whatever you want to call it. And Roman Godfrey looks up at you, the scent of your arousal in his lungs and your blood on his tongue, and he begs.

“Please. Please, I need you so bad. I need to… fuck I need to taste you. Please let me put my tongue in your cunt. Please. And I need to fuck you.” He adds it like an afterthought, even though the throbbing pain in his cock is almost enough to make him cry.

“God,” you groan, slipping your wet finger over his jaw and tilting his head further up to expose his throat. “Really thought you’d hold out longer.” You step back, taking your heat and your scent with you, and Roman feels tears spring to his eyes at the rejection. But no, no way, fuck no was he going to cry in front of you. You’d crucify him. Your back is turned as you kneel on the bed to retrieve your bra, and Roman’s arm hooks around your waist, slamming your back to the mattress as he shoves your legs apart and buries his face in your cunt.

You yelp in surprise as you’re thrown back, but your eyes squeeze shut at the cool, slick press of his tongue parting your folds. Roman finds your clit immediately, sucking the swollen bud into his mouth and flicking against it with the tip of his tongue. He groans against you, sending vibrations through your core, and you reach down to tug hard on his hair. Not to stop him, but to make him make that sound again.

Roman hums against you as your nails drag over his scalp, relishing in the sting as you pull his hair. He has to rut his hips against the mattress, dragging his sensitive cock against the sheets as he kicks his legs to free himself from the trappings of his jeans. He’s glad you can’t see that, because it’s awkward and they get caught up around his ankles and he can’t quite engage his brain enough to remember how to disentangle his limbs.

His fingers dig hard into the meat of your thighs as he pushes your legs further apart, nuzzling the sharp point of his nose against your clit as he dips lower to push his tongue into you. You’re so wet, arousal pooling on his tongue, and Roman swallows greedily, not caring that he’s making too much noise or that his cock is leaking steadily against the sheets and he’ll probably have to buy someone’s parents a new bed. Your palm flattens against the back of his head, pushing him further against you as your hips roll against his face, and Roman hums approvingly as you fuck up against his face. Your slick smears messily against his chin, his cheeks, so unbelievably wet that he almost can’t get a hold of your clit again when he wraps his lips around it, but he manages with the help of his teeth grazing over the hood and you let out a choked laugh. “Don’t fucking bite me, Godfrey.” You warn, voice breathless and sultry. Roman commits it to memory, though in his dreams he’s removing a word from that warning.

He pulls away from your pussy. “You gunna come on my face like a good girl?”

You roll your eyes and shove his head back down, eyes briefly loosing focus as he laughs against you, breath puffing over your sensitive flesh and raising goosebumps on the backs of your thighs. You squeeze your thighs around his head, bucking up against his face to smother the smug smile you know he’s sporting. “You’re so goddamn arrogant, you know th-“ your words cut off with a gasp as Roman shoves two long fingers into you, curling them back and grazing against your sensitive walls. Your head drops to the mattress, hips bucking madly against his face as your orgasm hits. It takes you completely by surprise, and your mouth falls open on an embarrassingly indulgent moan as pleasure rushes through you over, and over, and over.

Roman can’t breathe. Your slick is everywhere, coating his mouth and his nose and running down his chin. His fingers are trapped in a quivering vice as you suck them inside yourself, your release pouring down his wrist and soaking into the sleeve of his shirt. Your legs finally go slack, dropping open and releasing Roman’s face from your cunt. He releases your clit first, pressing a quick kiss to the sensitive nub before he pulls his fingers from you slowly, watching your face contort with the overstimulation of it.

He doesn’t ask permission to fuck you. Far as he can tell he’s earned it, and if you said no now he’d maybe do something insane like beg again. You’re boneless and soaked and pliant as he crawls up your body, pushing your knees up to your chest and pressing his cock into you in one long thrust. Roman moans then. A deep, low rumble of sound at the release of all the awful pent-up agitation he’s been dealing with since you’d threatened to cut off his balls and solidified his hopeless obsession with you.

“Fuck, Roman.” You mumble, lifting your hands to drape around his neck and drag his mouth to yours. You kiss him like you’re devouring something sweet and precious. It’s completely at odds with the way you’ve been treating him, and Roman wonders whether it’s cumming that’s made you so soft, or whether you were just as desperate for this moment as he was.

“You feel so fucking good.” He mutters, pressing his mouth to yours in short, sharp bursts of pressure. “Gunna fill you up with my fucking cum.”

You hum, legs lifting to hook over his hips so you can drive your ankles into his ass-cheeks.  “You’ll have to…” you shift your hips beneath him, changing the angle of his thrusts so his cock bumps perfectly against your g-spot. “Earn that… Godfrey.”

Roman bares his teeth, reaching around to grab your ankle and pushing your leg up higher. The stretch down the back of your leg is painful and you hiss, pushing your calf back against his hand. “You can take it.” Roman spits, shunting his hips against yours harder, faster. The thick head of his cock brushes against your cervix, drawing a whine of protest from you, and Roman’s answering huff of laughter pisses you off more than it should. Your fingers scrabble along the rumpled fabric of the sheet beneath you, looking for the razorblade you’d tucked away, and you drag it over the meat of your thumb. Roman’s eyes drop to your hand, a hum of approval vibrating from his lips as you lift your hand to his mouth and push your bleeding thumb against his tongue.

“There,” you coo, pushing your thumb harder, slipping deeper into his mouth as he sucks on your thumb gently and obedient. “Good boy. You can take it.” Roman’s mouth pops open and he narrows his eyes at you.

“Oh, fuck you.” He spits, hips snapping harder against yours. You squeeze hard around his cock and his hips stutter against yours as pleasure jolts through him, zinging low into his balls. Roman doesn’t at all want to admit that your words have pushed him so close to cumming that he’s holding on for dear life. You’ve pulled your hand back, sucking your thumb into your own mouth with a moan, and Roman spills his load inside you with a strangled string of pretty, filthy words.

You squeeze harder around him, milking every last drop of his orgasm from him, and Roman feels like maybe he loves you a little bit as your hips lift to meet his last few stuttered thrusts. Then you open your mouth. “Six.”

Roman frowns, dragging his oversensitive, softening cock out of you with a wince as he rolls onto his back beside you. He has an insane urge to pull you against his chest and cuddle but he can already guess how you’d take that. And besides. Six is rattling through his head and something like dread starts to kindle in his chest. “Do I wanna know?”

You hum, rolling onto your side and dipping your head to nudge your nose against his nipple. Roman huffs, but he doesn’t try to move away. You’re touching him with an almost-affection. He’s fucking giddy.

“That was a six. You’re a six, all around.”

“The fuck I am.” He drawls, though he hopes you don’t notice the hard way he swallows.

“Yeah. I mean, you get points for enthusiasm. And you can eat. But that was a given considering that mouth of yours.” Your tongue flicks out against the nipple you’ve been nuzzling, and Roman does jump a little then at the unfamiliar sensation.

“And I lose points for…” Roman trails off. He’s pissed at himself for asking, for playing into your sick game, but he can’t help it. He wants so badly to score top marks with you.

You sigh, sucking his nipple into your mouth and biting down hard on the sensitive nub. Roman yelps, shoving you harder than he means to, and you release his flesh with a wet pop. “Stamina, baby. You came so fast.”

Roman’s cheeks heat and he shuffles into a seated position, hastily fastening the buttons on his shirt. He doesn’t remember undoing them and wonders if you’d worked them open whilst he fucked you. The thought that you’d had any thoughts outside of his cock whilst he’d been inside you absolutely burns his pride. “Yeah, well so did you. Didn’t hear any complaints then.” He knows he sounds like a whiny kid, and he hates it.

You hum, climbing onto his lap and shoving his hands away from his buttons. Your fingers make light work of refastening them, and Roman swallows hard and tries to ignore the press of your bare pussy against his cock. “Six isn’t bad, you know?”

Roman scoffs, but his hands lift to rest on your hips and he draws his bottom lip into his mouth as he watches your hands on his shirt. “No?”

“No.” You agree, finishing the last button and draping your arms around his neck. You shift your hips, just a tiny bit, and Roman’s cock stirs to life at the warm, soft contact of your skin. He leans forward, brushing his mouth against yours agonizingly gently. “I mean,” you mumble, pecking his lips. “It’s out of a hundred, but still.”

Roman freezes, eyes narrowing and lips inches from yours. “You fucking bitch,” he breathes, before flipping your back against the mattress again and slotting his mouth over yours to muffle your delighted squeal. Yeah, he’s definitely buying someone’s parent’s a new bed.

But of course, House Lannister accepted the proposal gladly. Your father even went as far as breaking your previous betrothal to House Reyne. No matter how wretched Aerion was, he was still a prince of House Targaryen—blood of the dragon, and your house had never been one to shy away from greed.

And so when your new, blasted betrothed, with his silver hair and evil violet eyes, let out a derisive snort and told you right in your face that:

“The proud Lady Lannister has fallen to my feet at last… How sad.”

Gods knew you had never lacked for sharp words—but for once, nothing came, because this was exactly what your house had thrust you into.

And nor were you comforted when you would-be goodbrother, Daeron, came to you in his drunken stupor, saying:

“At this point, he’s a lost cause. I doubt marriage could fix him… but you could at least fuck him, yeah?”

Your life would be an utter disaster, you were sure of it. Why? Why must it be Aerion fucking Targaryen? You could understand politically beneficial marriage, but still, there were other Targaryen princes besides Aerion!

There were Daeron (though he might rope you into his drinking habit), Matarys (who might be too young for you), Aerys (who was said to have little interest in women, and way too old for you besides), and even Maekar?

No, no. The thought of being Aerion’s stepmother just filled you with more grief.

Valarr would be the perfect choice. The Young Prince was everything a bride could want in a husband… alas, his princess consort was already living that fairy tale with him.

As the only daughter of House Lannister, you were the perfect piece to be played in this game of thrones—such was your fate.

And whether you liked it or not... your wedding with your worst enemy was fast approaching.

“Father, Smith, Warrior, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Stranger...”

Your wedding was a grand event in King’s Landing. Held in the Great Sept of Baelor, three days of feasts and a wedding tourney would follow—festivities befitting a royal union between a prince of the realm and a lady from a powerful house.

You stood at the altar, every inch the perfect bride. Beside you, Aerion was draped in Targaryen prince regalia, the very image of arrogance as he recited the vows—

“I’m hers… and she is mine.”

“I’m his… and he is mine.”

The words tasted like ash on your tongue, but when you glanced at him, you caught the triumphant glint in his violet eyes.

“From this day... to the end of my days...”

You almost looked away in disgust, but the weight of a hundred watching eyes held you in place.

The High Septon then bound your hands together, silk wrapped tight, sealing a union that neither of you had ever wanted— and after a very awkward kiss, you became the Aerion Brightfire’s wife, and he your husband.

A union of a dragon and a lion. To the realm, it was a pretty spectacle, but to you, it was a veiled disaster.

. . .

The wedding, by all appearances, had been a resounding triumph. The feasts had been lavish, the tourney lively, the realm thoroughly entertained.

However, the real trial began when doors to your marital chamber closed behind you with a thud, when both of you shed the amicable masks you had worn all day.

At least your new husband had the sense to refuse the bedding ceremony outright. For that alone, you might have been almost grateful.

“I suppose with this, you could consider this the height of your ambitions fulfilled,” Aerion drawled, both hands on his hips, his voice dripping with that same unbearable arrogance you had come to loathe.

You let out a short, humorless laugh. “If this is the height, then I should like to return it.”

His eyes narrowed, a flicker of irritation breaking through his cool. “How ungrateful. Most women would kill to stand where you are.”

“You flatter yourself. Most women would weep to be wed to you.”

“Careful, my lady wife. You shouldn’t offend me too deeply, or I will be inclined to have your tongue.”

“I should hope to offend you thoroughly then. Feel free to get my tongue out of me, if you could.”

That was how it had always been between you—venom clashing like blades. From childhood to now, nothing had changed.

“Gods, what a delightful marriage this will be!”

Aerion scoffed, throwing his hands up in exaggerated delight before turning away. He began shrugging off his coat, then bending to pull at his boots. Another silence fell—sharper this time, brittle at the edges.

Your gaze flicked, unwillingly, to the bed... and realizing that as a man and wife, you would be sharing a bed together. Something in you snapped at the very thought.

“Oh, bloody hell,” you cursed. “If you intend to share my bed, I suggest you don’t.”

He looked back at you, brow lifting slightly. “Your bed? This is Red Keep, you dullard.”

“I refuse to be anywhere near you!”

“As if I would want—”

“Then go and find one of your whores instead!”

Oh no, maybe you had gone to far, but all you could see before you was the little monster who had made your childhood a misery whenever you visited King’s Landing—one who stole your tarts, shoved you aside, and screamed at you without cause.

For a heartbeat, the air seemed to turn icy, something dark flickering in your new husband’s gaze, sharp enough that it nearly made you recoil.

“Just so you wait until we go back to Summerhall.” Aerion’s piercing violet bore through you. “You won’t be so eager to test me then.”

“I shall try regardless,” you replied, still lifting your chin in defiance.

He held your gaze a moment longer, something unreadable passing behind it—before turning on his heel.

“Enjoy your solitude, wench.”

And with that, he strode from the chamber, the door slamming shut behind him. At last you were alone, safe and free from him and the dreadful notion of the first night.

…then, suddenly, you burst into dry, crisp laughter. The sound escaping you as you sank into the chair before your vanity, your limbs heavy with the weight of it all.

There you had it... the first night of your marriage, and your husband really went to the whorehouse.

. . .

“Impudent little wretch…”

Aerion stalked down the corridor, the words slipping through clenched teeth. His temper burned hot, as though the very walls of the Red Keep offended him.

You. Gods, how he hated you. It was not merely the defiance—though that alone would have been enough. It was the way you met every barb he threw with one of your own since you were children of five. You did not shrink, did not simper, did not bend.

And worse, you had been radiant throughout the day, as much as it pained him to admit. The way your eyes widened just so, the softness of your lips, the slim of your waist—

Gods, what cruel jest was this, that his sworn enemy—now inconveniently, his wife—should be so offensively comely?

A bitter scoff left him.

“Impudent little wretch,” he spat, quieter this time, though the words held no less venom.

As astounding a fact as it was, Aerion was no habitual whoremonger nor witless adulterer. He didn’t even frequent the brothels that often!

Which only made this all the more infuriating… because now he found himself striding towards the Street of Silk, driven not by want, but by seething spite.

If that was what you thought of him, then so be it! He would give you a tale worth choking on—he would be tangled in silks and perfumed arms, and by the morning, you would be known as the wife spurned on her very first night.

His lips curled faintly at the thought, satisfaction flickering beneath his irritation.

Aerion slowed at the entrance of a particularly well-appointed establishment. Music drifted faintly from within, low laughter following after it. For a moment, he simply stood there.

Not out of hesitation, but because the absurdity of it all suddenly pressed sharply at his pride. He, a prince of the blood, reduced to staging a petty display all because his own wife had refused him on his wedding night!

Still, his hand lifted—

“Your Grace.”

The voice cut cleanly. Aerion’s expression darkened at once, already recognizing it. Sure enough, when he turned, two figures cloaked in pure white stood just behind him.

Ser Roland Crakehall and Ser Donnel of Duskendale. Of the Kingsguard.

“Explain yourselves,” Aerion demanded coldly, his gaze flicking between them.

Ser Roland inclined his head, far too calmly for his liking. “We are under orders, Your Grace.”

“From whom?”

“Prince Maekar,” Ser Donnel answered with a tone of finality. “To keep you… in order, my prince.”

For a heartbeat, Aerion simply stared at them, utterly incredulous. That his father had foreseen him marching to a brothel from his wedding feast, and thought it necessary to hatch a contingency plan— how and where did the old man get such a wisdom from?

He moved to brush past Ser Donnel, intent on entering the brothel regardless, but Ser Roland stepped neatly before him and blocked the entrance.

“You insolent—”

“Forgive me, my prince. Our duty is to Prince Maekar, and he has made it clear that you are not to incite any scandal on your wedding day.”

And so the night ended not in scandal, but with a very fuming prince walking back to Red Keep, under the watchful eye of the Kingsguard.

When the news reached you that your husband (of a day, mind you) was unceremoniously escorted back from Street of Silk, you burst not into polite titter or a restrained chuckle befitting a princess—

But a fit of hearty laughter that rang through your chamber.

Gods. The image of insufferable, pride-swollen Aerion halted by his own father’s guards was too priceless in your mind that you wished you had seen it firsthand. This marriage might prove to be entertaining after all!

While you were thoroughly amused, this matter proved rather less amusing for Prince Maekar and Aerion on the breakfast table.

“Father, I fail to see—”

“You fail to see quite a great many things, boy,” Prince Maekar spat, not even granting him the courtesy of finishing. You folded your hands on your lap, trying to be the very image of a docile wife, desperately trying not to break into a smile at Aerion’s peril.

Aerion’s jaw tightened. “I was merely—”

“—making a fucking fool of yourself,” Maekar hissed. “On the night of your wedding, no less.”

“It was not—!”

“Do not insult me with excuses.” His father’s voice dropped, colder now. “I know you, boy. I knew precisely where your temper would carry you, but you are not a strapping boy of seven— you are a prince of the realm!”

Aerion stiffened, pointing a hand at you, which made you look at him scandalously. “She—!”

“Enough!”

The single word struck like a lash that you flinched.

Maekar stepped closer, his gaze hard as iron. “You will not shame this house over wounded pride, Aerion. Not now. Not ever. You are wed. You will act like it.”

Aerion’s hands curled at his sides. “And if I will not—”

“You will,” Maekar said flatly, cutting him off once more. “Because I will not have whispers spreading that my son cannot even command his own household.”

Even your hands were getting clammy at your father-in-law's warning tone. Was this how Aerion was always disciplined? Now you were feeling a bit sorry for him.

Then, quieter, but no less final, Prince Maekar left him with:

“Play your part, Aerion. Or you are no son of mine.”

It was a bit strange to see how Aerion took everything in silence as his father strode away from the hall. That was quite harsh, but unlike the fiery man who you knew, he just sat there, jaw clenched tight.

A part of you felt guilty because in a way, you were the one who drove him out last night, and you were not interested in drawing your father-in-law’s ire anytime soon, so you cleared your throat, having arrived at a decision.

“For what it is worth—” you began, but before you could finish, his head snapped towards you at once, violet eyes narrowing spitefully.

“Spare me.”

You crossed your arms. “I have no desire to be dragged into your father’s displeasure, Aerion.”

His gaze lingered, studying your face. You met it, chin lifting just slightly.

“For the sake of our self-preservation… let’s call for a truce,” you continued, voice measured, “I will play my part. In public, at least.”

“Damn it, wench. Don’t pretend to be generous now,” Aerion snarled at you, spitting each word.

But for all his sharp words, there was something almost resembling an understanding between you for the first time since you swore your vows in the sept.

And so, albeit begrudgingly, both of you became the image of blissful newlyweds ever since.

You would walk beside Aerion with demure smile and composed grace, your hand resting lightly upon his arm. He, in turn, played the decent husband well enough—standing close, sometimes a hand on the small of your back, his expression schooled into calmness befitting a royal prince.

“I have heard the two of you were inseparable as children,” Myriah Martell, the Queen of Seven Kingdoms, said with a pleased smile when you were presented to her. “You suit each other beautifully.”

“You are too kind, Your Grace,” you replied, dipping your head with practiced elegance, your fingers tightening slightly against your husband’s sleeve.

Aerion’s lips curved—or more like, twitched—just enough. “We are… well matched.”

The queen seemed to take your responses as a good sign, because she smiled so widely at the two of you.

“Good, good... May the Seven bless you with many children, dears.”

You grimaced for the briefest moment. Aerion coughed.

Little did the court know of what had transpired in your marital chamber.

. . .

Asking a separate room would make servants talk, and it would reach Prince Maekar in due course. You couldn’t have that, so you came up with an idea and requested a dozen of pillows.

It took three maids to carry them all in. You scarcely spared them a glance, too occupied with your task as you arranged yet another cushion upon the bed with precision.

By the time you were finished, a veritable fortress stood—two layers of embroidered silk dividing the marital bed cleanly in two.

Aerion returned from his bath not long after, about to retire to bed… and he was rendered speechless by the sight before him. He kept staring at it, then at you, then back at the barricade.

“You cannot be serious—”

You turned your head, meeting his gaze with sweet, dangerous calm. “Cross it, and I will make certain you regret it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“An inevitability.”

A long, charged silence stretched between you. Then, with a scoff, Aerion threw himself onto his side of the bed, turning his back to you with pointed disdain.

“Ridiculous woman.”

“Detestable man.”

And so that was how you slept ever since— back to back, divided by a fortress of pillows the two of you swore to never breach.

. . .

At banquets, however, the performance continued and not a soul in court the wiser.

“My lady,” Aerion grounded out through clenched teeth, extending his hand. “May I have this dance?”

You smiled, sweet as honey and false as it was flawless, placing your hand in his. “Of course, my lord husband.”

However, the moment you stepped onto the floor, both of you pressed your lips thin in unison. You were each a fair dancer—well-trained, as any highborn ought to be—and the steps of waltz were second nature. Yet, where other couples moved with effortless grace, you and Aerion were rigid, like two tin men forcing each step into place.

Aerion’s grip tightened ever so slightly at your waist. “Watch your step.”

“I always do,” you hissed. Then a thought, sharp and petty, slipped into your mind.

You drove your heel neatly onto his foot, and he sucked in a sharp breath in response.

“My apologies...” you said, all syrup and innocence, even as he shot you a scowl.

Moments later, his foot came down on yours—too deliberate to be an accident! You forced yourself to swallow the shriek in your throat, and glared up at him.

“A misstep,” he returned with a taunting smile. “My deepest apologies...”

To all, the newly married prince and lady shared a dance of perfect decorum. Only the two of you knew it for the battlefield it truly was.

Your lips were always soft. The curve of your cheek felt even softer beneath his palm, the quiet of your breath too... but it was the way you had looked at him that did it—not sharp, not cutting, but so unguarded and trusting.

Closing the distance, his hand caught your wrist, pulled you toward him with a force that startled even you. Your breath hitched, your body pressing against his as he leaned in—

And his lips crashed against yours.

Not gentle. That was never him. It was hot, fierce, claiming— like everything else about him. As though he meant to silence you, to steal the very breath from your lungs, to corrupt you—

. . .

. . .

. . .

And then, Aerion jerked awake.

His breath came sharp, his whole body tense as though he had truly been there—truly done that, and damnably, that one specific part of his groin felt hard. For a long moment, he simply stared into the dimness and the pillow wall next to him, disbelief settling over him, while hearing your soft snores.

“What the fuck?” he cursed under his breath.

A dream. Just a dream. But for the life of him, it had felt far too fucking real!

Your first official appearance as a royal couple came three moons after the wedding— a grand tourney at Storm’s End, held in celebration of Lord and Lady Baratheon’s tenth wedding anniversary.

By now, you had fully mastered the art of needling him. Aerion often had half a mind to slip sweetsleep into your tea, if only to spare himself your insufferable remarks—but, to his credit, his restraint had held… thus far.

He could not name precisely what it was about you that set him off. Perhaps it is your stupid hair, or your stupid eyes, or that stupid smile you so freely bestow upon squires, yet so rarely upon him. Sometimes, he just wanted to lock you away from prying eyes and silence that sharp tongue of yours himself... with his.

What...? The scenes from his dream last night filled his mind’s eye, and Aerion shook his head once sharply, as though he could rid himself of it.

The journey to Storm’s End from Summerhall was not long. You rode the carriage, while he remained outside upon his prized stallion. Through the veil of the window, he knew you could hear him swearing at his squire.

For this, there had been no question—Aerion would compete in the said tourney. He had always reveled in the bloodlust and the clash of steel, and took no small pride in winning, even if it meant employing tactics others might deem less than honorable.

When his ever-eager squire asked if he would ask for your favor and name you Queen of Love and Beauty should he win, he only scoffed, saying, “No need, and I would sooner put the crown on the elderly Lady Baratheon’s head myself.”

“H-huh? Not Lady Lannister…? Why—”

“No. And stop asking useless question, you witless fool.”

He did not know what he hoped—invoking some reaction, perhaps—but none came from the carriage. What, had he really thought you might rise to it and argue with him?

Aerion clicked his tongue, then drove his heel into his horse’s flank, urging it forward with a sharp kick.

. . .

By the time you arrived, Storm’s End was already alive with celebration. Many highborn lords and ladies gathered for this grand event, and you and Aerion slipped seamlessly into your harmonious facade until the first opportunity arose for you to part ways.

Conversing with ladies your age never held your interest, so you only spared them a few words before excusing yourself. Soon, you decided you had no appetite left for feasting or courtesy, and that the air outside would do you better.

Your husband was an imbecile. Of course you had heard the provoking remarks he’d made earlier, but you left him to his own devices. He was aggravating—so much so that, at times, you had the impulse to give him a good shake to rattle the madness out of him.

You exhaled, kicking the stones in your feet as if they drew your ire. Cool night air brushed against your cheeks and for a moment, you felt better.

“My, why is a fine lady such as yourself out here all alone?”

—so much so that you failed to notice the presence that had crept up behind you.

You went rigid at the sound, whirling around at once. And the instant you caught the sight of a crimson lion, dread coiled low in your stomach.

“Oh, what a surprise... if it isn’t the Lady Lannister.”

Your former betrothed, Rogar of House Reyne, stood before you, tall and imposing, a thin, venomous smile curling his lips.

There was no mistaking the resentment of a man once promised your hand, only to have it torn from him.

You straightened despite yourself, masking the unease clawing at your spine. “Lord Rogar.”

“Look at you now,” he drawled, the sharp stink of wine clinging to him. His gaze dragged over your black gown. “A princess of the dragon’s brood. Tell me, does your prince dote on you as sweetly as they claim?”

House Reyne was a proud and ancient line, long at odds with House Lannister in one way or another. Throughout history, there were many matches made to tie the two lion houses together, and you were considered for it... until your father broke it to bind you to Aerion.

You said nothing, clenching your skirts.

Rogar huffed a quiet laugh. “Ah, silent. How unlike you.” His head tilted, studying your face as though searching for something. “Do you remember, I wonder, how it was meant to be? You, at my side. Our houses bound, our banners flying as one.”

“My father never agreed to such a match,” you replied evenly.

“Strange. I seem to recall him swearing it so. Until a dragon came calling. Until your family decided a title was worth more than honor and handed you off to warm Aerion Brightflame’s bed like a common whore.”

You had always detested this man’s boundless greed. And now, you found one thought almost laughable—Aerion, for all his faults, was still far more tolerable.

Rogar Reyne’s lips twitched, though there was no warmth in it.

“Didn’t they say Lannisters always pay their debts? I’m afraid you owe me a great one, little princess.”

“And didn’t you hear that a Lannister lion does not concern itself with the opinions of sheep?” you returned coldly, lifting your chin. “Lord Rogar, I fear you are not even a sheep... but a roach.”

The crack of his hand against your face came so swift that you hadn’t even realized it. Pain burst across your cheek as you were sent sprawling to the ground, the world spinning for a heartbeat. You tasted blood.

“You bitch,” he spat. “You and your house dare to dishonor mine!”

It was the first time in your life a man had ever struck you. In that instant, your survival instincts took over—driving you to your feet and run.

Your breath came sharp and ragged as you fled through the darkened paths, your skirts gathered in your fists. Behind you, the heavy thud of his boots struck against stone, far too close.

“Stop running, you bitch!”

Something snagged at your leg—thorn or splinter, you didn’t know. The fabric of your dress tore, and pain flared hot along your calf, but you did not stop.

You caught sight of a narrow passage leading to an old door half-hidden in the stables. You lunged for it, fingers fumbling against the handle before wrenching it open and slipping inside. The moment you crossed the threshold, you shoved the door shut with all your strength and slammed the lock into place.

You staggered back a step, pressing a trembling hand to your mouth as you tried to steady yourself. Your cheek still burned, your pulse still raced—but you were safe. For now. Then—

A violent rattling at the door.

You flinched, a strangled gasp tearing from your throat as the handle jerked sharply, once, twice—then again, harder, as if someone meant to break it down.

“Go away, you bastard!” you screamed, holding the wooden door with your bare hands.

“Open the door!”

“I said go bloody hell—!”

“It’s me!”

You froze. For a moment, you could only stare at the door, your hands trembling where they pressed against it. Then, with a shaking breath, you lifted the latch.

And found your silver-haired husband standing outside.

A vexation wrapped in the flawless guise of a lady. Too sharp, too free, and far too composed for his liking. At times, you tried his patience so thoroughly Aerion thought he might truly strangle the fuck out of you.

And yet... here he was, breathless before you now, having chased you through the night like some fool led more by instinct than reason.

Aerion had not meant to follow you, but when he saw his wife fleeing into the night as though someone was hunting her, how could he leave her to it?

“What happened to you?” Aerion demanded, his violet irises blazing, taking in the sight.

You stood before him trembling from head to toe, your eyes wide with something dangerously close to terror. There was a smear of blood at the corner of your lips, and—

Aerion’s hand came up, firm as he caught your chin and tilted your face toward the dim light. The swelling along your cheek was already rising beneath his touch.

Someone has laid a hand on his wife.

“Whose bastard did this to you?”

“Aerion, it’s not—”

“Who?”

You did hesitate, but in the end, you told him of Rogar Reyne, the broken betrothal, and the wroth he had turned upon you.

By the time you finished, Aerion had gone very still. His expression darkened, something cold and vicious settling over his features—so much so that even you nearly recoiled from it.

“I will have his head!” he snarled then with righteous fury, to your shock. “This is high treason. I will demand a trial—!”

“No!” You clutched his arm, horrified. “Don’t!”

Trial by combat—or any form of trials, really—would spell disaster for the royal family and others alike. You wouldn’t let him, and he glared at you, anger still burning hot in his eyes.

“If you must answer this, then do it in the tourney,” you insisted, holding his fiery gaze. “Redeem my honor on the morrow. Slay him if you must, but do it in the melee.”

Still holding his arm, silence stretched between you. You found yourself looking at him—truly looking—as if you just saw him for the first time.

Aerion was ready to demand blood and call for judgment to see your attacker punished. His jawline was sharp, clenched as his beautiful violet eyes gazed at you in return, internally deciding what the best course of action was.

In the end, he listened to you somehow... but that was also when his gaze dropped. There, beneath the torn edge of your dress, blood had begun to seep down your calf.

“Seven hells.” The fury did not leave him, and now shifting to your sorry state. “You are fucking bleeding.”

“It’s nothing—” you dismissed it, but he ignored you entirely. Instead, Aerion forcefully led you down to sit on the wooden planks before he crouched before you, his hands lifted the torn fabric to see the wound.

With a sharp motion, to your shock (again), he tore a strip from the edge of his own doublet.

“What are you—”

“Hold still, wench. I’m trying to stop it.”

He bound the cloth firmly around your calf, his fingers deft despite the dim light, tightening it to staunch the bleeding.

You watched him, something unfamiliar fluttering in your chest. Throughout all the years you had known Aerion, tenderness had never been something you would attribute to him. But now, not only was he furious for your sake, he tended to you with such focus you would never have expected from a man so proud.

“…Where did you learn to do that?” you asked quietly.

Aerion huffed under his breath, not looking up as he secured the knot. “Daeron used to patch me up whenever I took a fall.” A pause followed. “It will have to do for now. Can you walk?”

You shifted, testing your weight. The sting along your calf answered for you as you grimaced. “…Not well.”

He let out of a long exhale, as if exasperated, and you thought you would force yourself to walk regardless rather than risking his ire, but—

Before you could protest, Aerion bent and swept you up into his arms.

A startled breath left you, your hands instinctively clutching at his neck. “Aerion—!”

“Spare me,” he hissed, already striding towards the way back. “You are not limping back to the castle.”

Your heart hammered traitorously against your ribs. It was ridiculous—utterly ridiculous!

His arm was firm at your back, the other braced beneath your knees, and you could feel the heat of him, the steady rise and fall of his breath, the strength he exuded in every step as though carrying you was the most natural thing in the world.

He did not set you down once—not even when the hall fell into a hush, nor when lords and ladies turned to stare, their gasps rippling softly in your wake.

A maester was summoned to tend to you the moment you returned. He worked in silence, cleaning and binding the cut in your calf far more thoroughly than Aerion’s efforts. By the time he finished, you were left sitting at the edge of the bed, exhaustion beginning to weigh on you.

You shared a chamber. That much could not be helped. And this was Storm’s End, where you couldn’t ask the maids for a heap of pillows, but the biggest concern was—

“It is a small bed,” you noted, casting him a sidelong glance.

Aerion gave a low snort, his gaze flicking to you. “You’ll survive.”

When you both finally lay down, it became more undeniable. There was scarcely any space between you. Your shoulder brushed his with the slightest movement, your legs threatening to tangle should either of you shift.

How were you supposed to rest like this...?

You let out a quiet breath, trying to lift the air. “If you so much as crush me in your sleep, I will see it counted as an assassination attempt.”

Aerion scowled beside you. “I would sooner have Rogar Reyne’s head before strangling my own wife in her sleep.”

“Must you sound so eager about it?”

“He dared to lay a hand on what is mine.” His voice sharpened, edged with a snarl. “If I had my way, his corpse would be hanging naked in the streets of King’s Landing. As it stands—he’ll beg for death before I’m through with him.”

His. You ignored the way your heart skipped a beat, and studied him in the dim light. “Why are you so upset about it, anyway?”

Aerion turned his head, fixing you with a look as though you had spoken pure nonsense. Why? Why indeed? Why had this searing anger taken hold of him the moment he realized some wretched cur had cornered you?

His indifferent, infuriating wife you might be, but still his all the same. That was enough reason.

“You are an enduring mystery,” you grumbled, saying this because you wasn’t aware of any of his thoughts, of course. “You told everyone and your squire you didn’t want my favor and all—”

The Bright Prince barked a quiet laugh. “Gods, you’re insufferable.”

“How—!”

“Because,” he snapped, “if I asked, you’d spend the night sewing like some overzealous seamstress just to meet the morning. Everyone knows your ribbons are the finest favor amongst the ladies.”

Your handmade favors had always been nothing more than a quiet pastime of yours. And yet, somehow, they had gained a reputation of their own because word got out that you always put so much care in the stitching.

“With your favor or not, I’ll beat the shit out of Reyne.” He shifted, settling in to his side and pressing his eyes shut. “Now stop prattling and go to sleep, wife. You ought to watch me on the morrow.”

You lay there for a moment, thoughts drifting. Aerion Brightflame who had become your husband— who made your life unbearable at times, and yet this same man whose touch had been careful, whose fury had flared at the sight of your injury, and who now swore vengeance upon who wronged you. You couldn’t fool yourself into feeling that you were not flattered in some strange, twisted way.

“Thank you,” you murmured almost shyly.

Aerion’s back remained to you, unmoving. Whether he had heard, you could not tell.

. . .

Aerion lay still, listening as your breathing gradually evened, growing slow and steady. When he finally turned his head, you were already asleep.

In sleep, you looked… different. All this time, that stupid pillow blockade had obstructed his view that it was the first time he saw you like this. The edge in your expression gone, your features eased into softness. Your lips were slightly chapped, and yet so bloody tempting to him he didn’t know why.

He still remembered the little lady with wide, doe-like eyes, clad in Lannister golden dress for her visits to the Red Keep. He remembered the way your face had pinched in irritation when he’d stolen your lemon tarts, clutching the empty plate as though it were a grave offense.

It had amused him then. It still did.

And no insolent fool dared to hurt you would be left alive.

Come the morrow, he would destroy the rat. But now, as he stared at you, his enemy-wife—

Aerion decided he would ride into the melee, crush every last opponent, and place the victor’s laurel in your hands after all.

The stands of Storm’s End were alive with color and noise, the roar of the crowd rolling like thunder beneath the gray skies as each knight lined in the arena.

Unlike most ladies, you did not shrink from bloodshed. You had always enjoyed tourneys—had cheered your brothers rather than fearing for them—and even now, with your husband among those in the field, you only felt a sense of calmness.

Or perhaps… you were simply distracted.

Your mind drifted back to this morning, and a flush of warmth rose to your cheeks.

Aerion’s face had been too close to yours when you woke, his arm draped loosely around your waist. His harsh features were nonexistent in sleep, and his expression almost… peaceful. With that silver-gold hair, he had looked less like terror and more like, you daresay, your protector.

“Good day, my lady.”

You blinked, dragging yourself back to the present as someone took the seat beside you. Prince Valarr’s smile was gentle, his mismatched gaze clear as he inclined his head in greeting.

“Your Grace,” you returned, offering a small smile.

He settled beside you, watching the field below. For a moment, the two of you simply observed the gathering knights.

“You are not competing today?” you asked, glancing at him.

“My lady wife is not fond of me in tourneys,” he replied, a note of fondness in his voice. “And she prefers the quiet of the castle with our son. I would have joined her, but I must stand in place of my father, you see.”

The tale of how besotted the Heir of Dragonstone was with his princess had all the makings of a storybook romance. At times, you found yourself envying them.

“Ah, and how does fatherhood treat you, Your Grace?”

His eyes softened then. “Better than any victory in the lists, I assure you.”

You smiled faintly at that, before your attention drifted once more to the field. It was a melee today—no tilting and just pure strength, steel and survival.

And there, striding into the fray in black and red armor, was Aerion of House Targaryen, the second son of the Prince of Summerhall, as the herald proclaimed.

With the shape of his helmet and spikes of his armor, he cut a menacing figure among the rest. Even at a distance, there was something in the way he held himself—like a blade drawn and waiting.

Valarr followed your gaze. “Are you excited, my lady? My cousin is a fine knight. I would not be surprised to see him emerge champion.”

Truthfully? Yes. You parted your lips to answer but the sharp blare of a trumpet split the air, signaling that the melee had begun.

Your husband drove his destrier forward with ruthless precision, scattering men before him. Steel rang, bodies fell, and in the chaos—he thrived. With that morningstar in hand, he was a force to be reckoned with.

At one point, he forced Lord Tully to the ground, looming over him like something out of a nightmare.

“Tell the Reyne bastard that Aerion Brightflame is after his head!”

Valarr’s lips twitched beside you. “Ah… so someone has offended him yet again. Poor him.”

You remembered an anecdote you had once heard, glancing at him. “I was told Aerion once asked for Her Grace’s favor, and you beat the shit out of him for it... is that true?”

From the meaningful smile he had on his face, it was clear there was more into the tale, but whatever it was, Valarr chose not to disclose it.

“To be honest, I have the Seven to thank for that. But fret not, my lady. Aerion will not lose this time.”

“And why are you so certain?”

The Young Prince’s gaze flicked to you, something knowing in his expression.

“Would you not be the one who knows best? He is the dragon. He ought never lose.”

If Valarr mirrored Prince Baelor’s impeccable duty and honor, then Aerion was the living image of Prince Maekar’s finest lance and fury—though sharper, fiercer, and far more unforgiving than his sire had ever been. His height might prove to be a challenge, but he more than compensated it with aggressive stances and lightning-fast strikes.

Below, as if to prove the point, the Bright Prince cut through another opponent with brutal efficiency, swinging his deadly mace mercilessly.

Soon enough, he cleared out all the combatants and found his target: Rogar Reyne.

Your former betrothed had barely time to react before Aerion’s destrier crashing forward with terrifying force. The swing of his morningstar came swift and brutal—striking so hard that sent Rogar flying from his saddle and into the dirt below.

The crowd roared, and Aerion did not stop. He had only just begun.

He dismounted in a breath, advancing like a man possessed. Lord Reyne scrambled to defend himself—but the Brightflame fought with something far worse than skill. Entitled fury.

The morningstar came down again and again, each blow denting armor, drawing blood. And when Rogar Reyne’s guard finally broke—

Aerion pulled out his sword. He drove the man back, slashing without mercy, carving through what little defense remained. Blood spilled freely, staining the ground, staining his hands— each strike was meant to answer for the wrong he did to you.

A gasp rippled through the stands. You also felt the shock and horror, but beyond that—

The sight of your husband, stained with blood of his own doing, and knowing that he did it because of you… it was not as repulsive as it ought to have been.

If anything, it felt gratifying.

Rogar was barely conscious when Aerion seized him by the collar, dragging him across the dirt like a carcass. The field fell into a stunned hush as he hauled him before the stands and forced him to his knees.

Your husband loomed over him, tearing off his skull-like helmet—his face unmarred by blood, yet no less fearsome. His presence overwhelming as his voice rang out across the arena:

“This cunt right here dared to dishonor my wife.”

A murmur swept through the crowd. You could feel the weight of eyes turning towards you but the crowd’s attention quickly snapped back to the broken man at Aerion’s feet.

“And now let it be known—”

His violet gaze burns anyone he laid eyes on—until it found yours. For a fleeting moment, you thought the corners of his lips curled ever so slightly.

“—any lowlife who dares the same will answer to me.”

With a single, vicious kick to his face, Aerion sent him sprawling into the dirt once more. The stands erupted at once, their roars rising for the champion they had found.

That day, Aerion Brightflame stood victorious… having claimed justice in the name of his wife.

Lord Corlys Velaryon once said that history remembers names. The fools of the Red Keep and Casterly Rock might argue over how it was that you and Aerion came to despise one another—but on this, both they and realm would agree:

When the Bright Prince dethroned Lady Baratheon to name you the queen of beauty in the grandest tourney in its time—

You can hear him step closer, feel the sudden bent in the atmosphere. “What are you doing?”

“Exploring.” You bite your tongue. “Not that it is any of your business.”

“Anything my good-sister does is my business.” His words, heard separately, would sound sweet. Would sound kind and gentleman-like. But there is the matter of his voice—it is sharp and cutting like a silken blade.

“What are you doing here?”

“Following you,” he says, and there’s a danger in his tone. Something flickering, burning like spice. It tastes of treason.

“Did Valarr send you?” you ask, knowing very well that Aerion is the last person your betrothed would send to look for you. Yet, you wanted to say his name. You wanted the reminder—that you are bound to Valarr Targaryen. And anything that comes out of his cousin’s mouth should regard this fact very carefully.

“My cousin does not even know you are gone.”

Your heart pricks, and you feel foolish. The sentence is intended to hurt you, to disquiet you. Yet the knowledge does not make it better.

“I was… exploring,” you say slowly, still not turning, “I wanted a moment alone.”

“Alone from the good prince?” he says cruelly. 

“Alone from all the noise.”

“Ah, because there is enough noise inside your head.”

You shiver. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Look at me.”

The command comes sudden and stark. His cursed voice slithers inside your skin, like a bad word, a malediction. You feel your blood warm as you turn back, unable to disobey. 

Aerion Brightflame stands, leaning against the other pillar of the alleyway. His head is tilted, violet eyes boring into you. And even in the dark, the silver in his head shines. The red from his chainmail shirt sends blisters of spark on his face. The moonlight always does inexplicable things to his complexion. That Valyrian paleness, the light eyes, that sharpness in his face are cut from marble—from something ancient that hasn’t been replicated in another creature quite so alluringly. When you first saw him, you thought he was the most beautiful person alive.

You tell yourself that it was because you were promised to him.

“I know what you mean. I know what you want. Because you were betrothed to me first.”

His words, accusations, burn your skin. “Aerion—”

“Before you betrayed me and went to him.”

“That’s a vile accusation.”

“Vile, is it?” He comes closer, and you still yourself, you don’t back away because you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how he affects you still. “Am I vile? Is that why you ran away to precious, golden Valarr?”

“I went to Valarr because I love him.”

He chuckles, it is a dangerous, joyless sound. “You did not love me, then?”

“No,” you lie.

His eyes flash cold. He steps closer and closer until you feel yourself step back, just to delay the gap between you. You feel your heart skid to a stop when your back meets with the stone of the alleyway. You will yourself to stare at him with force. With some of the fire everyone keeps telling you is inside you too.

Aerion reaches his hand to smooth the rough hair fluttering over your forehead. You stay still, not even breathing as he leans down, down, down until his pale nose touches your throat. 

He sniffs, predatory, insane. “You smell the same—cardamon, vanilla. Valarr likes that, does he?”

“Yes,” you hiss out, turning your face.

Aerion’s hand comes to touch your throat, his thumb brushes over your pulse point at the junction of your jaw. “But there’s something else, too. Something my good cousin cannot even fathom.”

“Aerion—let me go…” you breathe out.

“Blood,” he says, and you can feel his tongue lap out, for a fraction of a second. Tasting you. “That tangy, metallic taste of it. Something forbidden. Something rotten.”

You scoff in anger, pushing him back on instinct. “You are unbelievable.”

He leans back, undeterred, as if your hands weigh nothing. “He cannot smell that. He cannot smell you.”

You say nothing. There is nothing to say. Because whatever argument he has concocted inside his maggot-infested head is fallacy. Is nothing. You wish you never loved Aerion, never laughed at his cruel jokes, never touched his hand, never ran with him in the nooks of the Red Keep hiding from everyone else. You wish you never let him kiss you, pressed agaisnt his chest, his hands roaming everywhere in your body before settling on your face. 

You still wake up in sweat at night, feeling his tongue drinking you in—claiming you, maiming you.

“You cut off the finger of Lord Redwyn,” you say, surprised to find your voice calm despite the tremor in your heart.

“He brushed his hand against your skin.”

You shake your head in disbelief. “It was a dance.”

He laughs, and the sound echoes off the stone with razor-sharp intensity. “I do not like sharing…”

“That is insanity—”

“... and they have given you to someone I cannot fight. Cannot kill.”

“This is treason.”

“All my life Valarr was the one I pitied,” he hisses, clutching your wrist so hard it sends a stab of pain through your skin. “The good one, that docile lamb, the one those boring septons praised. He never had the courage to look inside his head, never had the courage to feel the dragon in his blood—a waste of an heir. I thought.” His grip tightens. But you stay still. “Yet he got the only thing I ever wanted without even trying.”

“I am not a thing you can possess,” you bite back, tilting your head to challenge him. “I am a woman and I would not have someone who deemed me any less.”

“Oh you are not a woman,” he hisses. “You are my doom.” The violet of his iris is burning bright, burning through you. “I tried to soften myself for you. I stopped cursing for you. I turned away from brawls whenever I wanted to pick up my knife and slit someone’s throat, I let that demon Egg maim my hand and did nothing. I let those meandering maesters give me potions for sleeping when I wanted to bash their heads and burn their useless hands. I wanted to appear sane for you. And yet the one time I slipped, you left me and went to bed with my dear, green cousin. The only one who I cannot touch. You are a witch, a temptress, a vile seductress. You say I could not possess you? You possess me.”

You want to be mad at him, want to pull him apart with your bare hands. And yet, the pain in his poisonous speech touches a deep, dark part of you. The one that was betrothed to him, the one that thought you could tame him.

“You scared me,” you whisper. “I realised I couldn’t change you.”

He stares at you, his eyes turning softer. For a quirt, forgiving moment, you think you see him again, the way you saw him first time. You were fresh off your ship and your feet barely touched the squalor of King’s Landing. He was there, standing by the royal carriage, head tilted at you in palpable surprise. As if he did not expect you. 

The months after, you saw him, again and again. He was willful, he was cruel. He was forever cursed with the blood of the dragon. You thought you saw inside him, that supple, rotten core of his heart. The seeds of madness swon so deep he could not extricate it without damaging himself. You thought you saw him softer, too. Yet. The lines blurred. More often than not. His softness becomes his cruely. His words become his blade. His kiss at once romantic and bruising.

“I wonder if you could… love me,” he says, there is a tender pang hanging there at the end of it. “Because you seemed the only one who could.”

The word—that cursed word—shakes you. Reverberate inside your head like a coin. Even in this momnet of damning clarity, you cannot tell him the whole truth. You did. “I wanted to love you good. I tried to.”

“And you failed,” he says, and the words are curiously flat. “And you left. Like everyone else.”

You chest pricks, it bleeds. Because that is the truth. You failed, like everyone else—everyone before you. People see him and they touch him and then they leave him in his own little prison. People see the curse and the pain and they decide that he is not worth the trouble. That his malice is both the question and the answer. And he stays there, wallowing in his own darkness, wondering what is wrong with him. Alone.

Without quite thinking what you are doing, you reach out your hand, the one he hasn’t gripped in anger, to touch his hair. It is soft, smooth, silken. It feels like a boy’s hair, it feels dangerously malleable. He feels ruinously malleable at the mouth of the darkened alley.

His breath hitches. There is an almost imperceptible shift in his expression. Almost not there. But you see it, and you feel your heart break clean in two. Because despite everything, the betrayal and the humiliation, Aerion Targaryen still loves you. 

“Why are you lurking the shadows?” he asks.

“I do not know,” you reply truthfully.

“I do. It is because the darkness calls you, too. It is because you liked when you were the only one who could chain me. Because the thought of a suitable life with a doting husband scares you almost as much as the opposite scares you. You want a gentle prince? Or do you want one who burns for you?”

Your voice is lower than a whisper. “You’d burn anyway.”

“I still love you.”

And you love him, too. But not enough to spend the rest of your life trying to soften his blows, trying to save him from ruining himself and others. Valarr, when he found you crying in the royal garden, scratching your wrist where Lord Redwyn had touched—you thought it was the reason of it all, you were the reason of all the violence— knelt in front of you. He touched your hand and soothed the brun of the scratch. You decided to love him, for the moment. And then, you decided to love him forever.

The man in front of you is staring at you in utter infatuation. You look at him and realise that you have never known your heart, not fully. You do not know how much you can bear. Your hand is still in his hair, and you lean in to press a chaste kiss to his cheek. You whisper that you are sorry. That someone brave enough to tame his mind would come. That his heart will not burn. That he will find reason, just not through you.

“They’re sending me off to Lys,” he says. “That far enough for you?”

“I never asked for that.”

“Your betrothed did.”

Surprise hits you with a blunt force. Your breath hitches. When Aerion notices it, he chuckles.

“So he did not tell you.”

“I am sure he plans to.”

“When, I wonder? My ships leaves on the morrow.” He leans in again, resting his mouth on your neck. You feel your knees buckles, without a will of their own. You almost fall over before his hands bracket your waist.

“Aerion.” His name on your lips is both a plea and a warning.

“I know you love him,” his words drench your skin. “Just pretend for a minute. Pretend you are mine.”

You nod, haze covering your senses. You find your hands reaching up to catch his neck, hold him in place. He is right, you love Valarr, and this is only pretend. You have been called a mad child enough in your life to avoid all intensities. You do not want the burn of Aerion’s fire, do not want his passion, do not want to feel the graze of his teeth marking his territory on your skin. You don’t want his madness or his desires because you know he’d ruin you. So you only pretend, you allow yourself to pretend as he holds you, as you pull him close for one last time.

When his teeth close around your skin, it is surprisingly tender. You whimper as he bites you, marks you, ruins you. The night wind flutters your clothes, the smell of the dark alleway is intoxicating, ruinous. But you stay there, you stay his for this moment.

Because for one, strange and sparking moment, it feels disastrously like true love.

-------++++++-------

aerion is my doomed noodle, my cursed bunny :)

“Have you seen it?” 

“Seen what, my lady?”

You turned to your handmaiden, Clara, and frowned. You gestured towards the empty nightstand. “My flower.” You said. “ It was here, I left it here. I know I did.”

Clara hesitated for a moment. “I have not seen it, my lady.”

You looked again anyway, as though it might have appeared while you were looking away. It did not. You have already searched the chamber twice over–table, floor, beneath the bed. You decided to look there once more, so you dropped to your knees and pushed the coverlet aside. You peered into the dim space to reveal nothing more than dust. 

You sat back on your heels and frowned again. It was a foolish thing to trouble over. You think. Though the small sting of it would not be soothed.

A knock came at the door, and Clara crossed the room to answer it. You heard low murmurs before she turned back to you. “The queen is calling on you, my lady.”

You glanced up from where you sat on the floor, resting one arm on the mattress. You pushed yourself up to brush your hands lightly against your skirt and blew away the loose strand of hair that had fallen into your face. “Could you fix my hair?” You asked. 

“Of course, my lady.”

The servant escorted you to the queen's solar. Queen Myriah sat with her ladies gathered about her in easy company. Lady Laerra lounged along one side of the settee with Lady Edeline at her side. They all turned the moment you stepped inside. 

You dipped into a curtsy. “Your Grace.”

“Ah, come, come. Sit here.” The queen said, her hand lifted, and beckoned you closer. 

You took the place indicated beside her, and a servant stepped forward before you had even settled and placed a hoop of embroidery in your hands with the needle and thread already set. 

You looked down at it and then back up again with a questioning look, but the queen only waved her hand. “Hush, busy yourself, dear.” She said,

You blinked and opened your mouth to speak. “Hush,” she repeated as though you were being unreasonable. 

You did not know what was required of you, but you set the needle where the thread had been left and began.

Across from you, Lady Laerra made a small sound that might have been laughter. Lady Edeline pressed her lips together, though her eyes betrayed her. You frowned, but did not look at them long. Your gaze fell again to the hoop, and your hand settled into the motion of it.

You had only set a few stitches before the door opened. When you glanced up, Prince Valarr had stepped inside, the tailor at his back burdened with folded lengths of heavy cloth.

Valarr bowed his head, “Your grace.” His gaze found you for the briefest moment, and there was the faintest turn at the corner of his mouth before he looked on. “Ladies,” he added.

“Valarr, dear,” the queen said, rising to meet him. She set her hands upon his shoulders as though to keep him in place. “We have been waiting on you.” 

That was news to you.

“So it would seem,” he said. “I had thought to be left to my own devices.

The queen gave a small huff. “Thank the gods I have thought better of it.” She took a square of cloth from the tailor’s burden and held it to the light, turning it this way and that. “The crown has an image to maintain. I will not have you boys undoing it with poor choices.”

You lowered your gaze at once, though a faint smile tugged at your lips.

“A pity,” Valarr said. “I had grown fond of my poor choices.”

A few of the ladies laughed behind their hands, and the queen only shook her head. The tailor came forward then and laid out lengths of cloth upon the table—deep reds and darker shades. He stepped back to look at Valarr to measure him with his eye, then began to drape the fabrics over his shoulders one by one. You looked up only once or twice.

The queen had set herself to fussing over him. She turned him slightly, then smoothed the cloth, discarding one piece for another with little patience. You bent your head again to your work, though your attention did not wholly remain there.

“Stand still.” The queen instructed.

“I am standing still,” Valarr muttered, though he shifted even as he spoke.

“You are fidgeting, Valarr.” She said and shook her head at the tailor who held up a color she did not like. 

“Grandmother, I can hardly help it,” he said, a touch lower now. “You do make a spectacle of me before your ladies.”

A ripple of soft laughter stirred through the room. You did not join it.

“Nonsense,” the queen said. Valarr shifted again, then seemed to catch himself and went rigid. “There,” he said. “I am not moving.”

The queen sighed, long-suffering. “Now you are too stiff.”

He let out a quiet breath, something between defeat and amusement, but did not move again.

The exchange went on a moment longer, small corrections and small refusals, the sort of thing that might have been familiar if not for the room full of watching eyes. You kept your own lowered, though you felt the faint absurdity of it.

“Lady Tyrell.”

You looked up at once, the needle stilled between your fingers. “Your Grace?”

“What do you make of this?” the queen asked, gesturing lightly to the cloth laid across Valarr’s shoulders. “The color, I mean.”

You swallowed, though there had been no need for it, and raised your gaze.

He stood where they had set him. His hands hung at his sides, not quite still, as though he had forgotten what to do with them. There was a faint awkwardness in him that made you believe he was enduring the worst humiliation.

You meant to look at the cloth, and you did at first. The color was rich and dark where the light did not touch it, brighter where it did. It suited him—more than suited him. You think. It did something to him, or else to how you saw him.

Your gaze lifted, and his eyes met yours, and for a moment it was as though you had both been caught in the same small foolishness and would not speak of it. 

You dropped your gaze at last, and the heat rose quick to your cheeks. “It suits the prince well,” you said, too fast.

Lady Laerra gave a soft laugh. “It does more than suit him. The young ladies will be clawing at one another for a place beside the prince.”

Valarr let out a quiet breath. “They need not trouble themselves.”

“No?” the queen said, her brows lifting. “Not even one fortunate lady has caught your interest?”

Valarr shifted again, “I did not say that,” he said.

Lady Edeline’s smile widened at once. “Oh,” she said, turning to Lady Laerra, “he did not say that.”

A murmur of amusement stirred through the room. The queen laughed and shook her head. “Enough. I have tormented my grandson quite enough for one morning.”

She began to return the lengths of cloth to the tailor’s waiting arms. “You may all go.”

There was a soft rustle of skirts as the ladies rose, and you set your needle and stood with them.

“Not you, dear.”

You stilled. The queen’s hand lifted, indicating the hoop still in your grasp. “You have not yet finished.”

“It is near enough, Your Grace—”

“Sit.” She said once, and that was enough for you. 

The room grew quieter once the others had gone. Only the queen’s low voice remained, as she spoke with the tailor in measured tones.

You bent your head to your work, and after a moment, you became aware of him. He stood beside you, not speaking at first. “That is very fine work,” Valarr said at last.

You looked up at him. “It is only stitching,” you said. “But thank you.”

Before you could say more, he had taken the seat at your side. Close enough that you felt the warmth of him and the faint brush of his sleeve against your own.

“Do you enjoy it?” he asked.

You hesitated, your gaze flickered once toward the queen, who had not yet turned back to you. You shook your head slightly. “Not much.” A small, knowing smile touched your mouth.

A laugh escaped him.“It seems difficult enough,” he said.

“It is not,” you answered. “Quite simple once you know the way of it.”

He leaned a little closer then, and his attention settled upon the hoop in your hands. “I do not know the way of it,” he said plainly.

You glanced at him. “Would you like to try?” you asked, and then felt immediately foolish for it.

He shook his head at once, a faint laugh following. “I think not.” 

“It is no great undertaking,” you said.

“Very well,” he said and cleared his throat. When you placed it in his hands, he held it as though it might break.

“The needle goes here,” you said, and reached to guide him before you had thought better of it. Your fingers closed lightly over his and adjusted the angle.

He tried, though not with much confidence. “No,” you said, shaking your head, “You will only tangle it.”

He tried again, and the thread caught immediately. You watched him struggle with it a moment; his brow drew faintly as he attempted to set it right without help. When it worsened instead, you leaned in to free it. Your fingers brushed his as you drew the needle loose.

He frowned at that. “You said it was simple.”

“It is,” you said. “You are making it otherwise, my prince.” There was no hiding the note of amusement in your voice.

He huffed softly, and when you leaned in a little more to see the thread properly, he turned his head toward you. You had not realized how close the two of you had drifted until that moment.

His face was inches from your own. Near enough that you felt the warmth of his breath against your cheek and near enough to see the pale flecks of gold in the dark of his eye where the sunlight touched it.

His gaze caught yours first. Then, slowly, it fell lower to your lips.

The room seemed to narrow around you. The queen’s voice faded to a dull murmur somewhere beyond the two of you. You became suddenly aware of everything at once—the warmth of his thigh against yours and the way your hand still rested lightly over his. Then—

“Ow.” He flinched suddenly, which caused you to draw back at once, your breath caught as the moment broke apart, and you looked down to find a bead of red welling at the tip of his finger where the needle had caught him.

For a heartbeat, he only stared at it, faintly perplexed. Then, without thought, he brought the finger to his mouth. You could not help but watch the slow press of his lips against it and the way his thumb rested there as he drew the blood away. 

Your gaze lingered far too long. You felt a coil of heat, low and sudden in your stomach. You swallow hard and hope he did not notice. 

You did not even realize the queen had made her way over. “You are bleeding.’ She said as though he had not noticed, her brows pulled together in worry.

“It is nothing, grandmother,” Valarr said. 

“I will fetch the maester–”

Valarr shook his head. “It is nothing.” He repeated. 

“I will not have you losing fingers because you wished to play at embroidery.” The queen said.

“Grandmother—”

But she was already crossing the room, skirts sweeping after her. “Do not bleed on anything,” she called over her shoulder. The door shut behind her.

“Are you hurt?” you asked, taking the embroidery hoop gently from his hands.

Valarr let out a breath that broke into a quiet laugh. “My grandmother worries too much.” He held up his finger between you. “It is only a prick.”

“It could fester,” you said.

He shook his head. “I begin to see why my grandmother is fond of you. You are alike in your taste for dramatics.”

That drew a laugh from you before you could stop it.

“Soon your finger will blacken and fall clean off.” You said solemnly. 

Valarr grinned at that, “I had not taken you for the morbid sort, Lady Tyrell.”

You lowered your gaze and feigned interest in the embroidery once more. A small crimson stain had bloomed against the pale cloth where his blood had touched it. “The queen only cares for you,” you said.

“She cares too much for everything,” Valarr replied.

You glanced up at him and lifted one brow slightly. “How so?”

“The tournament,” he said. “The flowers and the fabrics we are made to wear.” His gaze flicked briefly toward the door through which the queen had gone. “If she were able, she would arrange the whole realm to her liking.”

You considered that as you turned the hoop lightly in your hands. “She arranges things well enough,” you said at last.

“The queen is bored,” he said plainly.

The laugh escaped you before you could stop it. You looked away at once after, but not before you saw the way his gaze lingered on you in a manner that made warmth creep once more beneath your skin. 

You shifted in your seat, suddenly aware again of how close he sat beside you. And so, to break the feeling, you spoke quickly. “Will you ride in the tournament?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No?” You looked at him in surprise. “I had thought you would.”

Valarr leaned back into the cushions slightly, “For a nameday tourney?” he said. “I would spare myself the trouble.”

“The princess will require champions,” you pointed out.

“She shall have them,” Valarr said. “Her brothers, and others. Though Daeron may fall from the saddle before the melee is half done.” A note of quiet amusement entered his voice. 

You smiled despite yourself. “And Aerion?” you asked before you had thought better of it. The name seemed to linger strangely in the air between you.

Valarr did not seem to notice. “Aerion will ride fiercely enough,” he said. “My cousin has never cared much for losing.”

No, you thought. He did not. Your gaze dropped to the embroidery in your lap, though you no longer saw it.

For a moment, you could picture him plain as day— Aerion on his horse riding beneath the banners with that crooked smile upon his mouth that so often bordered arrogance and infuriated most men but stirred something else entirely in you.

The doors opened then, and the queen returned with Maester Rylon close behind her. “Here,” she said at once, drawing him forward with an impatient wave. “He has cut himself.”

Valarr let out a soft sigh but held up his hand obediently all the same. Maester Rylon took it in both hands as one might examine a mortal wound. The old maester peered closely at the tiny mark upon Valarr’s finger whilst the queen watched on with deep displeasure.

You lowered your head and hoped neither of them would see the smile threatening at your mouth.

Maester Rylon gave a small nod. “A prick only, Your Grace. Nothing more.”

Valarr huffed a laugh at that.

“It will heal cleanly,” Maester Rylon assured and released the prince’s hand at last. The queen seemed only partly satisfied, though she inclined her head all the same.

Valarr rose from the settee then. “Good,” he said. “I had hoped to survive the ordeal.”

He bent to press a kiss against his grandmother’s cheek, and some of the irritation left her face for it.

“You will be more careful,” she told him.

Valarr nodded, then turned toward you. “I hope to see you again soon, Lady Tyrell.” He smiled, and his gaze held yours a moment longer before he bowed his head lightly and made for the door.

Only once the doors had closed behind him did you become aware of the queen’s gaze upon you, and you looked back to find her smiling.

Your brows drew together. “What is it?”

“Nothing at all,” Queen Myriah said.

-

The corridors had filled since morning. Voices echoed off the stone, and servants hurried past with lowered heads. You had been in no great hurry. Not until you turned the corner and found him there, and you both stopped with only a handful of paces between you.

Aerion stood as he always did. As though you had invaded his space. One hand rested near the hilt at his hip, and the other was loose at his side. The light from the narrow windows caught in his pale hair, and his eyes found yours at once.

His brows drew together, faintly, and you saw the way his mouth had shifted as though he would speak but then thought better of it. 

Your lips parted, and his name pressed itself against the back of your teeth before you could stop it. You stood there too long, staring at him as though you had forgotten how to move. You look like a fool. You think.

You swallowed hard, and the words died in your throat. 

Then you moved. You gathered your skirts in one hand and stepped past him. Close enough that the silk of your sleeve whispered near his hand. Close enough that he could reach out and grab you, and for a heartbeat, you hoped thought he might. 

You could feel the sudden catch of his hand around your wrist, rough enough to bruise. He would pull you hard into the shadow of the wall and press your back against the cold stone. His mouth against yours with no sense to stop.

But he did not reach for you, nor did he move aside. 

You did not turn back. 

-

You had not thought much about the encounter after—or you had tried not to. When night came, and you reached for the candle beside your bed, the door opened without warning.

Aerion stepped inside. Why should he knock? You think bitterly. He shut it behind him with a soft thud.

You frowned faintly. “Aerion—”

“Are you ignoring me?” He asked sharply. 

You blinked at him. “What?”

“You heard me.” He crossed the room as he spoke, slow and certain, not waiting for leave nor invitation.

“Why would I—”

“Never mind it,” he said, cutting the words from you.

He dropped onto the edge of your bed with careless ease. One of his boots knocked against the floor as he kicked it off. A moment later, the other followed, kicked free, and set aside. 

You stared at him. “What are you doing?” 

“Nothing.” He leaned back upon his hands as he said it, and stretched his legs out before him, 

You let out a soft sigh and climbed onto the opposite side of the bed, drawing your legs beneath you. The mattress dipped faintly beneath his weight.

“It does not appear like nothing,” you said.

“It is.” His gaze wandered the chamber rather than settling on you. “I was passing by.”

“And thought to sit upon my bed?”

“I thought to sit.” His mouth twitched faintly. “The bed happened to be here.” At last, he glanced back toward you, “Do you object?” he asked.

You pressed your lips together and shook your head. “No.” 

Aerion nodded and looked back. “Good.” 

Silence settled between you two for a moment before you slid closer and settled beside him. “I heard you will ride in your sister’s nameday tourney.” You said a touch quieter. 

Aerion's gaze flickered to you, narrowed slightly. “Who told you that?” 

“I heard it mentioned.” You lied.

He studied you for a moment and then hummed softly. “Of course I will.”

He straightened a little where he sat. “I will give those piss-poor knights a proper show of it.” His mouth curved then. “Remind them what it means to ride against a dragon.”

For a moment, you could see the bravado falter slightly when his eyes met yours. “You will be there.” He said.

You could not tell whether it was meant as a question or a command.

“I will.” You answered regardless. 

His jaw tightened once before easing again. He nodded faintly, though his eyes never left your face. He moved closer then, as if he had grown tired of the distance between you. 

His knee knocked against yours, and his hand caught your sleeve. He smoothed out a crease that did not seem to exist. You glanced down at his hand and at the silver ring he wore, then back to his face. 

“I will win, you will see.” He said softly, lowering his voice slightly. For all of the arrogance in it, you could hear something else, almost boyish. You think. 

-

You woke without knowing when you had fallen asleep. For a moment, you lay still beneath the warmth of the blankets until the weight beside you made itself known. Aerion lay half-turned toward you, one arm cast careless across the coverlet. He had not yet woken. 

A knock came at the door. Aerion stirred at that, though he did wake fully. He only shifted with a quiet sound of annoyance.

Before the second knock could come, you snatched at the blankets and threw them over him in a hurried disarray. Aerion made a displeased noise at that, something like a scoff, but he did not rise. 

Clara stood in the doorway with a small folded letter in hand. “My lady.” She said and paused only a moment once her gaze flicked toward the bed and the shifting shape beneath the blankets. If she thought anything of it, she had the good sense not to show it.

You took the letter, recognizing the familiar red wax seal with three heads. You dismissed her quickly. 

Once the door closed, the blankets shifted violently. Aerion threw them aside with a sharp breath and pushed himself upright with irritation. “Seven hells was that for?”

One hand dragged over his face before his gaze caught on the letter in your hands. The annoyance in him dulled slightly then, replaced by something sharper. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” you said too fast and already began folding the parchment closed when Aerion rose from the bed and crossed the room in three strides.

“Aerion—”

He plucked the letter from your hands before you could stop him. You reached for it, but he shifted away from your grasp with ease, not even looking at you.

“He sends for you now, does he?”

You reached for the letter again, but Aerion held it just beyond your grasp between two careless fingers.

“Aerion—”

“A morning ride.” His mouth twisted faintly. “How tender.”

“Give it back,” you said.

The parchment crumpled slightly in his hand. “You mean to go?” he asked.

When you did not answer quickly enough, something changed in his face. His gaze moved over you slowly and lingered in a manner that made your skin prickle. You had seen that look before and never liked what followed after it.

“Do you warm my cousin’s bed now, too?” he asked softly.

You recoiled as though he had laid hands upon you. “I am not yours to question.” You spat.

“Mm.” The sound was low in his throat. “You have told me otherwise often enough.” He reminded you with that arrogant smirk you could kiss. 

You snatched the letter from his hand then. “Perhaps we both say things we do not mean.” 

For a moment, he did not move. This hand fell away slowly to his side, and he stepped closer until you had to tilt your head back to keep his gaze.

His mouth curved again, though there was little mirth in it now. A short laugh escaped him, and his tongue pressed briefly against his teeth before he spoke.

“Strange,” he said. “You sounded quite certain before.”

He brushed past you then, and his shoulder struck yours hard enough to stagger you half a step. The door slammed shut behind him with enough force to rattle the candles.

-

The stables smelled of hay and leather with another scent beneath it all that no lady should name aloud.

Your riding boots sank lightly into the packed dirt as you stepped inside and watched stableboys hurry past with saddles and feed. 

You tried to not think of Aerion or the look in his eyes, nor the cruel shape of his mouth around his words. You do not care what he thinks, you told yourself. But you knew it was a lie.

You found Valarr beside an open stall, with a stable hand nearby. He had bent his head whilst the man spoke, one gloved hand resting easily against the horse’s neck. He looked less arranged with his sleeves pushed back untidily past his forearms and riding leathers darkened with wear.

His attention had been wholly upon the animal until he noticed you. Then he smiled.

“My lady,” he said as he came toward you. “I am glad you could make it.”

“I thank you for the invitation.” Your fingers busied themselves with the leather of your gloves.

Valarr noticed, and his eyes lingered on your hands a moment before lifting once more to your face. “Come, I would have you meet him.” 

Valarr led you to the stall, his hand came to rest against the wood as the horse turned its head toward him. It was a fine animal—dark as soot. 

“He’s a good mount,” Valarr said, quieter now.

You stepped nearer, careful in your movements, your gaze moving over the horse slowly. “What is his name?”

Valarr did not answer at once.

His mouth tightened faintly. “You will laugh,” he warned.

“I will not.”

After a moment he relented. “Balerion.

One brow lifted before you could stop it. “Like the Black Dread?”

Valarr gave you a look at once. “You said you would not laugh.”

“I have not laughed.” You rebutted. 

There was a faint color in his cheeks now. “I was one and ten when I named him,” he said quickly, as if eager to defend himself. “At the time, I had wanted a dragon. A great one.”

You smiled at that. “It is a good name.” 

Valarr gave a quiet motion to one of the stable boys, who hurried forward at once to ready Balerion for the ride. 

“You should ride with me,” Valarr said as he took the reins into his hands. “It will be simpler that way.”

You looked at the horse, then back to him. “Are you certain?”

He nodded, and in one smooth motion, he mounted and settled into the saddle with the ease of long practice. He turned then, looking down at you and held out his hand. 

Your fingers slipped into his. His grip closed firm around your hand as he drew you upward. For one brief and mortifying instant, your footing slipped against the stirrup, and your breath caught—Then you were there. Seated in front of him. 

The reins fell to either side of you. Valarr's arms came forward to take them, caging you in, closer than you had expected. His chest was at your back, the warmth of him sudden and unavoidable, and you could feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing 

The horse shifted beneath you, and on instinct, you drew back slightly, only to meet him instead. 

“It is alright,” he said, his voice low, just behind your ear. You swallowed, and your hands settled at the front of the saddle.

The noise of the stables fell behind you, and soon stone gave way to earth. The walls of the keep dropped behind you, and cool morning air moved through the trees. The scent of fresh grass and less crowded air hit you at once. You welcomed it. 

Valarr said little. His hands remained light upon the reins as Balerion moved at an easy pace beneath you, the horse knowing the path well enough without much urging. The wood thickened gradually as you rode farther from the keep, tall elms and dark pines gathered close on either side of the narrow trail, and sunlight broke through the branches.

You found yourself enjoying this more than you had thought. It was like that for a while until Valarr slowed by a stream. He dismounted first, then turned to you. His hands found your waist as he helped you down. You felt them linger there a moment longer than needed once your boots touched the ground.

Then he stepped back. The horse dipped its head to drink, the water ran soft over stone, the sound of it against the morning quiet.

You turned toward the horse quickly, grateful for somewhere else to place your attention. Your gloved hand settled along the dark line of Balerion’s neck, smoothing gently over the sleek coat as he drank.

“There is… something,” Valarr said behind you.

You glanced back over your shoulder. He had not moved far from where he stood near the stream. One hand had gone to his belt only to fall away again a moment later. There was an uncertainty to him now. 

“I had wished to ask you something.” You watched him draw a slow breath. “I thought it might be easier in private.”

Then, as if just now hearing himself, he froze. “Though that sounds…” A flush rose visibly on his cheeks. “Not as I intended.”

You lifted one brow. “Are you here to murder me, my prince?”

His head snapped toward you, his eyes widening. “What? No.”

The answer came so quickly that you nearly laughed. “I jest.”

For a heartbeat, he only stared at you. Then a breath escaped him, and he appeared to ease a bit. He looked down briefly, shaking his head once as though embarrassed by himself. “I do not speak well around you,” he admitted.

“Around me?” you asked.

His eyes lifted again. “I find myself… faltering.” A faint huff of breath followed. “And perhaps nervous.”

That more than anything softened you. The prince and heir after the Hand, nervous before you like some green boy.

“If anything,” you said lightly, “I should be the one nervous.”

Valarr’s brows drew together slightly.

You toyed idly with a strand of Balerion’s dark mane, the corner of your mouth curved. “You may yet murder me.”

This time, the laugh came freely from him, and he stepped closer. Your hand stilled against Balerion’s neck. You turned your head slightly toward Valarr, and for a moment neither of you spoke. The sound of the stream filled the silence between you. Then your gaze drifted past him and towards the sky.

What little sky could be seen through the trees had darkened whilst you were not looking. The wind stirred faintly through the branches overhead.

“I think it may rain,” you said.

Valarr glanced upward. “It will not—”

Thunder cracked across the sky as if on cue. The first drops struck the leaves above, then the rain came. Light at first, then heavy. 

Valarr moved. He caught Balerion by the reins and pulled the horse from the stream; his other hand found your waist. Before you could properly gather your skirts, he had lifted you back into the saddle, and you scarcely had time to settle before he mounted behind you.

The rain came harder then, and drops hit your face. The rain had soaked through your sleeves and hair within moments. You felt a heavy weight settle on your shoulders before you realized it was his cloak. You pulled the dark wool over your head against the rain.

Trees blurred past on either side as the horse thundered through the wood. Water ran from your brow to your neck in streams, and your skirts clung, damp and heavy, to your legs.

You should have been miserable in this moment, but instead, you heard your own laughter escape you. You clapped a hand over your mouth far too late to stop it. And for the first time in longer than you cared to admit, your world did not feel so terribly small.

Behind you, Valarr laughed too, quieter than you had, but you could feel the vibration in his chest against your back.

The gates of the keep rose ahead through the rain, and by the time you rode through them, the storm had worsened. Rain came down in sheets across the yard and turned packed earth to mud.

Balerion slowed at last, and a stable boy came running through the downpour. Valarr was off the horse before it had fully stopped moving. He turned immediately toward you, reaching upward as rain streamed from his hair and brow.

His hands closed firmly at your waist as he lifted you down, and your boots sank slightly into the mud. The cloak clung damp and heavy about your shoulders, dragged low enough over your head that you had to blink rainwater from your eyes to see him clearly.

“We should get inside,” Valarr said.

Rain hammered against the yard around you, though you did not move. “Wait.”

He turned back. His hair fell loosely, and it clung to his temple. He had to squint against the rain. “What is it?”

Your fingers tightened slightly around the soaked folds of his cloak. “What did you mean to ask me?”

For a moment, he only looked at you through the rain.

Then he shook his head once. “Another time,” he said. “I had thought…” His mouth tightened faintly. “I had thought it might be better said than this.”

You stepped toward him before you had fully decided to do so and grabbed his hand. Cold and wet, your fingers closed around his.

“Say it now,” you said.

His gaze dropped, not to your hand, but to you. Perhaps to the way the rain had undone you. You released his hand at once, sudden heat bloomed in your chest.

Then he stepped closer. One hand rose carefully to your brow, his palm turned just so to shield your eyes from the rain. The other gathered the cloak more tightly about your shoulders, drawing it close and in doing so drawing you close as well.

The rain ran down his arm and gathered at his wrist. It fell in drops from his fingers where they hovered at your brow.

“I would have your leave,” he said, raising his voice to be heard above the storm. “To court you.”

Your breath caught somewhere between one heartbeat and the next. “Court me?” you repeated as though you did not hear him the first time.

“I have the king’s blessing,” he went on. “I could write to your father. Ask it done as it ought to be.” As it ought to be. You think. 

You had suspected he favored you. Gods, any woman with eyes might have seen it plain enough in the way he sought your company and in the way he looked at you. But this was no longer a passing fancy. It was earnest. 

The world seemed suddenly unsteady beneath your feet, though you had not moved at all. Perhaps he saw some trace of it on your face because his mouth tightened.

“Seven hells,” he muttered beneath his breath. Rain dripped from his lashes as he gave a short, nervous laugh. “I have made a poor showing of this.”

“No—”

“I had thought…” He shook his head once. “No matter what I had thought.”

Something in your chest twisted painfully then. Your silence had wounded him somehow, though you had not meant it. It was only that your throat had gone tight, and no words would come.

His hand remained against your brow all the while. “You are beautiful,” he said quietly. “Any man can see that.”

You felt heat bloom across your cheeks and hated yourself a little for it, like some foolish maid hearing sweet words for the first time.

“I have found I enjoy your company,” he went on, his voice softer now.

“Valarr—”

“I must finish now,” he said quickly, “Before I lose what little courage I’ve managed to find.” A breath of nervous laughter escaped him.

“You are kind,” he said. “And clever, and you make me laugh.”

His eyes held yours so steadily then that you forgot the rain entirely. 

“Will you have me?” he asked softly.

-

You're sitting on his kitchen counter in one of his shirts and nothing else. The white linen one, the soft one, the one he wore to dinner three weeks ago and left here on the back of the bathroom door. Your bare legs rest crossed at the ankles, and you have toast in one hand and coffee in the other. 

May sun spills through the eastern windows of his apartment in long gold panels, lighting up the cut peonies on the island, lighting up the smooth marble, lighting up, especially, the sweat at Valarr's collarbones.

You watch him. You take your time about it, too. Your eyes drag—deliberately, calculated, unsubtle—from the wet hair down to the line of his throat, across the soaked t-shirt where it sticks to him. Your attention lingers on the lean cut of his torso under the cotton, down to the shorts, finally to his bare feet on the dark wood floor. You make sure he sees you doing it. 

You bring your eyes back up to his, and you raise one eyebrow, calmly, as if you’re reviewing a piece of property.

Valarr’s jaw ticks once, the brown eye darker by half a shade than it was a minute ago.

"Love."

"Yes?"

"I'm going to shower," he informs you.

You take a sip of your coffee. "Are you?"

"I am, yeah," he says, half a laugh in it, drinking you in with that fascinated focus that's become his default in your presence. "I'm—I'm fairly gross, I just got off the rower and the trainer was a sadist this morning. I won't subject you to—"

You crook two fingers at him.

It's a small gesture. Two fingers, lifted, curled. Just once. Come here.

Valarr stops talking.

He stops talking with the visible suddenness of a man whose train of thought has just been derailed by the simplest possible signal. Your two fingers, one small motion, the kind of summoning a woman might do to a dog she's fond of. You watch him do exactly what you knew he would do, which is start across the kitchen toward you without thinking about it.

"You don't actually want to—" he begins.

You sigh. "Valarr."

"—I really am sweaty, love, give me five minutes—"

"Valarr."

He's at the counter. His hands land on your bare knees, automatic, because your knees are at the level of his hands and because he can’t stand near you and not touch you. The contact is hot and slightly damp, not unpleasant, and you watch him register the heat of his palms on you and not pull them back.

"Yes, love?" 

Your eyes narrow. "Come here."

His brows wrinkles a little. "I am here."

"Closer."

He laughs. Soft. A little wrecked already, and you've barely started. He steps in between your knees, his hands sliding up your thighs an inch and stopping with that intentional, leashed restraint that’s the central tic of his physical presence. The way he always pauses an inch before he means to land, the calibration he’s constantly performing in the millisecond before he touches you.

Valarr leans down and kisses you.

It's a careful kiss. It's a good morning, sweet girl kiss. Closed-mouthed, warm, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, his thumb stroking once along your cheekbone. He tastes like salt, like the espresso he downed before he left for the gym, like the mint in his pre-workout gum. His nose nudges yours, and Valarr makes a small contented sound in his throat that’s so unbearably boyish that for half a second you almost let him have his shower.

Almost.

You set the coffee down beside you, and set the toast down right after. You free both your hands and you put one of them in Valarr’s damp hair—high, at the crown, where the sweat is—and you fist your fingers in it, and you pull, just enough.

He makes a sound.

It's a small thing, coming out of him like he didn't know he was going to make it at all. A short involuntary catch in his throat—half a groan, half a question—and you feel Valarr’s whole body go still against you. Feel his hand at your jaw arrest, feel the breath leave him and not come back.

You growl.

You don't mean to. It comes out of your throat low and warning and entirely without your permission. A thin rough sound at the back of your tongue, the kind of noise something with teeth makes when it's decided what it wants, and Valarr stops moving altogether.

He stops kissing you, stops breathing. He stops, full stop, his mouth a half-inch from yours, his hand cradling your jaw. The towel still hangs from his neck, his pupils dilating in real time so fast you can watch the brown one go almost black, the blue one going luminous.

"Love," he breathes hotly.

You don't answer.

You hook your bare legs around the back of his thighs, and you pull him forward into you. Yank him in until his hips are pressed against the edge of the counter and against the inside of your thighs. Until the soaked cotton of his t-shirt is against the linen of his shirt you're wearing, and you can feel the heat of him through everything. The post-workout furnace of his body, the damp cling of sweat-warmed cotton against your bare skin.

"You said you needed to shower," you say mildly.

Valarr swallows. "I did say that."

"Do you?" you question, deceptively mildly.

"I—I think I—love."

You're already pulling at the hem of the t-shirt.

You drag it up slowly. You make Valarr lift his arms for you, and he does it instantly, his eyes locked on your face, and the wet cotton peels off him with that particular reluctance damp cotton has. Sticking, releasing, sticking. Until you've got it bunched at his shoulders and then over his head and then balled in your fist and then dropped, wet, to the marble counter beside the toast, where it lands with a small slap that neither of you registers.

He is. He is—

You knew. You've known what Valarr looks like under the t-shirt for three months now.

You’ve catalogued every line of him, watched him strip down in the dim of his bedroom, and traced your hands over him in the dark. You have, several times, watched him swim laps in the building's pool while pretending to read by the glass. 

You know what he looks like. But you haven't ever seen him in this light before.

The eastern sun is fully on him, illuminating him fully, painting him golden. 

He’s the long, lean, particular shape of a man who works out with the discipline of someone who has time and money to consider his body a project. Not bulky, never bulky, that wouldn't suit him, but cut. 

Every line of his body is beautiful and deliberate. The cut of his hipbones above the waistband of the shorts, the smooth, lean stomach with that faint dark and white trail of hair below his navel you've licked twice now. The lift of his chest, where his breath is going uneven, and the long, elegant lines of his toned arms.

There’s sweat in the hollow of his throat. Sweat gathers at his sternum, too, gathers and trails down. There’s a small mole low on his ribs that you’ve kissed three times in three months, and that catches the light now in a way that makes you want to sink your teeth into him.

He’s beautiful. Absurdly beautiful. Valarr is the kind of beautiful that’s been worshipped his whole life and has therefore developed no real defence against being wanted. 

You can see it in his face. In the slight parting of his mouth, in the held quality of his breathing. The way Valarr stares at you like you’ve just announced war against him.

Nobody has ever wanted him quite like this before. Not for his wealth or name, or pretty boy looks, but in an older way, the animal way.

You put both hands on him.

You start at the jut of his collarbones. Both palms flat on the slick of him. You drag them down leisurely over the planes of his chest, your thumbs grazing the small dark points of his nipples because you can’t help yourself and because he makes another small sound when you do. Ragged, swallowed; then over the cut of his ribs, the flat of his toned stomach, the line of his sides where his obliques narrow into his hips; down to the waistband of the shorts, where you stop, where you let your fingers hook into the elastic for one held second.

He’s shaking faintly under your hands.

"Love," he rasps again, like it’s the only word left available to him.

"Shhh."

You lean forward.

You put your mouth on his throat.

Right where the sweat gathers. Right at the hollow at the base of Valarr’s throat, where you can taste salt and the dark woody thing that’s his soap and underneath both of those, the warmer animal smell that is just him, just Valarr. The thing you've known by scent since the third week of knowing him by name. 

You suck. You set your teeth, very lightly, against the tendon at the side of his neck, and you suck until the skin there gives a little. Until you feel the heat rise to the surface of his skin, until you feel his pulse pound against your tongue. His hands come up and land hard on your hips, fingers digging in, ungoverned.

Valarr groans.

No perfect control in that sound.

It comes out of him into your hair, your throat, the bare line of your shoulder where the linen has slipped. It’s the sound of a man whose composure has finally—finally, after three months of every careful, courteous can I, sweet girl, may I, my love—slipped its leash entirely.

His hands tighten on your hips. He goes hard against you instantly. You feel it happen through the thin shorts, against the inside of your thigh where you've pulled him in between your legs. The heat of it shoots up your spine and turns your vision white at the edges.

"Oh," he breathes against your hair. "Oh, fuck."

You keep your mouth at his throat, mouth twitching with satisfaction. You drag your teeth. You suck a second mark, lower this time, near the cut of his collarbone, and feel his hips push forward involuntarily against yours. Then jerk back as he tries to remember himself, tries to remember he's gross and sweaty and was going to shower.

You don't let him remember.

You hook your legs harder around the back of his thighs, rolling your hips against his. Once. Slow and hard. You make sure Valarr feels the line of you against him through the thin linen of his shirt, through the thin cotton of his shorts and through the heat of his own ridiculous body. His hand at your hip slides up your back, under the hem of the shirt, finds the bare skin there, and his fingers spread, and he holds. Possessive, dazed, cradling you close.

You pull back enough to look at him.

His face. Gone soft, completely glazed. Those mismatched eyes are blown, his mouth parted slightly. His hair is pushed back from his forehead where you've fisted it, his pulse going at his throat so visibly you can count it. 

Valarr’s gazing at you the way he looks at you across rooms, the way he looks at you when you laugh at something he said, the way he looks at you when you walk in late to a dinner he’s set up. That immortalising look, the one where he’s making a permanent record of you.

Except now there’s no polish on it. None. The look is stripped down to the thing underneath, which is hunger, which is wonder, the dazed, unguarded face of a man who’s not, in twenty-six years of being adored, ever been taken.

You rake your nails down his chest.

Just enough to leave four faint pink lines that will pink up red within a minute, that he’ll notice in the shower later and trace with his fingers when he looks at himself in the mirror. That will make him hard again four hours from now in some meeting he’ll remember nothing of.

"My love," he says softly. "Christ, what—what are you —"

"Need you," you rasp. “Need you right now, Val.”

It comes out of you low, rough, without softness. Not I'd like, or will you, or any of the carefully negotiated phrasings you’ve used with Valarr for three months, because that’s the register he speaks in. You’ve dropped the register. 

You’re looking at him with your eyes gone dark and your mouth wet from his throat, the linen of his shirt slipping off your shoulder, and you have told him exactly what you require.

He stares at you.

The brown eye is so dark now you can't see the iris anymore, the blue one lit from within. He’s breathing through his mouth in shallow pulls, and his hands have not let go of your hips. You can feel him, hard, throbbing, against the inside of your thigh, and you watch the last of his composure go.

You watch it. You watch the moment.

It’s extraordinary.

Nothing slips or cracks. He's too dignified. It’s a handing-over. Three months of careful patient attentive I won't presume, love, and you’ve asked him for one thing in two words. He has, without taking his eyes off your face, simply given you the leash he’s been holding on to himself the entire time, set it down at your feet.

"Whatever you want," he says.

His voice has gone low and ragged. Half-octave under his usual register. Reverent.

"Whatever you want, sweet girl. Whatever you want. I'll—anything. Tell me."

You lean forward. You put your mouth to his ear. You feel the shiver that goes through him when you do.

"Counter," you murmur, lips brushing against heated skin. "Here. Now."

"But—"

"Now, Valarr."

"Yes, yes."

You barely hear it. He's nodding into your hair. His hand is sliding down the back of your thigh and lifting you slightly and pulling you to the very edge of the counter, the marble cool under the back of your thighs and Valarr’s hand hot under them. 

His other hand comes up, going into your hair, grabbing a fistful at the nape of your neck. Then his mouth comes back to yours, and this time he’s not polite. There’s nothing careful about this at all. The kiss is open and wet, a little desperate, and it tastes like salt and espresso. Valarr’s making small, devastated sounds into your mouth that he doesn't seem aware of, and his hips roll forward against yours without his permission. 

He doesn’t pull them back this time, hasn't apologised, hasn't asked.

You bite his lower lip. Lightly. He groans and you swallow the sound. 

"Sweet girl."

You let out a small, pleased hum at the hungry groan in his voice.

"Sweet girl,” he says again, pecking you, then again, one hand at your jaw. "I—what are you—"

"You said anything?"

He murmurs against your lips, "Anything."

"Then stop talking."

He nods with a low groan, his forehead dropping to yours. His hand tightens in your hair. His other hand has come up under the hem of his shirt and slides up the bare skin of your back, splayed hot against your spine.

You roll your hips against his again. Harder, this time. His whole body shudders.

"Oh."

You peck the corner of his mouth. "Shh."

"You can’t,” he whispers, ragged, “you can't do that—"

"I can."

"—you can't, you'll—"

"Valarr."

His breath hitches. "Yes?"

"Be a good boy."

The sound that comes out of him is going to live in your head for the rest of your life.

You smile.

You bring his face up to yours. You make him look at you. He’s looking at you like you’re a miracle he gets to claim for himself, and you look back at him, letting him see your face. You let him see the wolf in you that you’ve been carefully keeping behind glass since he met you, let him see the thing he’s been suspecting was in there and not been allowed to see until now.

His mouth parts.

"Where," he says quietly, wrecked. "Where have you been all my life?"

You smile gently, dragging your thumb across his swollen lower lip.

"Right here, pretty thing," you say lovingly.

A groan rumbles in his throat. "Pretty thing," he repeats, dazed. 

Your mouth curves, and you kiss the corner of his mouth again, cradling his cheek. "Mm."

Valarr laughs. Silky, ruined. He turns his face into your hand and kisses your palm, then your wrist and then the inside of your forearm. His eyes, when they come back to your face, are dazed and adoring in a way that’s bordering, you realise distantly, on something more dangerous than adoration. 

He drops to his knees. He kneels there, on the dark wood floor, and looks up at you.

For one suspended second, Valarr doesn't move. His hands are at your knees, splayed wide, and he’s on the floor of his own kitchen, gazing up at you. He is, you realise after a beat, waiting.

He’s waiting for you to tell him what you want from him.

Three months of carefully negotiated can I, sweet girl, may I touch you here, may I taste you, will you let me, and you’ve stripped that out of him in eight minutes flat. He’s on his knees, bare-chested, sweat-slick, the early sun gilding the long lean lines of him.

You spread your legs. Just enough. You shift your weight onto the marble and let your knees fall a fraction wider, watching Valarr’s eyes drop to where the linen of his shirt has ridden up. His breath leaves him in one long, painstaking exhale through his nose.

"Love," he breathes. “Anything for you. Just ask.”

You say nothing for a full minute. "Then eat, Valarr."

The sound he makes goes through you like a struck bell.

He surges forward. There’s no other word for it. Doesn't crawl, doesn't lean, he surges, both hands pushing your knees wider as he comes, his mouth opening against the bare inside of your thigh first. High, where you’re softest, and biting, not hard, just enough to make you arch off the marble. Just enough to leave a small crescent he’ll be staring at later in the bathroom mirror like evidence.

Then his mouth is on you.

A sound you don’t recognise slips past your clenched teeth. 

It comes out of your throat broken and surprised, unbearably loud in his quiet kitchen, the morning sun slanting across both of you, and Valarr—who’s been so unfailingly polite for three months, who’s asked permission for every step, and eaten you out before with that slow reverence—Valarr eats you now like a man who’s been waiting his entire life for someone to tell him he can do this.

His hands drag across your body, devouring each curve. One comes up under the linen shirt, spreading hot and wide across the small of your back, anchoring you, pulling you to the absolute edge of the counter. 

The other hooks under your thigh and lifts, draping your leg over his shoulder, the bare back of your knee against the slick, damp skin of him. Valarr’s hand grips your other thigh hard enough that you'll have small fingertip bruises by lunchtime, four neat ovals in a row on the inside.

And his mouth. His mouth. He’s using his teeth in a way he hasn't before. Lightly, with calculation. He’s using his tongue with the same focused accuracy he’s always used it, but he’s shed the carefulness; he’s shed the I won't presume, he’s going at you with the dazed greed of a man who wanted this for a long, long time.

You fist your hand in his hair.

You pull. Hard. You drag his face deeper into you because you can’t help yourself. 

Because the sun is full on both of you and the marble is cold under your thighs, his hair damp under your hand, and his mouth is exactly where you need it, and Valarr moans into you, the sound vibrating against you. His hand on your thigh tightens, and his shoulder presses harder under your knee, making him go at you with renewed focus, as if the pull of your hand in his hair were an instruction he;s just gratefully received.

You come embarrassingly fast.

With one hand fisted in his damp hair and one hand braced flat behind you on the marble. Your back arches, your toes curling, the linen of his shirt sliding off one shoulder, your thighs clamping around his head, and Valarr’s hands grip you through it, holding you exactly where he wants you while you go to pieces against his mouth. He doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He keeps going through it, soft and persistent, his mouth gentling but not lifting, his tongue dragging through the aftermath of your release with the same dazed, reverent focus.

"Valarr—"

He hums against you, and your hand spasms in his hair.

"Valarr."

He lifts his head a fraction, mouth wet, chin wet too. The white streak at his temple is plastered with sweat, and the dark of his hair is sticking up in places where you’ve been pulling, and his eyes, when they meet yours, are destroyed.

He licks his lower lip.

"More," he states, voice low. “I want more. All of you, sweet girl. Let me taste you. More.”

It's barely a word. More so, a request, a question, and a small wrecked plea rolled into one. You watch Valarr’s face, and you feel—sharply, delightedly, with a clean cold satisfaction in the centre of your chest—that you have him.

That you’ve just had him in a way you haven’t had him before. 

Those three months of polished, restrained worship have just been redrawn, definitively, in your favour.

You drag your thumb across his wet lower lip, holding his eyes. You let him see you.

"Up," you tell him softly.

"But I’m not done—"

"Up."

Valarr rises. Like a man who’s forgotten how legs work and is figuring it out in real time, sluggish, stupefied, his hands sliding up the backs of your thighs as he comes, his mouth coming up to yours. He’s kissing you before he’s fully standing, his mouth open against yours, and you taste yourself on him. Sharp and bright and warm. You make a low sound of approval in your throat, biting his lower lip, hard enough to leave a mark, and he whimpers into your mouth.

Oh, that sound.

That sound is going to live in your head until you die. 

A beautiful, rasping sound of a man who hasn’t known he was capable of producing that sound until a moment ago. Your hand fists tighter in his hair in reward, and you yank his head back. Your mouth goes to Valarr’s throat where you’ve already marked him once, but you bite him there a second time, harder now, dragging your teeth across the place his pulse is pounding, sucking until you taste salt and the faint copper-edge of where you've broken a capillary, and Valarr—

Valarr's hips jerk forward against yours.

Once. Twice. Hard. Involuntary.

You feel him through the thin gym shorts, against the bare wet of you on the very edge of the counter, and the heat of him is shocking. His gasping breath breaks against your hair in ragged little catches, so you set your teeth into the muscle at the side of his neck and bite. 

Hard, unapologetically, the way you would bite into something you intended to keep, and Valarr makes a sound you haven’t heard from him before in your life, low and shocked and delightfully animal. His hips jerk forward one more time and stop, his whole body going rigid against you, his hands clamping on your hips, his forehead dropping hard to your shoulder, and you feel him—

You feel him come.

In his shorts. Through his shorts. Against the inside of your thigh, the bare wet of you, the marble counter underneath. You feel the pulse of it through the thin cotton, and you feel the heat of it bloom against you. He’s shaking, properly shaking, his fingers digging into your hip. Valarr’s mouth slacks open against your collarbone, making small ragged pained sounds into your skin.

You go very still.

You watch his face, eyes wide. His face angles into your throat and stays there, hidden, his shoulders shaking finely under your hands.

You feel the wet heat of him soak through the cotton against your inner thigh, slow and too warm and absurdly intimate, and you understand—with a low, bright pleasure that has nothing to do with reciprocation—that you’ve just made Valarr Targaryen come in his pants in his own kitchen on a Tuesday morning by biting his neck.

He’s gone, distinctly, several shades pinker.

"Fuck," he chokes out, faintly, into your throat. "Oh, fuck."

Your mouth curves into a pleased, feline smile.

You already hear the apology forming on his tongue when he whispers, "I didn't mean—"

"Look at me," you drawl.

"I—"

"Look at me, Val."

He lifts his head.

His face is wrecked, cracked open by pleasure. His mouth gapes, his perfect hair destroyed. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are nearly black, both of them, even the blue one, and there’s colour high on his cheekbones and the hollow of his throat is heaving. There’s a fresh red bruise blooming under the line of his jaw where you’ve just sucked it into being, and he’s looking at you, just looking like you’ve cracked something open in him. 

He swallows.

"I—" His voice is ruined, quiet, faintly embarrassed. "I'm sorry, that has—that hasn’t happened to me since I was—"

You stroke your thumb up his jaw. "It’s alright. I liked it."

"—fifteen, love, I—" 

"Valarr, I liked it," you tell him. "I like making you fall apart just as much as you enjoys doing the same to me."

His eyes sharpen, focusing on your face. "You do?"

You drag your hand down his chest in response, watching his eyes track the path of your hand.

You feel him still hard against you—still hard, even through what just happened, the impossibility and the inevitability of him, twenty-six years old and beautiful and on a strict regimen, his body already rallying—and you drag your fingers down across his stomach. Down to the soaked waistband of the shorts, and you slip two fingers into the waistband, and you tug playfully.

"Off."

"Are you sure?" he croaks.

"Take them off."

He nods, fumbling with the drawstring. His hands are shaking—actually shaking, you can see them, his fingers can't manage the knot at first—and you watch him laugh once, breathless, embarrassed, and it makes you smile at him fondly. His own expression softens further when he catches you looking at him like that, some tension melting from his shoulder blades. 

The knot finally loosens, and he pushes the shorts down, stepping out of them. He kicks them aside, naked and sweat-streaked. Wet at the front of his thighs where he spilt moments ago, but still hard, gloriously, almost insolently, his cock heavy and flushed dark against the cut of his hip. 

You look at him.

You take your time looking at him.

He stands there in his own kitchen and lets you. Valarr’s hands hang at his sides. His face is naked in a way that pricks inside your chest, so you take your time with him. 

You let your eyes drag inch at a time. Over the planes of his chest, the four pink lines down his sternum where you scratched him five minutes ago, the two darkening bruises at his throat, the smoothness of his stomach, the trail of hair below his navel. You watch him bear your hungry examination. Watch him stand there and let you look, watch a small, almost-shy smile pull at the corner of his mouth.

"Sweet girl," he says quietly.

You tilt your head. 

"You're—"

"Hush, pretty thing," you say instead, still drinking him in. 

You reach down between your own thighs.

You don't break eye contact. You drag two fingers through the wet mess of you—your own, his, the slick of both of you mixed at the edge of the marble where his shorts had pressed against you—and you bring your fingers up between you, glistening, and see his face change.

"Oh."

"Open your mouth, Valarr," you instruct gently. 

He opens.

He opens with the same dazed, automatic obedience he’s been giving you for the last fifteen minutes.

His head tilting back a fraction, his lips parting, his eyes locked on your face, and you slide your two wet fingers into his mouth, and you push—past his teeth, past his tongue, two knuckles deep—and Valarr's eyes flutter half-shut. 

He makes a tiny, muffled sound around your fingers and his hands come up to brace on the counter on either side of your hips. His tongue moves against your fingers, sucking at them, lapping up the wet of himself off your skin with such immediate pleasure that something hot and possessive unfurls in your chest.

You push your fingers a fraction deeper. He takes them. Valarr’s throat works around the heel of your hand. He keeps his eyes on yours.

You pull your fingers out slowly, dragging the wetness across his lower lip, leaving a slick smear.

He makes a small, ruined sound.

"You taste yourself, pretty thing?" you ask quietly. 

"Yes," he answers, breathless, eyes hooded.

He leans forward and kisses you.

He kisses you with his mouth still wet from your fingers and your wet still on his tongue, and he kisses you the way he ate you ten seconds before. Open, urgent, no carefulness anywhere in him. You taste him in your own mouth, salt and bright and warm and slightly bitter and him, and his hands have come up off the counter and gripped your hips again, fingers digging in. You feel him roll his hips forward against the bare wetness of your core and groan into your mouth.

He’s so hard. Again. Still. His cock is hot and heavy against the inside of your thigh, and there’s wetness against your skin, and you don't know whose anymore. Valarr’s mouth moves against yours, slick and fully open-mouthed. 

You break the kiss after another moment. You hold his face in both your hands.

"Harder," you order huskily. 

He groans against your lips. "My sweet girl."

"Harder, Val."

He nods. He kisses you harder. His teeth catch your lower lip, and he sucks at it, tentative, and then—when you make a hungry, pleased sound into his mouth—bolder, biting, the carefulness sliding off him in real time as he learns that you want this. That you’ve wanted this for a while. That the ferocity he’s been keeping behind glass for three months because he was afraid of frightening you was, in fact, the thing you were waiting for.

You drag your hand down between you. You wrap his length in your fist.

Valarr chokes.

"Shhh." 

You kiss his cheek, stroking him, once, slow, grip tight. He’s hot and slick at the head from his own coming, from his own anticipation. Valarr shudders against you, his forehead dropping to your collarbone. His hand fists in the linen of his shirt at your back.

"You can't,” he groans, barely audible, “I'll come again, I'll—"

"You will," you agree softly, kissing the shell of his ear. 

He loosens a groan. "Love."

"You will, pretty thing,” you say again, thumb rubbing over the slit of his cock. “As many times as I want."

He makes a sound, a ragged half-groan, and you smile against the side of his head, kissing the spot where his white streak meets his temple and you feel him shudder under your mouth.

You keep stroking him. Just at the edge of unbearable. You watch Valarr’s face turn into your shoulder, his hips pushing forward into your hand. You watch the discipline of him—the man who deadlifts at five in the morning, who runs his portfolio with surgical precision, who has never not been in control of a room—fall to absolute pieces against the linen of his own shirt on your shoulder.

"Show me," you murmur into his hair.

"Mm?"

"Show me, Valarr," you whisper into his ear.

Valarr ruts into your fist, a hot, wet pant burning the hollow of your throat, "Show you what, sweet girl?” he croaks. “I—anything, for you—"

You hum, twisting your wrist as you exhale, "Show me your strength."

He stills.

You feel it. He stills against you, his face still pressed to your shoulder, his cock heavy and pulsing obscenly in your hand, his hands locked at the small of your back. You can hear him breathing. Can hear the pulse in his throat against your shoulder. 

You feel him register the words, feel him understand them, exactly.

"You're a dragon, aren't you?" you wonder idly. “My golden, beautiful dragon.”

"—yes." 

No hesitation. 

"Then claim me."

He lifts his head.

The stupified, shocked compliance of the last fifteen minutes is gone. 

What’s in its place is something you haven’t seen on Valarr's face yet. He’s not the polished, smiling, immaculate boy who brought you peonies and asked permission to kiss you; what’s in its place is the thing his very polite Targaryen ancestors used to be before three generations of money and manners stripped it out of them, the thing he’s been told all his life he’s too well-bred to be. 

The thing he didn't know was in him until you put your two fingers in his mouth and said hello to it.

He doesn't say anything.

He yanks you up off the counter.

One motion. His hands are on you, and your back hits the cold marble of the kitchen island. His mouth is on your throat, and he’s biting you, properly biting you, hard enough to make you gasp. His hand fists in your hair at the nape of your neck, and he’s angling your head exactly where he wants it, and his other hand drops between you. Between your legs, two fingers, no asking, sliding into you with the slick that’s half him and half you and the heel of his hand grinds hard against your core. Your vision goes white.

"Yes," you breathe. “There, yes, Val.”

He kisses your throat, jaw, and tip of your nose. "Sweet girl."

"Yes—"

He pecks your mouth, curling his fingers. "Tell me again."

"Claim me. Use me, Val."

He kisses you. Bruising. He kisses you like he’s furious with you, like he is grateful to you, like he’s been holding his breath for three months and you have only just told him he’s allowed to use his mouth.

Valarr’s fingers work you with the kind of precision that asserts he’s been studying you the entire time and remembers every signal you’ve ever given him.

His thumb—Christ, his thumb—is exactly where you want him, mean and relentless, and he’s learning you all over again. Learning what you sound like when he’s rough with you, learning what you look like when you stop being careful with him, his eyes on your face the whole time, immortalising, committing the whole thing to a permanent record he will not let himself forget for the rest of his life.

You come around his fingers in under a minute.

You come with your forehead pressed to his, moaning loudly, and his mouth open against yours, swallowing the sound.

The fingers buried in you keep moving, and his other hand stays fisted in your hair, and you’re making sounds that are not words, and he’s murmuring into your mouth (that's it, my sweet girl, there she is, my beautiful girl, give it to me, that's mine, you’re mine) in a tone of voice you haven’t heard before. Low and hoarse, certain of himself, and you feel the mine hit something in your chest that makes you bare your teeth with pleasure. 

He pulls his fingers out of you, pushing them into his own mouth.

Valarr sucks them clean while watching your face.

You stare at him, still panting, your nerves on fire.

He smiles around his fingers, slow, crooked.

"Love," he says, drawing his fingers out with a wet pop, "tell me where you want me."

"Inside," you tell him. "Need you dripping out of me, pretty thing."

Valarr squeezes his eyes closed, counts mentally, then, croaked, "Counter or floor?"

"Floor."

He doesn’t lower you carefully.

Valarr goes down with you. Goes down to his knees on the dark wood floor with you locked around his waist, and he tips you back, one hand braced behind your head, the other splayed wide at the base of your spine. 

He lays you down on the wood with the gentleness of a man laying out a relic and the greed of a man about to break it open. 

The wood is cold under your back, the linen of his shirt crinkled up around your ribs. The morning sun is on you both, gilding the slick lines of him, lighting up the white streak at his temple, painting the bruises you've left on his throat in dark purple.

He braces above you.

His hair falls forward over his face. His hand slips between your thighs, lining himself up, and his eyes are on your face, and he’s waiting for the word.

"Now," you urge him.

He pushes into you.

You arch off the floor.

Valarr watches your face, he gives you the half-second to adjust, reading you in real time the way he reads everything. But he doesn’t give you the deliberate measured slowness he’s given you for three months. 

He pushes in to the hilt in one long slow stroke that has you fisting your hands in his hair and tipping your head back and making a sound that is going to embarrass you in approximately twenty minutes when you can think clearly again, and Valarr—sweat-slick, marked, beautiful,so beautiful, gone—drops his forehead to yours and breathes against your mouth and doesn't move.

"You’re so perfect," he exhales, a silky sound.

You breathe out a small, pleased sound.

"You drive me insane," he whispers, and there’s a hint of laughter in his ragged voice. “You undo me, love. Do you understand that?”

"Val,” you breathe out, feeling how the fond shortening of his name makes him pulse inside you. “Move."

He does. 

He moves the way you’ve asked him to move, the way you’ve told him he’s permitted to move. 

He fucks you on the kitchen floor, his hand fisted in your hair. Valarr’s other hand hooks under your thigh, pushing your knee up against your chest, opening you wider for him. His mouth is on your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder where the linen of his shirt has slipped, biting and sucking and leaving marks of his own, finally, claiming you along the line of your throat the way you’ve just claimed him.

His hips snap forward. Again. Again.

You feel him in your teeth. The tempo is so painfully efficient that it drives you insane. You feel him through your spine in every stroke. The wood of the floor is cold against your back, and your shoulder blades are going to be bruised by tonight, but you can’t bring yourself to care.

His pelvis grinds against yours on every powerful thrust and his hand slips between you, circling where he’s pushing into you, and his thumb is—his thumb is— 

You come again, your walls fluttering around his cock, embarrassingly, helplessly, with your nails dragging four red lines down the middle of his toned back. Valarr groans into your throat, yes, yes, that's it, sweet girl, my wolf, that's mine, that's it, give it to me, and he’s fucking you through it without slowing, his rhythm only stuttering for a second and then catching, his eyes wild on your face, his mouth open against yours.

He’s sweating. He hasn’t stopped sweating since he came back from the gym. 

The whole of him is slick and hot, the morning sun on him and you feel the salt of him against your mouth when you pull his head down to yours. His hair is a complete wreck where you’ve been yanking at it. His back is going to be a map of your nails by tonight and his throat is going to be a map of your mouth and you almost laugh in delight.

You arch under him instead. You hook your heel into the base of his spine, dragging him deeper.

"Harder, dragon."

The sound that comes out of Valarr is barely human.

A low broken thing. His name lands exactly where you placed it, dragon, not pretty thing, not sweet boy, dragon, the old word, the one his blood has been waiting for. 

Valarr’s eyes darken, impossibly so, and his hand at your hair tightens and he gives you exactly what you asked for. 

He gives it to you so completely that the world around you becomes very narrow and very sharp and he’s fucking into you with the strength he’s been hiding for three months, the strength of a man who deadlifts at dawn and rows until he aches, the strength of the thing in him that his ancestors used to ride into wars on, and it is—

It is exactly what you needed.

You bite his shoulder. Viciously. Copper burns on your tongue and you feel Valarr’s whole body lock against yours and his hand fist convulsively in your hair and his hips drive forward one last time hard enough to push you up the floor by several inches, and Valarr—

Valarr comes inside you with a sound that’s torn between a sob and a roar, his face pressed into your throat, his other hand braced flat on the wood beside your head with his fingers spread wide and white at the knuckles. 

He shakes. Through the whole thing, his hips jerking against yours in small uneven thrusts, and you can feel the heat of him filling you up, gushing deep, and you can feel the pulse of him and you can feel his teeth set into the side of your throat at the very end, marking you, finally properly marking you. Your answering moan sounds more animal than woman, your body coiled around his.

You both go still.

The kitchen is suddenly painfully silent. 

It takes you several minutes to come back to your body. 

You blink up at the ceiling blearily, squinting. You’re on the dark wood floor of Valarr’s kitchen with his weight on top of you and his face buried in your throat. The linen of his shirt is soaked through at the ribs with sweat that’s now also half his and half yours. 

Valarr breathes against your throat. 

Then he lifts his head.

He’s looking at you with an expression that’s not quite settled into anything yet. Not fully shock, or joy, not even fear. There’s only the unguarded face of a man whose entire model of himself has just been rearranged by the woman pinned under him on a kitchen floor.

He laughs. Gentle, breathless, fond. He drops his forehead to yours.

"My sweet girl," he says, and his voice is hoarse, "what the fuck have you done to me?"

Your mouth curls into a pleased grin.

You bring his mouth down to yours, kissing him gently, lingering at the seams of his lush mouth. You taste yourself on his mouth, and you taste sweat and salt and the metallic edge of where you broke skin on his shoulder, and you keep your hand fisted lightly in his hair.

"My golden dragon," you murmur fondly. “My beautiful, perfect Val.”

He laughs into your mouth, a terrible, broken sound. He shakes his head against yours.

"Christ."

You only tighten your arms around his shoulders in response. 

"You're going to ruin me," he rasps, mouth on your collarbone. "You're my ruin, sweet girl."

"Yes," you agree lightly, stroking his flushed face.

"My love, I need—"

You know what he needs; even if his body is spent, he still wants more, always more. Your knuckles fondly skim over the white streak against his temple. 

"Yes, Val," you say quietly, closing your eyes when he begins jerking his hips inside you again, pleasure raking through your oversensitive nerves as his cum drips onto the kitchen floor between you. “Take what you need.” 

The fire had burned down to embers and left the room dim and still. The only warmth came from him. Aerion was half draped over you, one arm thrown loosely across your waist and his head resting against your shoulder. His breath was slow and steady.

You were not sure when you’d woken, only that you had, and he hadn’t. And now you were stuck there, pinned beneath him. When you shifted slightly, you felt his arm on your waist tighten. You should leave, you think.

A quiet breath left him, something between a sigh and a hum, and then he stirred. His eyes opened, unfocused for a moment before settling on you. “You are still here?” he said.

You blinked at him. “You told me to stay.

He frowned slightly, “Did I?”

“Yes.”

He shifted again, dragging a hand over his face. “I don’t remember that,” he muttered. “Must’ve had too much wine.”

You scoffed softly, pushing lightly against him. You started to move, trying to slip out from under him. “Fine. I will go—”

His arm tightened again before you could get far. “I did not say that,” he said.

You glanced at him, frowning. “You just did.”

He looked at you then, more awake now. “I did not tell you to leave,” he corrected. “Do not make things up.”

Gods, you hated him.

He shifted above you, propped up on one elbow, looking down at you with half-lidded eyes. “You are an idiot.” He said. You frowned, caught off guard. “What?”

“You are,” he repeated, like it was obvious. His other hand moved to slip into your hair. His fingers grabbed a loose strand and toyed with it idly.

“I do not remember asking for your insults,” you said, shaking your head slightly as you pushed to get up from under him. His hand moved to your chest and he pushed you back down. His lips curled and met your neck. He kissed your skin softly and buried his head in the crook of your neck. You hated how good he made you feel.

“A Tyrell.” He muttered against your skin. “In my bed like a common whore.” Your breath caught, and you placed your hands on his bare chest to push him away, again. “I am not a whore.”

Aerion breathed a small laugh before prying your hands from his chest, moving to press his lips against your collarbone. He slipped your nightgown from your shoulder and then lower past your breast. He moved to take it in his mouth. You gasped softly, feeling his tongue circle your nipple and then sucking hard. His hand moved, from your waist to under your nightgown and in between your thighs in one motion.

“You get wet for me, like a whore.” He said, you could feel his smirk on your skin.

“Aerion—“

Before you could finish, he dove a finger into your already slick folds, and a broken moan escaped your throat. He added another, pumping in and out of you. Your head fell back onto the pillow as his mouth bruised your flesh from breast to collarbone. Your chest rose and fell with uneven breaths. “I fuck you like a whore.” He said.

“Aerion, please.” You moaned.

His thumb found your clit and rubbed in soft circles. He worked his fingers faster, pressing his lips to your jaw. Your hand slid up his arm, and your nails dug into his flesh. He shifted until he hovered over you completely. His fingers curled slightly inside of you, enough to bring a sound of pleasure from your throat.

A knock at the door broke you from the moment. Your eyes widened, and you pressed your hand against his chest. Aerion kept moving unbothered, adjusting himself between your legs, his mouth still on your neck as if he did not hear it at all. It came again.

“Aerion—“ You said. “Shut up.” He muttered.

Then, when it came a third time, he groaned and pulled his fingers from your cunt. He turned towards the door. “What?” He snapped. The door creaked open slightly, and you moved farther beneath him. Hoping to disappear into the mattress. A servant girl appeared in the small gap. She kept her eyes on the floor. “The queen is requesting Lady Tyrell; the servants have been searching everywhere for her.” She said softly.

A small irritated huff escaped his lips. “You interrupt me for this?” The girl only swallowed hard. “I am sorry my—“

Her apology was cut short when Aerion grabbed the half-full goblet beside the bed and threw it. It shattered against the wall beside her head, and she flinched. You flinched as well, peering over his arm to see the red liquid run down the stone. “Get out!” He ordered.

The girl nodded and disappeared quickly, the door shut behind her. He did not hesitate before moving his hand to your thigh, pushing your legs further apart for him. Aerion was quick to anger. You learned that early, not long after you first fell into his bed. It came fast, and it did not always make sense—his violet eyes would burn with something frightening. It was never turned on you. You liked to think that meant something.

“Aerion, stop.” You said quietly. He looked down at you, his expression more annoyed than confused. “My cock is still hard.” He said.

You pushed yourself upwards, and he groaned, rolling off you and onto his back and drug a hand over his face like the whole thing was an inconvenience. “What could my grandmother possibly need?” He muttered, his arm fell onto the mattress as he turned to look at you.

You were already dressing. “I do not know.” You said. “But it is bad enough your servants know I am here.”

He made a quiet sound at that, “They will not say anything, I will have their tongues if they do.”

You turned to look at him. “Do not say that.”

He scoffed, “I say what I please. Come here.”

You walked to the edge of the bed. “Turn around.” He said. “Aerion—“

“Turn around.”

You turned, and you heard him shift from the mattress. His hands found the back of your gown without warning, fingers catching the loosened laces and he yanked you back slightly.

“These are a mess,” he said.

“I was fixing it,” you muttered.

“Hardly,” he replied, already pulling them tighter. He tugged the laces into place, tightening them more than you would have, his fingers brushed your back. “There.” He muttered.

“Thank you.” You said, turning to face him.

He waved his hand dismissively. “Go on.”

-

You turned the corner too quickly and walked straight into him. You would have fallen if it weren’t for the hand that caught your elbow and steadied you.

“I—“ you began to speak, looking up at the poor wayfarer in your wake. Your face turned an awful shade of red when you had realized it was Prince Valarr who stood before you, and your throat went dry. You do not know why he makes you blush so terribly. You tell yourself you are just embarrassed.

His hand was still on your elbow. “My lady.” He said, his lips tugging upwards.

You swallowed. “My prince—I did not see you.”

“So it would appear.” A small laugh escaped him. “We must stop meeting like this.”

You glanced away, already trying to move past him. “I’m sorry, I’m just—”

“In a hurry?” he asked.

You nodded. “The queen is expecting me.”

“Ah.” His hand dropped from your elbow, and he took a step back.“I will walk with you.”

Gods, that is the last thing you wanted.

You looked at him, your mouth parted slightly to find the right words, the polite words to refuse a prince. “That is not necessary,” you said.

“I know,” he replied but still fell to walk beside you. You stared at him for a moment before moving.

-

“There you are,” Queen Myriah said once you entered the solar. Her gaze moved to Valarr just behind you, and her eyes flickered between the two of you for a moment. “Ah—Valarr.”

“Grandmother,” he said, inclining his head slightly.

“Where have you been, dear?” The queen asked, turning her attention back to you.

You felt your stomach tighten. “I—overslept.”

“The servants said you were not in your chambers.” She pointed out. “I overslept and then went to the sept.” You corrected.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, looking at you for a moment too long before breaking her gaze away. “Never mind it, I need your assistance.” She said, slowly taking a seat.

“How can I be of service, your grace?” You asked.

“There is something I’ve been meaning to see to,” she said, waving her hand in front of her. “Princess Rhae’s name day is approaching, and the floral arrangements have yet to be settled.”

She looked between you and Valarr once more. “What better person to assist me than a Tyrell?” She smiled.

Your smile faltered a bit. You inclined your head. “Of course, Your Grace.” You said.

“I would have you speak with the gardeners,” she continued. “See what can be done for the tourney feast. I want it done properly.” She paused, her fingers tapped the table in thought for a moment. “Valarr could accompany you.”

You were about to decline, but Valarr stepped forward slightly. “I would like that.” He said.

You clenched your jaw slightly and turned to face him with a forced smile. “Very well, let us go.”

In the gardens, you moved ahead without thinking of Valarr. You spoke to the gardeners as they showed you several arrangements. It did not take you long to see where they had gone wrong.

One of the men nodded and stepped forward. “And the center arrangements?” You glanced toward the beds of flowers, considering. “No, not those,” you said and shook your head “They will wilt before midday. Use the deeper reds.”

“They’re not as full, my lady,” one of them said.

“They do not need to be,” you replied. “But they need to last the day.”

You moved further down the row, your fingers brushing lightly over a bloom, checking it without thinking. “Cut these earlier,” you added. “If you wait, they will open to soon and wilt before the tourney.” Gods, no wonder the red keeps garden was a disaster. You think.

“Yes, my lady.”

“And do not place them so high on the tables,” you went on, glancing back at them. “It blocks the view. Keep them lower.”

They adjusted them immediately.

You watched a moment longer, then gave a small nod. “That will do.”

They bowed and dispersed and only then did you remember the prince was still lingering behind you.

Valarr stepped forward, his shoulder brushed yours. You looked at him. He was more put together than when you’d seen him previously—his tunic fastened high at the collar, threaded through with deep red that caught the light when he moved. A black cloak rested at his shoulders, clasped with a small dragon in red enamel. He looked very princely. You think.

He laughed softly. “You have impeccable taste, my lady.” He said.

You blushed and looked away. His compliment made your chest feel tighter. “Thank you, my prince.”

“Valarr is quite fine.” He said.

“Thank you…Valarr.” You corrected, testing his name on your tongue. He smiled at that. A moment of silence lingered between you two so you decided to speak again.

“I was raised in Highgarden. We have the best gardeners in the realm. I have learned much from them.” You began to walk, Valarr followed. Your fingers toyed with each other as you spoke, a habit you hadn’t quite shaken. “Flowers are very pretty to look at.” You said, glancing up at him. “But they can tell a story if you place them correctly.”

“Then I suppose roses tell a poor one?” He asked.

You looked down and your cheeks burned red. You remembered quickly how he had seen you brutalize an innocent rose bush a few nights prior. “They are…fine.” You said.

Valarr was not wrong. Roses did tell a story, they were supposed to tell your story. Your house, your sigil, your words. Now you could not look at them without thinking of him. He had gotten into it somehow. Not just your time, or your thoughts—but this too, your story and you hated him for that.

Valarr slowed, stopping before another bush. “What are these ones?” he asked. His fingers brushed over the flowers that had seemed to catch his attention.

You glanced over. Your shoulders eased, just slightly. “Peonies.”

He looked down at them. “Do these tell a good story?”

You moved beside him and tilted your head slightly to examine the pink blooms. “I suppose. They are pretty,” you said. “And they last long.”

“Hm.” Valarr hummed. He reached down, fingers closing around one, and pulled it free with an easy motion. He turned it once in his hand, then held it out to you. “For you.”

You blinked at him. “I could not accept.”

“You could.” He smiled. “If it would please you.”

Your fingers brushed his when you took the flower from his hand. Your breath caught slightly, and heat rushed to your face. Suddenly, you had the sinking realization that the prince may fancy you.

“I thought you were a prince,” a voice spoke from behind you, “not a meek gardener.”

You and Valarr both turned. Aerion stepped into view. His gaze went to Valarr first, looking at him with something more intense than usual. His eyes moved to you, then to the pink flower in your hand.

“Do you not have better things to do, cousin?” Valarr said.

Aerion huffed softly, his tongue pressed briefly against his teeth before he looked back up. His eyes settle on yours. “I have far better things to do.”

Valarr exhaled, unimpressed. “This is Lady Tyrell.” He said.

“Yes, I know,” Aerion said. You could drop dead in this very moment. You think. The way Aerion's eyes hadn’t left yours made your stomach curl with something close to dread. “We have met,” Aerion added.

Valarr's expression shifted, his mismatched eyes moving between you two. “You have?” He asked.

“Mhm.” Aerion hummed. “Briefly.”

“Yes.” You said, turning back to Valarr. “Briefly.” You repeated.

Aerion's jaw tightened slightly, barely noticeable. Then he looked away from you, back to Valarr. His lips curled into something that almost passed for a smile. “You must have done well, cousin,” he said to Valarr, almost absent. “Our Lady looks quite pleased in your company.”

Valarr nodded and extended his arm to you. “Excuse us, cousin.”

Aerion didn’t move at first. His brows lifted slightly, his mouth parting for a second before his tongue pressed against his lip. His fingers drummed once against the pommel of his sword. Then he smiled and stepped aside.

Valarr began to walk, your arm settling into his. As you passed, your shoulder brushed lightly against Aerion’s. You looked up without meaning to, and his eyes were already on you. You looked away first.

-

The knock hit your door hard. The brush in your hands clattered to the floor. You turned toward it. Your face tightening and brows pulling together in confusion. The hour was late, and you were not expecting anyone.

You stood and reached for your shawl, pulling it tighter around your shoulders as you crossed the room. You opened the door just enough to see Aerion. He leaned against the frame with his arms crossed. His expression was easy in a way that did not match the way he had knocked.

You stared at him for a moment. “Are you going to let me in?” He asked.

You opened your mouth to answer—But he did not wait. He scoffed and pushed past you, one hand brushing the door as he stepped through, already inside before you could say anything. You turned after him, still standing near the door, your grip tightened slightly on the edge of it.

“What are you doing here?” You asked.

Aerion did not answer right away; instead, he moved farther into your room. His gaze drifted over everything. Your bed, your vanity, your wardrobe. He had never been directly in your chambers before; you always followed him to his.

His attention turned towards you. His eyes flickered over you once. “Take your clothes off.” He said.

You stared at him for a moment. Closing the door, “Aerion, I have had a long day—“

He let out a humorless laugh. “Do not speak to me like that,” He hissed, taking a few steps towards you. Instinctively, you stepped back. You looked at him, and something in your gut sensed that something was off. The way he was looking at you now… it was different.

He was in front of you now. “Like what?” You asked.

He looked down at you. “Like I care how your day went. Like I want to hear it. Like you are my wife.” A pause. “You are not. And I do not care.”

His words hit you hard. You know that. You think. But there had been a time—you hated that there had been—when you thought he might ask it properly. That he might look at you in the daylight, speak to you in front of others, make something of it that wasn’t hidden behind closed doors. He had made it clear, quickly enough, that he would not.

And you had let him. You told yourself it did not matter. Told yourself you understood him better than the rest, and that was all you had wanted. That if you were patient enough, careful enough, he would want you in the same ways you wanted him. You knew him better now.

“I only meant that you are acting strange.” You said, quieter than you intended. His fingers caught your chin and he forced you to look at him.

His violet eyes scanned your face, “I want you to understand something.” He said, his thumb dragging softly against your jaw.

“This,” he said and gestured faintly between the two of you, “This is for me.” His hand moved from your chin to the nape of your neck. Intertwining his fingers with your hair. “You are for me,” his grip tightened.

“You do not dare tell me no.” He said. You winced slightly from his grip until he suddenly let go. “And do not look at me like that.” He muttered, turning away from you. You watched as he sat on the edge of your mattress as if it belonged to him.

You stayed unmoving. “Like what?” You asked.

“Like a heartbroken whore. Come here.”

Your feet moved, and you hated yourself for it. You stood now, between his legs. His hand moved, and you barely had time to react before he pulled you towards him. Your breath caught as you stumbled, and your hands instinctively braced against him. His lips met yours, and his hands found your waist. He gripped you firmly against him.

His lips moved against yours with an undeniable hunger. There was no softness to it. His tongue dragged against your bottom lip, demanding entry. You allowed it, parting your lips slightly to allow his tongue to ravish your mouth. He tasted like the bitter wine he likes, You thought. A soft moan escaped your throat, which only seemed to fuel him further because his fingers dug into your skin.

He took your bottom lip between his teeth and bit down. You pulled back slightly, moving your tongue to drag along your own lip. You tasted rust where he had bitten. He only watched you. Then you kissed him again, taking his own lip and biting hard enough to draw blood. You could feel his lips curl into a smirk against yours.

“That’s my girl.” He muttered.

His hands moved, sliding your nightgown from your shoulders until it fell past your hips and pooled at your feet. He leaned back slightly, his eyes moved over you slowly. He ran his tongue over his lip. You hated it when he looked at you like that. You hated that you never wanted him to ever stop.

You pulled his tunic up over his head and dropped it to the floor beside your feet. He stood, his bare chest to yours as he undid his belt buckle, kicking his pants off. When your lips met again, his hands found your waist, then dropped to the back of your thighs.

One sharp pull upward with a firm grip and he drew you against him. Your legs wrapped around his hips and your arms around his neck, deepening your kiss. He moved only a few steps before your back met the cold wall. He pulled back slightly; you could feel his length against your cunt, already slick with arousal. He thrusted into you with one deep stroke, burying himself completely. You cry out against his shoulder, and it comes out muffled against his skin.

When he started to move, his rhythm was demanding. Your mouth moved against his neck. You felt him lean forward slightly, burying his face in your hair. You could feel him draw in a slow breath against it, and for a moment, you think he is quite literally sniffing your hair. But then you realize that would be absurd.

His hips snap forward again, hitting that spot that makes your vision blur. He swallowed your whimper with another kiss. His grip on your thighs was bound to leave bruises as he lifted you up and back down on his cock. “Say you are mine.” You hear him mutter against your ear.

When you open your mouth to speak, the words are lost when he thrusts into you harder. “Say it.” He hissed.

“Yours.” That was all you could muster. Your head lolled back against the wall. “Mm, mine.” He hummed. The moment you came undone onto him, your chest rose and fell heavily. Aerion worked you through it, continuing to fuck you until tears pricked your eyes, and it all became too much. It did not last long before he let out a pleasurable groan, and his head went slack against your shoulder.

-

You were half asleep when you felt him move. His warmth left you first, then you felt the mattress shifted from his weight. A part of you had hoped he might stay. You should go back to sleep. You thought. But you opened your eyes anyway.

He sat there, shoulders shifting as he pulled his tunic into place, the fabric dark against pale skin. The candlelight lingered in his silver hair, bright where the flames touched it. He dragged a hand back through his hair. He sat there for a moment and then,—“Do not think yourself special.”

You frowned. “What?” You felt like you never really had a clue what he was talking about half the time.

He glanced back at you. “Valarr.”

You didn’t answer.

“He is used to being given things,” he said. “His father is heir to the throne, and he is a prince of the blood.” He paused and glanced back at you. “And you—what are you?”

You pushed yourself up slightly, the sheets pulling with you. Gods, you hated him. You wanted to argue, to tell him you were a Tyrell, to tell him that Valarr has been nothing but kind and that he was far more respectful than he was. “I did not—”

“If he wants you,” he cut in, “it is because you are easy to have. Not because he truly cares for you.”

At last, Maekar wrote to Dorne. Your father was not the ruling prince, but from Lord Orran Martell, his brother. Close enough to matter, far enough to manoeuvre. When the letter reached him, he read it once, then again, then a third time, slower. Only then did he allow himself a smile.

The carriage carried the scent of cedar and dust, and the road behind you stretched longer with each turn of the wheels.

Your father had spoken plainly. No softening, no illusions. He laid out the value of the match, the reach it offered, the place it would secure. He spoke as he would to a man he trusted with consequence. That was his way of showing regard.

He did not pretend the groom was good. He did not ask you to pretend either.

You are strong enough for this, he had said. I would not send you otherwise.

He had expected hesitation, perhaps fear, but he had not found it.

You watched the land shift through the narrow window, red stone fading into green, dry air thickening with damp. The world changing in slow increments.

You turned the name over again and again, testing it.

Aerion Brightflame.

You had heard the Ashford story, of course, everyone had. The mercy of the hedge knight that some called wisdom and others called weakness. What stayed with you was not the cruelty itself, cruelty was common enough among men with power and power made men careless with other people.

I am no man, he had reportedly said. I am a dragon.

You found this almost amusing.

Not because it was foolish, though it was. Because it told you something useful. A man who believed himself a dragon was a man who had built his entire self upon a story. And stories had seams, they could be read, they could, if one were careful, be rewritten.

Maekar thought he was sending you to tame his son. You could feel it in the careful tone of his words, you could feel the hope through the careful diplomacy of his acceptance letter, which your father had allowed you to read. The prince wanted a strong wife for his son. A steady hand. Something that might anchor Aerion to the earth before he burned everything around him.

But you intended to do something more interesting than that.

The journey north gave you time, and you used it well. The rhythm of the road settled into your bones, wheels creaking, hooves striking dirt, the quiet murmur of voices beyond the curtains. Long hours where nothing changed except the light.

You let your thoughts arrange themselves without forcing them. That was how it always worked best. Piece by piece.

By the time you reached the Crownlands, the structure of your plan had taken shape. You named it: Seven Steps to Tame a Beast.

King's Landing announced itself in smell before sight, woodsmoke, salt, something sour beneath both. Too many people, too little space, all of it pressed together and left to simmer. The Red Keep rose above it all, pale stone against a dull sky. It looked less like a crown and more like something grown in the wrong place.

The reception was brief, formal and efficient.

Maekar received you himself. He stood solid and broad, the years written into his face in hard lines. His hair had gone mostly to silver. His eyes were sharp, searching, measuring. You held his gaze just long enough, then gave him courtesy and nothing more.

Aerion was not there, you noticed.

STEPT 1. Keep Your Distance from the Wild.

A wild creature does not welcome approach. Every movement is weighed, every sound judged. You do not step into its space uninvited. You do not reach. You watch. You learn the rhythm first. Where it rests. What startles it. What draws its attention and what it ignores. Rush, and it turns. Wait, and it forgets you are there.

You did not seek Aerion in those first days, even if it took some effort.

There were servants willing to arrange a meeting. Courtiers who offered, curiosity thinly veiled. You declined each time, politely, with reasons that could not be pressed. Fatigue, settling in, amild headache.

In truth, you were mapping him. You began where he could not avoid being seen.

Meals.

He sat very straight, almost too straight, not relaxed. Every movement placed with care, hands set just so. Shoulders squared. The stillness was deliberate, the kind that came from control, not comfort. He ate little. Drank more than he should, though he kept it from showing. His eyes moved often. Not restless. A sweep, measured, taking stock of the room without drawing attention to it. He noted everything.

He laughed twice in three days, both times it was wrong. Too quick, it stopped at his mouth and went no further. The men around him laughed as well, they always did. You watched them more than him in those moments. Watched how easily they bent to it. Mirrors, all of them, they gave him back what he wanted to see.

On the second day, a steward stumbled over a name. A small mistake, barely worth notice. But Aerion noticed. His jaw tightened, just once. A brief pause before he spoke, a fraction longer than natural. Then it passed, the steward went on, unaware. You did not miss it, he disliked error. Disliked imprecision. The world, in his mind, should hold its shape. When it did not, something in him bristled.

On the third day, there was a gathering. Music, wine, low voices. People playing at ease.

You took a place near the edge, beside a column. Your handmaid stood with you, quiet, unobtrusive. You spoke when required, smiled when expected, nothing more.

Aerion crossed the room twice. The first time, he did not look at you. The second time, he did. A brief glance, flat and measuring. The kind given to something not yet worth attention. You were already looking elsewhere when it happened. Your focus set just past him, as though he were incidental.

Still, you saw enough. The slight tension at his mouth, the way his gaze held for a breath, then moved on. He knew you were there. Of course he did, and he was not interested.

Good.

Interest that comes too easily is useless. It has no weight; it does not last. Curiosity had to be earned.

That night, you sat by the window and let the city settle into silence beneath you.

He was proud, that was obvious, but there was something under it. Control, carefully maintained. He was not as unrestrained as the stories suggested. It meant the outbursts were not constant. They built. Pressure, then release.

He was intelligent. More than most around him allowed. That kind of mind, left without challenge, turns inward. Finds its own amusements, not always good ones. He had been told he was exceptional for too long. Ordinary things no longer held him.

Boredom, then. Boredom as a spark.

You suspected he had never been met with anything real. Only reflections and performance. That would have to change. You drew your braid over your shoulder, thinking.

You were not satisfied. You never were, this early. But you understood the ground beneath your feet now. Where it dipped, where it held. You had not spoken to him yet; you had barely shared a room. And still, you were closer than anyone here knew.

The ceremony took place at dawn.

Black candles burned low, their smoke thick and sweet, curling into the corners of the chamber. The maester spoke in High Valyrian, his voice steady as he shaped words that had existed long before the Conquest. Pale light slipped through a narrow window, thin and colourless. Maekar stood off to the side, his posture rigid, his expression set in that familiar way of a man who no longer expected much in return for doing what was required.

Aerion arrived on time.

He was dressed as expected, red and black, pale hair brushed to the side. He took his place beside you without hesitation, carrying himself like a man waiting out an obligation he could not avoid. He did not fidget; he was too controlled to do so. Instead, he held still, composed to the point of absence, his attention drifting toward the candles now and then as if searching for something that was not there.

When the maester's words required it, he took your hand. His grip was exact, dry and cold. It lingered only as long as custom demanded, then released at once, as if he had touched something hot and withdrawn before the burn could catch.

You kept your gaze forward and before you let your mind move forward, it was over.

The feast was small and slightly mournful. The kind of gathering where people ate and spoke because it was expected, not because they wished to. The food was well prepared, the wine even more so. Conversation moved carefully, never quite settling.

You were seated beside Aerion.

He spent the early portion of the meal demonstrating how effortlessly he could ignore you. He spoke across you, around you, treating the space you occupied as if it had always been empty. It was not for your benefit, it was for the others, for himself, for the quiet need to show that nothing had changed.

During the second course, he turned his head slightly in your direction, just enough to acknowledge you without granting you the full courtesy of attention.

"You are quieter than I expected. I was told Dornish women always had opinions about everything."

It was not the sharpest thing he could have said. You suspected he was holding the sharper things in reserve, testing whether blunt instruments would serve before reaching for finer ones. You let your fingers rest on the stem of your cup before answering.

"We do," you said. "We simply learn early which conversations are worth having."

Then you returned to your plate.

The silence stretched. You could feel it tighten, like cloth pulled just a little too far. You did not look at him; you did not need to. Beside you, he drank, then turned away, letting the moment dissolve.

Across the table, Maekar was watching. When the music began, it was him who moved first. You saw the decision before he acted. He crossed the room with purpose and spoke low to Aerion. You did not hear the words, but you did not need to. There was no request in the exchange.

Aerion turned toward you. He extended his hand with slow precision, making absolutely certain that every person in the room understood this was costing him something.

"Will you honour me, dear wife," he said, the words shaped correctly, the tone less so.

You placed your hand in his.

The floor was not crowded. The other couples kept their distance, leaving a space around you that felt exposed rather than open. He danced well, you noted without surprise, he had been trained to do everything.

This close, you could see the pale sweep of his eyelashes, lighter than his hair, catching the faint light when he blinked. The depth of his lilac eyes was clearer up close, not just colour but something layered beneath it. He had two scars under his cheek, but his skin still looked almost unreal in its smoothness.

His hand at your waist was the same as his grip during the ceremony, measured, controlled, with no warmth.

“Let us understand one another,” he said, his voice low enough to remain private, though there was nothing intimate in it. "I did not want this. I want you to know that I know what my father intends by it, and I want you to know that it will not work."

You let the music carry you through a turn before answering.

“I know you did not want it," you said. "I did not ask for your wanting. I asked for nothing at all, if you recall.”

"You will want things eventually. All wives do."

"Perhaps." You met his gaze briefly, then let it drift past him. "But I did not come here to want things from you, Aerion. I came because the arrangement was made, and I do not refuse an arrangement simply because it is inconvenient."

His hand tightened slightly at your waist, not painfully, but enough to notice.

"You think you can manage me." he said almost curious.

"I think, that they have been trying to manage you your whole life." you said. "And it has not served you much. I am not interested in managing you. I am interested in being your wife. That means I will keep this household in order, I will hold my place properly, and I will do what is required of me. Whether you choose to be part of that is yours to decide."

Another turn as the music continued.

"But I will be here," you added, quieter now. "That part is not negotiable."

He said nothing after that, but you did not mistake the silence for agreement.

Your chambers had been prepared with careful attention as expected. The fire lit, the bed done, everything arranged with quiet precision. You dressed for the night and sat near the hearth with a book open in your lap, though you were not reading.

You waited but he did not come.

The fire burned low. The sounds of the city shifted beyond the walls, settling into the deeper quiet of night. Somewhere, the watch called the hour and you closed the book.

You were not offended; you were not disappointed. You had already known Aerion would rather spend his wedding night in a brothel.

You extinguished the candle by the window and watched the room fall into shadow.

STEPT 2. Become a Familiar Shape.

Constant presence, always at the same distance, without sudden change. Given time, you stop being something to watch for. You become part of the world itself.

In the days that followed, you made yourself ordinary. It took more care than it appeared. True ordinariness had to be consistent. Too much absence would be noticed. Too much presence would draw the eye. You chose your places and kept to them. The great hall in the morning, a corridor near the training yard in the afternoon, a chair by the window in the library, once, where you read for two hours without lifting your head when he entered.

You did not seek him out and you did not avoid him. You were simply there. Aerion noticed.

At first, it was nothing clear. A pause when he entered a room and found you already in it. A shift in his attention, brief and controlled. The smallest recalculation. He had expected something from you. You could see it in what he did not find. No coldness, no wounded pride, no performance at all.

You gave him nothing to work with. Three days after the wedding, he passed you on the library and spoke to you for the first time since the feast.

“I trust you slept well. I confess I cannot say the same for the woman I spent the night with. She complained I kept her awake until dawn.”

You stopped reading and looked up at him.

“Kept her awake, or kept her waiting?” you asked, tilting your head slightly. “There is a difference, I find, between a man who exhausts a woman and a man who simply prevents her from sleeping. One leaves her satisfied. The other leaves her staring at the ceiling." A brief pause. “From what I have heard of you, I suspect she saw rather more of the ceiling than she would have liked.”

You walked away with your book before he could answer.

You had learned early that a voice could betray a person faster than any blade. Most people used it badly. They made it loud when they wanted to be heard, sharpened it when they wanted to cut. They filled it with weight and urgency, as if force alone could make something true. Your father had taught you otherwise. In his solar, he spoke with the same measured evenness whether he was discussing grain yields or deciding a man's fate. A voice that only rises when threatened, he had told you once, is a voice that teaches people when you can be threatened.

You remembered that.

STEP 3. Let It Hear You Before It Sees You.

A calm voice, used often, without command. No edge to it, no sudden movement tied to the sound. The creature learns the voice first, without reason to fear it. Given time, the sound settles into the background. Familiar, expected, something it turns toward without quite knowing why.

So, you began to speak.

The first time was nothing. A grey morning, the stone still holding the night’s cold. Aerion walked the corridor outside the great hall with two of his usual companions, and you were walking alone, and there was no reason to say anything, silence would have served just as well, would in fact have required less effort, but you spoke anyway.

“The easternmost courtyard is iced over this morning,” you said as you went by. “If you are riding, the south gate will be quicker.”

You did not look at him as you said it. You did not look back after.

Behind you, there was a brief silence, and then the low sound of his companions resuming their conversation. You could not tell if he had answered, it did not matter. The point was the sound itself, your voice, steady, offering something useful and nothing more, left behind in his morning like a small, ordinary fact.

You did this again two days later. And again, after that.

An observation about the kitchens. A remark about a particular courier who had been delayed. Once, on the stairs, a quiet comment about a book you carried, spoken into the space without asking for anything in return.

He said nothing the first time. The second time, he gave you a look, the same one you had seen before, sharp and narrow, weighing, deciding whether what it saw was worth the trouble of attention. The third time, he answered, briefly, as if the words had slipped out before he could stop them.

You counted this as exactly what it was, progress.

The friction came eventually. Midday meal, smaller than the evening gatherings, the kind where people allowed themselves to speak a little more freely. You were seated across from Aerion rather than beside him, which meant you had the less comfortable position of being visible to him rather than adjacent.

He had been in a particular mood all morning. You had seen it earlier, out in the courtyard. A tightness in the way he held himself, a coiled irritation that suggested some earlier conversation had not gone as he'd wished. He kept it contained, but it showed in small places. The set of his shoulders, the way his gaze lingered a fraction too long.

Halfway through the meal, he looked at you directly.

“I saw you speaking with the hedge knight this morning. The boy could barely look at you.”

“Ser Duncan,” You corrected, “Could barely look at anyone,” you said. “He has learned that drawing attention to himself is dangerous. A useful instinct, when one lives in a dangerous environment.”

Around the table, the shift was immediate. Eyes moved away, shoulders shifted, someone found their cup suddenly very interesting. No one wanted to be part of whatever this was.

Aerion's mouth curved, but not warmly.

“You say that as an observation. I wonder if you mean it as a criticism.”

“I mean it as neither.” You set down your knife. “A knight who flinches is a knight who has learned what happens when he does not. That tells you something about where he lives.” You looked at him steadily. “The more interesting question is what it tells you about yourself.”

“I am not in the habit of concerning myself with knights anymore.”

“No,” you said. “But you might concern yourself with the fact that a man who fears you will serve you only as long as he must. Fear is a short leash, and the moment it slackens, the moment you turn your back, a frightened man will not think of loyalty. He will think of himself.” You picked up your knife again. "Respect holds longer. It is less satisfying, I imagine, but considerably more reliable."

The table was very quiet.

Aerion's expression did not change, which was its own kind of change, in the vocabulary you had spent weeks building. The muscles around his jaw held with a precision that was not natural stillness. He was choosing his next words with more care than usual, which meant the previous ones had landed somewhere he had not expected them to reach.

“You speak as though I require your counsel,” he said almost thoughtful.

“I speak because the observation seemed worth making,” you said. “What you do with it is your own concern.”

You returned to your meal.

He said nothing more. But he did not look away for a longer moment than was comfortable, and when he finally did, it was not with a quick dismissal, it was with adjustment.

In the library, three days later, you found him already there when you arrived.

This was unusual. Aerion was not, in your observation, a man who spent mornings in libraries by preference. You entered anyways and took the chair you usually took, near the far window, which had the best light and a view of the inner yard, and opened the book you had brought.

For a time, neither of you spoke. The fire cracked softly. From outside came the steady rhythm of steel on steel, practice in the yard below.

“The Celtigar boy.”

You did not look up immediately. You marked your page, then lifted your eyes.

“The one my father is considering for a trade agreement,” he went on. “You spoke with him yesterday.”

“Briefly.” you said.

“He is not what he presents.” There was something restrained in the way he said it. Irritation, perhaps, or reluctance, as though the act of asking you something, or almost asking you something, cost him more than he was willing to fully account for.

You studied him for a moment. “No,” you agreed. “He is not. His family's debts are larger than they've admitted, and his uncle's position in the city has been weakening for two years. The trade agreement would favour him considerably more than it would favour the crown.

Aerion's eyes moved over your face, his gaze precise.

“You gathered that from a brief conversation.”

“From the conversation, and from the days before it,” you said. “People show where the pressure is, if you pay attention.”

A pause.

“My father should know,” he said.

“He should,” you agreed. “I thought you might be the appropriate person to tell him.”

You let that rest between you without elaboration, the implicit suggestion that this was a useful thing, that you were offering it to him rather than taking the credit for it, that you were treating him as someone worth offering useful things to. You did not dress it in sentiment. You did not soften it into a gesture. You simply left it there, plainly, for him to take or ignore as he chose.

He chose to take it. Not gratefully, not with any acknowledgment of the exchange's nature. He simply gave a short, almost inaudible sound of agreement and turned back to his book.

You had met, in your life, exactly three people who understood the particular discipline of the open hand.

Your father was one of them. A merchant woman in Sunspear who had built a trading empire from a single stall was another. The third was a maester who had served your household for eleven years and who had, in that time, quietly accumulated more influence over its workings than anyone with an official title. None of them had achieved what they achieved through force, or through the performance of authority. They had achieved it through the same mechanism, over and over, they gave things away, then let them go.

STEP 4. Offer Without Expectation.

Something of value left within reach, knowledge, advantage, ease. Then you step back. You do not insist. You do not demand. You do not watch too closely. The creature must come to the thing on its own terms, or the thing carries the smell of a trap. Patience here is not passive. It is the most active thing you can do, the discipline of the open hand, extended and then stilled, asking nothing, waiting without the tension of waiting.

You began small, that was where patterns took hold.

The first thing was almost accidental, simple enough to pass unnoticed.

Over weeks, you had seen how Aerion’s mornings turned. When his correspondence waited in disorder, something in him tightened. It was a small irritation, but it spread, it created a particular friction that compounded into the broader texture of his day. His steward handled it unevenly, some days careful, others careless.

You said nothing about this to anyone.

Instead, you mentioned to the steward’s assistant, a young man called Pell, anxious and observant. You mentioned once, that mornings that begin clean tend to stay that way, as though sharing a general philosophy, and then you moved on.

Next day, the letters were sorted before Aerion reached his study. You were nowhere near him when he noticed. You were in the eastern courtyard, the air sharp enough to sting your throat, walking slow circles over frost-hardened ground.

The second offering was more direct, and more deliberate.

The previous night, you had lingered in the great hall long enough to catch a conversation not meant for you. Two of Maekar’s advisors, careless in their angle, speaking of the Plumm family, a loan, a disputed inheritance, a claim that had the potential to become inconvenient for the crown if left unaddressed. The kind of thing that moved slowly until it did not.

You wrote it down, simply a single sheet of paper, placed beneath a volume you had observed Aerion taking from the library shelves twice in the past fortnight, angled just so, easily visible to someone reaching for the book.

You were gone before he arrived, you did not check if it had been taken. This was the discipline, the open hand, and then the stillness.

He found you in the corridor outside the great hall two days later. The way he approached told you enough, straight line, no hesitation, you knew the paper had been found and used.

“The Plumm family matter,” he said. “My father addressed it this morning. He mentioned information that reached him through unusual channels.”

“Did he.” you said.

“He did not know the source.” A pause. “I did.”

You met his gaze, nothing more. “Anyone listening could have heard it,” you said. “I assumed it was worth noting.”

“You assumed,” he repeated sceptical. “And the assumption led you to leave an unsigned document in a place you knew I would find it, rather than simply speaking to me, or to my father directly.”

“Speaking to your father directly would have made it mine to claim. It seemed more useful for it to be yours.” You said, you were well aware that he needed to slowly gain his father’s trusts again.

“You expect me to believe you want nothing in return.” He said.

“I expect nothing from you,” you replied. “I noticed something that seemed relevant to your interests. I noted it where you could find it. That is all.”

He studied you for a long moment, measuring again, then stepped past you without another word. You turned in the opposite direction and continued walking.

The pattern continued.

Days filled with small things, each one easy to miss on its own. A map left open to the right page before a meeting. A quiet word to a knight whose behaviour toward Aerion had been developing a particular insolence. Not a warning, only a reminder of how quickly favour could turn. The knight corrected himself. Aerion noticed the change; you were reasonably certain he had chosen not to address it directly.

During a meal he caught you refilling his cup before the servant reached it, an automatic gesture, barely conscious, and he watched your hand as you set the jug down.

“You do not behave like someone who dislikes me,” he said.

“I am not certain I dislike you,” you said, truthfully. “I have not yet seen enough of you to decide.”

“You have been living in the same castle for a month.”

“So, my husband has taken to keeping track now?” you said, a light note of teasing slipping in despite yourself. You lifted your cup and took a slow sip, letting the taste of the wine linger as a small, knowing smile curved at the corner of your mouth.

He exhaled through his nose, not quite a scoff he meant to share. He didn’t answer. His gaze lingered, a fraction too long to be careless, as if he were trying to smooth over something that had caught him off guard. There was a faint tension in his face, in the set of his jaw and the stillness of his shoulders, the sort of thing that suggested he was trying very hard not to let any hint of embarrassment show.

Later you noticed he took the map you left on his desk. Maekar’s manner afterward told you enough, less strain and more thought behind his words when he spoke to his son.  Aerion did not mention it and you did not either.

The absence of acknowledgment said what it needed to. He would take what was useful, he would not name the source. Pride held that line, but still, he had used it. He had accepted the offering, even reluctantly, even silently. That mattered more.

Which meant the distance was slowly shrinking.

He came to your chambers late on a Thursday, when the castle had settled into its quieter rhythm and the corridors carried only the distant steps of the watch.

You sat at your vanity, drawing the brush through your hair in slow, even strokes, winding you down toward sleep. Your sleeping gown was light, meant for the warmth of the room and the privacy of it, nothing more. Your hair hung loose, longer than it appeared when pinned, falling across your shoulders in a way that belonged to a version of yourself you did not generally allow the castle to see.

The door opened without warning, but you did not turn.

You watched him through the mirror instead. It gave you a clearer view than facing him outright. He stepped inside, then paused when he saw you, or the version of you caught in the glass. Something flickered across his face, quick and unguarded, before he shut it down.

You kept brushing your hair.

He crossed the room at an unhurried pace. No sudden movement, no sign of haste, still, there was weight in it. He stopped behind your chair and rested both hands on its back. In the mirror, his eyes met yours directly, without the usual angle or distance.

You held his gaze and continued the brush stroke to its end.

The silence lasted several seconds. In the mirror you watched him watching you. The loose hair, the gown, the particular version of you that belonged to this room and this hour, and you watched him notice that he was watching, and tighten slightly around it.

“I have been really patient with you,” he said at last, his voice low. “I have watched you move through this household for weeks. The documents, the steward, the arrangements that appear before I ask for them.” A pause. “No one does this without a ledger. Show me yours.”

“I told you I keep no ledger,” you said.

“Everyone keeps a ledger.” The words came sharper now. “Whether they admit it or not.”

You set the brush down on the vanity and folded your hands in your lap, and looked at his reflection. The candle shifted, and for a moment the light caught him differently in the mirror. The closeness of him. The space between you that had narrowed without either of you naming it.

“You are angry,” you said. “Not because you think I want something from you. You are angry because you cannot determine what it is, and that distinction is troubling you more than you would like to admit.”

His grip tightened slightly on the chair, his frown deepened. “Do not tell me what troubles me.”

“Then tell me yourself.” You said. “You came here and opened that door without knocking. If you have something to say, say it plainly.”

“What you have offered me,” he said, and this time the control thinned, sharpened into something colder, “is the manner of a woman who wants something. The oldest trick there is. Every woman I have met wanted things. Every woman in this castle wants things. You-” and here something almost contemptuous entered his voice, directed less at you than at his own inability to solve you “-stand there with your quiet gestures and your useful information and expect me to believe it costs you nothing, that you want nothing from me.”

“I told you I expect nothing from you,” you said, for the second time in your acquaintance “Which is not the same as wanting nothing.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. For a moment, his gaze dipped, catching on the fall of your hair over your shoulder, the line of your neck in the candlelight, before returning to your reflection with more force than before.

“Then what do you want,” he said lowly, moving a strand of your hair behind your ear.

You watched him for a moment. The tension in his shoulders. The way he held himself still, as if movement might betray him. The closeness of him, the warmth of it at your back.

“To see you for what you truly are,” you said, now turning around to look up at him. “When no one is performing fear at you.”

The room went quiet.

He did not move at once. His hands remained on the chair, though you felt the subtle shift in them, the restraint in it. His breathing changed, barely, but enough to notice. His gaze stayed on yours, searching now in a way it had not before.

Then he straightened. His hands lifted from the chair with care, as if he had to think about the motion before making it. He held your gaze for a moment longer, something unreadable passing through it. Then he turned and left.

The door closed with a loud thud behind him.

You looked back at your reflection in the glass. The room holding a trace of him still, something unsettled in the air. You reached for the brush and finished what you had started.

A man like Aerion did not adjust. He did not take pressure and reshape himself around it. His world ran on confirmation, on power answered with submission, on a rhythm that reassured him of his place in it. You had been interfering with that rhythm since the morning you arrived. Quietly, consistently, without giving him anything he knew how to answer.

A disruption like that never passed without consequence.

STEP 5. Survive the First Test of Teeth.

Before any bond forms, there is a test. A feint of violence, a warning, a measure of what you are made of. Not always meant to hurt, but whether to see of you will break or bite back. If you do, is over.

You held this thought in the quiet of your morning as you dressed carefully and went about your day.

The argument started in the corridor outside his study, late in the afternoon, when the light came through the western windows, catching dust in the air, turning it gold. You had passed him with the usual moderate acknowledgment, not ignoring him, not seeking him, the same distance you had maintained for weeks, and he had stopped walking.

“You were in my father's solar this morning,” he said.

“I was,” you said. “He asked my opinion on a correspondence from the Arbor.”

“He asked your opinion on that matter,” Something tightened in his face. “Instead of asking me?”

“He did.”

“You have been very busy these days,” he said, “Making yourself useful, to my father, to every corner of this household except the one that is actually your concern.”

“You are my concern,” you said. “Which is precisely why I do not sit waiting for you to need something."

“I do not need anything from you.”

“No,” you agreed. “You have made that very clear last time we discussed. And yet here we are, having this conversation, which you initiated.”

He turned and walked into his study. Not an invitation, but not a dismissal either, and you followed because the conversation was unfinished.

“You think you are very clever,” he said, moving behind his desk, putting wood and distance between you, like it might help him sort what he could not name.

“I think I am.” you said defiantly.

“You think,” he said, and the voice had dropped into its most dangerous register. “That you can arrange yourself into something that suits you, move pieces across a board you were not invited to play on, smile at my father in his solar, look at me like that, and that none of it will have a cost.”

“I have never believed anything is without cost.” you said.

“Then if you are so clever, you should have calculated more carefully.” He stepped past you, toward the door. “You will remain in this room until I say otherwise.” The words came out with anger and the door shut behind him.

You stood in the centre of the room for a moment. Then you moved to his chair, behind his desk, and sat in it, and looked at the documents arranged across the surface, and began, with the unhurried attention, to read them.

Three days later, in the great hall. You had not sought Ser Duncan out specifically. You had spoken with him before, briefly, like with most people in the Keep, and found him to be earnest, possessing more native intelligence than his manner suggested. He was easy to be around. You were in the middle of an unremarkable conversation about the road conditions north of King's Landing, he had travelled them recently, and you had asked a practical question. You felt the shift before you saw him.

A hand settled at your waist. Firm, claiming, meant to be seen, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your dress. Ser Duncan's expression went still, not quite discomfort and not quite confusion.

“My wife,” Aerion said. “I was looking for you.”

Duncan inclined his head and stepped back. You kept your expression exactly as it had been. Aerion’s gaze lingered on you, then flicked once toward the knight, measuring, assembling something he did not like. The hall had gone quiet.

“Is this a game to you,” he said under his breath. An accusation that had the shape of a question.

“No,” you said.

“Then what is it.” He moved in front of you. “What are you doing with the hedge knight-” He stopped, jaw tightening. “Are you provoking me, deliberately.”

“I was having a conversation about road conditions,”

“Do not.” His voice dropped further. “Do not use that voice with me.”

“Which voice would you prefer then? One where I lie?”

“You know,” he said quietly, to you, only to you. “What he did to me.”

“I know what happened at Ashford,” you said, equally quietly. “As does most of the kingdom-”

The struck came fast. Mid-sentence, mid-breath, in front of the hall and the fire and Ser Duncan's suddenly rigid stillness. The back of his hand across your cheek with a force that turned your head and produced a sound that silenced the nearest conversations.

You straightened. You did not touch your face. You did not look at Duncan, who you could feel in your peripheral vision. You looked at Aerion, directly, steadily, with the same expression you had worn in the study, and you said nothing at all.

His jaw was tight and the hall was watching it all. He gripped your wrist, hard, the mark already beginning, and turned toward the corridor, and you went with him because the scene that would result from not going would cost you more.

In your chambers, he released you without a word and left. The door shut and the lock clicked.

You sat by the window. The light had shifted, pale now, moving slowly across the stone. You looked at your wrist, at the faint marks forming. You were not afraid and you were not angry, so you waited with patience.

Maekar went to Aerion that same evening, of course he did. No one told you outright, but you knew before a word reached you. The servant who came to open your chamber door avoided your eyes, her hands slower than usual on the latch. Raised voices, you guessed. Maekar did not shout often, but when he did, it carried. Aerion would have been made to stand there and take it. For the insult. For making a spectacle of his own wife. For stepping, once again, where he had been warned not to. You could almost hear it. The sharp edge of Maekar’s restraint, the threat beneath it.

You let out a slow breath. This would not help. It would tighten something in Aerion, push him further into himself before it loosened anything at all.

He did not return that night, or the next.

On the third, you woke to the sound of your door.

The room was dark, the fire long since reduced to coals and a faint red glow. The kind of hour when even the castle seemed to pause, caught between one watch and the next. You lay still for a moment, listening to the sounds that followed the door, unsteady footsteps, the sounds of a man navigating a familiar space with less precision than usual.

You had smelled the wine, thick and sour on the air, and something else beneath it, cheap perfume and sweat. You had passed enough doorways in this city to know it came from a brothel.

He moved through the dark toward the bed with care that bordered on effort. Not quite stumbling, but close. You lay still with your eyes not quite closed and your breathing steady and you watched him through your lashes.

He stopped at the bedside. For a moment, he only looked at you.

He was less put together than you had ever seen him, his hair dishevelled, collar open, his clothes carrying the evidence of hours spent in places this castle was not and had not bothered to hide it well. His gaze moved over you, slower than usual, lingering in places he would have ignored in daylight. There was anger in it. That much you knew. But there was something else tangled into it, something the drink had loosened.

Then his hand shot out and closed around your throat.

The force of it drove the breath from you before you could think. His grip was sure, fingers settling with a familiarity that made it worse. The ceiling tilted as your body reacted, instinct rising fast and sharp. His face was above yours, close, and it was not the face of a man in full command of himself. His eyes were bright, unfocused in a way that had nothing to do with the dark. His grip tightened.

You felt the tightness clearly, the pressure at your windpipe, the pulse hammering under his hand. The animal instinct toward struggle that rose in you like a tide and that you identified and still you did not move.

And then, quietly, helplessly, from somewhere underneath the shock and the constriction and the absolute clarity of your own danger, you laughed. Not loudly. Not mockingly. Not shaped for him, not meant for anything at all. It simply came, as if your body had found something in the moment that did not fit the rest of it. Simply absurd and honest and almost intimate in its desperation.

The sound of it, barely audible, stopped him completely.

His hand did not leave your throat, but it stopped tightening. His expression shifted, confusion cutting through whatever had driven him here.

“What are you-” he said. It came out raw, his voice rough, stripped of its usual control. “What are you doing, what are you doing to me.”

You said nothing. You held his eyes in the dark and did not struggle, you did not look away.

“I hate you,” he said. The words came out flat, almost tired, like a confession.“I hate what you do. I hate that I cannot-.” His voice broke across the unfinished sentence. “I cannot find the edges of you. I cannot-.”

His grip loosened, fractionally, and then fractionally more.

Something in his face gave way. The control slipped, not all at once, but enough. His shoulders dipped, the tension draining in uneven pieces. Something beneath the surface rising without permission. His forehead dropped, his weight shifted, and then, with the slow, helpless gravity of exhaustion, he leaned against your chest, his hands still loosely at your throat, his body giving what his pride would not. Choked sobs forming on the back of his throat as his shoulders trembled.

You lay still beneath him. The room held its silence. No voices in the corridor, no movement beyond the walls. Only the weight of him, and the strange, unguarded vulnerability he had not allowed himself before.

Carefully, you lifted your hand. Slow and measured. The way one moves around something that might startle.

He felt the motion before you completed it.

He pulled back at once. Your hand knocked aside, not gently, but not the way he had struck you before either, with less force and more reflex. He was off the bed and standing before you had fully processed the movement, and the reassembly was happening in real time, you could watch it, the walls going up stone by stone, the expression reorganizing, the posture recovering its usual architecture.

He did not look at you as he wiped his tears with the back of his hand, and left.

You lay in the dark for a long time after the door closed. Your throat ached. When you touched it, you could feel where his fingers had pressed, the marks already forming under the skin. You let your hand fall back to the bed. You had survived the teeth.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a storm.

It is not peace, peace settles. This waits, it hangs over what is left, thin and watchful, as if the ground itself is deciding whether anything will take root again. You lived in that silence for six days. You ate in it, walked the corridors in it, spoke when required and otherwise let it sit around you, like weather that refused to move on.

Aerion was never where you were. Not once, not even by accident.

You noticed the pattern the way you noticed everything else. He left rooms when you entered them, not with obvious avoidance, but with quiet efficiency, but avoiding something nonetheless, something that he had not yet decided how to face. The corridors he had habitually used became corridors he did not use. The hours he had kept became hours he abandoned.

Like he was afraid of you. Not in the way people feared harm. In the way they feared being seen too clearly.

STEP 6. Allow Contact on Its Terms.

The first touch is not taken, it is allowed. A still hand. No pressure. No attempt to hold or redirect or claim. The creature must choose the contact, or the contact means nothing. It is the most fragile moment in the entire sequence the one where everything that has been built can collapse in a single wrong movement. Patience here is not strategy. It is something closer to faith, the belief that what has been established is enough to bear weight, if the weight is placed gently enough.

You dressed with care that seventh night, with a specific kind of nightgown your hair loose again, and went to him.

His chambers were deeper in the keep than yours, further from the outer walls, further from the sounds of the city, the kind of rooms that held heat and shadow in equal measure. The door was heavy. The light beneath it was the particular amber of firelight rather than candle, which meant he was awake and the hour was not the reason.

You did not knock.

The room was larger than you had expected, and sparser. There were maps on one wall, detailed ones, and a writing table covered with papers that had the disordered quality of work abandoned mid-thought. A shelf of books, several displaced at a specific angle with care. On a low table near the window, a cup and a flagon, mostly empty. The fire was high, built up more than the room's warmth required, the kind of fire you build when you want something to look at.

He was standing before it.

He turned when you entered, and the firelight caught his face in a way that daylight had never been permitted to. His eyes carried the particular redness that came not from drink but from something that had happened before the drink. His shoulders, which were always exact, held themselves with an effortful maintenance, but it took effort to keep it that way.

You closed the door behind you. The latch caught with a sound that was very small in the quiet.

“You should not be here,” he said.

“Probably,” you agreed. You did not move further into the room yet. You stood near the door and looked at him across the firelit space between you and said “What is wrong.”

“Nothing that concerns you.” He turned back to the fire. The set of his shoulders said the conversation was over, but the fact that he had not told you to leave said something else.

You crossed the room.

Slowly, without purpose written into the movement. You stopped beside him. Not close enough to require acknowledgment, not far enough to be a withdrawal, and you looked at the fire.

Neither of you spoke.

The fire crackled, wood settled with a low crack, and you waited.

A minute passed, then another. The fire shifted, settling lower in the grate, and in the new configuration of light you saw it, brief, barely visible. A single track of tears, catching firelight, at the corner of his jaw.

You did not look at it directly.

“Aerion,” you said.

“My father-.” he began, and then stopped, like the words had caught on something.

You let the silence hold.

“He saw,” he said with flatness. “The marks on your neck. He saw them. Someone spoke of what happened at the hall too.” His jaw tightened. “He made himself very clear.”

“How clear,” you said.

“In all his wisdom, has threatened me, again, to send me into exile.” The word sat between you. Heavy enough on its own. “He called it a last chance. He has called it that before.” Something crossed his voice that was not quite bitterness. “The words had begun to lose their meaning, but it felt too serious now”

You turned to look at him then.

He was still facing the fire, but the profile of him had changed. The structure of his expression had begun to crack. Not enough for others to notice but enough for you. He looked, in the firelight, less like the man who had locked you in his study and struck you in the great hall and more like something earlier than that, rawer and less certain and considerably more alone.

You reached out. Slowly, with the deliberateness you had promised yourself, no force, no urgency, no claim. Your hand found his and held it with the lightness of something offered rather than taken.

He looked down at it.

“I should have covered the marks better,” you said. “I misjudged the consequence. That was my error, and I am sorry for it.”

“That is not-.” He stopped; his hand had not moved. “That is not what this is about.”

And he pulled away fast. Almost startled by it. With the sudden, electric motion of something that has allowed contact and immediately regretted the allowing. He stepped back, something sharp and unsteady in his eyes.

“Do not,” he said, and the word came out wrong, cracked across the middle of it. “Do not do that. Do not stand there and apologize and take my hand and look at me like-.” He stopped again, breath uneven. “Like there is something worth-.” He stopped again. His hands had closed into fists at his sides and he was breathing with effort. “You do not know what I am.”

“I know what you have done,” you said.

“Then you know enough.” He turned away. “You know I hurt people. You know I cannot-.” His voice fractured. He pressed on through it. “I cannot stop myself… there is something wrong with me. There has always been something wrong with me and everyone who has come close enough to see it leaves or breaks. And you are here, in this room, at this hour, and I do not-.” He stopped.

The fire was the only sound.

“I am a beast,” he said, very quietly. Tears running free down his cheeks. “That is what I am. That is all I am.”

You looked at him for a long moment.

“You are a man,” you said, “who has been told a story about himself for so long that he has stopped questioning whether it is the only story available.”

“It is not a story. It is evidence of everything I have done.”

“Evidence can be read in more than one direction,” you said. 

“Do not make me into something I am not.”

“I am not making you into anything.” You held his gaze. “I am telling you that what you are is not to be fixed. That the thing you have been, it is not the only version of you that exists. And that-.” You paused, because the next words required accuracy, and accuracy required care. “You matter to me. Not the prince, not the name. You. What is underneath all of this. That matters to me.”

The room was absolutely still.

He looked at you with an expression you had no entry for in the vocabulary you had built of him, something unguarded, almost frightened, like he has been handed something he does not know how to hold and is not certain he can afford to drop.

Then something gave way.

Not loudly. Not all at once. His breath shifted. His shoulders dropped. Whatever he had been holding together slipped. His breathing changed. You did not move toward him, but you did not need to.

He crossed the remaining distance himself without thinking about it, and then his forehead was against your shoulder and his hands were at your sides without grip, without force, simply present, and he was not making a sound but you could feel the shaking of him and the wetness against the fabric of your nightgown and the weight of him.

You stood very still.

You did not put your arms around him. You did not make any movement that could be felt as claiming. You simply held yourself and let him use it, and the fire burned lower as he came apart quietly against your shoulder without asking permission and without being asked to stop.

You did not know how long it lasted. Long enough.

You raised your hand slowly, slowly enough that he could have pulled away again, enough to be refused, and brought your fingers to his hair.

It was shorter than it looked. Silver-pale and fine, the kind of hair that carried light rather than colour, and beneath your fingertips it was softer than you had anticipated. You drew your hand through it once, carefully, from the crown of his head down to the nape of his neck, where the hair ended and the skin began, warm and taut over the column of his spine.

He did not move away.

He leans into your touch involuntarily, as if starved for contact. His eyes flutter shut, a shudder running through him at the simple gesture. It's a chink in his armour, a crack in the façade he has built around himself. He hates how good it feels, how desperately he craves your gentleness, like something that had been starved for so long it had forgotten the word for hunger until the smell of food arrived. He hates that it's you, a woman he has dismissed as a nuisance, a distraction.

You kept your hand still at the nape of his neck and waited until the tension in him eased, just a little, then you took his hand. He did not resist the guiding.

That told you more than anything else had. Aerion Brightflame, who resisted everything, who turned even small things into contests, let himself be guided across the room, no argument, no pause. Just the quiet, spent compliance of someone who had nothing left to push with.

You lay down and he lay beside you.

For a moment he remained on his back, staring upward, and you could feel the effort in him, his composure still running even now, still attempting to impose order on something that had moved past the reach of order.

Then, slowly, as if testing each inch of the movement, allowing himself permission one fraction at a time, he moved closer. His head found your chest. His arms came around your waist, and the grip that followed was not gentle exactly, it had too much need in it for gentleness, but it was not aggression either, it was anchoring.

“Don't mistake this for weakness,” he muttered, eyes fixed somewhere above you, studying something very far away. “Or tenderness.” A pause. “I merely refuse to let my father's words haunt me alone tonight.”

“All right,” you said.

You brought one hand up to his hair again. The same movement, slow, unhurried, from crown to nape and back, repeated with the consistency of something that asked nothing in return. Your other hand rested against his back, barely any pressure at all.

The fire had burned low and the room was mostly shadow.

“If you much as breathe a word of this to anyone,” he murmured into your chest, his voice rough but stripped of its usual edge, “I'll deny it until my last breath.” His arms tightened slightly, involuntarily. “Stay with me tonight… please.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” you said.

As the night went on, Aerion slowly succumbed to sleep. Something about being held, about your gentle touch, brought a peace he had rarely known. He did not dream of dragons or conquests, for once. His sleep was free of the constant restlessness that usually plagued him. He burrowed into your chest, unconsciously seeking more of your warmth, of your presence.

You lay awake longer than he did. Not from discomfort, too much to process, lying in the dark with their thoughts arranged in rows like objects after a flood.

His breathing had changed, his weight against you had changed. The man who had come apart was now simply sleeping. With his face against your chest and his silver hair tickling your collarbone and his arms loosely maintaining their hold even in sleep, the grip eased to something that felt closer to a choice rather than necessity.

You ran your hand through his hair one more time, very slowly. He made a small sound, low and entirely unconscious, and pressed closer.

You looked at the ceiling for a long time and eventually, sleep took you too.

The room was in the grey-dark of late night, not yet dawn, but the black had thinned to something softer. His breathing had changed again; he was watching you.

His breath caught as he took in the sight of you, soft, vulnerable, beautiful in the unguarded way of sleeping things. A strange warmth curled in his chest, foreign and unsettling. He hesitated. His fingers twitched toward your hair, as if to brush a stray lock from your face, then stopped. He scowled at himself, at this weakness. But the scowl faltered when his gaze lingered on the way your lashes rested against your cheeks, the rise and fall of your breath.

Slowly, carefully, he shifted closer, draping an arm over your waist as if claiming you, not with arrogance, but with something dangerously close to possessiveness. His lips pressed against your temple in a fleeting, uncharacteristically tender kiss.

You opened your eyes. The ceiling was grey above you. Beside you, or rather, around you, Aerion had stilled, as if caught in the act of something he had not meant to do.

“Is something wrong?” you asked quietly.

He cleared his throat, his thumb idly tracing circles on your skin, trying for normalcy, trying to ignore the way his stomach twisted at your proximity.

“Are you comfortable?”he asked.

“Yes,” you said. You turned your head slightly to look at him. “Are you?”

He gave a noncommittal hum, not meeting your gaze. The truth was he had slept better than he had in years, but he was not about to say so. That would imply weakness. He shifted slightly, the arm around your waist drawing you a fraction closer without him seeming to notice. His fingers continued their circles, almost absentmindedly, as though he were lost in thought and the touch was the only thing keeping him tethered.

The grey outside the window had begun its slow migration toward something lighter. The fire was entirely cold now, the room held only the warmth of the bed, of proximity, of the particular heat that accumulates between two bodies in the hours before dawn.

Then awareness settled in him fully. Of the closeness. Of the precise arrangement of you against him, the warmth of your body, the thin fabric of your sleeping gown, the way the hem had shifted in the night to lie differently against your skin. His hand tensed briefly.

He swallowed.

You felt it, the shift that moved through him, the awareness sharpening into something specific, something that did not belong entirely to the vulnerability of the preceding hours. His lips parted, but no words came. He looked at you with an expression caught precisely between irritation and something he could not arrange into anything controllable, frustrated by the evidence of his own body, by the want that had surfaced without authorization.

You could feel it, the warmth of him. The unmistakable pressure of his want against your hip, present and unambiguous, and the particular tension of a man who has noticed you noticing and does not know what to do with it.

Neither of you spoke.

His hand, which had stilled, began very slowly, as though testing whether the motion would be stopped, to move again. Not the idle circles of before. Something more deliberate, more aware of itself, tracing the line of fabric against skin, as if testing whether the moment would break.

You did not stop him.

Not passive, there was nothing passive in the attention you were giving to this moment, to his breathing, to the fractional shifts of his weight and the warmth of his mouth near your temple and the press of him against your hip that had not diminished. But still in the way you had always been still near him, present, available, making no demand and offering no resistance, letting the space between you be defined by what he chose to do with it.

He exhaled.

“You are-.” he began, and stopped, his jaw tightened. He tried again, and the words he found were not the ones he had started with, “This changes nothing.”

“I know,” you said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” you said.

His hand moved again with less hesitation, no longer tentative, something with more intention behind it, and his body followed, shifting against you with the weight of a man who has been resisting something for weeks and has arrived, at last, at the particular exhaustion of wanting and the decision to stop pretending otherwise.

His mouth found your throat, the same throat he had gripped days ago in the dark. You brought your hand to his hair, fingers threading through silver.

Aerion exhales slowly, a controlled breath that does nothing to conceal the tension wound through his jaw, his shoulders, the deliberate stillness of his hands. He's beautiful in his conflict, you think. Unbearably so. That sharp face, that proud mouth, carved for cruelty or for this, and tonight the line between them seems very thin.

He opens his eyes again, his gaze locking with yours again. He looks almost pained, his pride warring with the desire that's quickly consuming him. He wants you. Gods, he wants you so much it hurts, and he hates that he can't bring himself to deny it any longer. He hates how powerless he feels at your touch, how he craves more despite his better judgment. His breathing is ragged as he leans over you, his eyes dropping to your lips. “Stop me. Say... say no.” The words come rough, almost like a plea.

You looked at him for one long moment, you take in the conflict laid bare for the first time, the stubborn pride, the hunger he can no longer hide, the exhaustion of holding both apart.

Then you kissed him first.

He kisses you back like a man drowning who has finally stopped fighting the current. His hands come up to grip your face, not gently, and the sound that escapes his throat is low, rough, barely human. The careful prince, the controlled and calculating Aerion Targaryen, dissolves in the space between one breath and the next. What replaces him is something rawer. Hungrier. Something he's kept caged behind violet eyes and cutting remarks for far too long.

The kiss deepens without hesitation, consuming. His mouth moves against yours with a kind of desperate precision, tasting, claiming, as if he's cataloguing every detail through touch alone. You feel the heat of him, radiating off his skin like fever, like fire, like something that has been burning in secret for too long and has finally found air.

His hands roam your body with a feverish desperation, as if trying to memorize every curve, every gasp, every shudder beneath his touch. His kisses trail from your lips down your neck, nipping and sucking at your skin, marking you as his, branding you in the only way he knows how. His hands grip your hips, pulling you flush against him, letting you feel just how badly he aches for you. He's lost in the sensation, in the fire between you both, consumed by it. He's not gentle about it. He leaves a trail of hot, open-mouthed kisses down your neck, his teeth grazing that sensitive point where your shoulder meets your throat. He wants to mark you, to make you scream his name, to make sure there's no doubt in your mind or anyone else's of who you belong to.

His free hand slides under your nightgown, his fingers trailing up your thigh, leaving trails of fire in their wake. His touch is possessive, demanding, as if he's making up for every minute he's denied himself this pleasure. Your breath hitches as his fingers trace higher, teasing, taunting, every brush of skin against skin sending sparks through you. His lips return to yours, swallowing your gasp as his touch grows bolder, more deliberate. He plays with your breasts, kneading them and pinching at your nipples until you arch into him, your back lifting from the mattress like a prayer. His hands clutch at you, clinging as if you're the only solid thing in the world. He's panting now, his control frayed to the breaking point.

“Gods,” he breathes against your collarbone, “I've been waiting-.” He cuts himself off and bites down instead of finishing the sentence, leaving a bruise.

He buries his face in that spot on your neck, his breath hot against your skin, his lips roaming feverishly as if he can't get enough. Then he kisses down your body, his mouth leaving a trail of hot, wet marks down your stomach, your hip, your inner thigh. His hands slide up your legs, his touch rough but reverent, the touch of a man who has never let himself experience something so wholly, so completely. He moves with the focus of someone who has thought about this, who has imagined and resented and wanted in equal measure.

He pauses for a moment, looking up at you, the desire in his eyes burning hotly as he takes in the sight of you, spread out before him like a feast.

“Gods, woman...” His voice comes out low, cracked at the edges. “You look exquisite.”

Your hand goes to his hair, gripping it, silver-pale between your fingers, and you guide him where the ache pulses hottest. He goes willingly, like a man possessed, his lips tracing a path to the very heart of you. He worships at your altar, exploring you with a fervour that borders on madness, his tongue drawing slow, deliberate strokes against your folds, lapping at the slick heat of you with a thoroughness that makes your thighs tremble. He kisses your core the way he kissed your mouth, thoroughly, hungrily, as if he intends to ruin you for anything else.

He slides one finger inside you, curling, exploring, while his tongue continues its work, finding the rhythm that makes your hips roll helplessly toward him. Then two fingers, stretching you slowly, his pace maddening, his silver head moving between your thighs while his free hand pins your hip to the mattress. He teases. He draws it out with the patience of a man who has denied himself too long and now intends to take his time about the undoing. Every time you feel yourself cresting toward the edge, he eases back, withdrawing just enough, slowing just enough, his eyes flicking up to watch your face with something that looks almost like satisfaction.

The third time he pulls back from the precipice, you take a fistful of his hair and drag him up.

“Now,” you tell him. “Take me now.”

A feral smirk curls his lips at your demand. He rises up over you, his chest heaving, his entire body taut with anticipation. He leans down to capture your lips in a bruising kiss, you taste yourself on his tongue, one hand gripping your thigh, the other cupping your face as if to brand the moment into your memory.

“As my lady commands,” he growls against your mouth.

He shifts his hips, pressing himself against your entrance. Then, with one sharp thrust, he buries himself inside you, filling you completely, claiming you in every way possible. The moment he's sheathed inside you, a ragged groan tears from his throat, half pleasure, half disbelief. His forehead drops against yours, his breathing ragged, his fingers digging into your hips as if he fears you'll vanish.

“Gods,” he chokes out. “You feel so- warm. So tight.”

He's barely coherent. That, more than anything, undoes you.

His hips roll against yours in slow, deliberate strokes, each one deeper, more possessive than the last. He watches your face, memorizing every gasp, every flutter of your lashes, as if this is the only thing that's ever truly mattered. His eyes, those violet eyes that have looked at you with contempt and hunger and everything in between by now, are dark, pupils blown wide, and he doesn't look away. He watches you as if watching you is a compulsion he can no longer afford to deny.

“Look at me,” he rasps, when your eyes begin to close. “Don't you dare-.”

And you do, you hold his gaze.

His jaw tightens. Something moves across his expression that he doesn't have the composure left to conceal, something raw and frightened and ferocious all at once. His strokes deepen; his grip hardens.

Then he flips you, without warning, rolling you onto your stomach with the ease of a man accustomed to taking what he wants. The mattress shifts beneath you. His hands find your hips and drag you up to meet him. One palm presses flat between your shoulder blades for a half-second, then slides up, fingers winding into your hair, pressing your face into the pillow.

His lips find your ear, his voice low and rough as he whispers, “I won't be gentle, sweetling.”

It sounds like a warning. It sounds like a promise.

“I don't want you to,” you answer.

The sound he makes at that is almost feral, something ripped from somewhere deep in his chest that he would never willingly give you in daylight. His fingers dig into your hips as he takes you with a force that borders on brutality, each thrust deeper, harder, driven by pure unrestrained need. His lips drag across your shoulder, teeth sinking into your skin to stifle his groan as he loses himself in the heat of you. He releases your hair so both hands can grip your hips, holding you in place, as if he fears you might slip away if he doesn't, his fingers leaving half-moon marks you will feel for days.

His pace is relentless. Desperate. Driven by a hunger that has been building since the first moment he looked at you and hated that he wanted to keep looking.

“I can't-.” you gasp, the pleasure coiling impossibly tight.

“Come for me,” he growls, the words bitten off, rough and low. “Come on- I want to feel you. All of you.”

And you do, you shatter. Your whole body arches into it, trembling beneath him, clenching around him, and you hear his sharp, broken exhale, feel the way his rhythm stutters.

His release hits him like a storm, violent, consuming, unstoppable. His body tenses, his fingers digging into your flesh as he spills inside you with a ragged groan, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades. For a moment, he just breathes against your skin, his chest heaving, his muscles trembling with the aftershocks.

Then, slowly, he collapses over your back. His weight settles, heavy, present, real. His lips move against one of the bruises he's left on your shoulder. Then another. Not in apology, Aerion Targaryen does not apologize. But in something. Acknowledgment, perhaps.

Neither of you speaks.

His arm slides around you, not tenderly, but with a kind of quiet insistence, as if placing himself between you and something invisible. You feel his heartbeat against your back. Fast, still. Then slower. Then slower still.

The silence stretches. It does not demand anything from either of you. His breathing deepens, but his grip does not loosen. You close your eyes.

Sleep comes for you both like a tide, not gentle, not kind, but inevitable. The way all true things are.

STEP 7. Never Cage What You Cannot Break.

A beast is not tamed by taking away its fangs. That only makes it weaker, and weakness is not the same thing as trust. It is tamed, if it ever is, by giving it a reason not to use them. It stays because it chooses to. It stays… because it chooses to.

The manse Maekar had given you sat at the edge of a quieter part of the city, near enough to court to satisfy obligation and far enough to breathe in peace. It was smaller than the Red Keep, less grand, but that suited the both of you. No one had said so out loud, yet it was clear enough. The walls were warm stone. The windows faced east and caught the morning light instead of shutting it out. Lavender grew along the outer walk, planted by someone before your time, and it had survived the winter with a stubbornness that felt almost personal.

Inside, signs of a shared life had gathered in slow, ordinary ways. His books beside yours on the shelf. Your embroidery frame positioned near the best window, which he had moved without comment one afternoon when he noticed the light falling wrong. A second cup on the table by the fire, already poured.

None of it was dramatic, all of it mattered to you.

You settled deeper into the chair, adjusting your weight carefully. The pregnancy sat heavy in your lap, in your lower back, in the way you rose slowly from chairs and descended stairs with one hand trailing the wall. Seven months had left their mark. Your belly was full and round beneath the loose linen of your gown, warm to the touch, occasionally shifting with the insistence of someone who had not yet been born but already had opinions on its own.

You pressed a hand briefly to your side where the movement was. A flutter, a press. I know, you thought at it. I know you're there.

The fire crackled. Across the room, Aerion sat at the writing table with his back half-turned to you, working through correspondence with the focused quiet of a man who had learned, slowly, imperfectly, to channel his energy into something productive rather than destructive. Candles burned at either side of the table. His silver hair, longer now, caught their light and held it.

He had not spoken in some time. Neither had you.

The silence was not tense. That distinction still struck you sometimes, even now, the difference between his silences then and his silences now. Before, quiet had been the space between provocations, the held breath before a storm. Now it was simply the room at rest, two people existing in the same warmth, without the need to perform that fact.

Your needle moved through the embroidery. A branch. Leaves in pale green thread, stitched slowly because you no longer rushed things that deserved to be unhurried. You had learned that too, somewhere along the way, though you weren't certain when. Perhaps it had been a lesson you taught yourself while teaching him.

“You've been rubbing your back for the better part of an hour.”

His voice came without him turning. Your hand had drifted there without you noticing. You lowered it. “I'm fine.”

“I didn't say you weren't.”

You went back to the embroidery and the scratch of his quill resumed.

You looked at the back of his head for a moment, at the set of his shoulders, the long line of his spine. He was still proud in his posture. That had not changed, nor would it. But there was something different in it now. Less like a man braced for attack. More like a man who had simply grown comfortable inside his own frame.

Maekar had expressed quiet satisfaction, the last time you had attended court. Not in words, the prince was not a man for words where a look would suffice. But satisfaction nonetheless. You had understood it without needing it explained. So had Aerion, which had caused a complicated expression to move across his face, something between pride and the ghost of old resentment, before easing into something closer to acceptance.

He was still Aerion. He could still cut with a word when he chose to. His patience was a thing learned rather than natural, and it occasionally showed its seams. Two weeks prior, at a supper that had run overlong, he had said something to Lord Peake's second son that had made the table go briefly silent. But he had stopped there, he had not pursued it. He had reached instead for his wine and redirected the conversation with a deliberateness you recognized, because you had practiced that deliberateness in front of him, repeatedly, until he understood what it looked like.

He was not fixed, he was better. There was a meaningful difference.

The fire shifted, throwing new shadows. You set down the embroidery and pressed your palm flat against the side of your stomach, feeling the weight of it, the warmth. The child moved again, long, slow, like something turning in a dream. You breathed around it.

The scratch of the quill stopped.

You did not look up immediately. You felt, rather than saw, the moment his attention shifted, the feeling of being observed by Aerion, which you had long since learned to recognize. It was different now too.

You looked up.

When you looked up, he had already turned in his chair. He was watching you with those violet eyes of his, pale in the candlelight, and there was something in his face he had learned to hide less well over time. Not because he had grown careless. Because keeping it hidden had begun to cost him too much, and he had finally decided, with the quiet certainty he brought to every important thing, that it was no longer worth the price.

Then he rose from the table.

He crossed the room at an unhurried pace, the way a man walks when he has already made up his mind. When he stopped in front of you, his gaze dropped from your face to your hands, then to the rounded curve beneath the linen. Then he knelt.

Not in surrender. Not in show. One knee to the floor, steady and deliberate, bringing himself level with what he meant to honour. He reached out, and his hand, the same hand that had once gripped and demanded and taken, settled with impossible gentleness against the side of your stomach.

He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the fullest part of you.

He stayed there a moment, forehead resting lightly against you, his hand curved around the life you carried. His breathing evened out. His eyes were closed. He did not speak at once, and you did not ask him to.

Then, very quietly, without lifting his head, he said, “I love you.”

You looked down at the top of his silver head, at the broad line of his shoulders bent in a shape that was not quite defeat and not quite humility, but close enough to make your throat tighten. You thought of the man who had once watched you across a banquet table with cold, assessing eyes and found nothing in you worth his attention. You thought of all the months between then and now. The arguments. The patience. The slow, stubborn work of remaining.

You reached down and touched his face gently. He looked up at you. The candlelight made his eyes very bright.

You held his gaze and said, simply, “I love you as well.”

No strategy in it. Just the truth, spoken in the same quiet room where you had spent months learning each other's silences.

He turned his face and pressed one more kiss to your stomach, almost habitual, as if he had already developed the instinct, then rose slowly and settled himself on the arm of your chair. His hand remained at your side, warm and present. You returned to your embroidery. His shoulder rested against yours, and he did not move away.

The fire burned low. The night spread softly around the manse.

Later, when he had drifted into sleep beside you and his breathing had gone slow and even, you lay awake in the dark and thought about the whole path that had brought you here.

Seven steps, written out with the clean, measured certainty of someone who understood that hearts, even difficult ones, had their own structure. You had approached him with respect for what it was, patience for what it could become, and no illusions about the process between.

But somewhere in the long careful middle of it, something had shifted that no guide could have anticipated, or perhaps the guide had always known it and simply not named it. The method had worked. But the method had not been the point.

The point was that he had changed.

Not because you had fixed him. Not because you had caged him or diminished him or stripped away the things that made him difficult. He was still proud. Still sharp. Still capable of the particular cold cruelty that had earned him his reputation, though he used it less now, and never against you.

He had changed because he had chosen to. Because somewhere in the accumulated weight of all those quiet days and careful moments, something in him had found a reason.

And he, Aerion Targaryen, the Bright Prince, the man they called Brightflame for the way he burned, had stayed too.

His hand rested over yours in the dark, light and warm and present.

The beast doesn't need its fangs removed, you thought, closing your eyes. It just needs something worth protecting more than it needs to bite.

Sleep came, slow and complete, and took you both with it.

He doesn't approach you directly. He works the floor. He nods at men twice his age, clasps a few shoulders, and laughs at a joke you're not close enough to hear. He lets you watch him do it.

The whole time, his eyes come back to you. Brown on one side. Pale blue on the other. Unsettling in a way you can't yet name. Not because his stare is cold or leering, but because it’s a curious stare. You’re not used to men looking at you curiously. Men look at you hungrily; they look with calculation. They look at you because of your father.

He looks at you like he’s found a page he didn't expect to find in a book he'd already read. By the time he's in front of you, you’ve already decided you will let him speak.

"You're the Stark heir."

You angle your head. "I am."

"Valarr Targaryen," he says in a smooth voice. "I own—"

"I know who you are."

You give him the inventory—Halcyon Holdings, the tech portfolio, the shipping arm his father had been trying to divest—and watch his face go through four different expressions in half a second, ending in something delighted. He laughs, and it’s a real laugh. Not the performed, polite kind he gave others.

"You've done your homework."

"I do homework on everyone in my father's orbit," you inform him bluntly, and his smile widens. 

Some small animal part of you sits up inside you, taking very careful note of what kind of man smiles wider when you show him your teeth.

He takes you for a drink. Just one. He doesn't try to make it two which surprises you. He’s charming and painfully handsome, the type of young man everyone in the room looks to while he looks only at you. He walks you out at the end of the night, doesn't touch you once, except to brush his lips over your knuckles goodbye. 

He sends a car to your dorm the following morning with a bouquet of peonies and a note that reads only: I'd like to see you again. No pressure. Valarr.

You call him because he sends peonies, not roses. Because there’s a thread of candour in his note that would be absent in another man's attempts to grab your attention. A man of his pedigree doesn’t need the embarrassment of chasing someone who doesn’t want him back. 

You still make him wait a week before you dial his number. 

You decide later that this was your first mistake, though you’ll revise that assessment many times over the following five years until you can no longer locate the mistake at all. Because the mistake will turn out to be him, in his entirety, and he’s not something you can extract from your life by then. 

He will have woven himself through you like a silver thread.

II. december, year one.

It happens at his penthouse. 

Everything that matters with Valarr happens at his penthouse in those early months. The apartment is a stage, and he’s the only actor who lives in it full-time. He likes you on his set, framed by his windows, lit by his lamps. There's loneliness in that, but also coldness.

Still, it's the first time you’ve slept with a man who chose his own light fixtures.

He asks if he can kiss you first. Actually asks. Means it, too. And that's the thing that sets your teeth on edge for reasons you don't understand yet. Because nobody’s asked you that in years, because the men who want you take, or they presume, or they pose the question as foregone. Valarr asks like it means something, like he needs the word for more than your comfort.

You say yes.

He kisses you slowly, then, like he’s mapping new terrain. His mouth is careful, too careful. His hands stay high. Respectfully so. One at your jaw, one at the curve between your shoulder and your neck. His restraint is so deliberate it reads as its own kind of pressure. You can feel him holding back. You note it even as it happens. He’s managing himself, you think, and then, what for?

You find out what for, eventually.

You fuck him in his bed. On his white, pristine sheets, art you haven’t bothered to identify on the wall behind his headboard.

Valarr undresses you with a reverence that edges on worshipful. He slides the dress off your shoulders, presses his mouth to the notch between your collarbones. There’s a soft murmur of god, look at you into your skin like a man who’s never in his life felt lucky and now does.

He kisses his way down your body. He’s generous and attentive. Eats you out patiently, focused, reading your body for its responses and adjusting. Not badly; he’s good at this, he’s been good at this with other women, he knows the mechanical shape of what he’s doing. You come, eventually, for him. Because he’s earned it, because your body is responsive and because he’s pretty and wanted you badly enough.

And then he rolls you under him, sliding inside you, and he fucks you like a man who’s been told, at some point in his life, that women like it slow and reverent. That's it. The only setting.

He looks into your eyes. Smiles. He says your name, moves with a careful cadence, a kind of technique. He’s performing a version of making love that he’s learned somewhere, from someone, and it is—you realise with a small, distinct pulse of dismay—soft.

Not bad. Soft.

And somewhere in the middle of it, around when his mouth finds the hollow of your throat and stays there like an apology, you get bored.

You don't mean to. It’s not a conscious act on your part. It’s the involuntary response of a Stark to being handled too gently: boredom, and under the boredom, the oldest thing in you, the wolf-thing, the predator, turning its head and noticing the room has a man in it. Realising how easy it would be to claim him, however you want to claim him. 

You flip him.

You put a hand flat to his sternum, shoving him back against the pillows, and Valarr goes. He goes easily, readily, with a surprised sound in the back of his throat that’s not displeasure. Then you climb him, and you pin his wrists above his head with one hand. You watch with great curiosity how his pupils dilate. The brown eye goes nearly black. The pale blue one goes almost luminous. You’ve never seen a physiological response happen this fast in a grown man's face, and you’ll remember it, in detail, for the rest of your life.

"Oh," he breathes.

"Shh."

His mouth parts. "Yes—whatever you—yes."

You take him apart for forty-five minutes. 

You ride him hard and mean, with his wrists held down and his hips pinned by your weight, and you watch him come undone in a way he clearly has never been undone before. 

Beautiful boys who’ve been beautiful their whole lives are used to being unwrapped. They’re not used to being handled. 

They’re not used to being made to earn anything. But you do. You make Valarr earn permission to move, to speak, to finish, and by the time you let him, he’s gone somewhere very quiet behind his eyes. When he comes, Valarr makes a sound like he’s dying, like you’ve broken something vital inside him. 

Afterwards, he lies on his back in the wrecked sheets and stares at the ceiling like he's trying to remember his own name.

"Where have you been all my life?" he asks, half-joking.

You don't answer.

Because this, right now, is the first crack. This is where you understand, somewhere wordless, that you’ve just shown a beautiful self-contained man a version of himself he didn't know was accessible, and that he’s not going to forget. 

Valarr is a cataloguer, a collector. And he’s just catalogued this—the weight of your hand on his wrists, the precise angle of your mouth as it bit, the particular heat of being made to wait, to plead—and he’s going to want it again. He’s going to want it differently. Going to want you with escalating need that, by the end of the week, will feel less like desire and more like a project plan.

You let him hold you afterwards. You lie against his chest, and you listen to his heart rate come down, wondering, dimly, what you’ve just let yourself into.

III. january, year two.

The second time is three nights later. 

You come to Valarr's apartment straight from a dinner your father made you attend. You’re still in a dress and heels, still carrying the particular tense irritation that two hours at such gatherings always loads into your shoulders. 

He opens the door with a glass of wine already in his hand for you, and the look on his face when he sees you—the one that’s half-devotional and half-hungry—somehow sharpens the irritation instead of easing it.

You don't let him kiss you hello.

You stalk past him into the apartment, set your bag down, turn around, and you say coldly, quietly, "Bedroom."

He doesn’t ask. Valarr's expression shifts once—the surprise, then recalibration, his pupils blowing—and he follows you without a word.

You’ve not planned this. You don't plan, with men. Generally. You’ve spent the cab ride home thinking about three nights ago, thinking about the sound he made when you let him finish. Remembering that precise glazed stupidity of his face when you finally let him speak. 

Something in you is hungry for it in a way that’s making you reckless.

You put him on his knees.

Not with your hands. With a single word and a small gesture of your chin. Valarr goes down onto the rug at the foot of his bed with a grace that’s almost unseemly. He looks up at you. The white streak at his temple catches the bedside lamp. His shirt is unbuttoned at the collar now, slightly crumpled. He must have undone it at some point between the door and the bedroom. Whether consciously or not. You can see the pulse in his throat moving faster than it should be. Almost smile at the sight.

"Is this what you want?" you ask.

His jaw works. "Yes."

"Say it properly."

"I want—yes, I want this, I want—" He stops, searching for the word. He doesn't find it because he's not yet fluent in the language you're about to teach him. "Please."

You let him undress you from that position.

You make him do it only with his hands. No mouth. Not yet. He hasn't earned his mouth yet.

His fingers find the zip at the side of your dress. He's used to undressing women, not to being made to do it without being permitted to touch them the way he wants. When the zipper finally gives, he peels the dress off you, knuckles skimming your ribs, your hip, the outside of your thigh. Not a caress, exactly. Something else.

You watch him swallow when the fabric catches on the curve of your hip, and he has to tug it gently, until it slips down and puddles at your feet. You step out of it with one hand light on his shoulder for balance. Valarr flinches faintly at the contact because it's the first you've given him voluntarily in almost ten minutes.

He folds it, of all things. Folds the dress and sets it aside, because he's Valarr Targaryen and even on his knees at his lover's feet, he can't not be neat, and the small domestic absurdity of it twists something warm in you that you weren't expecting to feel.

"Bra."

He reaches up, fingers shaking so faintly you would have missed it if you weren't watching for it. He has to slide his hands around your ribs to get at the clasp. You feel him go still for half a second when his palms bracket your sides—feel him fighting the urge to press his mouth to your sternum, to your stomach, anywhere—and then he masters it. He finds the clasp, unhooks it in one practised motion. The straps slide down your arms.

"Good boy," you hum gently.

His breath rushes out like you hit him.

It’s not a sound he meant to make or for you to hear. He makes it anyway, a short ragged thing, and his head tips forward so his forehead is almost touching your stomach. Valarr doesn't look up at you—can't, you conclude—but you see the flush rising up his throat. 

Oh, you think.

You file that away neatly.

You make him take your underwear off with the same rule. Hands only. He hooks his thumbs in the waistband, drawing them down your legs so slowly it’s almost cruel to both of you. When he has them at your ankles, Valarr pauses. His forehead nearly grazes your thigh, his breath hot on the skin just above your knee. Then he waits. Because he’s understood, now, without you having to say it, that he’s not to rise from this floor until you tell him he can.

"Very good," you tell him. "So good, Val."

Another shudder. Full-body. You feel it in your calf where his hand is still resting.

You let him put his mouth on you eventually. You make him earn it inch by inch.

First, he’s allowed, only, to press his mouth to the inside of your knee—closed lips, no tongue, you specify—and when he does it, Valarr’s eyes close and his whole face softens in a way that makes you warm.

Then an inch higher. Then higher.

You let him kiss the inside of your thigh in a slow ascending line. When he shakes faintly against the skin he hasn't yet been permitted to taste, you feel it go all the way through you.

By the time his mouth is at the crease of your thigh, you can feel Valarr’s breath against you. You’re already wet—embarrassingly wet, obviously wet, and he knows it; you see his eyelashes fluttering at the nearness of it—he’s visibly struggling not to turn his head the two inches he needs to turn and put his tongue where he wants it.

He doesn't. He waits.

That's the part that undoes you, in the end. That he waits.

"Look at you," you murmur fondly, almost to yourself. "You're so good at this already."

His eyes flutter closed. A small sound comes out of him, soft and hungry.

"Open your mouth."

He does. Just like that. Just parts his mouth, on his knees, and waits.

You press two fingers to his lower lip. Slide them inside. Valarr closes his mouth around them without being told, and sucks, his tongue working against the pads of your fingers with the same careful, thorough attention he applies to everything he does. His eyes—when he opens them and looks up at you—are gone.

Not dazed. Not drifting. Gone.

You pull your fingers out of his mouth slowly, wet and slick, dragging them lightly down his chin, down the line of his throat.

"Now," you say.

You stand over him with your fingers in his hair. His hair is silky in your grip, dark and thick, the white streak sliding between your knuckles like a bright ribbon. Beautiful. So beautiful. You guide him where you want him to be, and you hold him there.

Valarr makes a sound the instant his tongue finds your core.

Low in his throat, half-swallowed, not a sound he meant to make, either.

He wanted this, you understand now, for longer than the twenty minutes he’s spent on his knees. Wanted this for weeks, maybe months. The specific version of this where you hold him in place and don't let him lead, but he didn't know how to ask for it.

You feel him go slack with the permission of it now.

You feel him sink into your thighs. His hands come up and settle on the backs of your legs. Not gripping, not guiding, just resting there. The way a man rests his hands on something he’s grateful for, and then he begins.

He’s good at it.

He’s Harvard-good at it, in the same way he’s Harvard-good at everything. Which is to say, thorough and attentive to feedback; he learns the rhythm you want from the very first twitch of your hips, and he adjusts to it, he builds on it, and when he finds the stroke of his tongue against your clit that makes your breath catch, Valarr stays there with a focus that’s almost unnerving.

But this isn't what he's used to. You can feel it in him.

You can feel him trying, underneath the skill, to work out what you want from him now—not the technique, he has the technique; what you want from him as a person, in this position, in this reversal he hasn't rehearsed—and the searching of it is what's making his breath shake against you.

You tighten your fist in his hair and grind down against his mouth, once, experimentally.

Valarr moans.

Loud. Longer than he meant to. The sound breaks against your sensitive folds, and you feel it all the way up your spine. So you do it again, harder, and Valarr’s hands tighten on the backs of your thighs. His throat works, and you think he likes being used, he likes being used, he likes being used, and the knowledge of it makes you cruel.

"Take it."

He takes it.

"That's it,” you hum, gripping his hair tighter. “That's exactly what I want. Just like that. Don't move."

He doesn't move.

You ride his face.

There is no polite word for it, and you don't want one. You hold his head in place with both hands now—one fisted in his hair, one cupping the back of his skull almost tenderly—and you use Valarr’s mouth the way you would use a tool.

With intent, with pressure, a rhythm you choose for yourself and not for him. You don’t let him set the pace or pull back. When his breath goes ragged against you, you hold him through it, and when he makes a choked, wet sound into your skin, you tell him, "That's it, love, you’re so good for me," and you feel his whole body jolt.

When Valarr tries to pull back to breathe, you tighten your fist, and you say, "No. Like that. Don't stop."

He doesn’t stop.

His throat works. You feel it against you. He takes a breath through his nose, ragged and shallow, and goes back to what he was doing. You grind your hips down into his face and let him feel the weight of you against him. Valarr moans again, but this time it’s smaller. Lovelier, wetter, more ragged. This time, it’s closer to a whimper. It’s the sound of a man who’s just discovered something about himself that thrills him.

"Look at me."

His gaze snaps to you like you’ve yanked a leash.

Vlarr’s eyes are glazed, his mouth glossy. There’s wetness on his chin, his upper lip, the line of his elegant jaw. The blue eye has gone so pale it’s almost white, while the brown eye has gone almost black. He’s breathing through his nose in quick, desperate pulls, and when you look down at him, he looks up at you.

"You're doing so well for me," you tell him quietly, stroking your thumb against his temple. “You’re perfect, Val.”

Something in his face breaks open.

You don't know what exactly. You only see the aftermath of it. The way his eyelids flutter, the way his mouth parts against you in a shape that’s almost a smile. Then Valarr sets back to work with a renewed devotion that makes your knees wobble.

He’s putting the entire finish of his Harvard MBA and his twenty-six years of self-possession into the single project of making you come. By the time he manages it, working for it, struggling a little, his jaw trembling with the effort, his tongue gone soft where it was precise ten minutes ago, you’re coming against his mouth in long, cruel waves that you don't bother to be polite about.

"Fuck," you breathe, gasping for breath. "Fuck, Valarr—"

You hear him moan against you.

Dry, small, wrecked. He moans into your swollen cunt at the sound of his own name in your mouth, and he keeps going, keeps working you through it, lapping at your folds, drinking you in. You ride it out against his face without mercy because you know now, with absolute certainty, that mercy is not what he wants.

Valarr’s taking it like a gift. 

You have understood something.

He’s never done this before, exactly. Not like this. He’s gone down on plenty of women; his skill backs that up. But he’s never been used before, and the distinction is not lost on him; the distinction is what he’s just tripped face-first into.

He keeps going when you tell him to.

Through the aftershocks. Gentler now, but still there, still working, still mouth-to-skin and hands-on-thighs and not moving until you permit it. When it's too much—when your whole body flinches at the overstimulation—you say, "Stop." 

Valarr stops instantly. He doesn't move back. He just stops. Rests his mouth there, open, panting against you. Waiting.

"Good boy," you say again, softer this time, and his whole body shakes.

When you finally let him up, he’s dishevelled in a way you’ve never seen him. His perfect hair tousled where you tore at it, mouth wet and swollen, jaw shining, eyes blown. His collar is crumpled, damp mess at the throat. There's a red mark on his cheek where you pressed him into you too hard.

The pristine line of him, that Valarr-polish you've been looking at for four months, is gone. 

It's just a man on his knees with his mouth ruined.

He sways forward on his knees. He presses his forehead to your hipbone.

He whispers, "Thank you."

You freeze, briefly, because you hadn't expected the thank-you, and because you felt it in your whole body.

"Get up."

He does as he’s told. 

You fuck him against his bedroom wall. He puts his hands against the paint on either side of your head, and he holds himself there. Doesn't move them, doesn't touch you except where you’re letting him touch you. He looks into your eyes the entire time with an expression that's, more than anything, studying. He’s memorising what works. For every micro-expression your face makes, and he’s noting which movements of his hips produce which sounds from you, filing it all away, in real time, for next time.

You come a second time with his hand at your throat.

Not hard. He doesn't know how hard yet. You have to take his wrist, afterwards, and place his hand back there, more firmly, and say, "Like this. Not there. Here." And he corrects, he learns. When he comes, he comes with his face buried in your neck, and he’s whispering something, and you only catch the end of it.

—anything you want, whatever you want, tell me—

You stand in his bathroom ten minutes later, splashing cold water on your face, staring at yourself in his obscenely expensive mirror. Your hair is ruined. Your mouth is swollen. You still feel the ghost of his hands at the back of your thighs. 

You have the thought, then, for the first time:

I could make him into anything.

And under that thought, immediately and with the specific chill of an instinct you don’t yet trust:

I probably will.

IV. february, year two.

You wake up in his bed on a Saturday morning in February, and it’s snowing outside.

King’s Landing snow. The rare, good kind. Fat soft flakes drift past the penthouse windows in a slow hush, the city muted under them, the light in the bedroom gone grey. 

You’re under a cashmere throw because he pulled it over you sometime in the night. Valarr’s still asleep next to you, on his stomach, one toned arm thrown across your waist, his face half-buried in the pillow. The white streak at his temple is a pale slash in his dark, messy hair. His mouth gapes open slightly. He’s not handsome in sleep; he’s boyish, a little ridiculous, softened.

You gaze at him for a long time.

There’s no performance in him right now. No studying. No careful awareness of the angle of his own jaw. He’s just a man in his twenties, asleep next to a woman he’s in love with, and he’s breathing evenly, a small crease between his brows that you want to smooth with your thumb.

You smooth it with your thumb.

Valarr stirs at once. His mismatched eyes crack open. They focus on you slowly, without sharpening, and the first thing his face does is smile—helpless, unguarded, delighted.

"Hi," he mumbles.

"Hi."

"What time is it?" he croaks sleepily.

"Early," you tell him gently.

"Mm." He pulls you closer, tucks his face into your shoulder. His voice is rough with sleep, muffled against your skin. "Five more minutes."

You let him have five more minutes. You let him have a whole hour. You lie there with him curled around you like a very expensive dog, and you watch the snow come down outside. 

At some point, you understand, with no particular astonishment, that you’re happy.

Plainly happy. The kind of happiness your mother used to talk about. The quiet kind, the Sunday-morning kind, the kind that can't be captured or faked. You’re in a warm bed with a man who loves you, and it’s snowing. There’s coffee somewhere in your near future. There’s nothing you have to do today, nowhere to be. Valarr’s body is warm against yours, and he smells like cedar and clean skin, and you’re happy.

You turn your face into his thick hair, and you think: oh.

And then you think: oh, no.

Because you hadn’t expected this. 

You expected the sex, expected the dance, the expensive gifts, the careful strategic pursuit. You braced for all of it, watched yourself enter this relationship with a kind of distant curiosity. 

What you hadn’t expected was the five-more-minutes. Or the gentle urge to smooth the crease between his brows. You hadn’t expected the domestic, boring, ordinary, warm-bed happiness of a man who makes you breakfast and laughs at your jokes and holds you in his sleep.

You’ll remember this morning later, after it’s all over, as one of the ones that mattered. Really mattered. 

You’ll remember the grey light, the cashmere throw, the comforting weight of Valarr’s arm across your waist. You will not be able to explain to anyone how a man you eventually understood to be dangerous was also, unambiguously, someone you loved dearly.

But you did.

For a time, in that apartment, in the snow, in February of year two—you did.

Valarr eventually wakes properly, gets up with a groan, and stretches, making you appreciate the toned lines of his back. 

He makes you breakfast: eggs, toast, and the specific preserves you like from a small local shop that he had delivered last week. He puts a record on—jazz, soft, something his father used to play, he tells you—and he stands barefoot at the kitchen island in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and he cooks for you.

You sit at the counter with your chin in your hand and you watch him. Valarr catches you watching him, and his whole face does the thing it does when he’s happy: it goes transparent, briefly, and you see him, the man under the golden performance, and he’s not a man who’s been loved enough.

You see it that morning. You see it so clearly it hurts.

He’s a man who’s been adored and admired his whole life but never loved, and the difference is catastrophic. Because you’re the first person who’s bothered to know the difference. Valarr knows you know, and he is—in his careful, precise, terrified way—trying to let you inside.

You eat the eggs, spinning your fork with each mouthful. You kiss him on the jaw on your way to the coffee pot. Valarr catches your elbow and pulls you back and kisses you properly, deeply, consuming. Not hungry, not sexual, just a long warm kiss that means stay, and you do.

You stay the whole weekend.

You tell him, on Sunday night, in the dim of his bedroom with your head on his chest: "I love you."

You hadn't planned to. It comes out of you whole, unstudied, clumsy. His body stills under you.

"Say it again," he whispers.

"I love you."

Valarr is quiet for a long, long time. His hand is in your hair. When he speaks, his voice is not the voice he usually uses. It’s smaller, more cracked. "I've loved you since October."

You skim your lips over his chest. "I know."

"I know you know."

"I wasn't ready to say it back until now," you tell him.

"I know," he says again, and there’s such terrible gratitude in the words that you understand, lying there, that you could ruin this man simply by changing your mind. 

You could ruin him without trying. It’s already too late; he’s already folded into you past the point of extraction, and you’re only three months in.

You close your eyes and breathe against his sternum. You tell yourself, then, that you’ll be careful with him. 

You will not be.

But you mean it, that night, when you think it.

V. march, year two.

You teach him to bite.

You do it slowly. Patiently. One day at a time. You’re in no rush. You have months—you have years, it will turn out—and there’s a specific pleasure in taking your time, in shaping him in increments so small he doesn't notice the shape changing until the shape is already altered.

The first time, you’re sitting on his face. It’s something he asked for, quietly, after weeks of letting him earn it in smaller increments. Somewhere in the middle of it, bored with his stiff politeness, you grab his hair, hard, and you say, into the dim of the room: "Bite me."

Valarr hesitates. Two seconds. A full two seconds of hesitation, in which you can feel him not understanding the instruction.

"The inside of my thigh,” you clarify. “Bite me. Do it."

He does it. Lightly. A nervous, under-committed bite, more suggestion than action.

"Harder."

He bites harder.

"Harder, Valarr."

He bites until you gasp, until you feel his teeth sink in, hard. The skin will bruise in a faint shape that you will look at in the bath the next morning with a small satisfied curl at the corner of your mouth. He freezes after, holds too still, uncertain whether he’s overshot.

You tell him, "Again."

You see his eyes darken. You see him learn.

Two weeks later, in the middle of fucking you, Valarr bites the joint of your shoulder and your neck unprompted. He does it because he can feel you wanting it—reads it off you, reads it in the arch of your back, reads it like a language he’s becoming, slowly but thoroughly, fluent in. 

He does it without asking. He does it knowing you want it.

You come almost immediately, with your nails sunk brutally into his toned back. He kisses the bite afterwards tenderly, apologetic in a theatrical way that’s not actually apologetic, and you laugh—actually laugh—against his chest because you can feel him performing the tenderness for you. It’s cute and it means he’s yours.

You teach him to hold you down.

You put his hands where you want them. You tell him—not always with words; sometimes just with a look over your shoulder, sometimes just by lifting your wrists above your head and waiting for him to understand—and Valarr learns to pin you. He’s tentative at first, afraid of hurting you, his grip more like a suggestion than a hold. 

You break his wrist-grip one night just to show him he isn't trying. "Try again," you order, soft but firm. "Mean it this time."

He tries again. This time, he means it. The grip goes iron. You can’t pull free, and your breath catches with a slow, satisfied curl of heat in your belly.

"There," you rasp against his mouth. "There, Val. Like that. Don't let go."

He doesn't let go.

VI. april, year two.

You teach him to talk to you.

This one takes longer. Valarr's natural register in bed was praise (beautiful, you're so beautiful, god, look at you, I can't believe you're mine), and the praise is real. It’s genuine. It’s not a thing you want to remove from him. You just need to layer something underneath it. You need to teach him to be filthy under his perfect, golden shine.

You coax it out of him in small pieces.

You ask him what he's thinking about when he looks at you. You ask him questions in bed that he has to answer, and watch him struggle with the vocabulary. 

What do you want? What are you thinking about when you’re inside me? Tell me. 

He’s articulate. Valarr has been trained his whole life to be articulate. But this particular articulation—the dirty one, the possessive one, the one that lives under the golden boy and has never been spoken aloud—he has to find the words for first.

But you’re patient. You’re endlessly patient. You coach him like a man learning a language, and he learns it for you, because he learns everything for you.

The first time he manages mine in that low, smooth voice—against your ear, his teeth at your throat, his hand at your hip—you actually shudder. He feels it. His rhythm stutters. Then Valarr whispers it again, more certain this time, hungrier, and you feel him understand that he’s found a key that works.

By April, he's saying worse things.

Specific things.

The kinds of things you hadn’t known you needed to hear from him until he’s saying them, in that smooth voice, while fucking you against his windows with the city eighty floors below.

You feel so tight around me, love.

You're so wet for me. Listen to that. You’re making a mess.

Look at you taking it. Look at you. Perfect.

Some nights, you make him narrate.

You make him tell you, in his quiet voice, exactly what he’s going to do to you before he does it. You make him describe, out loud, in exact words, how he wants you. At first, he can’t do it without laughing a little—self-conscious, unused to the performance, the white streak at his temple catching the lamplight as he ducks his head—and you let him laugh, you kiss the laugh out of his mouth, smiling, and you urge him to try again.

Valarr tries again.

I'm going to put you on your back, and I'm going to eat your cunt until you're crying.

I'm going to make you come on my tongue so hard you forget your own name.

Then I'm going to fuck you so slow you'll be begging me, and I'm not going to give it to you. I'm going to make you work for it. I'm going to make you ride me until your thighs give out.

You reward him for that one. You reward him generously.

You let him put you on your back, let him take his time, watch him watch you the whole time he's doing it. His mismatched eyes burn, fixed on you, feverish with pride at himself. His mouth shines, the picture of a man delighted with his work, and you understand that you’ve started something. That there’s something inside this man that’s coming apart. Thanks to you. 

Some nights, he narrates before he's even touched you.

Sits across from you at the bar cart in his sitting room with a glass of something amber in his hand and tells you conversationally what he's been thinking about since lunch. In detail. Tells you what he wanted to do to you in the elevator, what he almost did in the car. Tells you about the board meeting he sat through that afternoon, where he couldn't stop picturing your mouth.

I had to cross my legs under the table like a teenager. Half-hard in a room full of old men, thinking about you on your knees. Thinking about the noises you made when I had my fingers in you this morning, and still won't let you come.

Thinking about how you taste after I've already made you come twice. How you go soft for me. How you let me do whatever I want to you when you're that far gone.

You drink your drink. You let him talk. You don't interrupt.

He's learning the cadence of it, learning what lands. He knows, now, to slow down on the parts that make your breath catch, to speed up on the parts that make you shift in your seat. By the time he stands up and crosses the room to you, he’s already fucked you twice in his head, and you’re already half-gone for him, and you haven't moved.

He takes the glass out of your hand, sets it down.

Come here, love. Let me show you what I've been thinking about all day.

I'm going to ruin you for the rest of the weekend.

And then he does. 

By May, Valarr’s saying them first. Without you having to prompt him. It’s then that you understand that you’ve succeeded completely. That you’ve taught him oh so well. That the version of Valarr who will now, unprompted, describe to you in graphic detail what he’s going to do to you across the dinner table is a version of Valarr you built, line by line, with months of patience.

You take him to a gala in late April at the Met. Black tie. His hand at the small of your back. At some point during dinner, with a lord on your left and a museum board member across from you, Valarr leans in, ostensibly to pour you more wine, and purrs, in a voice pitched just for you:

"I'm going to take you home and fuck you in that dress, my love. I'm going to put you face down on the bed, still wearing it and fill you up. I want to ruin that dress. I'll buy you another one, and then I’ll ruin that one, too."

You don’t spill your wine. There’s no change in your expression at all in fact. You just keep smiling at the lord.

But when you turn your head, just slightly, to look at him, Valarr’s face is smooth and pleasant, his mismatched eyes hooded, and you understand, with a bright, cold thrill: I taught him to do that. I made him into a man who could do that. I put that in him.

He ruins the dress.

You let him.

VII. may, year two.

You teach him to take.

This one is the hardest one. Because Valarr's natural instinct is to give. Everything inside him is oriented toward giving, toward worship, toward the specific pleasure of making you pleased, and learning to take requires him to suppress the reflex that’s organised his entire sexual life.

You make him anyway.

"Put me where you want me," you tell him one night. You’re standing in his bedroom in a silk slip he’d bought you, purposely crooked so he glimpses the curve of your breast and the crease of your thigh. "Don't ask. Don't check. Put me where you want me and fuck me."

He stares at you. "I won't know where—"

"Figure it out," you say bluntly.

He hesitates. Then, slowly, he crosses to you. He puts his hand at the small of your back, walks you backwards toward the bed. He turns you, at the last second, and puts you face down on the mattress. His hand grips the back of your neck, pressing you into the duvet. His other hand lands at your hip, yanking you up onto your knees.

Your breath catches.

"Like this?" he asks, tentative.

"Don't ask."

"—alright."

He fucks you like that. Face-down. Hand at the back of your neck the entire time. His other hand grips your hip hard enough to leave fingerprints. He doesn’t check in, doesn’t ask. He reads everything off your body—the tension in your thighs, the starved, half-animal sound in your throat—and he adjusts in real time. 

He takes, and you come harder than you’ve come in months.

Afterwards, he’s trembling faintly against your back, kissing the damp skin of your shoulder.

"Was that—"

You hum, pleased. "Yes."

"I didn't want to—"

You reach behind you, tangle your fingers in his hair, the roots faintly damp from sweat, and say, "It was perfect, Val. Shh."

Valarr is quiet for a while. Then, "I didn't know I could do that."

I know, you don't say. I know. I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you what you are.

You kiss him instead, kiss him slow and deep and long. He folds against you with that particular trembling gratitude, and you understand, in that moment, that you’re in the middle of remaking a man from the inside out, and that he’s letting you. 

That he’s thanking you for it every step of the way.

Over the next few weeks, Valarr gets bolder. He doesn’t ask anymore. Valarr puts you where he wants you, holds you there, and takes. He flips you in the middle of the night and fucks you half-asleep into the sheets until you’re gasping from pleasure, one hand collaring your throat, another pinching your clit. 

He pulls you off the couch and onto your knees without warning, parting your mouth with his thumb. He pins your wrist against the bathroom counter one morning. Fucks you unhurried and deep, looking at your own reflection while he whispers gently, chin on your shoulder, his eyes dark, what you look like when you come for him.

You’ve taught him, by the end of May of year two, to be the man you needed. You’ve spent six months in his bedroom remaking him, and the remaking isn’t done, but the structure is in place. The rest is finishing work. The rest is polish.

He’s so grateful you taught him.

That’s the part that, later, you will not be able to stop thinking about. 

That the whole time you were shaping him—the whole time you were pressing his hand to your throat with the right pressure, the whole time you were correcting his grip, his language, his angle, his tempo — he was thanking you. He was grateful. He was so happy. 

Valarr walked around the city feeling like he’d been given a gift and the gift was himself. He didn’t understand, yet, that what you were giving him was also a leash. Because you were the only woman who would ever know how to handle him like this. 

You were building a lock and holding the only key to it.

And he loved it.

He loved every fucking second of it.

VIII. summer, year two.

He flies you to Myr for ten days. Private plane. Private villa. A staff you will never see who puts fresh fruit on the terrace each morning before you wake.

Valarr is, in Myr, the best version of himself. 

He cooks you breakfast in the little kitchen overlooking the bay. He reads with you on the terrace, your hands occasionally brushing over the pages, his thumb tracing yours when he thinks you aren't paying attention. 

He asks you questions about your mother that no one has ever asked you. Not the polite questions, but the real ones, the ones that come from a man who’s lost his father young and who knows the particular shape of that absence. What was her laugh like? What did she smell like? What did she think of your father, honestly?

You answer him with more honesty than you’ve given anyone in years. You lie in a pool of sun on his chest, and you tell Valarr about the last Christmas before she died and about the way your father still mourns her. Describe the specific sharpness of grief that’s hardened inside you. Valarr listens, and his hand strokes the back of your neck, and you feel known.

You feel known.

It’s not the only time in the relationship you will feel it. It’s one of several. You will have a handful of mornings like this—on terraces, in beds, in cars, on planes—where Valarr will look at you and you’ll have the unmistakable sense that someone is listening. The listening is real, and the loving is real, and the man listening and loving you is not a performance.

It is, however, the first time you feel the wrongness alongside it.

Because that night, after sex—after he’s eaten you out until you were gasping and then fucked you until you couldn't feel your legs, after he’s let you mark his chest with your nails and kissed the inside of each wrist with that bowed, careful reverence that’s started to unsettle you a little—he lies behind you with his arm over your waist and he says, casually, into your hair:

"I want to marry you."

You go still.

"Valarr."

"Not tomorrow. Not next year, even, if you don't want. I know it's fast." His hand flattens over your stomach. His palm is warm. "I'm telling you because I want you to know that I'm serious about us. I've known since October."

October. You’ve been sleeping with him for eight months. He’s known since the second.

"I don't think you know me well enough to—"

"I know you perfectly well." There’s no defensiveness in his voice, only a calm, unwavering certainty. "I've been paying attention. I know what you take in your coffee and tea. I know the sound you make when you've had a bad call with your father. That you check your watch every forty minutes when you're bored, and that you laugh at bad puns you pretend not to laugh at. There’s a particular way you kiss when you want more and when you're being generous. I know, more or less, what you'd name our children. I've been listening."

You lie in his arms, and you feel the entirety of your body go cold, and then warm, and then cold again.

Because he isn't lying. He has been listening. For eight months, with a focus of a man building a dossier, and he’s assembled a working model of you accurate enough to be operational. He can predict what you will want for dinner, can predict what you will wear to a party. He can, demonstrably, predict what you will say when he does certain things in bed.

And none of it is knowing you. Not really. It’s the shape of knowing. It’s the model, not the real thing.

But he loves the model so completely that he can’t tell he doesn't love you.

You don't say any of that. You turn in his arms, and you kiss him. Because what Valarr has just said is, in some animal part of your brain, a thing you want to be flattered by. You’re a Stark heir. Men have been vying to marry you since you were sixteen, and none of them has ever meant it with this degree of genuine want.

You kiss him, whispering, "Not yet."

Valarr smiles against your lips. There's no bitterness in his voice when he says, "I'll wait."

He means it. That’s the other thing about Valarr. 

He means every single thing he says.

IX. autumn, year two into year three.

It happens at a bar near Maegor’s Holdfast. 

Valarr’s in the bathroom, and a man with a clean-shaven jaw and an expensive jacket sees you alone at the table and decides that’s an invitation. He’s not aggressive. Not even even vulgar. Just the kind of lawyer-ish, investment-ish man you’ve been politely deflecting since you were old enough to understand what men want from you. He puts his hand on the back of the chair next to yours and asks if you'd like a drink.

"I'm with someone," you dismiss him with practiced ease. 

"He's not here," the man replies.

"He is, actually,” you say coolly. “He's in the bathroom."

The man smiles, unbothered. "Long bathroom break."

You give him the Stark look—the one your father perfected and your mother refined—and he laughs, shrugs, already gone by the time Valarr gets back. You don’t mention it because it’s not worth mentioning. It was nothing.

Three weeks later, the man had moved across the country.

You find out by accident. A girl you know from your studies mentions, at a brunch, that so-and-so took a sudden role in Gulltown. Which is strange because he'd been up for partner at his firm in King’s Landing and everyone assumed he was going to take it. The change of heart was unexpected. Something to do with the timing, she says vaguely. His firm made him a very aggressive offer to leave.

You look at Valarr across the table. He’s drinking coffee, his expression serene. 

"You knew him," you say, later, in the car.

"Who?"

"The man,” you say tightly. “The one who's moved."

"Oh. That one." He doesn't glance at you. His eyes are on the street, and his hand is on your thigh, thumb stroking absently. "Was that his name?"

"Did you do something?" you ask bluntly. 

He’s quiet for a moment, only his thumb moving.

Then: "I made a phone call. That's all. A friend at the firm mentioned they were looking for someone to head up the Eastern office, and I mentioned that I knew a promising associate. That's all. Whether he took the role was up to him."

"Valarr."

"He wasn't coerced."

"You—" 

You don’t know how to finish the sentence. You exiled a man across the country because he flirted with me for forty seconds at a bar. It’s insane. It’s also, you realise with a cold ripple down your spine, entirely plausible. It’s exactly the kind of thing Valarr would do. Quietly, legally, unimpeachably, with deniability built in at every step. He’s probably not broken a single law doing so, and he’s almost certainly sent a man across the country.

"I didn'tt like the way he looked at you," Valarr says, mildly, as if it were a small dietary preference. "I handled it."

You’re silent for the rest of the drive.

That night, you make him fuck you on the floor of his foyer, because you’re too angry to get all the way to the bedroom. Because the only way you can process what you’ve just learned is to take. 

You yank him down by the tie. You bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. He takes it. Valarr takes everything like a black hole made solely for your consumption. He takes you roughly on the marble with his head at an uncomfortable angle against the baseboard, and when he comes, he whispers your name like a prayer. When it's over, he lies there under you and looks up at you with those mismatched eyes gone entirely dark, and he says softly:

"I love you. I'm sorry. I love you. Please don't be angry."

You understand, then, something true about Valarr that you will not articulate to yourself for another two years. 

You understand that sorry and angry are, for him, interchangeable currencies, because both of them end with him in your hands. He doesn’t actually regret the phone call. He would make it again. He’s only sorry that you’re angry, sorry that it has cost him something. The action itself, he’s not sorry for at all.

You roll off him and stare at the ceiling. You think, for the first time: This is not a good man.

Then you think: I don't know if I can leave him.

Then, more quietly, and even more honestly: I don't know if I want to.

X. winter, year three.

Valarr takes you to his mother's house at Dragonstone for Christmas. 

He’s never taken anyone there before. You know because his brother tells you, at the door, with a slightly dazed look on his face, as if he doesn’t quite believe you’re real at all.

Matarys Targaryen is three years younger than Valarr and auburn-haired. He and Valarr don’t look like brothers at first glance, not until you find the architecture of the face underneath, the same line of the nose, the same mouth. He got their mother's colouring. Valarr got their father's. Matarys is warm, where Valarr is polished, loose where Valarr is calibrated.

When he opens the door to you that first evening, he hugs you before you’ve finished stepping inside.

"The Stark heir," he calls out, pulling back, grinning widely. "God. You're actually real."

A surprised, amused snort builds in your throat. "I'm real."

"He's brought me girlfriends before. Valarr, I mean. I mean—he's mentioned girlfriends before. In passing. I'm not meant to know about most of them. But mother doesn't meet them. Mother hasn't met one, ever." He’s still holding your hand. His grip is warm and unselfconscious in a way his brother's grip has never once been. "You're a big deal, apparently. I hope you know."

You suppress another smile. "I'm fast getting that impression."

"I'm Matarys by the way,” he introduces himself, flushing when he realises he hasn’t yet given you a name you already know. “I'm the disappointment."

"He's not the disappointment," Valarr says behind you fondly, setting the bags down. "Don't believe him for a second."

"I’m definitely the disappointment,” Matarys disagrees, even as Valarr throws his arm around him and ruffles his hair in a gesture so brotherly it makes a pang go through your chest. “If I weren't the disappointment, he'd have to invent one." Matarys winks at you. "Come in. Mother's in the drawing room pretending not to care that you're here."

Their mother, Jena Dondarrion-Targaryen, has the same auburn hair as her younger son. A deep burnished red, streaked through with grey at the temples, pinned up with the careful artlessness of a woman who spent her youth in magazines. She’s slender and elegant, and eats one almond with every glass of wine she drinks. She examines you for precisely three seconds too long, assessing your face, your hair, your clothes, your posture. She approves. You see her decide as much in real time. 

The Stark heir. Northern ice. Old money. Good bones. Can give him beautiful children. 

She folds her hands.

"My son has spoken of you." Her voice is dry and dignified. "Extensively."

"I'm flattered."

"He doesn’t speak of women extensively,” she tells you pointedly. “This is new. I think you should know."

You feel Valarr tense, very slightly, next to you. Mother, his body says, without his mouth moving. His hand tightens at your waist a fraction.

Jena looks at her son, then she looks back at you. "He’s been patient his whole life, for lack of anything worth being impatient about. I had begun to fear he would never find anything worth impatience. It’s a relief to me that he finally has."

You say the polite thing and make equally polite conversation. You get through dinner. Matarys is at your elbow the whole time—making you laugh, feeding you gossip about the other guests, refilling your wine without asking—and you like him, immediately, in the instinctive way you like very few people. You understand that Matarys has been deployed gently by his brother, as your ambassador to the house.

Later, much later, after the dinner and the drawing room, in the guest bedroom (he’s been given the guest bedroom; no unmarried couples in the main wing, even for him), Valarr strips you out of your dress and lays you down and makes love to you so gently you could cry, and you do, silently, a few tears sliding into your hair. 

Valarr notices but asks nothing, simply kissing the tears from your temple. And you love him, in that moment, with a quality of love that’s terrifying. Because you don’t trust it, and you don’t trust him. You’re lying in his mother's house in a guest bedroom, and you’re crying, and he’s kissing your tears away with the tenderness of a man who’s been preparing for you his whole life.

He murmurs into your hair: I have never been so happy, love.

You believe him.

That’s the most frightening part.

The next morning, you come down for breakfast in one of his shirts over your own pyjama bottoms. Matarys is at the kitchen island in a sweater that used to belong to their father, and Jena is at the table with a cup of tea and a newspaper. The sun is coming in through the windows, and Valarr comes up behind you, kissing the top of your head absently while he reaches for the coffee, and you think—with a small, clear tremor of shock—this is what it would look like. If I married him. This is what the rest of my life would look like.

Jena lowers her newspaper. She looks at you over the rim of her teacup. You think she sees something in your face, then.

"He is better," she says mildly, "when you are in the house."

You don't answer.

You don’t know, that morning, that you will remember her saying that for the rest of your life.

XI. january, year three.

You come back to the penthouse late on a Tuesday night in January. Eleven, maybe later.

You’ve been to a dinner you hated. Your shoes are off before you’re fully through the door, your shoulders set in a rigid line. You peel off your coat impatiently, a moment later, glaring at nothing. You want a drink, a hot bath, and you want not to think about the man you sat next to at dinner for a full forty minutes. That’s how long it took you to realised he was the uncle of a woman whose deal your fund had just walked away from.

You drop your bag on the console.

You call out, "I'm home.”

And a voice behind you, low and leisurely, drawls: "I can see that."

You turn.

Valarr stands in the doorway of the living room. He’s still in the suit trousers, and the shirt from his own evening—rolled at the sleeves because you told him once you like how his forearms look bared, collar open at the throat, the white streak at his temple catching light. He has a glass of scotch in his hand, and he’s not smiling. 

He’s looking at you in that particular way Valarr looks at you now, which is different from how he looked at you two years ago.

Two years ago, he looked at you like a man who found something he’d not expected to find and was afraid, faintly, that it would be taken away from him.

Now he looks at you like a man who knows exactly what he has and is, quietly, keeping it.

"Hi," you call out.

"Hi." He takes a sip of his drink. His eyes do a single slow pass down your body, head to toe, unhurried. Shoes off, hair a mess, dress wrinkled, the faintest mascara smudge at the corner of one eye. "Bad night?"

"The worst," you admit tightly.

"Mm." He doesn't move from the doorway. "Come here."

You don't go, immediately. Not because you’re refusing, but because you like, these days, to make him ask a second time. Sometimes third. Because the small pause between the first instruction and the second has become its own private language between you, a thing he understands, a thing that turns the air in the room half a degree warmer.

His mouth does a small thing it does nowadays. The corner tugs slowly, something tender and dark in it.

Valarr waits a beat. Then, lower: "I said come here."

You cross the room unhurriedly.

Valarr sets his drink down on the side table without looking at it. He catches your jaw with the hand that was holding the glass—warm, faintly tacky from the condensation—and he tilts your face up. He looks at you. Just looks. No kiss yet. He’s reading your face, the way he always does now, doing his inventory of you: tired, wound tight, wants to fight something, wants to be handled.

Alright.

He tilts his head a fraction. "Who seated you next to him?"

You blink. "What?"

"At dinner. Who seated you next to him? Not by accident, I assume." His thumb is moving leisurely along the line of your jaw, his mismatched eyes hooded. "You wouldn't be this tense if it was an accident. So who did it?"

You stare at him.

You haven’t told him who you sat next to at dinner. You haven’t told him anything about dinner. You’ve only been home for forty seconds. He’s read it off you, you realise. The angle of your shoulders, the particular tension in your mouth, the fact that you dropped your bag instead of setting it down. He’s reconstructed, from this, a whole sequence of events he wasn’t present for, and he’s landed with uncanny precision on the actual problem.

"How do you—"

"You'll tell me later," he says, dismissive, almost bored.

He’s not interested in dinner anymore. He’s already set it aside. It’s a thing he’s logged for later. You know there’ll be a phone call later in the week, you know someone will find himself suddenly unavailable for a seating arrangement, and that will be that . 

He’s already turned his full attention back to you.

"Not now,” he goes on idly. “Now you're going to take off that dress, my love."

Tonight you do. 

Because you want to, because you need this, and he sees it in you. 

Valarr watches you, but he doesn't help. Two years ago, he would have helped—would have reached for the zip, would have knelt to slide it down you, would have made a little production of it—and now he just watches. He leans back against the doorframe, head tilted back, and watches. His eyes go steadily darker as you work the zip. The dress slides off your shoulders, and you step out of it, kicking it aside.

"Bra. Underwear. All of it. Slowly."

You obey, keeping eye contact throughout. You reach behind your back for the bra clasp, taking your time. Because he said slowly, and you are, these days, a woman who rewards specificity. 

The straps slide down your arms. You feel Valarr’s attention on your breasts when the bra comes loose. There’s a small sound he makes—not a word, just a silky exhale—and you hook your thumbs into the sides of your underwear and drag them down your legs. You step out of them, and when you straighten, he’s looking at you the way men in paintings look at things. All consuming, devout.

"Stay there."

You stay.

He crosses the room, still half-dressed, and walks once around you. A full slow circle. His eyes on your back, the line of your spine, the curve of your ass. Valarr stops behind you. You feel his breath at the nape of your neck. His hand, warm and dry, slides down the length of your spine leisurely, following the bumps of each vertebra down to the small of your back.

He palms your ass.

Squeezes, almost thoughtfully, appreciatively. Then, without warning, he hits it—one sharp, precise smack, not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to make you gasp. You feel the heat of his handprint bloom instantly across the skin, and you feel his breath at your ear dip a half-register lower.

"Hm," he hums, pleased, as if confirming something. "I thought so."

He comes back around to the front of you.

His eyes have gone entirely black now. He slides the back of his knuckles down your sternum, between your breasts, over your stomach, and between your legs. When his fingers come away wet, he looks at them for a long contemplative second, then pops them in his own mouth.

You watch his eyes close.

You watch his throat work as he sucks his own fingers clean of you, and when Valarr’s eyes open again he’s smiling. It’s small, private, the smile of a man who’s just had his first sip of a very good wine he was looking forward to all evening.

"Tell me what you want," he says quietly. "The short version."

"Valarr—"

"I said the short version."

"Rough," you answer breathlessly.

"Mm." His thumb, still wet, strokes the side of your throat, almost tender now. "Is that so?"

He manoeuvres you against the wall.

One hand at your throat—exact pressure, the pressure you taught him, two years of calibration behind his thumb—and one hand at your hip, gripping hard enough to bruise. He’s not kissing you yet. He’s just looking at you, up close, his forehead almost to yours, his breath warm against your mouth, and then Valarr kisses you.

It’s not the kiss of a man asking permission. 

Instead, it’s a kiss of a man who’s fucked you several hundred times and who knows, from the rhythm of your breath and the angle of your chin and the specific way you had dropped your bag, precisely what you need from him tonight.

He kisses you hard, with teeth. With hunger. He bites your lower lip and drags it between his own. And when you bite his lip back, Valarr laughs against your mouth, low and pleased, as if you’ve just confirmed a diagnosis he was already fairly sure about.

The hand at your hip slides between your legs. No preamble. Two fingers into you in one long, slow push, knuckle-deep, and the wet sound of it is obscene in the quiet of the entryway. His mouth goes still against yours for a half-second as he catalogues how wet you already are.

"All through dinner?" he wonders.

You don't answer. You can't answer. He’s curled his fingers, and you’re breathing through your teeth, your forehead pressed to his collarbone.

"Answer me."

You make a small, hungry sound. "Valarr."

"Were you sitting across from him, thinking about this?” he demands, working his wrist. “About coming home to me like this?"

"Yes," you breathe out.

"About what I'd do to you?" he probes further. 

"Yes."

His lips skim your temple. "Good. I’ve been thinking about you, too."

He adds a third finger.

You feel yourself stretch around him, and your knees go for a second. Valarr catches you with the hand at your throat, holds you up, keeps fucking you on his fingers without breaking rhythm. He’s not going easy. He’s decided, somewhere in the last three minutes, that tonight is not a night for going easy. His thumb finds your clit at the same moment his fingers hit the spot inside you that he’s mapped years ago. 

You come on his hand against the entryway wall less than ninety seconds after walking through the door.

Valarr doesn't let you ride it out. He pulls his fingers out of you before you're done, wet and glistening, and holds them up between you.

"Open."

You open your mouth.

He slides his fingers in. You taste yourself on him, tangy and clean, and you close your mouth around his knuckles, sucking slowly, because you know what it does to him, watching his pupils dilate. Valarr’s breath catches, and his cock twitches visibly under the fabric of his trousers.

"You're going to kill me, my love," he murmurs fondly, already slightly breathless. "Turn around."

He half-turns you himself. Face to the wall. One hand between your shoulder blades, holding you there, the other sliding up the inside of your thigh, keeping you open.

"Stay."

You swallow, staying in your spot.

He undresses behind you without hurry. You hear it—the soft drag of his shirt, the clink of his belt being drawn from his trousers, the considered way he puts his cufflinks down on the side table because Valarr doesn’t throw cufflinks.

No matter how hard he’s about to fuck you.

You hear the whisper of fabric when he steps out of his trousers. You hear him take himself in his own hand, a single slow stroke, and the small catch of breath that follows.

You hear all of it, and you can’t see him, but listening is part of it, and he knows it’s part of it. This play between you. He’s taking his time on purpose.

When he comes back to you, he’s fully naked, skin hot against your back, the length of his cock sliding heavy between your thighs before he's even angled himself. He drags his length through the wetness of you, slow, once, twice, and you hear him groan low behind your ear at the feel of it.

"Look at you," he breathes. "Come undone. All for me. Just for me."

Valarr puts one hand back at the nape of your neck, pressing you forward against the wall, and the other hand he slides down to check—thorough, unhurried, two fingers back inside you like he’s making absolutely sure you’re exactly as ready as he wants it—and he makes a low, satisfied sound against the back of your shoulder.

"My good girl."

Good girl is new.

He would not have said good girl in year one. He wouldn’t have said it in month eighteen. He’s arrived at good girl through long study, through months of testing adjacent phrasings, through watching your face when he tried things, abandoning the ones that didn't land. Good girl landed. For a different reason good boy landed with him. 

You feel yourself react to it now, with a small, involuntary shiver. Valarr feels it against your back, and you hear the small pleased huff he makes when he catches it.

He fucks you against the wall.

He pushes into you in one long, deliberate stroke, to the hilt, no mercy, and the sound you make is raw and loud. You would, on a better night, be embarrassed about it.

He doesn’t give you a moment to adjust. He doesn’t ask. Valarr pulls almost all the way out and pushes back in again just as hard. Then again, setting a pace he’s chosen for you. You feel the flat of his pelvis hit your ass with every stroke, his balls heavy against you, and you feel yourself already starting to build again against the wall.

He fucks you with the hand at your nape, holding you exactly where he wants you, and the other hand reaching around and down to work your clit with a precision that comes from two years of specific practice. His mouth brushes at the join of your shoulder and your neck where he had, once, been taught to bite.

He bites now. He bites hard enough that you yelp. There’s no pause, no apology. Valarr sucks the bite afterwards, a long, relaxed drag of his tongue, and you know you’ll have a bruise there tomorrow in the exact place your collar will not cover.

He fucks you through it, and his voice low in your ear is not a voice he had in year one, is not a voice he knew was in him in year one, because it’s a voice you made.

Listen to yourself. Listen to how wet you are for me.

You're so fucking tight tonight, my love. Did you miss me this much?

That's right. Take it. Take all of it. That's my good girl.

You're mine. Say it.

You let out a breathy gasp. "Yours."

"Again."

"Yours, Val, I'm yours—"

"Louder."

He reaches up, his fingers sliding into your hair, and pulls. Not brutally but with intent. Forcing your head back against his shoulder so your spine arches and your breasts push forward against the cold of the wall, and the angle of him inside you changes. You make a sound that’s not a word, exactly, and he fucks you through the sound of it anyway, his mouth at your ear again.

"Come on my cock."

You do. 

You come with your forehead pressed to the cold of the wall, his hand at your throat, and his cock pulsing inside you. When you do, Valarr makes a small sound behind you that’s not thank you anymore, not the way it was in year one.

It’s something else now. Something more possessive, darker, closer to yes.

He doesn't let you down from it. He keeps moving. He fucks you through the aftershocks, slower but not gentler, his hand still working your folds, and when you whimper and try to close your legs, he murmurs, "No. Stay open for me, love," and you do.

He pulls out of you only when he's decided to.

He’s still hard. You feel it against the curve of your ass as he presses a slow kiss to the bite mark on your shoulder—almost tender now, almost apologetic—and then he turns you, bodily, with a hand on your shoulder. Still controlled, still in command, walking you backwards to the couch and puts you on it.

Knees open, thighs spread. On display. One hand flat against your sternum to keep you lying back.

He kneels between them.

He looks up at you.

And this—this is the moment you don't quite expect.

His mouth is wrecked from your mouth, floppy hair mussed from your fingers, the white streak at his temple dark with sweat. His cock is still hard and flushed, glistening where he pulled out of you a minute ago, stomach tight with the effort of not finishing in you against the wall. Looking down at him on his knees between your thighs, still entirely composed even now, his mismatched eyes blazing, you feel, for a second, a small bright flare of something you have to call wonder.

Plain wonder. The kind you feel looking at something you didn't know could exist.

Because this isn’t the man who came to your dorm with peonies in September of year one. Not the man who asked if he could kiss you.

This is a particular, meticulous, terribly capable man who’s just fucked you against a wall with the exact intensity you needed on a bad Tuesday, without being told a single thing about the said Tuesday. Who’s now kneeling between your thighs with his own release still unspent, looking up at you like he’s waiting for the next instruction.

Valarr sees your face change.

His own face shifts, just a fraction in response, eyes going soft. His mouth tugs at the corner. Not a smile, exactly, but the shape of one. You’ve seen this expression on him maybe four times in two years. It’s the expression he makes when he catches you looking at him with that particular stunned, wondering, what are you look on your face.

He loves it. He loves it more than anything.

He loves being seen by you. That’s the deepest thing in him, you understand in that instant. That’s the mouth of the well. He loves being seen. And you’re the first person who’s ever looked at him and seen what was under the gold. You’re the only person who knows what to do with it, with him. And when you look at him this way—with wonder, with the small stunned what have I made gleam in your eyes—his whole face goes soft.

"What?" he asks, almost a whisper.

"Nothing."

"Tell me," he urges, more needy than ordering. 

"I was just—"

You don't have the word. A part of you doesn’t want to give him the word. The word is organising itself in your mouth anyway. You know, if you say it out loud, he will keep it, he will treasure it, will pull it out on bad days and press it against his chest like a warm stone.

"I was just looking at you."

His mouth softens further. His hand, big and warm, slides up the inside of your thigh. It’s a slow movement, fingers still slick from you, and his hand settles high. Not yet where he wants it. He holds it there. You can feel the faint tremor in him; he’s not as composed as he’s pretending to be. He’s still hard, wound up tight without release. But you know he’s not going to come until he’s made you come again, and the decision is written into every beautiful line of him.

"I like it when you look at me like that," Valarr admits quietly. His eyes don’t leave yours. "Keep doing it. Look at me like that forever please."

You keep doing it.

He puts his mouth on you.

He’s messy about it tonight. Deliberately so. Two years ago, he was precise about eating you out—careful, technical, a man demonstrating his competence, selling himself—but tonight he’s sloppy. In a specific way he’s learned you like, open-mouthed and wet, tongue flat and lazy, a filthy worship.

He licks into you, tongue curling. He licks you clean of his precum. He makes a low sound against you when he tastes both of you mixed together, and that sound goes through you like a current.

Valarr hooks your knee over his shoulder and opens you wider, taking you apart, all while you watch him. The whole time he’s working you with that specific precision—which was yours, which you gave him, your gift—he keeps glancing up at you through his lashes to check that you’re still watching him with that face.

And every time he catches you still looking, Valarr’s mouth curls minutely against you, pleased. You feel his throat hum with it.

He’s thriving on it, feeding on it. He’s a man who’s happiest when he’s being looked at like this, and this look—the slightly stunned I did this to you, didn't I look—is the only look in the world he wants. More than anything. More than oxygen, more than food. 

He slides two fingers back into you while his mouth sucks and nibbles between your folds. You hear how wet you sound. He hears it too and makes a small choked sound against you at the evidence of it. His free hand, slotted between his own legs, you realise with a hot jolt, tightens on himself. Not to stroke himself, but to clamp down on his own orgasm. He refuses to waste himself like this, even now. 

You come again. Slower this time, longer, messier, twitching and rigid against the couch. Your hand goes tight in his hair, and Valarr’s face is a mess of you and his own fingers slick to the knuckle. He fucks you through it with his mouth and his hand until you push his forehead away with your own hand because you can't take any more.

He sits back on his heels.

His cock is visibly pulsing, wet and leaking at the tip. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, not breaking eye contact.

"Come here," you order quietly.

He comes up.

He climbs onto the couch with you. He puts his head in your lap. You stroke his hair, your fingers finding the white streak at his temple, sliding through it. Valarr closes his eyes. He makes a small contented sound, almost a hum, and you feel the warm press of his mouth against the skin of your inner thigh. It’s lazy and affectionate, not meant to start anything, even though he’s still hard against your leg.

You reach down with your other hand.

You close your fingers around his hot, slick length, and you start to stroke him, working up a steady rhythm. He shudders against you, breath stuttering against your thigh. He doesn't ask for it; he wouldn't; he’s learned, over two years, to take only what you hand him.

"Who was it?" you ask, after a long, quiet moment. 

Valarr twitches in your hand, hot and throbbing. You’re calmer now, more settled and watch his beautiful face as his brows furrow.

"At dinner?"

You hum.

"Later," he whispers, eyes still closed, mouth moving against your thigh. Little nibbles and kisses. "Tell me… later. I'll take care of it."

You tighten your hand on him, an almost cruel grip, and Valarr makes a small, wrecked sound.

You stroke him like that, slow but relentless, and you feel him starting to tremble. When he comes, he does so quietly. Spilling hot and sudden into your hand, face pressed into the meat of your thigh, breathing your name into the crease of your hip. It’s not the way he came in year one, either. In year one, he made a production of it. In year one, it was all theatre.

Now it’s almost silent. It’s private. Now he comes into your hand like it’s the only place in the world he’s permitted to.

And he will take care of it.

You believe him. Completely.

You stroke his hair with your clean hand, spreading his cum back across his softening cock with your other, marvelling at the groan that vibrates in his slender throat as you do so.

You look down at the top of Valarr’s head, and you think—with the same quiet wonder you had a minute ago, not yet frightened, not yet aware of what the wonder is going to cost you one day—look at you, look at what you've become, look at what I've made of you.

He hears you thinking it.

He turns his face into your thigh, kissing the skin there, once, and he says, almost too quietly to hear, "Thank you."

And you understand he’s not thanking you for letting him do what he just did to you.

He’s thanking you, specifically, for the look on your face.

He’s thanking you for making him whole. 

XII. spring, year three.

It’s not all wrongness. 

That's the thing you have to remember. That's the thing you’ll have to remember, later, when you’re trying to explain to yourself why you stayed.

There’s the morning in Pyke, at the house his father left him on the coast. You wake to find him on the porch with two cups of coffee and a book he’s not reading (he’s watching the water with a faraway look you’ll remember forever). When you come out barefoot in his t-shirt, Valarr pulls you into his lap without a word and kisses your temple. Lightly, lovingly. You sit there together for forty minutes while the fog burns off the bay, neither of you speaking, and it’s one of the quietest hours of your life.

There’s also the night in the penthouse kitchen when you’re both drunk, and he tries to teach you to make his grandmother's pasta by hand (my father's mother, her side was Dornish, this is how she taught him, this is how he taught me) and you ruin the dough twice.

Valarr laughs so hard he has to brace himself against the counter. You throw flour in his face, offended. He catches your wrists, still laughing, flour on his cheek and in the white streak at his temple like snow. He backs you against the refrigerator and kisses you until you can’t breathe. The pasta is forgotten, and you eat cereal for dinner in his bed at one in the morning, and he tells you, softly, that his father would have liked you.

There’s the afternoon at Maidenpool, when you both go to a gallery, and Valarr watches you more than the art. You catch him, in the reflection of a glass case, looking at you with an expression of undiluted wonder, and that look is so naked, so unguarded, that you have to turn your face away because you can’t bear the weight of it. Later, in the cab home, you put your hand in his. He lifts it to his mouth and kisses your knuckles, one by one.

There’s the weekend in late spring of year three when your father has had a small cardiac event, and you fly up to the family estate. Valarr comes with you without being asked. He handles the logistics and makes himself useful with your father's staff. Warm and competent.

He charms your uncle, Brandon, who’s not an easy man to impress. No Stark ever is. He doesn’t charm your grandmother, who’s far worse, but he’s respectful, and your grandmother tells you, at the end of the weekend, in her dry northern way, that he’s sufficient. 

It’s the highest compliment she’s ever given a man.

Barthogan Stark, in bed, propped on pillows and recovering, watches Valarr from the doorway and then looks at you and says, "He'd take good care of you."

"I know," you reply.

"He'd do it well,” he continues. “He'd do it with everything he has. I can tell. He has that look about him, that boy. It’s how I once looked at your mother. Just… more intense. He’s charming, alright, but I can see the dragon in him, deep beneath that shine. Maybe that’s good. That edge. You’re a wolf, pup; a weak man won’t survive beside you. You’d eat the bastard alive."

"I know, Dad."

Your father's face softens, and he grips your hand. "I'm only saying, I want you happy."

You hesitate, squeezing his hand back, and admit, because you love him more than anyone, because he’s everything to you, "I'm thinking about it."

And you are thinking about it. Through year three, you think about it more and more. 

You think about it in the penthouse and in his mother's house. On the plane coming back from a weekend in Pentos, and in the cab on the way to a friend's engagement party. An evening where Valarr holds your hand all night and introduces you, everywhere, as my girl, low and fond, with a small proud angle of his jaw. You think about it at 2AM in his bed when you can’t sleep, and he pulls you into him without waking, his arm going heavy across your waist. 

You feel, underneath everything, the specific warmth of a life that you could have and keep, if you wanted it.

There’s another night in June of year three, after a charity gala, where you end up barefoot on his penthouse terrace at two in the morning. He’s in his shirtsleeves, you’re in your gown, and he glances at you and says, "I'd like to ask you something. I'm not going to. Not yet. I'm telling you that I'd like to."

He hasn’t mentioned marriage once since Myr, put no pressure on you about the subject. "I know," you tell him.

"I've had a ring for a year," he reveals calmly.

You meet his gaze. "Val"

"I'm telling you so you're not surprised. When I do ask. I don't want you to be surprised. I want you to have had time to think it through." He reaches over, tucking your hair behind your ear. His hand stays there, warm against your jaw. "I'm not asking now, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you to have known. I want a lifetime with you. Just that. This, us."

You stand on the terrace with him, and you gaze at him, your heart torn inside your chest. The night is balmy, and the city is lit up below you. He’s so beautiful, and he loves you more than anything, and you think, I could say yes. I could. I could marry him tonight. I could have this forever.

You almost tell him yes, then.

You don't.

You kiss him instead, long and deep, holding his cheek in your palm, and whisper against his lips, "Ask me again in a year."

Valarr smiles softly, "Alright."

He means that, too.

He has the ring.

You could marry him, you know you could. He would be a good husband, by every standard that can be measured. His loyalty to you goes beyond anything you’ve ever found in any other lover. He would be attentive, he would be kind. He would fold himself around you and your future children like a man building a fortress. 

He would spend the rest of his life learning you.

You think about it seriously for months.

And then, somewhere in year four, you stop.

XIII. winter, year four.

It begins quietly. 

You don’t wake up one morning having decided to leave Valarr. You wake up one morning, and you’ve been not-quite-looking at him for three weeks, and you realise, over coffee, that you’ve stopped laughing at his jokes.

Stopped looking up when he enters a room, started staying late at the office. You’ve started picking small fights about unimportant things, the way you used to do as a teenager with your father when what you actually wanted was to go outside and scream. Wolf-blood, you father always huffed, it runs thick in you, pup.

You don’t know why you feel this way. 

Valarr is the perfect lover. Attentive, kind, rich, devastatingly handsome. He is, in bed, precisely the man you shaped him to be. In public he’s a proud, ambitious young dragon prince, and in private with you he’s a devoted puppy who would drink from your palm if you offered it. He anticipates your moods. He brings you tea with honey without being asked on the mornings your sinuses hurt. He’s memorised the names of your father's men. 

He’s faultless.

And you’re so bored.

Not sexually—the sex is still, somehow, excellent, because he keeps iterating, he keeps learning, he keeps studying you like a language he’s determined to master—but existentially. 

You’re bored in that specific way that a person is bored when their lover has become a mirror. 

Valarr reflects you back at yourself exquisitely, but there’s no him anymore that’s not also you. He’s folded himself so completely to your shape that when you reach for him you find only your own reflection staring back.

You want to be met. Challenged. You want to be met by a thing that’s not you. You don't know this yet, then. You know only that the penthouse has started to feel like a tomb.

And you know only that sometimes, increasingly, when he’s inside you and he’s saying your name, pressing his forehead to yours with that total worshipful absorption, you want to tear his throat out.

You want to bite him until he bites you back.

But he won't.

Valarr will open his mouth. He'll moan, let you draw blood. He'll thank you for it afterwards. Genuine and polite.

But he’ll not bite you back, not really.

He doesn’t know how.

You gave him every other tool. That one—the one he would have had to bring himself, the one that can’t be taught—he doesn’t possess, you realise. He never did. The whole core of Valarr is receiving, refining, and reflecting. He can’t originate, he can’t surprise you.

He’s not a match that lights the room. He can only ever be the mirror you light yourself in.

And you’re tired of lighting yourself.

XIV. spring, year five.

You end it in May. 

You do it at the penthouse, on a Sunday afternoon, in his kitchen, with sunlight coming in through the windows and striping the floor in gold. You’re wearing jeans and one of his old t-shirts. Valarris making pasta. His grandmother's recipe. The one he taught you badly, the one you now make together sometimes on Sundays. It’s domestic and ordinary.

You feel vaguely sick. 

"Valarr,” you say, “I can't do this anymore."

He stops stirring.

He carefully sets the wooden spoon down on the rest, turning off the burner. He turns to face you fully, his hip leaning against the counter, his full attention on you. There’s no pain, no panic, no anger. He doesn’t even look particularly surprised.

"Tell me why."

"I can't explain it," you reply. “I’m sorry—”

"You can,” he cuts in softly. “You just don't want to. Please tell me."

"Val—"

"Please." His voice pitch hasn’t changed. It’s the please that kills you, because the please is precise. It’s the please of a man who’s asking for data, not mercy. He’s asking because he wants to understand what happened so he can adjust. Even now. Even now, at the end, his first instinct is to find out what the input was so he can recalibrate his output. "Please tell me. I'd like to understand."

But you understand, in that moment, why you have to leave him. You understand it with full clarity for the first time in five years that almost staggers you.

You can’t leave him in a way Valarr can understand. Because if you do, if you leave him in a way he can understand, he’ll simply become the thing you left him for. And if that happens, you’ll be back in his bed within six weeks. You will fold him again, then again, and you'll be married to yourself more than ever.

So you give him nothing. You give him, It's not working. You give him, I'm sorry. You give him, I need time.

His jaw works, his eyes tracking your face.

Then, Valarr says quietly, "I know you're lying. I don't know about what. But I know."

"I'm not—"

His voice is soft but there’s iron underneath. "Whatever it is, I deserve at least not to be lied to. Keep your reasons. I won't make you explain, but don't lie to me, my love. Please."

You stand in his kitchen, staring at him and you feel the shape of what you’re leaving. You feel it with full weight. Four and a half years. The silver thread he’s woven into your life pulses faintly, painfully.

You sense each place where, if you pull it out, the fabric of you is going to tear. The snowy morning in February. The porch in Pyke. The night with the flour. Matarys winking at you in the doorway. Jena saying he is better when you are in the house. The terrace in June, and the ring he’s had for a year. 

The life you almost chose, and the life you will never now have.

You whisper, "I'm sorry."

For doing this to you, for remaking you, but I can’t live with myself anymore, seeing what I’m turning you into.

"I love you," Valarr says, so simply you feel yourself exhale, pained, "I will always love you. You should know that. I'm not going to stop. I don't have that in me, I’m afraid."

You nod because you can’t speak.

"When you're ready to come back," Valarr says quietly, "I'll be here."

"Val—"

"I heard you. You need time. I'll give you time." His voice is low, almost tender. "However long it takes. Take years if you need. I have nothing but time. I'll be here."

You leave, hesitating for exactly four seconds at the door, chained by four and a half years. Valarr inhales, and you yank the door open before he can speak again.

You walk through the lobby and out onto the street, where a car is waiting for you. A car he called, because he called it before you even finished leaving him, and you ride all the way to your father's townhouse with your hands shaking in your lap.

You know, even then, that he meant what he said.

I'll be here.

He will be. For years. He’ll be exactly where you left him, in the specific shape you left him in, made to precisely your specifications, patient, waiting. Valarr will not move on, will not date, or forget. He’ll do what he’s always done: build businesses, sit on boards, attend galas and smile that golden smile of his and underneath it all, he’ll be a man at the bottom of a well waiting for the sound of your footsteps.

He’ll wait.

And he’ll not be becoming someone else while he waits. He’ll stay exactly who he was on the day you left him. Because the man he was on the day you left him was you. He finished becoming himself the minute you unlocked him, and the self he became is the self you made. 

There’s nowhere else for that man to go now.

That’s your last mistake with Valarr Targaryen.

Not the leaving.

The making.

XV. later.

You will meet Aerion Targaryen a year later. 

In a bar. In nowhere, Ashford, off a highway, on a road trip you took because you couldn’t sleep in your own beds anymore.

You’ll meet him and your whole body will go still. Because his jaw will be the shape of Valarr's jaw, and his mouth will be the shape of Valarr's mouth, and his eyes will be the wrong colour—both of them pale, icy, mean—and his hands will be callused in a way Valarr's never were. He’lll look at you like nothing at all and everything, simultaneously, and you’ll understand, immediately, that this is the other branch of the family.

The failed one. The cautionary tale Valarr told you about once. 

You will understand immediately, that this is the man you’ve been looking for your whole life. 

Because Aerion will bite you back.

Aerion will not have been made by you. He’s been shaped by his own wounds, his own father, his own failures. You’ll be dropped into his life like a match into dry grass, and he’ll burn, and you will burn with him. It’ll be the first time in years you’ll feel met. By something that’s not yours, that wasn’t shaped by you. 

That existed independent of you and that still, somehow, wants you more than air.

You’ll never tell Aerion about Valarr. You’ll keep Valarr like a grave in the back garden of your life, water it and tend to it but you’ll never speak its name aloud.

But the whole time, in the city, in a penthouse that still has your toothbrush in a drawer he’s never emptied, Valarr will be waiting.

Because he’s a man of his word. 

He has nothing but time.

And he remembers everything.

"I thought about it for two weeks and decided maybe was insufficient."

He crosses the terrace toward you like he's been invited and sets the peonies down on the table, directly on top of your grandmother's hand-annotated copy of The Well-Tempered Garden.

"I was in the area, genuinely in the area. I'm looking at a property in the next county."

Your expression remains cool. "Are you?"

Valarr's eyes crinkle at the flatness of your tone. "Mm. Equestrian. Thinking about whether it's worth the renovation costs."

"You don't ride," you point out dryly.

"I could learn. I'm adaptable." He sits down across from you without being offered a chair. His eyes—pale blue and dark brown, still arresting every time you see them anew—travel slowly across your face, drinking you in with hunger and longing both. "You look well. Northern air agrees with you."

"Valarr," you say, ignoring how his lips part when he hears his name on your tongue again. "Why are you here?"

"I told you. I'm in the area."

"You drove five hours out of your way to be in the area."

"Five and a half, technically. There was construction on 84." He smiles, easy and warm, head tilting in that boyish way. It's the same smile he uses on his board. The smile he uses on your father. The smile you once found charming and now find, primarily, tiring. "I was hoping I could take you to dinner. There's a place in town that apparently has a decent wine list, which is a minor miracle given the location."

You study him, setting down the pen you'd been holding.

"I said I needed space."

His smile folds a little. "You've had space."

"Six weeks is not space."

"It's forty-two days," he says quietly, and something like genuine pain licks over his handsome face briefly. "Which is meaningful, to me. I came to see if you'd reconsidered."

"I haven't."

"Then I'll have wasted a drive. That's acceptable to me." He leans back in the chair and the sun catches the watch on his wrist, throws bright spots onto the iron table. "I didn't come to force anything. I came because I wanted to see you. And because I don't believe in letting things end via text message and mutual silence."

"I didn't end it via text message," you remind him. "I ended it in person, at your apartment, while you held my hand a little too tight."

"Yes. I know." His expression shifts, and for a moment he isn't the composed, arrived version of himself, he's something quieter, slightly younger. "I owe you an apology, actually. A real one. I've been rehearsing it for five and a half hours."

"Valarr—"

"Let me. Please. I won't take long." He leans forward suddenly, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped between them. He takes you in, searching your expression as he speaks. "I was too much. I know I was. You told me I was, more than once, and I heard you and I kept doing it anyway, because I couldn't... I didn't know how to scale myself back, where you were concerned. I've always known how to modulate. With my board. With my mother. With women I was seeing. I've always been very good at showing people exactly as much of myself as they could comfortably hold. But I lost the ability to do that with you, and instead of admitting it I pretended I was in control, and I wasn't, and that's unfair to you, and I'm sorry."

You don't answer immediately because you honestly hadn't been expecting this. You've been expecting charm delivered like a weapon, and instead you're receiving something that looks, from the outside, very much like honesty.

"I've had four months," he says quietly, "to think about what it is you do to me. And I'm still not sure I have a clean answer. I've never felt this way about anyone. I want you to understand that. I don't say it for effect."

He loosens a breath, pausing, fingers lacing then unlacing. He's nervous, genuinely so. This brilliant, dazzling, young millionaire from a dynasty of wealth and power, is nervous.

"I say it because it's a fact that's inconvenienced me considerably," he admits with a little shaky laugh. "I've been with beautiful women before. I've been in love, I thought, twice. And none of it prepared me for you. There is something about you, love, that makes me feel—" He searches for the word, finds it. "Awake. Alive. Like I've been moving through the world at seventy percent my entire life and then you walked into it and I've been at a hundred and twenty ever since and I don't know how to go back anymore. I'm not sure I want to."

You watch him, not a word escaping you. He's looking at you as if he has just handed you something too heavy and is waiting to see what you do with it.

You, who have been a product all your life of the finest schools and finishing programs and drawing-room etiquette, who have been trained from age twelve to respond to masculine declarations with exactly the correct calibration of warmth and deflection, don't trust yourself with any of those well-taught instruments right now.

So you do what you do when you don't want to feel something. You make a joke.

"Has no woman," you say dryly, "ever ridden you in bed and told you to shut the hell up? Is that it?"

Valarr starts laughing.

Not one of his polished, polite chuckles, but a real one. The one that leaves him shaking his head and dragging one hand down his clean-shaven face and pointing at you with the other, mismatched eyes bright with something that's genuinely delighted.

"No," he says. "That. That right there. That's what I'm talking about. That's the thing."

You sigh. "Valarr."

"I'm serious. Any other woman, I'd have just told her I loved her and she'd have cried and we'd have had a very emotional afternoon. You make a joke about riding me and you don't even break eye contact, and I—" He laughs again, quieter, fond. "I don't know what to do with you. I've never not known what to do. It's humbling. It's actually humbling."

The worst thing is that you understand exactly what he's describing.

You know the feeling of being unable to operate at seventy percent with a specific person in the room. You know what it's to walk into a life at seventeen years old and have someone make every other room you enter for the rest of your life feel slightly darker by comparison.

You know it intimately. You know it because that's what Aerion is to you.

And the fact that Valarr has just described, in almost exactly those terms, what you feel for someone else—it's perhaps the loneliest thing that has happened to you in weeks, and you can't tell him, because telling him would be unspeakably cruel, and you're not unspeakably cruel, even to men who might deserve a little cruelty.

So instead, you say, "That's very flattering."

And he smiles at you, small and knowing and slightly sad, as if he's heard the thing you didn't say.

"I'll take it slower," he says. "Today I'm not asking for anything more than a dinner. One dinner. If it's still not working, I'll fly back to the city tomorrow and I'll leave you alone."

Your brows lift ever so slightly. "Really."

"Really."

You don't believe him, not entirely. You know, with the clarity of six weeks of having thought about very little else, that Valarr doesn't accept no the way other men accept no.

That he'll take dinner tonight and mean it to be the beginning of a reconsidering. That he's come here because the estate is your grandmother's house and he knows what this place means to you, and he has always, always been strategic about where he deploys his attention.

But he's also, right now, looking at you with that soft all consuming manner, and you're also the woman who spent four months letting him bring her peonies and take her to dinner and fuck her in his silky bed, and there was a real thing there.

"One dinner," you say eventually. "Tonight. And then you go."

His face softens. "Thank you."

"Where are you staying?" you ask instead.

"I haven't decided," he replies. "I thought I'd see how the afternoon went."

"There's an inn in the village. I'll have someone call and hold you a room."

"You're kind," he says with a small, crooked grin.

"We call that northern efficiency," you rebuke. "It's not the same thing."

He laughs, standing. He comes around the table and, before you can react, leans down and kisses your temple—brief, fond, exactly the way he kissed your cheek outside your exam hall six weeks ago. You don't flinch and you don't move. You let it happen because not letting it happen would require more from you than you want to spend on this moment.

"I'll let you get back to your books. Pick you up at seven?"

You angle your chin to meet his eyes. "Yes."

Valarr crosses the terrace, gets back in his car, reverses smoothly down the long drive. You watch until the Range Rover disappears behind the line of oaks.

Then you sit there, staring at the peonies he laid over your grandmother's book, and think: I have to tell Aerion before he finds out from someone else.

And the moment you think that, you hear his truck.

The crew has been working on the back lawn all week—the final grading, the re-sodding of the section that was torn up during the foundation work.

Aerion's been here every day. You know his truck's engine the way you know a heartbeat. The old F-150 his father gave him when he was nineteen, the one with the rust along the wheel well you once teased him about when you were both younger. You'd ride out to the lake together to fuck in the bed of it under the stars.

He's not supposed to be at the front of the house. The crew parks behind the stables.

He's here because he saw Valarr's car.

The truck pulls up behind where the Range Rover had been. Aerion gets out slowly, the way he does everything slowly when he's angry.

He's wearing a plain black t-shirt already soaked through between the shoulders from the heat, worn jeans that ride low on his narrow hips, work boots caked in the pale dust of the back lawn, a red bandana tied around his wrist to wipe sweat.

His hair is damp at the temples—the silver-blond of it gone darker where the water has worked through, catching the gold of the three o'clock sun in the parts that are still dry. He looks, in a way he's always looked but that you notice more sharply today because Valarr just left, like something not entirely mammalian. A long, lean predator.

The way he holds himself is wrong for the heat. Too still, shoulders loose in that way they only go when he's calculating something. His face is a closed door. His eyes, when they find yours, are the cold pale that happens when he's no longer interested in performing at good.

You have forgotten, in four months of Valarr's warm and careful attention, exactly what Aerion looks like when he's doing the thing he's doing right now. You have forgotten the flat way his mouth sets. You have forgotten the particular stillness of his hands.

But your body hasn't forgotten. Your body remembers and well. Your body is already recalibrating to his presence the way its done so for years.

"Who was that?" he asks, too calmly.

You tense. "Aerion."

"Whose fucking car was that?"

You stare at him, unmoving. "You know whose."

He doesn't come closer. He's standing with one hand braced on the side of the truck, and you can see the tendons in his forearm, the veins, the three-year-old scar along the back of his knuckles from the night he punched through the drywall. He's not moved an inch but he's, nonetheless, closing distance.

It's something he does with attention rather than with his feet.

"He came here."

"Yes."

His mouth flattens. "To your house."

"Yes."

"And you let him on the property."

Your eyes narrow. "I was hardly going to have him forcibly removed in front of the gardeners, Aerion."

"You absolutely were. That's exactly what you were going to do. That was the entire plan I was operating under." His voice is level, too level. Quieter than the situation calls for, which is always how you know he's somewhere past actual anger and slipping into the territory you like least. "What the fuck."

"He just arrived. There was no—"

"Did you invite him?" he demands, jaw pulsing once.

You level him with a cold look. "No."

"Did you know he was coming?"

"He told me he might be in the area. I didn't tell him to come. I didn't give him the address. He knows where the estate is the same way everyone in our social circle knows where the estate is, it's not exactly a secret, Aerion—"

"Are you having dinner with him?"

You pause.

Aerion smiles at the slip, but it's a cutting, dry thing, barely a movement of his mouth, and it doesn't touch his eyes.

"that's what I thought."

"I said yes to one dinner so he'd leave," you tell him. "He was standing on my terrace. What was I supposed to do?"

"Tell him to fuck off. That's what you were supposed to do." His nostrils flare and you see his knuckles bleaching from the grip he has on the door. He stalks closer, walking up the porch steps. "The way you'd tell any other man you'd broken up with who showed up unannounced at your family home. Because normal people don't do that, because it's a threat, even when it's delivered with flowers, especially when it's delivered with flowers—"

"I know what it is," you cut him off coolly.

"Then why is he coming back?"

You shake your head. "Because it's easier."

"Easier." Flat with disbelief.

"Yes. Easier." You angle your chin back towards him, your eyes narrowed into slits. "Because having one dinner and then never seeing him again is easier than whatever scene would have happened if I'd told him no on my front terrace with the staff watching. Because I'm managing a complicated situation in the only way available to me—"

"You're managing it by fucking rewarding him for showing up—"

"I'm not rewarding—"

"That's exactly what you're doing," he snaps, forcibly leashing himself back into that predatory smoothness a blink later. "You're teaching him that if he just keeps pushing, he'll get what he wants. He drove five hours to your house. That's not a normal thing for a man to do when you've told him it's over. And you're having dinner with him."

"Aerion."

"No, we're not doing the thing where you lower your voice and I'm supposed to be reasonable. You know. You know what this is." He scoffs, clicking his tongue dismissively. "Rich boys who don't hear no grow into rich men who don't hear no, and the only thing that ever stops them is someone actually willing to—"

He cuts himself off, lips parted, staring off into space and a prickling sensation licks down your spine.

"Willing to what?" you ask, deadly serious.

His eyes glimmer when he looks back at you. "Make them."

You stare at him. "Make them how?"

"Any way necessary."

"Jesus, Aerion."

You turn, yanking the door to step inside. You hear him behind you, closing in. The door closes behind him and suddenly you're both back between four walls again.

"Don't Aerion me, don't do the disappointed voice, I'm trying to explain to you in plain fucking language what you are dealing with—"

"You think I don't know?" you bite out, shooting a glare at him over your shoulder. "Do you think I'm some stupid, naïve little girl for a man to use and throw out? Don't insult me."

"I think you know and you're trying to be polite about it because you were raised on that bullshit Stark honour mentality about everything and this isn't a situation that responds to politeness—"

The sound of the front door opening cuts him off.

You turn.

Valarr is standing in your doorway.

He's let himself back in. He's holding a travel bag—leather, expensive, monogrammed—and a suit carrier draped over his arm. His smile doesn't reach either eye.

"Sorry, love, I hope you don't mind," he greets cordially. "I called the inn and it was full. The concierge service I use suggested a hotel forty minutes out, but I thought—since we're having dinner anyway—it might be simpler if I just stayed here tonight. Would you mind? I'll be no trouble at all, I promise. I'll be gone in the morning first thing."

You don't answer immediately. You can't answer immediately, because behind you, Aerion's gone completely still.

You turn your head slowly and take in Aerion's expression.

You've seen Aerion furious. During a bad night, during a worse morning, during the moment he put his fist through a hollow-core door. You've seen him at his most broken and most venomous and most unhinged.

You have never seen him look like this.

Because this isn't rage. Rage has heat to it. This is the absence of heat. This is him going somewhere you have never been able to follow him, somewhere very quiet and so dark there's no light to be found.

You step between them.

You do it without thinking, pure instinct. You put your body between your ex and the man you still love, on the front terrace of your grandmother's house, in a cotton sundress, with your hair coming down from where you'd pinned it up for the afternoon.

"Who is this?" Valarr asks politely.

The question is directed at you, not at Aerion. Because Valarr noticed him at once. He's taken in the work clothes, the sweat, the truck parked in your drive, and he's arrived at a set of conclusions.

You can see the calculation happening behind his mismatched eyes. He' trying to determine whether this is a servant he can dismiss or a problem he has to engage with.

"I think you already know," you say flatly.

Valarr's head tilts fractionally, almost curiously.

"Do I?"

"Don't insult me, Valarr," you say, your voice sharpening. "You know what he looks like. You've seen photographs of your own family tree."

There's a long pause.

Valarr's smile changes, then, becomes something else. Smaller, thinner, more focused. You see him putting the pieces together in real time. You see him recognising Aerion's jawline, the proud Targaryen colouring Valarr lacks, even when hidden underneath the sunburn and the dust.

You see him recognise Aerion for what he is—family, distant family, the failed branch, the cautionary tale, standing in work clothes on your front terrace with the look of a man who belongs here in a way Valarr doesn't

"Well," Valarr says softly. "Isn't this interesting."

Aerion still hasn't moved or spoken. He might as well be carved stone at your side.

"You didn't mention," Valarr continues, looking at you, "that you had a history with my cousin."

"It wasn't relevant," you reply tightly.

"I think it's very relevant."

"Then you and I can discuss it privately," you bite out.

Valarr edges half a step closer. "I think we should discuss it now."

"I'm not going to do this on my front terrace."

Valarr smiles, a slightly twitch of his mouth, nothing more. "Then let's go inside, love. I'd love a drink."

He steps past you. He doesn't look at Aerion as he passes. He crosses into the foyer as if he's been here a thousand times, and you realise with a cold lurch in your stomach that this is exactly what he wanted.

He set this up. He most likely arranged for the inn to be full. He came with a bag and a suit carrier and the expectation that he would be staying the night in your house, and the only unexpected variable in his plan was Aerion, and now that he has Aerion, he's repositioning to weaponize Aerion as quickly as possible.

You turn back to Aerion.

He looks at you.

Something in his face cracks, briefly. You see the boy you loved at seventeen underneath the man you love now. You see the version of him that's always, underneath everything else, afraid of being left behind by you.

"I'm not leaving you alone with him," he bites out, so quietly you almost don't hear him.

"Then come inside."

He comes inside.

Valarr is already at the bar cart when you walk into the sitting room. A part of you is glad he chose this room. It's the one with most exits, because your grandmother furnished it for the specific purpose of conducting uncomfortable conversations. Because its windows are tall and face the drive and you want both of their cars in your line of sight.

Valarr's poured himself a scotch already. The Macallan 25 your uncle, Brandon, sent for your birthday, which you've been saving for a specific occasion and which you didn't intend to open for this mess.

"I hope you don't mind," Valarr says, without turning around. "I thought we could all use one."

"I do mind, actually."

"Mm." He sets the decanter down. Turns. Offers you a glass you don't take. He drops his hand. "My apologies."

Aerion hasn't come fully into the room. He's standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, arms crossed low across his chest, watching Valarr the way a thing that hunts watches a thing that doesn't know it's being hunted yet.

He looks, in your grandmother's silk-wallpapered sitting room, exactly as out of place as he is: work-dusty, sunburned, still wearing the bandana knotted around his wrist, a splinter of wood caught in the laces of his right boot. The silver in his hair catches against the yellow lamp your grandmother used to read by. His eyes have gone flat. Pale. Fixed on Valarr with an unblinking quality that's not, on a normal face, something you'd consider frightening. On his face, it's the exact look he gets before he does something that can't be taken back.

You love him. You love him so much in this moment that your chest aches with it. You also know that you're the only thing in this room that is going to keep him from doing something stupid.

Valarr takes a seat on the settee, crossing his legs in that dignified manner. He takes a measured sip of scotch, rolling his wrist lazily.

"So," he says. "You two have a history."

"Yes," you reply.

Valarr hums softly. "And you neglected to mention this to me for—what? Four months?"

"It didn't seem necessary."

"Love," he says with a faint chuckle, "it's not a question of necessary. I asked you, multiple times, if there was anyone else. You told me no."

"There wasn't anyone else," you insists flatly. "We were broken up. We'd been broken up for months."

"How long did you two—"

"Five years," Aerion answers from the doorway, his voice smooth, so cold and emotionless you can't help but suck in a breath. "On and off. Mostly on."

Valarr's eyes flick to him, stays on his cousin for a moment. There's a faint, brief pulse in Valarr's jaw, then his attention slips back to you.

"Five years."

You nod jerkily. "Yes."

"And when we met."

"We had been broken up for two months," you explain evenly. "We were broken up the entire time I was with you. I wasn't lying to you, Valarr."

A mean little twitch of his mouth. "Omission, love."

"Omission is not the same as lying, and you know it."

"It's a fine distinction." He takes another sip, looking toward Aerion again. Then he looks back at you. His mismatched eyes are bright and strange in the afternoon light. "May I speak frankly?"

Danger some old instinct in you whispers. "No."

"I'm going to anyway." He sets the scotch down lightly, folding his hands in his lap. His posture is perfect and his voice flows warm and smooth towards you. "I understand that you have a history with him. I understand that history has weight. I'm not going to pretend I'm thrilled about this, but my father raised me to be pragmatic, and I can be pragmatic now. What I would like to do is speak honestly, as adults, about what your future looks like."

You spine locks. "Valarr—"

"Just... allow me a moment. Please." He holds up a hand, turns toward Aerion.

"I don't know you," he begins. "We're technically family, but we've never met. My understanding, from what my father mentioned when I was younger, is that your side of the family fell on hard times."

Aerion doesn't move, and doesn't respond. He's utterly still in the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the frame. There's something frighteningly animal in his stillness.

"That's not an insult," Valarr continues, and much to your surprise, you can hear honesty in his smooth voice. There's no mockery, no goading, not yet. "It's a fact. The Targaryen name used to carry real weight. Then two generations ago, our grandfather made a series of over-leveraged real estate plays that cost your branch of the family almost everything, and my father's branch was better positioned to weather the 2008 crash thanks to my mother. None of that is your fault. I want to be clear about that. I don't hold you responsible for what our grandfather did."

Aerion's jaw works, but still no sound. You see a tendon jump at his temple.

"What I do want to be honest about," Valarr says, "is what you can offer her."

You go cold. "Valarr. That's enough."

"No, love, I think this needs to be said now, and I think it needs to be said in front of both of you so nobody can accuse me of talking behind anyone's back or trying to manipulate the situation. I'm going to be very plain. May I?"

"Don't—"

He keeps going.

"You work construction. Sometimes. With your father. You make—what? Forty thousand a year? Probably under the table a fair amount of that. You live in a trailer park with five siblings. You have, from what I understand, struggled significantly with substance abuse. So there's a good chance your income is even worse."

Valarr loosens a breath, considering his cousin. The lack of cruelty or enjoyment on his face makes it somehow worse.

"You have no college degree," he goes on, and his eyes sliding to you, like he needs you to hear this above all else, "You have no savings, no assets, no inheritance coming. If something happens to you medically, you're one hospital bill away from bankruptcy. If something happens to her with you, she's one hospital bill away from covering your bankruptcy."

Aerion peels off the doorway.

Not a step, exactly. A shift of weight. A pushing away from the frame. It's the smallest movement a body can make and still be considered to have moved, and it rearranges the air in the room. You feel it.

"You are," Valarr says quietly, still looking at you, "in the coldest possible terms, a very expensive hobby. I say this without malice. I say this with a great deal of sympathy for the situation you were born into, which was not of your making. Truly. But she's the heir to one of the largest private fortunes in the country. She's going to inherit a seat on three different boards, going to run a foundation that manages nine figures in charitable assets. Her life comes with enormous public and private scrutiny. And the question I would like to pose, as someone who loves her, is this: what part of that life do you fit into?"

"Enough," you bite out.

You're watching Aerion as you say it. Your whole attention is now divided between Valarr's voice and Aerion's face. Aerion has come another step into the room, and he's not taken his eyes off Valarr. The cold, flat pale of them hasn't moved once.

He is, at this point, about four steps from the settee.

"What kind of house can you offer her?" Valarr poses idly, like you're all playing a fun game. "What kind of security? What kind of peace? Because I'll tell you what I can offer her. I can offer her a partnership of equals. A life that matches the one she was born to. I can offer her my name, which is not a small thing—our family name, cleaned up, restored, attached to the right side of the ledger. I can offer her children who will never want for anything. I can offer her staff, security, travel, art, the ability to say yes or no to anything she pleases for the rest of her very long and happy life."

He turns his head away from you, finally, and settles his focus on Aerion.

"What can you offer her?"

The only answer is Aerion's too controlled breathing filling the silence.

"I'm asking," Valarr says gently, "because I would genuinely like to know. If you have an answer. If there's something you can give her that I can't. I'm open to hearing it. I'd like to understand. Because from where I'm sitting, cousin, the only thing you've ever given her is grief."

Aerion moves.

He doesn't lunge. There's no yell or snarl. He simply takes a single step forward, a controlled step, and something about the quality of it makes every hair on your arms stand up. You know what he looks like before he hurts someone. You've seen him put his fist through drywall, through a door, through a man's face in a parking lot outside a bar in your sophomore year. You know the stillness that comes before he breaks something.

You're in front of him before your brain catches up to what your body is doing.

Both your hands on his chest. Flat. Low. Pressed against the damp black cotton of his t-shirt. It's too warm and clings to his skin, like he has a fever, but through it you hear his heart. Too slow, which is the real thing that actually scares you. Because a man at the edge of violence should have a faster pulse, but Aerion's always been utterly calm when faced with violence.

You can feel, underneath everything, the terrible coiled readiness of a man who's been told to his face, in front of the woman he loves, exactly what he's worth on the market.

"No."

His lips peel back. "Move."

"No, Aerion," you urge, pressing into him. "Look at me. Look at me."

He looks at you. He always does.

His pupils are blown. The pale irises have gone almost entirely dark. His jaw is set so hard you can see the muscle jumping under the skin. His hands have come up but not to touch you. They're hovering, one at your hip and one near your shoulder, as if he knows he can't be trusted to grip right now. His restraint is, in its own way, more frightening than the almost-violence; you can feel how much it's taking from him.

"He's baiting you," you say. Low, fast, just for him, your mouth almost against his jaw. "That's what this is. He showed up with a bag already packed. He let himself into my house. He said what he just said in front of you, on purpose, so you'd do this. He's looking for a fight he can document, looking for reason to press charges. If you hit him you hand him everything he wants, do you understand me? You hand him me."

Aerion practically snarls, his hands pale fists at his sides. He hasn't touched you. He's not going to, right now, in this state, because he's never once in the years you've known him touched you wrong even when he's been far more wrecked than this.

"Aerion. Outside. Now. With me."

"I'm not leaving you with him," he snarls, still shaking with rage.

"I'm coming with you," you tell him, gripping him to you. "That's why I said with me. We're going outside. Together. You and me. Right now."

His nostrils flare. "He stays in the house?"

"He stays in the house," you agree, already angling him away. "He's not going anywhere. He has everything he wants from this moment, he doesn't need to make it worse. Please. Please come outside with me."

You have never said please to him like that before.

Aerion looks at you for another second. Breathes out.

Nods.

You turn, and you don't look at Valarr as you cross the room. You don't have to. He's watching. You can feel the satisfaction rolling off him in waves, smooth and well-mannered and absolutely venomous. You can feel him filing this away. He has, you realise, not lost anything in the last five minutes.

He's gained a tremendous amount of information, and he hasn't had to swing once to do it.

You walk Aerion out of your grandmother's house with your hand closed around his wrist, because you know if you let go he'll go back and he'll do something he will not be able to take back.

You don't speak until you're at his truck.

He walks ahead of you the last few steps. Braces both hands on the hood, dropping his head. He sucks in a breath that sounds painful.

"Aerion."

"Don't."

"Aerion, I need you to—"

"I said don't."

"You can't do this," you say harshly. "You can't let him do this to you. You know that's what he was doing, and you still almost—"

He forces out another breath. "I know."

"Then why."

"Because he's right."

You stare at his profile. "He isn't."

"Yes, he is. He's right about all of it." Aerion scoffs and the sheer, vicious bitterness rolling off him almost steals your breath. "The money. The life. The hospital bill. He's not wrong. He laid it out in numbers and he wasn't wrong about a single one of them and I just had to stand there and listen to him say it to the woman I—"

He stops, his jaw claps shut so fast you can hear the bones clicking.

You work over the lump in your throat. "Say it."

"Fuck no," he shoots back, scoffing again.

"Say it, Aerion."

"I'm not going to say it. Not here. Not after that." He jerks his head towards the house. "Not standing in your driveway while your new shiny boyfriend is right there."

"He's not my boyfriend," you retort sharply.

"He's in your fucking house."

"Because you wouldn't stand down!" Your voice is cold, whip sharp. "Because if I'd tried to make him leave we'd have had exactly the scene he wanted, in front of the staff, on my grandmother's terrace! I'm handling this, Aerion. I've been handling this since the moment his car pulled up, and you showing up and almost putting your fist through his face is not helping me, it's making this significantly harder—"

"You're having dinner with him."

"I'm not having dinner with him," you tell him, your voice gone quiet with fury. "I'm not having any dinner with anyone. I'm going to tell him to leave the moment I go back in that house. He has made the situation impossible to pretend otherwise."

"He's staying the night."

You almost roan. "He's not staying the night."

"He has a bag in your foyer."

"He has a bag he brought on purpose," you remind him. "He's not staying."

"You don't know that."

"Careful," you say coldly. "If you want to piss me off you're doing a grand job of it."

"You don't know anything about him," Aerion snaps, his eyes pinning you. "Which is the problem, you've known him for four months—"

"I know enough about him. I know what he is. I also know what he isn't, Aerion, which is nothing."

Aerion's expression darkens at the reminder, at mention of the time another man had your life while he was away doing whatever the hell he's been doing for months now.

"He wasn't nothing to me," you tell him bluntly. "I'm going to say this once and I'm not going to say it again: I cared about him. I still do, a little. If he'd been a hollow suit I was stringing along, I'd have known how to handle him. I'd have told him to leave on the terrace. The reason I didn't is because there was a real thing there, for four months, and I don't turn real things into nothing just because they stopped working, and I don't pretend men I liked never mattered because it would be convenient right now."

He stares at you for a long moment. Then he smiles. A small, flat, terrible smile again. The one that's not a smile and edged only with cruelty.

"Huh." A beat, then, "You really are just like the rest of them."

You suck in a breath.

"Exactly like the rest of them," Aerion goes on with a mean little smirk. "A real thing there. Four months. He was real to you. Jesus Christ. You sound like one of your mother's friends. Do you hear yourself? You sound like a woman at a garden party describing her husband's mistress as a fine girl, really, when you get to know her. That's what you sound like right now."

"Don't you dare—"

"I thought you were different. That's what I've always thought." He searches your face like he can't quite recognise you in this light. "I've thought it since I was seventeen and you told me you'd rather be honest and ugly with me than polite and lovely to someone else. And now I'm standing in your driveway and you're telling me, in your very composed heiress voice, that some rich motherfucker who just itemised my net worth was real to you. That's fine. That's informative. I'll file that, thanks."

"You asked me," you say coldly, raising your chin. "You asked me the direct question and I gave you the direct answer because we don't lie to each other, Aerion. That was the deal. That's always been our deal. I don't lie to you about what he was to me even when the true answer is ugly. You don't get to punish me for not lying just because the truth isn't what you want to hear."

Those words find him. His jaw moves with them. He looks away from you, once, briefly—the first time he has broken eye contact since he got out of the truck.

"Five years," he says, quieter. "Five years and you're telling me he was real to you."

You take a step closer, then another, your chest aching. "He was a man who was kind to me when I was mourning you. That's what I'm telling you. I'm not saying he replaced you or that I loved him. I'm telling you I don't erase men from my personal history because you're angry at them. That's not what I do. I'm not going to become that woman because it would be convenient for you right now."

His eyes are searing when they find you again. "You still have feelings for him."

"I have feelings about what he was to me," you reply evenly. "Those are different things. I know they feel like the same thing to you right now. They're not."

You take another step closer, knotting your fingers to stop yourself from reaching for him, from soothing that fire you see raging through him. "And I've known you for five years and you're about to set yourself on fire in front of me because a rich man said out loud what every rich man has been thinking since the moment I was born, Aerion. I know, you don't have to perform it for me, I don't need a demonstration—"

"That's not—"

"It's exactly what you're doing," you cut him off, trying to keep your voice even. "You're going to punch my ex in the face and ruin your life to prove a point you don't need to prove because I already know it. I've always known who you are. I've known since I was seventeen. I don't need you to prove it by getting arrested in my driveway."

He's silent for a moment, then quieter, almost mourfully, "You're having dinner with him."

You suck in a shallow breath. "I'm not, Aerion—"

"You said you were."

"I said that before he walked back in with a bag. I said that before he stood in my grandmother's sitting room and itemised your worth in front of me. I said that when I thought I could manage one dinner and be done. I'm not having dinner with him,, do you understand me?"

Another silence, longer, then: "Why do you care?"

You blink. "What?"

"Why are you shaking?" he asks, his head angling with predatory slowness toward you.

"I'm not—"

"You're shaking," he bites out softly. "Look at your hands. Why are you shaking, if you feel nothing, if this is all just management—"

"I didn't say I feel nothing."

"You said you're not with me," he reminds flatly, impatiently. "You said you're not with me and you're not with him. You're handling it and it's all just, what, triage, damage control, managing the estate, is that what I am—"

"Aerion—"

He pushes off the hood of the truck, turning to you fully.

He's in front of you before you can step back. His hands are still at his sides, not touching. But his face is too close to yours and his breath is uneven, his pupils still blown wide and you can smell him. A mix of sweat, pine sap and the ghost of whatever cheap deodorant he still uses, because he's never once in his life bought expensive deodorant.

"Why are you shaking?" he demands again.

"Aerion, stop."

"If you feel nothing for me" he goes on, softer, almost vicious. "If this is all just you managing a situation, then why are you shaking? Why did you put your hands on my chest? You should have let me hit him, if you don't feel anything, because then you'd be rid of me, then he'd have what he needs to make me disappear, so why didn't you let me, why did you—"

"I hate you."

Aerion goes still. His expression morphs, his eyes dragging over your face slowly.

"Yeah," he murmurs, stepping even closer, his hand outstretched. "Yeah, you do."

"Get away from me," you warn, gasping softly when his hand locks at your nape, searing.

He leans closer, your heads bowed, his lips pulled back in half snarl, half grin. "You hate me, huh?"

"Yes," you hiss, pushing at his chest.

"That's always how we loved each other, wolf." His voice has dropped, not quite a whisper but the same dark softness he uses in the dark, when you're alone, when he's telling you something he won't tell anyone else. "So much we hated each other. That was the whole—that was the whole fucking thing. You know that. You know that."

A gasp escapes past your lips. "I'm not—"

"Tell me to leave."

"I—"

"Tell me to leave. Say get in your truck and go. Say it."

You don't say it. You can't.

He kisses you.

And it's not the kind of kiss you've been imagining in the three months he's been gone.

He takes your face in both hands—those hands, ruined and calloused and dangerous, the hands you know better than you know your own—and he walks you backwards until your shoulder blades hit the door of his truck.

He kisses you with his whole body, with his hips pinning yours to the metal, with his thumb hooked under your jaw to tip your mouth up to exactly the angle he wants, and his mouth is already open when it meets yours, already hungry, already working you apart with a focus that's always been obscene in its particularity.

Aerion has never kissed the way most people kiss. Aerion kisses like a man who decided, long ago, that mouths are the most interesting thing about bodies and has spent a lifetime since perfecting what he believes about that. It's a whole separate language from how he does anything else. The one place he's never, in the entire history of your knowing him, been in a hurry.

He's not in a hurry now either, even in the middle of how badly he wants you.

He takes his time. He takes the first several seconds just to taste you—slow drag of his tongue along the seam of your mouth, teeth catching your lower lip and releasing, a second pass, a third, as if he is reacquainting himself with the specific landscape of your mouth after three months away.

When he finally licks into you it's a deliberate thing. Patient. Softly hungry. The same quality of attention he brings to unwrapping you in bed when he has all night to do it.

You make a hungry, broken sound into his mouth.

He makes one back—low, wrecked, a real groan, the sound of a man coming home—and kisses you deeper for it.

His tongue slides against yours and it's familiar in a way that's almost unbearable; you had forgotten the specific rhythm of how he kisses, the way he chases your mouth instead of waiting for it, the way he opens his jaw wider to give you more of him to work with.

You meet him. You can't help but meet him. Your tongue to his, your breath going fast and uneven against his cheek, your head tilting the way he likes because your body still knows the choreography even after three months of trying to forget it with someone else.

Your hands come up without permission. One into his hair, fisting there, sweat-damp strands tangling between your fingers, and you pull. Not a tug, a real grip. The way you used to when you wanted something from him while he fucked you.

Aerion groans into your mouth so loudly the sound almost has shape, and his hips jerk forward against yours, a helpless rocking thing. His teeth catch your lower lip and drag hard enough that you taste a thin bright thread of blood, but neither of you cares. Your other hand clutches the front of his damp black t-shirt, bunching the fabric in your fist, anchoring him to you in case the world tries to take him back.

It's all consuming; the kind of kiss that has a sound to it, wet and open and unbeautiful, that neither of you is trying to make pretty.

He licks into your mouth and you lick back; he bites and you bite back; he pulls you closer by the jaw and you pull him closer by the hair and you feel the shudder that runs through him when you tug again, harder, experimental, checking. He groans a second time into your open mouth—a real one, the kind he gives you in bed, the kind that comes from the base of his throat—and you feel yourself smile against his teeth because you had forgotten you could do that to him.

You had forgotten that you've always been able to do that to him.

His hand leaves your jaw and settles at the base of your throat—not gripping, just resting, just covering, just claiming—that he's always done and that no one else has ever figured out how to do, because no one else knows that the hollow of your throat is the place you like to be touched when you're scared.

His other hand goes to your hip, fingers spreading wide, thumb digging in just under the jut of bone. He's holding you like a man who's been held off from holding you for three months.

This is language of animals, three months of not-him. It's the memory of every time he's ever kissed you in a driveway, in a kitchen, against the door of a cheap motel, against the passenger door of this exact truck and he had sawdust in his hair and you spent the afternoon watching him work and couldn't wait another minute.

It is, also, painfully, a little tender.

In the middle of the heat, in the middle of the teeth, you feel it. Because Aerion has always been tender in small, private ways that he'll not show anyone else and that he's never once denied you.

You feel his nose brush yours. You feel his forehead tip against your forehead for a half second, a breath, a quick involuntary press, like he needs to confirm you're still you. His mouth is wet and flushed and there's a tiny smear of blood at the corner—yours, from his teeth. His pupils are blown. His hair is wrecked where you've had your fingers in it.

He doesn't say anything. He just gazes at you, and you him. Two seconds, three. Long enough to register what you've both just confirmed, which is that you're not done with each other and have never been going to be. But you feel how badly you've missed him in every bone of you, and you can see it mirrored in his face.

Then he kisses you again. Softer this time, the second one—a small, searching kiss at the center of your mouth, a held thing, a landing. The kiss of a man who missed you in rooms you didn't know he was in, who's been missing you in his sleep for ninety-one nights.

A breath later, it turns again and his mouth opens on yours, and you're back in it, back in the consuming heat of it. You can feel him hard against your hip and you can feel yourself pressing back. You're not thinking at all anymore. You're not the heir of anything. You're simply a body pressed against a truck that smells like sawdust and gasoline, with the hands of the only person who's ever really held you right, and everything in the last four months, the last six weeks, the last ten minutes, is very far away.

Then Aerion smiles against your mouth. You feel it before you see it.

He turns his head, just slightly. Just enough. His eyes flick over your shoulder, past you, toward the house. Toward the tall front window of your grandmother's sitting room. Your eyes follow his, because they have to.

Valarr is standing at the window, scotch glass in his hand, his face unreadable, his mismatched eyes on you.

He's been watching. You don't know for how long.

Aerion, his mouth still hot and tender against the corner of yours, murmurs darkly—

"Let him see."

You freeze.

It takes half a second, less than half a second. It takes the length of time it takes for the word see to resolve itself in your head, for the meaning to land, for the moment to rearrange itself into something uglier.

You shove him. Both hands on his chest, hard. He stumbles back a step, and his expression shifts—confusion first, then understanding, then something more defensive.

Your lips peel back into a snarl. "Get off me."

"Wait—"

"Get. Off. Me."

"Wait," Aerion urges. "Listen—"

"Don't you dare," you snarl, words tearing out of your throat, "Don't you fucking dare, Aerion."

"That's not—it wasn't just that—"

"Get the fuck off my property."

"Would you let me—"

"No. I wouldn't. Not one more word. Not one. You kissed me because you missed me and I was stupid enough to believe that was the only reason, but that wasn't the only reason, was it? You kissed me so he'd see you kiss me. You kissed me so you could win a point in your fucking pissing contest, you made me a—"

Your voice cracks. You hate that it cracks. You keep going anyway. You school your expression.

"I'm not an object to be fought over. I'm not some fucking trophy. I'm not a thing you plant a flag in to piss him off. I'm a person who missed you and I was about to make a very stupid decision on the hood of this truck and you used that against me. Against me. To win a fight. So get the fuck off my property, Aerion. Get in your truck. Go."

"Wolf—"

"Don't call me that."

"I fucking missed you, that was real, it's always been real. It's the realest fucking thing about me." His expressions screws up, then, reluctantly, "It was also the other thing—"

"Get the fuck away from me."

He stares at you.

His expression constricts. Part of it is regret. Part of it, underneath, is still not-sorry; he's still a little glad Valarr saw; there's a part of him that's still fifteen years old and outside the golden boy's life looking in, and that part of him wouldn't take the last minute back even if you asked him.

You see both things on his face. You hate that you see both things. He's always been both.

"Go," you repeat, a cold finality in your voice.

He goes.

He walks around the truck, opens the driver's door, climbs in. He doesn't slam it, just starts the engine. He looks at you once through the windshield. Pale eyes, wrecked mouth, the very faint blood on his lip that you put there a minute ago. He nods, once, almost to himself. Then he reverses down your drive.

You stand there until the truck disappears behind the oaks. Then you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and you go back into your grandmother's house.

Valarr is no longer at the window when you get inside.

He's in the foyer, standing very still. He must have set his scotch glass down somewhere in the last thirty seconds, because his hands are at his sides.

The front door closes behind you.

The house is eerily quiet. Somewhere, deep in it, you can hear the grandfather clock in the hall. Mostly you just hear your own breathing, which hasn't yet evened out.

Valarr watches you but he doesn't speak.

You cross the foyer in five strides.

You don't think about it. You don't consider whether this is beneath you, or unwise, or a thing you'll regret later. You walk up to him and you slap him across the face as hard as you have ever hit anything in your life.

The sound of it is enormous in the quiet of the foyer. A real, cracking, open-palmed strike. Your hand stings immediately, going numb. You have put your whole body into it, weight coming up from your heels, the way your mother's riding instructor taught you to strike in self-defence class when you were fifteen years old—like you mean it, like you're not sorry, like you're a she-wolf and not a lady in that particular moment.

His head slams to the side with the force of it.

Valarr doesn't put a hand up defensively. He takes the hit and then, slowly, turns his face back to yours.

His jaw is already reddening. You can see the shape of your palm on his cheek. He works his jaw—once, tentatively, testing whether you've loosened anything—and then brings his own hand up, not fast, not reactive, and touches his face. Gently. Almost thoughtfully. His fingers trace the heat of where you hit him with a kind of slow, considering attention that registers, to you, as wrong in a way you can't immediately name.

Then you see his eyes.

They're not angry, or shocked, or wounded.

They're glazed.

The pale blue has gone a shade darker and the brown has gone almost black. His pupils are wide and his mouth is very slightly open and there's a quality to his breathing that's—you register it with a cold, quiet horror—affected. You've struck him across the face and the dominant response in his body isn't pain or fury. He's, very obviously, turned on.

You stare at him.

He looks back at you, doesn't look away or try to hide it. His fingers are still touching his cheek.

"Oh," he says softly.

You bare your teeth. "Shut up."

"I wasn't expecting that."

"Don't you fucking dare."

"I mean the reaction, love. I wasn't expecting my own reaction." His voice is... it's not quite composed, it's gone a half-octave lower. "That's new."

"Valarr." And there's warning in your voice that makes a tiny shudder roll through his body.

"I deserved it, though." He says it matter-of-factly, nodding. "I want to be clear about that, before anything else. I deserved that. What I said about him in that room was ugly, and I knew it was ugly. I said it anyway because I wanted it to hurt. So yes, love. Hit me. I'm glad you did. I'd rather you hit me than hate me quietly."

"I do hate you quietly," you mock. "I hate you quietly and I hit you. I'm very good at both."

His mouth twitches, his tongue touching the corner of his mouth. "Fair."

"It doesn't change what you did."

"No. It doesn't." His hand falls from his face. His cheek is properly red now, in the distinct shape of your hand, and he's making no effort to hide it, which is possibly worse than if he had. "And the slap doesn't change the facts either, I'm afraid. Everything I said to him in that room is still true. You can be angry with me for saying it out loud, you have every right. But I'm not going to pretend I was wrong. I wasn't. You know I wasn't."

You stare at him for another second. Then you breathe out, hard, through your nose.

"You need to leave," you inform him coolly.

"I—"

"You need to leave. Tonight. Now." You glare at him when he tries to reach for you and his hand drops back. "You're not staying in the guest room. And we're not having dinner. You're getting in your car and you're driving back to the city. Tonight."

"Of course."

Your brain stutters for a breath. "—what?"

"Of course, love. I'll go." He says it softly. Evenly. Like he's agreeing to a reasonable request. "I'll have my bag in the car in three minutes. You don't need to ask twice."

You blink. You were braced for a fight.

You were ready for him to insist on the guest room, to suggest you both needed to cool down, to refuse gracefully. You hadn't been ready for him to simply agree.

Which is, you realise, the point.

He walks toward you. Slow. Not threatening—nothing Valarr does is ever obviously threatening. He stops close. Not as close as Aerion was, but within reach.

Something about the look on his face makes the back of your neck prickle. The small hairs. The involuntary animal part of you that's always been better at reading men than the trained, civil part.

This is not the face he's shown you in four months. The boyish warmth is gone. The careful charm is gone. What is left is something quieter and more focused, and the thing underneath it is not performance; the thing underneath it is want. Uncomplicated want, actually. Stripped of everything he usually wraps it in.

You've never seen him look at you this way, because he's never let you, because it's not the version of himself he had planned for you to meet. And now, on top of all of it, there's the red handprint on his face and whatever you've just unlocked in him that neither of you was aware of ten minutes ago.

Your hand is still tingling. You don't let it show.

He raises a hand.

And you don't flinch.

He brings his thumb to your mouth. Very gently. He doesn't grip your chin, doesn't hold your jaw. He simply sets the pad of his thumb against your lower lip, which is tender from Aerion's teeth, still faintly swollen, and has a small split you hadn't noticed yet.

You feel your own jaw set. Your hand, the one that hit him, is still humming. You haven't stopped wanting to do it again. You let him touch your lip anyway because pulling back would register as flinching, as weakness, and you're a Stark, a wolf, and nothing makes a wolf flinch.

He rubs his thumb across it. Once. Thoughtful. As if he's assessing the damage. His eyes follow the movement of his own thumb, and you watch his pupils adjust. The handprint on his cheek hasn't faded. You can still see the shape of your palm clearly on his face and it is—though you will not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it—a little gratifying.

"He bit you."

"I don't care."

His gaze darkens a touch at that.

"That's going to bruise, you know. That little split. You'll feel it tomorrow. Every time you drink coffee. Every time you touch your mouth without thinking." His thumb passes over it a second time. "It'll remind you."

You don't answer. His thumb is still on your lip, still gentle. His mismatched eyes are somehow too peaceful, and too intense all at once.

"I'll replace every single kiss he's given you with my own," he says quietly. "Until you forget him. I don't mind how long it takes. I have time."

"You're impossibly arrogant."

"Perhaps." But he doesn't seem stung. His thumb moves, a fraction, tracing the edge of the split. "Look at me."

You glare at him instead and Valarr smiles softly before it fades.

"I saw you, just now. I saw your face when he shoved you against that truck. I saw what he does to you. I've watched you for four months and I've never seen you look like that—not with me, not ever. I'd be lying if I said it didn't cut me. It did. It cut me quite badly, actually. I stood at that window and I watched my cousin kiss my girl and I've never, in my entire life, wanted to hurt another person the way I wanted to hurt him in that moment. I hadn't known that feeling existed in me. It was a genuine surprise."

"What are you—"

"Let me finish. Please."

His voice is so soft, ever so reasonable. His other hand comes up to cup the side of your jaw—not holding, just resting, the way Aerion's hand had rested at the base of your throat ten minutes ago, and the echo of it is not accidental; nothing Valarr ever does is accidental. His palm is warm, his fingers careful. You can feel the calculation in how carefully he's touching you, and underneath the calculation, the thing that's not calculation. The thing that's been eating him since you left his penthouse six weeks ago.

Want. Genuine want, dark and greedy and so strong he clearly doesn't know what to do with it.

"I understand now," he whispers. "I didn't before. I thought you wanted the life I was offering, and you only hesitated because it was too much, too fast. I thought if I slowed down, if I was patient, if I gave you room to breathe.... you'd come back to me. That was the wrong read. I see that now."

He's close to you, his breath warm against your mouth. He smells like the scotch and faintly, underneath, like the cologne he's always worn. The same one he let you pick out at a shop in the city in October because he'd wanted something you liked the smell of on him.

"It isn't that I was too much. It's that I wasn't enough. Not enough of the right thing." He smiles faintly, his gaze roaming over your face. "I was soft where he was hard. I asked where he took. I made love to you where he—" he exhales through his nose, then, very quietly, "—did whatever he does to you that leaves you looking like that."

"Good on you," you say flatly.

"I can be that, you know."

Your breath catches.

His thumb moves off your lip. Traces, very slowly, along your jaw. Down the side of your throat. Stops at the hollow at the base of it, where Aerion had his hand ten minutes ago. The place he can't possibly know is the place, and the fact that he's found it anyway is either coincidence or he's been paying more attention than you gave him credit for.

"I can be that for you. If that's what you need."

His voice goes soft, thoughtful, a caress. Not the boardroom voice or the boyish voice; it's something lower and rougher and entirely new to you.

"I've never—" he exhales, small, rueful, almost amused at himself. "I've never had to be. With anyone. Women have always wanted to be handled gently by me and I've always been happy to oblige, because I'm not a cruel man by nature. It's been one of the steadier parts of my self-image."

His thumb presses, briefly, against the hollow of your throat. Lightly. Barely. Just enough that you feel it.

"But I've been thinking about you, love. A lot. For six weeks. I've been in my apartment alone running through every minute I spent with you and trying to understand what I missed, and what I've come to realise is that I missed a great deal. I missed the whole of you, actually. I missed that the woman I was making careful love to was a woman who wanted to be taken apart. I missed that you don't want soft. I missed that you've been riding me hard for four months because the other direction wasn't available. Because it flattered my ego to be the recipient of your intensity instead of the source of it."

His mismatched eyes latch onto yours.

"I've been studying. Let us call it that. I've been preparing for the conversation I'm having with you right now," he says lightly, and there's something almost hypnotic about the softness of his voice, the naked hunger in it. "Because I didn't drive five and a half hours to be rejected politely on a terrace. I drove five and a half hours because I love you, and because I've had six weeks to figure out what that requires of me, and I've figured it out."

His thumb moves on your throat. Very, very gently, then again.

"I'll be cruel to you, if that's what you want," he whispers lovingly, darkly. "I'll take what I want the way he takes. I'll mark you so you feel it for days. I'll even put my hand around your throat the way he does and I'll mean it. I'll tie you to the bedposts in the penthouse and I won't ask how you're doing every five minutes the way I used to.. I'll make you beg. I'll make you work for it. I'll ruin you and I'll be very, very good to you in between, and you will never have to choose."

He leans in and his mouth brushes the corner of yours. Not a kiss. Not yet. The preview of a kiss. The promise of one.

"I can be so good to you, love. If you let me. I'll be every version of myself you've ever needed and I'll be them all at once," he explains. "He can't do that. He's only ever going to be one thing. I can be anything. I'll spend the rest of my life figuring out what you need and then I'll become it. I swear on my father's grave. Whatever he is to you, I will be that and more. You only have to let me."

You can't speak.

You can't speak because some small, terrible part of you is considering it.

Because you know he would try. He would be precise and patient about it the way he's been precise and patient about everything else. You know, also, that it wouldn't land the way Aerion lands—that the performance would be perfect but it would still be a performance. Valarr could learn the choreography but he couldn't learn the thing underneath, the thing that's in Aerion without him having to try.

But you consider it anyway, for a half second. For the length of a breath. Because it's a very good offer, from a very handsome man, who has just watched you get taken apart in a driveway and is choosing, instead of walking away, to expand. To learn, to adapt, for you.

Because underneath the darkness of what he's offering you can feel, unmistakably, the shape of the thing he said to you on the terrace earlier—awake, alive, a hundred and twenty percent, and I don't know how to go back. It's not only a strategy. He's a man in love with you, trying to figure out what he has to become to keep you, and committing to becoming it.

And that's, genuinely, terribly, a little moving.

He sees it. The half-second hesitation. He sees you consider it.

His smile is small, and to his benefit, it's not triumphant. It is, if anything, a little grateful.

"Think about it," he says softly. "Please."

He lets his thumb fall from your throat, his other hand falling from your jaw. Steps back, just slightly, just enough to give you air to breathe that isn't full of him.

He picks up his bag from where he'd set it by the console table. Picks up his suit carrier, adjusts it over his arm.

"I'll give you your space," he says. "Real space, this time. But I'll wait. In case you'd like to have that dinner later this week, when the mood is better. I think once you've had a day or two to think, you'll see things differently."

He smiles at you. Warm, boyish, crooked, painfully handsome. A model smile he's given everyone for years. But underneath it, now, you see the other thing. You'll never not see it again. Because he's let you see it, because you awoke it in him, and you can't unsee it again.

He lets himself out. The door closes behind him with a soft click.

You stand in foyer, in a cotton sundress, with your lip throbbing and your neck still prickling and the taste of two different men on your mouth. You understand, with a cold and total clarity, that you're in even more trouble now than you were when you first came here.

You touch your lip. It comes away with a tiny spot of blood on your thumb.

You look at it for a long, long moment.

You laugh faintly. “Greedy.”

“Say it,” he repeats, his hand tightening in your hair, pulling just enough to make your lips part, exposing your throat. “Please. Just—let me have this. Let me pretend.”

And there’s something needy in the request, that naked want in his voice, and you soften despite yourself. “Yours,” you murmur against the corner of his mouth. “Tonight, I’m yours.”

The sound he makes is almost a whimper, like the word is oxygen you’ve just given him. “Mine,” he breathes, hands roaming restlessly over your back. “Mine, mine, mine.”

“Yes.” You let your hands slide up his chest, feel his heart hammering beneath your palms, then up to tangle in his pale hair, nails scraping lightly against his scalp. “Your girl. Your mess. Your problem.”

“My everything.” He’s kissing down your throat now, teeth scraping against your pulse, one hand splayed possessively across your lower back. “God, you have no idea what you do to me.”

“Show me.”

You should probably feel something about this, his naked need for you. Guilt, maybe. And despite yourself, despite your best efforts to keep him at arm’s length, you’ve grown too fond of him. Your mouth opens, ready to tell him what he should do to you, when you feel it. The heat of another gaze burning into you from across the dance floor, platinum blonde hair catching the strobe lights and drawing your eye, and when you meet Aerion’s eyes over Daeron's shoulder, the curl of his mouth is pure venom.

You’re not surprised he’s here. Likely saw the update on your socials, followed like a monster on a hunt, just like you knew he would. 

He doesn’t come to you. That’s not how Aerion works, you know—he never chases, never begs, never shows his hand until he’s already won. Instead, he leans against the bar with studied carelessness, all graceful angles and expensive tailoring, and raises his glass in a mock salute. The message is clear: your move.

“Your brother’s watching,” you murmur against Daeron’s throat, and feel him go tense against you. “Looks like he’s found us.”

“Let him watch.” But there’s something jagged in his voice now, something that wasn’t there a moment ago. His hand slides from your hip to the small of your back, pulling you closer, and you can feel his heartbeat thudding against your chest. “Let him see that you’re mine.”

“Am I?” you ask playfully. 

The question hangs between you, and Daeron’s jaw works repeatedly, searching your face for something he won’t find easily. 

“You are when you want to be," he finally says, and kisses you again, slower this time, deeper, like he’s trying to memorise the shape of your mouth. His hands frame your face, thumbs stroking your cheekbones, and there’s something almost reverent in the gesture that makes your stomach coil. “Aren’t you, baby? You promised."

You don’t answer. You slide your hands up his chest, feel the rapid thud of his heart beneath expensive cotton, and push him back gently. His expression fractures, just for a moment—hurt and hunger and something darker—before he schools it into something cooler, more controlled. But his hand catches your wrist as you step away, holding on too tight.

“Where are you going?”

You step closer, close enough that your lips brush his ear. “To get us another drink.”

The lie tastes sweet on your tongue, and Daeron knows it for what it is—you can see the knowledge in his eyes, the way his mouth thins—but he releases you anyway. Because he’ll let you walk away every time, hoping you’ll come back, believing that his affection will be enough to keep you. 

The crowd swallows you as you move across the dance floor, bodies pressing close, the music so loud it rattles your ribs. You can feel Daeron’s gaze following you, too heavy and dark, but you don’t look back. You never do.

Aerion doesn’t move when you reach him, just watches you approach with those cold mercury eyes, his expression unreadable. He leans against the bar like he owns it, like he owns everything in the world, one hand wrapped around a glass, the other hanging loose at his side. There’s a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and when you stop in front of him, close enough that your thigh brushes his, he doesn’t acknowledge you at all. The strobe lights catch on the multiple silver hoops climbing his left ear as the silence stretches.

“You’re wasting your time with him.” 

His voice is flat, bored almost, but you can see the tension in his shoulders, the tight line of his jaw. Aerion wears his control like armour, you’ve come to learn, layered so thick that most people never see the violence simmering underneath, but you’ve always been good at finding the cracks in him.

“Jealousy suits you, Aerion.” 

“I’m not jealous.” He takes a slow sip of his drink, eyes never leaving yours over the rim. “I’m simply stating facts.”

“Right,” you drawl, stepping even closer into his space. “You’re just standing here watching me like a creep because you’re bored.”

Aerion’s lips curl back, revealing his teeth, predatory even in the shifting light. “I’m standing here watching you because you’re putting on a show. Would be rude not to appreciate the performance.”

“Careful.” You lean in close, let your lips brush his ear—the one with the piercings, cool metal grazing your mouth, and you control the urge to bite down. “Keep talking like that, and I might think you actually give a shit.”

“Perish the thought,” he says boredly, but his hand comes up to grip your hip, pulling you between his legs with casual possession, thighs caging you in. His rings—thick silver bands on three fingers—dig into your skin through the thin fabric of your dress. “We both know I’m incapable of such tender emotions.”