#aerrions

They said you had been born at dawn. Not merely in the hour before the sun rose, no, for court never left a simple thing unadorned when beauty might be made from it. They said the eastern sky had opened like a pomegranate, red and gold spilling over Blackwater Bay. They said the clouds had caught fire. They said your first cry had come just as the first light touched the towers, and that Prince Baelor Targaryen, called Breakspear by men who loved courage more than crowns, had wept when they placed you in his arms.

That part was true.

Baelor had been young enough then for wonder still to wound him. He had taken you from the midwife with hands more suited to sword and lance than cradlecloth, and when you opened your eyes, violet as dusk seen through wine, he had gone still. There were men who looked upon their daughters and saw alliances. Baelor looked upon you and saw judgment. A thing so small, so breakable, so entirely his to protect that it terrified him.

“My little star,” he had whispered, and bent his brow to yours as though swearing fealty.

Afterward, songs were made of that too.

The realm adored making songs of you. It had begun before you could walk, before you could speak, before you understood that adoration was only another kind of hunger. You were Baelor Breakspear’s daughter, and that alone would have been enough to turn eyes toward you. But you had also been born with the old Valyrian beauty in its cruelest form, the kind that made people forget themselves. Pale silver and gold hair, soft as poured light. Eyes dark violet and bright together, changeful as twilight over a blade. Skin the court ladies called pearl, though pearls were duller. A face too composed in repose, too vivid in anger, too radiant when you smiled.

By the time you were twelve, singers had compared you to moonrise, maidenhood, dragonfire, and dawn. By the time you were fourteen, men old enough to have sons your age had begun watching your hands at feasts. By the time you were flowered and marriageable, half the realm had learned to say your name softly, as though gentleness might disguise ambition.

They wanted you beautifully. That was the trick of it. No man ever said plainly that your hand would bind him closer to Baelor, that your father’s honor would gild his house, that your blood would strengthen his children’s claim to old Valyria’s vanishing glory. No lord confessed aloud that to marry you would be to marry a song, a banner, a promise, a piece of the realm’s faith in better princes. They spoke instead of admiration. Of devotion. Of courtly reverence. They begged for dances, favors, glances, permission to wear your color in the lists. They knelt before you with the faces of worshippers and the appetites of wolves.

You learned early that beauty was not softness. Beauty was coin. Beauty was command. Beauty was a gate men pressed their mouths to while dreaming of conquest. Beauty could quiet a hall more quickly than a drawn sword, if worn correctly. Beauty could excuse cruelty when cruelty smiled. Beauty could make silence seem like innocence and calculation seem like grace.

Your father knew this. Baelor Breakspear knew court too well to trust it. He watched you be praised as other men watched borders.

When knights bent too low over your hand, Baelor’s gaze cooled. When a lord’s compliments grew too warm, Baelor interrupted with courteous murder in his voice. When letters arrived from houses too proud, too hungry, too close to old grievances, he set them aside unread until morning, when temper had less chance of ruling him. He did not lock you away, for he was not a fool and you were not a jewel to be kept in a box. He let you shine. He let the realm love you.

But he stood always between you and the part of love that devoured. Or he tried. There was one hunger he had never been able to turn aside.

Aerion Targaryen had been born ten months before you, and from the first moment he was old enough to understand the insult of those months, he made a kingdom of them. Ten months, to him, was seniority. Ten months was wisdom. Ten months was a crown, a sword, a divine decree. When you were both children, he would remind you of it whenever you defied him.

“I was here first,” he would say, chin lifted, silver hair falling into eyes too bright with malice for any nursery.

“You will die first too,” you told him once.

He had stared at you, then laughed until the nurse crossed herself.

You were first cousins. Your fathers were brothers, though little else in them seemed made of the same substance. Baelor was the noble dream of the dynasty, honor given flesh, a prince who made lesser men ashamed and better men braver. Maekar was iron where Baelor was light: stern, proud, sharp edged, a man who loved his children as he loved his sword, by keeping them hard.

Aerion was Maekar’s son in bone and temper, but there was something in him that had outrun even Maekar’s severity. Something theatrical. Something fevered. Something that looked at the world and did not see people, only fuel.

The court said you and Aerion had been bound from the cradle.

That was true too, though not in the way the court meant.

When you were still swaddled and sleeping in carved wooden cradles near one another, Aerion would scream whenever you were taken away. Not cry. Scream. He had a prince’s lungs and a demon’s persistence. Wet nurses came and went with bloody bitten fingers. Maids whispered that the little prince knew when the little princess left the room even in his sleep. If your cradle was moved nearer, he quieted. If it was moved farther, he raged. If you stirred, he stirred. If you wept, he shrieked as though your grief were theft from him.

“Charming,” the ladies called it.

“Dragon children know their own,” said men who enjoyed prophecy when it cost them nothing.

Baelor did not call it charming. Even then, he watched.

You were no gentler. That was the secret everyone took years to learn, and some never learned at all. You were quieter than Aerion, but quiet was not mercy. He was flame leaping openly from dry wood; you were the coal hidden under ash, waiting for breath.

When he stole your painted wooden dragon, you did not cry. You waited three days, smiling sweetly through lessons and prayers, until you found his favorite ivory horse unattended beside a window. Then you dropped it from the tower stairs and watched it break upon the stones below.

Aerion found you there, looking down.

“You broke it,” he said.

“You stole from me,” you answered.

His face twisted, not with grief, but with furious delight.

“I shall tell.”

“Tell,” you said. “I shall weep. They will believe me.”

He lunged at you then, small hands clawing, and you struck him across the mouth with your little fist hard enough to split his lip. Blood shone red against his teeth. A nurse shrieked. Aerion touched his mouth, looked at the blood on his fingers, and smiled at you as if you had given him a jewel.

“There you are,” he said.

He could not have known what the words would become. He was a child then, beautiful and wicked and half formed, with blood on his mouth and wonder in his eyes. But some phrases are born older than the mouths that speak them. Some vows choose children before children know the shape of vows.

After that, he followed you everywhere. Not gently. Never gently.

If you walked in the gardens, he appeared between the hedges with burrs in his hair and mud on his boots, accusing you of abandoning him. If you sat with your septa, he found ways to ruin the lesson, dipping quills in ink and drawing little black dragons along the margins of your prayer book. If a page made you laugh, Aerion tripped him before supper. If a lordling offered you a sugar plum, Aerion snatched it from your hand, took one bite, and crushed the rest beneath his heel.

“You cannot eat what is given by sheep,” he told you.

“You are very tiresome for someone so grand,” you said.

“I am a dragon.”

“You are a boy with dirty fingernails.”

He shoved you into a rosebush for that.

You came out bleeding from three scratches along your forearm, your gown torn, your silver hair caught with thorns. The gardener gasped. The nurse began to cry. Aerion stood very still, perhaps realizing too late that he had damaged what the court treated as sacred.

You looked at the blood. Then at him. Then you laughed. Not because it did not hurt. It did. But pain, you discovered, could be made into a throne if one refused to kneel before it. Aerion’s face changed. The fear vanished. Something hotter took its place.

You pulled a thorn from your sleeve and pressed it into his palm until he hissed and bled.

“Now we match,” you said.

For years, that was the shape of you.

The court saw two dragon children, wild in the way noble children were permitted to be wild before decorum was strapped upon them like armor. They saw silver heads bent together over cyvasse boards. They saw you racing through halls where kings had walked, your slippers silent and Aerion’s boots loud behind you. They saw him tug your braid and you smile like a saint before stepping on his foot hard enough to make him curse. They saw quarrels. They saw laughter. They saw blood sometimes, yes, but royal children were strange, and Targaryen children stranger still.

They did not see what Baelor saw.

They did not see the day Aerion found a beetle with a cracked shell and declared himself its king because it could not flee him. He placed it in the center of the nursery table and built a court around it from broken toys. A headless doll for a queen, a wooden knight without legs, a cracked cup for a throne. He commanded the beetle to bow.

“It cannot hear you,” you said.

“Then it is treasonous.”

You were seven. He was nearly eight and carried those ten months like a drawn dagger.

He lifted his hand to crush it.

You caught his wrist.

For a moment the two of you only stared at each other, violet eyes against violet eyes, old blood looking into its own dark mirror.

“Do not,” you said.

Aerion sneered. “Have you grown tender?”

“No.” You plucked the beetle from the table, carried it to the open window, and let it fall into the garden below. “I only wanted to be the one who decided.”

Aerion went silent. Then he kissed your knuckles. Not with sweetness. Not with innocence. With ceremony. As though you had done something worthy of homage.

The nurse, entering too late, saw only a prince bowing over a princess’s hand and clasped her own hands to her breast.

“How dear,” she whispered.

You and Aerion looked at each other and smiled.

When you were nine, you dared him to climb the broken outer wall above the training yard after rain had slicked the stones dark. He climbed because he would rather have fallen and cracked his skull than let you call him afraid. Halfway up, his foot slipped. For one sharp moment he hung by both hands, face white, boots scraping empty air. Below, boys shouted. A master at arms cursed. Someone ran for help.

You stood nearest, looking up at him with your heart hammering so hard it felt like joy.

“Beg,” you called.

Aerion bared his teeth. “Never.”

“Then fall.”

He laughed, wild and breathless, and hauled himself up by sheer spite. When he reached the top, soaked and shaking, he looked down at you as though he had conquered a kingdom. You climbed after him before anyone could stop you, your skirts torn to ribbons, your palms rubbed raw by stone. Baelor arrived just as Aerion pulled you over the parapet.

Your father’s face was the color of death. The rage came later. First came fear, and fear in Baelor Breakspear was more terrible than anger in lesser men. He did not shout before the guards. He did not strike Aerion, though for one moment his hand flexed as if it remembered every sword it had ever held. He only lifted you down from the wall himself, set you upon the ground, and cupped your face between both hands.

You had blood on your palms. Mud on your cheek. A torn sleeve. A smile you had not yet remembered to hide. Baelor saw it. That was the first time you understood that your father’s love had eyes.

“My star,” he said softly, and the softness made you look away. “There is no courage in courting the Stranger for sport.”

“It was only a climb.”

“It was a test.” His gaze flicked to Aerion, who stood rigid under Maekar’s grip. “And tests are not harmless because children name them games.”

Aerion’s mouth curled. “She wanted to climb.”

Baelor did not look away from you. “I know.”

That hurt worse than if he had blamed Aerion alone.

Later, in your chamber, as the maester wrapped your palms in linen, Baelor sat beside you and told you of dragons. Not the way singers told it, with wings blotting out suns and kings kneeling in ash. He told you of reins. Saddles. Commands. The bond between beast and rider. The discipline of guiding fire.

“A dragon left to hunger becomes a ruin,” he said.

You watched his hands. Broad, scarred, gentle. “I am not a dragon.”

“No,” he said, after too long a pause. “You are my daughter.”

That should have been answer enough. It was not. Because Aerion heard the same stories and learned the opposite lesson. To him, dragons did not require reins. They were not meant to bow beneath saddles, nor answer little men with little laws. Dragons took. Dragons burned. Dragons proved themselves by leaving marks upon the world. He grew beautiful in that belief, as poisonous flowers grow beautiful by drinking from graves.

By twelve, he had learned courtesy well enough to insult without consequence. By thirteen, he knew which servants feared him and which could be made to fear him. By fourteen, he smiled like a prince before fathers and septons, then turned in private with cruelty still warm beneath his skin. He was not mad in the way fools were mad. He was worse. He understood enough of the rules to know when he was breaking them.

And you understood him. That was the sin beneath all the others.

You understood the thrill he took in making the world flinch. You understood why obedience bored him, why gentleness offended him, why a person who would not resist seemed hardly alive at all. You despised his clumsier cruelties, not because they were cruel, but because they lacked art. Aerion was a torch thrown into dry straw. You preferred candles placed carefully beneath silk curtains, so that by the time anyone smelled smoke, the room was already doomed.

Once, when a young lady of House Darklyn mocked the Dornish cut of one of your gowns, you did not answer. You lowered your eyes. You let your mouth tremble. The court saw wounded sweetness and gathered around you in outrage. By sunset, the girl’s mother had apologized twice, her father had withdrawn a petition, and the girl herself stood red-eyed beside the fountain while you kissed her cheek and forgave her before half the court.

Aerion found you afterward in the godswood, though the Red Keep’s heart tree was pale and carved and strange beneath southern skies.

“You should have slapped her,” he said.

You adjusted the fall of your sleeve. “Then she would have been pitied.”

“She cried.”

“Yes.”

“You liked that.”

You looked at him. He was leaning against a tree, dressed in black and red, silver hair loose at his forehead messily, his face almost too lovely to belong to anything human. That had always been the trouble with him. Aerion looked as a prince in a tapestry ought to look, bright and dreadful, the sort of figure maidens dreamed of before waking afraid. His eyes shone when he was amused. They shone brighter when he was cruel.

“You would have made her bleed,” you said.

“I still might.”

“How vulgar.”

His smile widened. “There you are.”

You hated when he said that. You loved when he said that.

No one else spoke to the hidden thing in you so directly. The court praised your grace, your beauty, your modesty, your perfect courtesy. Your father praised your wit, your discipline, your strength when strength was yoked to honor. But Aerion looked at the pretty mask the realm had painted upon your face and laughed as though he could see your teeth beneath it.

You were not a fool. You knew what he was. You had seen him order a stableboy to hold a coal in his bare hand because the boy had laughed when Aerion slipped in mud. You had seen him draw his dagger over a table during supper, carving wings into the polished wood while an old lord pretended not to notice. You had seen him smile and laugh when men grew uncomfortable. You had heard him speak of smallfolk as though they were weather. You had watched his pride swell into something deformed whenever the word dragon left his mouth.

And still, when he entered a room, some part of you woke.

Baelor saw that too. Your father’s protection changed as you grew. When you were small, he shielded your body from falls, blades, fevers, careless hands. When you became beautiful, truly beautiful, the kind of beautiful that moved through court like a drawn curtain revealing fire behind it, he shielded your future.

Suitors came first in trickles, then in tides. A Baratheon cousin asked for permission to wear your favor in a melee and looked at your mouth instead of your eyes. Baelor refused him so politely the boy thanked him before realizing he had been dismissed. A Hightower lord sent pearls the color of milk and a letter praising your virtue with such oily precision that Baelor burned both. A Lannister wrote from Casterly Rock in phrases polished bright as coin. A Tyrell sent roses enough to drown your chamber in perfume.

You smiled over them all. Sometimes you enjoyed it. That was another truth too ugly for songs. You liked watching proud men become reverent. You liked choosing who might hope and who would be made ridiculous by hope. You liked the way ladies stiffened when their brothers stared too long. You liked knowing that your hand could alter the balance of great houses, that your glance could stir envy, that your silence could be mistaken for maidenly innocence when it was often judgment.

Baelor did not scold you for that enjoyment, which made you feel worse. Instead, one evening, he walked with you along a gallery where the dragon skulls slept in shadow below, vast and black and eyeless. Torches burned along the walls. Outside, rain tapped at the windows like fingernails.

“Power is not sin,” he said.

You glanced at him. “Have I been accused?”

“Not by others.”

You smiled faintly. “By you, then?”

“By your own face when you think no one is watching.”

That silenced you. He stopped before the skull of Meraxes, great and ruined, her empty sockets wide enough for a child to hide inside.

“You are loved,” Baelor said. “You are admired. You are desired. Those are three different things, and court will spend your life trying to confuse them.”

You looked at the dragon skull rather than him. “And what does Aerion feel?”

Baelor’s jaw tightened. There. There it was. The name neither of you had spoken, though he had walked between you from the beginning like a drawn blade.

At last your father said, “Aerion wants.”

You waited.

“He wants as fire wants,” Baelor continued. “Without gratitude. Without conscience. Without end.”

“He is my cousin.”

“Yes.”

“We are Targaryens.”

“Yes.”

That word hung there, silver and red, ancient and accursed. In other houses, blood was a wall. In yours, blood was a road. The histories were full of it. Brother to sister. Uncle to niece. Cousin to cousin. Dragonlords preserving dragonblood, kings wedding queens with the same pale hair and violet eyes, the realm protesting until victory or beauty or fear made it quiet again. You had been raised among portraits of ancestors who looked like reflections marrying reflections, their hands joined beneath painted dragons, their eyes solemn with destiny.

So Baelor did not say what another father might have said. He did not call the thought impossible. He did not pretend the blood between you and Aerion made desire unthinkable in a house built upon blood’s own vanity. That was not what frightened him.

“Aerion thinks blood absolves,” Baelor said. “He thinks being born of the dragon means never needing to become worthy of it.”

“And you?”

“I think the higher the blood, the deeper the duty.”

You looked at him then. Truly looked. He was not old, your father, though grief had not yet claimed him and Ashford had not yet opened its red mouth. He was strong still, handsome in the plain and noble way men trusted before they understood they loved him. His eyes held a gentleness that court had failed to kill. There were lines at their corners from laughter, from squinting beneath tourney suns, from worrying over the realm and over you.

“You think he will ruin me,” you said.

Baelor’s expression changed. “No.”

“No?”

“I think he will ask you to ruin yourself and call it freedom.”

You hated him a little then, for knowing. You loved him more for the same reason. That was the cruelty of Baelor Breakspear’s love. It was not blind enough to be easy. He did not worship the perfect princess as the realm did. He saw your vanity and did not turn away. He saw your temper, your hunger, your secret pleasure in being obeyed. He saw the sharpness under the silk. Yet where Aerion saw that hidden self and grinned as though finding treasure, Baelor saw it and grieved, not because he despised you, but because he believed you could master it.

Aerion never wanted you mastered. He wanted you revealed.

The year you came fully into the court’s gaze, the Red Keep changed around you. Or perhaps it had always been so, and you had only grown old enough to see the knives beneath the flowers. Feasts became theatres. Dances became negotiations. Every gown chosen by your ladies sent some message, whether you meant it or not. White made you maidenly. Red made you bold. Black made you dynastic. Blue softened you. Gold turned every singer witless. Pearls made old women sigh. Rubies made young men stupid.

You learned to enter halls slowly. Not timidly. Slowly. There was power in letting silence arrive before you reached the center of a room. Power in permitting people to look. Power in appearing unaware of the effect you had while measuring every last breath of it. You were Baelor’s daughter, yes, and the court loved you for his sake. But increasingly they loved him for yours too, because beauty rewrites loyalty in ways honor cannot.

At a harvest feast beneath a ceiling hung with red silk, Prince Valarr himself danced with you first.

Golden Valarr, your father’s son, your brother, bright with all the promise the realm had fastened upon Baelor’s line. He was courteous, handsome, beloved in that easy way Aerion hated most, as though admiration had simply come to him and laid itself at his feet. He smiled when he took your hand, brotherly or princely or both, depending on who watched and what they wished to see.

“You are causing unrest,” Valarr murmured as he led you into the dance.

You tilted your head. “By standing?”

“By standing beautifully. It is a grave offense.”

“I shall try to limp.”

“That may make it worse. Half these men would compose tragedies about the wounded swan of House Targaryen before sunrise.”

You laughed, and the hall warmed around it. Across the room, Aerion watched. He had been drinking, though not enough to blur him. Aerion never liked to be blurred. He preferred the world sharp, so that he might cut himself on it or cut others first. He stood with one shoulder against a pillar, a cup loose in his hand, black velvet at his throat, rubies like drops of hard blood along his collar. Firelight made his hair gleam white-gold. His eyes did not leave you once.

When Valarr turned you beneath his arm, Aerion smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.

Later, a Fossoway knight begged a favor for the morrow’s riding. He was young, freckled, earnest, and doomed by the hope in his face. You let him kneel. You let him speak. You let the watching ladies lean close behind their fans.

Then you drew a narrow ribbon from your sleeve, pale as moonlight, and held it just beyond his reach.

“You may wear it,” you said, “if you remember that a favor is not a promise.”

His face flushed scarlet. “Princess, I would not dare presume—”

“Men dare many things once cloth is tied around their arm.”

He swallowed. The court smiled. You tied the ribbon yourself. It meant nothing. That was why you did it.

You felt Aerion’s gaze like heat between your shoulders for the rest of the night. He waited until the feast had spilled into its softer hours, when wine had deepened voices and the musicians played slower songs. Baelor had been drawn aside by a lord with maps in his hands and worry on his brow. Valarr had gone to speak with friends. Your ladies had relaxed just enough for you to slip away beneath the pretense of air.

The terrace beyond the hall was cold. Below, the city breathed in darkness. Torches moved along the walls. Far off, the Blackwater carried moonlight in broken pieces. Above, the stars were pale and indifferent, all those cold little witnesses Baelor loved to name you after.

You had only taken three breaths before Aerion spoke.

“Did you enjoy it?”

You did not turn. “The feast?”

“The worship.”

Now you looked back. He stood in the archway, half shadowed, half lit. Beautiful as sin in a sept window. His cup was gone. His hands were empty, which made him seem more dangerous.

“I enjoy many things,” you said.

“Yes.” He stepped onto the terrace. “That is what they never understand.”

You faced the city again. “Go back inside, Aerion.”

“No.”

“I did not ask.”

“I know. I refused anyway.”

He came to stand beside you, close enough that his sleeve brushed yours. You could smell wine on him, and smoke, and the faint sharpness of the oils he used in his hair. For a moment neither of you spoke.

Then he said, “You gave him your favor.”

“I gave a ribbon to a boy who asked prettily.”

“You tied it yourself.”

“Was I meant to throw it at him?”

“You were meant not to give it.”

You laughed once, softly. “Because every ribbon in the realm belongs to you?”

His head turned. You felt it more than saw it.

“Everything of yours concerns me.”

“That is a sickness.”

“That is blood.”

You looked at him then, and there it was between you, ancient and breathing. Blood. The word that excused kings, doomed queens, built dynasties, warped cradles, joined hands, spilled brothers, crowned monsters, and made the realm swallow what it would have spat from any lesser house. Blood had placed you in the same nursery. Blood had made your fathers brothers. Blood had made your faces mirrors of old Valyria. Blood had taught Aerion that wanting you was not trespass but inheritance.

“You mistake relation for right,” you said.

His eyes glittered. “You mistake denial for virtue.”

“You are my cousin.”

“Yes.”

The word was not shame in his mouth. It was claim.

“You have been mine since before you knew words,” he said.

Your pulse struck hard once, then again.

“No,” you said.

Aerion smiled as though you had answered exactly as he wished. “You screamed when they took you from me.”

“I was an infant. Infants scream.”

“I screamed louder.”

“You still do.”

His smile sharpened. “Careful.”

“Or what? You will push me into roses again? Frighten another servant? Poor Aerion, forever proving himself fearsome to people too low to answer.”

The air changed. It always did when you cut too near the bone.

His face stilled, and the boy from the nursery looked out through the prince’s beauty: the child with blood on his teeth, the little tyrant commanding beetles, the creature who had hung from wet stone and laughed rather than beg. Only now he was taller than you, stronger, nearer to manhood than boyhood, with malice refined by years of practice.

“You think yourself above fear because men kiss your hand,” he said.

“I think myself above you because I do not need to announce I am a dragon every time I enter a room.”

His hand closed around your wrist. Hard enough to bruise. Hard enough to remind. You looked down at his fingers, then up at him.

“Let go.”

“No.”

“Aerion.”

He leaned closer. “Say it again.”

“What?”

“That I am not a dragon.”

You should have stopped. You knew the shape of the precipice. You knew Baelor’s warnings. You knew Aerion’s pride was not armor but a wound dressed in scales. You knew, too, with a thrill that made you hate yourself, that no one else in the world would let you be this cruel and call it truth.

So you smiled.

“You are a prince desperate to be a dragon,” you said. “That is not the same thing.”

For one heartbeat, you thought he might strike you. Instead, you struck him. The sound cracked across the terrace, small and bright and vicious. His face turned with it. Your palm burned. A red mark bloomed along his cheek, stark against the pale perfection of him.

Inside the hall, no one noticed. The music swelled. Laughter rose and fell. The court went on worshipping itself.

Aerion slowly turned back to you. His eyes were alight.

“There you are,” he whispered.

You hated the words. You had always hated them, because they reached past gown and jewel and courtesy, past Baelor’s little star, past the realm’s perfect princess, past every song ever made to cage you in beauty. There you are. As if he had hunted you through yourself and found the door unguarded. As if the cruelest, proudest, truest part of you had lifted its head at his call.

“You know nothing of me,” you said, but your voice had changed.

“I know what they do not.” His fingers loosened from your wrist only to rise to your face. He did not touch you gently. He touched you as though testing whether silk could burn. “I know the look in your eyes when men kneel. I know you smiled when that girl cried by the fountain. I know you wanted me to fall from the wall before you wanted me saved. I know every pretty lie they tell about you, and I know the thing beneath it that listens.”

“You know what you want to see.”

“I see you.”

“No.” The word came quickly. Too quickly. “My father sees me.”

At that, something ugly passed through Aerion’s face.

“Baelor sees a star,” he said. “Something distant. Bright. Untouched. He would hang you in the sky if he could, where no hand could reach you and no desire could stain you.”

“He loves me.”

“Yes.” Aerion’s mouth curved. “That is his weakness.”

“And what is yours?”

His gaze dropped to your lips.

The answer was there before he spoke it.

“You,” he said.

It should have sounded soft. From another man, perhaps it would have. From Aerion it sounded like a threat made before witnesses, though the stars were the only witnesses and they had seen worse from your house.

“You do not love,” you said.

“I do not love like sheep love.”

“You do not love at all. You claim.”

“Yes.”

The honesty of it robbed you of breath. He moved then, sudden as flame catching oil, and kissed you.

It was not sweet. Nothing about Aerion had ever been sweet except his face when he wished to deceive. The kiss was anger, recognition, conquest, punishment. His hand slid to the back of your neck, not pleading but holding. You should have pulled away. You should have thought of your father. You should have thought of the ribbon tied around some foolish knight’s arm, of Baelor’s careful warnings, of blood as burden rather than permission.

For one moment, you thought of nothing. Or no, that was not true. You thought: so this is fire. And worse, far worse, you answered. Not softly. Not innocently. You answered with the same violence with which you had once broken his ivory horse, the same pride with which you had laughed bleeding in the rosebushes, the same secret hunger you hid beneath pearls and lowered lashes. Your hand fisted in his doublet. His breath caught. Aerion, who made servants tremble and boys bleed and lords uneasy, trembled once beneath your touch. That pleased you. The knowledge of your pleasure frightened you more than the kiss.

When you tore yourself away, both of you were breathing hard. The mark of your hand still burned on his cheek. His mouth was red. His eyes were almost black.

“You see?” he said.

You wanted to slap him again. You wanted to kiss him again. You wanted to run to your father and confess like a child with bloodied palms. You wanted to stay exactly where you were until the terrace burned down around you.

Then Baelor called your name. Not loudly. He did not need to shout. Your father stood in the archway.

For a moment, the world narrowed to three Targaryens beneath the moon: Baelor in the light from the hall, noble and still; Aerion beside you in the cold, smiling with your handprint on his face; and you between them, beautiful enough to be forgiven, proud enough to be damned.

Baelor’s eyes went first to your mouth. Then to Aerion’s cheek. Then to your face. He did not speak Aerion’s name. Somehow that was worse.

“My daughter,” he said, and the tenderness in it cut deeper than accusation. “Come inside.”

You went. Of course you went. Each step toward him felt like waking from one dream into another. The warmth of the hall touched your skin. Music returned. Voices rose. The court was still there, jeweled and hungry, unaware that anything had shifted. Men still watched you and thought you perfect. Ladies still measured your gown. Knights still hoped for favors. Singers still prepared to make you into something simpler than flesh.

Baelor offered his arm. You took it. His hand covered yours, warm and steady. For a moment you were small again, palms wrapped in linen, listening to him speak of dragons and reins. You wanted to tell him everything. You wanted to say that he had been right, that Aerion was fire without conscience, that the danger had teeth and violet eyes and knew your hidden name. You wanted to say you were sorry. But sorry for what? For the kiss? For wanting it? For being seen?

Baelor bent his head slightly, his voice for you alone.

“My little star,” he said.

The name broke something in you. Because stars were distant. Stars were pure because no one could touch them. Stars burned alone where men could admire them safely.

But across the hall, Aerion had followed. He stood at the terrace arch, the red mark of your hand bright upon his cheek, his eyes fixed on you with a look older than desire and darker than love. When your gaze met his, he lifted a cup from a passing servant’s tray and raised it slightly. Not in apology. Not in farewell. In vow.

And in that glittering hall, beneath dragon banners and candleflame, with your father’s loving hand closed over yours and Aerion’s claim burning from across the room, you understood the first cruel truth of your life. You were Baelor Breakspear’s daughter.

But Aerion Brightflame was the first person who had ever made you feel like a dragon.

“They are singing of the Doom tonight,” he said, his voice a low, melodious thread in the perfumed dark. He did not turn. “Some minstrel in the square. A pretty little tune for the ruins of our blood. They sell our tragedy here like spiced nuts.”

You leaned against the doorframe, the cool plaster seeping through your thin linen shift. “We are not ruined. We are here.”

At that, he turned. The last of the sun caught the silver-gold of his hair, lit the sharp, perfect bones of his face, your face, echoed in masculine lines. His beauty was a weapon he wielded with careless brutality. “Here,” he spat, the word a poison. “A rented cage in a city of whores and merchants. Is this what you wanted, sister? To trade the Iron Throne’s shadow for a balcony overlooking a lemon tree?”

“I wanted,” you said, your voice as cool as the marble under your bare feet, “to see the look on your face when you realized I would follow you into a hundred hells.”

He moved then, a predator’s fluid grace. The goblet was set down without a sound. In three strides he was before you, his scent enveloping you...smoke, salt, the sharpness of the wine, and underneath it, the maddening, familiar smell of him, the smell that had been in your nursery, in your lessons, in the very air you breathed since the womb. His hand came up, not to strike, but to cradle your jaw, his thumb pressing into the pulse point at the base of your throat. His touch was furnace hot.

“You followed me,” he whispered, his breath a brand on your lips. “Against my command. Against all reason. Against every law of gods and men. You let them strip you of your title, your prospects, your honor, and you trailed after me like a loyal hound.” His thumb pressed harder. “But you are no hound, are you? You are a dragon. My dragon. And you have just proven to every soul in Westeros what I have always known: you are mine. Not Father’s. Not the realm’s. Mine.”

You did not pull away. You leaned into the pressure, your own eyes reflecting his chaotic fire. “I belong to no one.”

He laughed, a short, cracked sound. “Liar. You are here. In this room. In this city of sighs. You chose the fall with me. That makes you mine more than any wedding vow ever could.” His other hand rose, tangling in the hair at your nape, pulling just enough to arch your neck back. “You think this is a partnership? A shared exile? This is a captivity, darling sister. You are my most treasured prisoner.”

“And you are mine,” you breathed.

The madness flashed between you, a visible heat haze. His mouth crashed down on yours, not a kiss but a claiming, a violence. It was all teeth and desperate tongue, the taste of wine and bitterness and a decade of forbidden looks in crowded halls. You gave it back to him, bite for bite, your hands flying to his hair, yanking the silver-gold strands until he growled into your mouth. He walked you backward, your legs hitting the edge of the wide, low bed draped in Lysene silks, and you fell amidst a riot of cushions, him landing atop you, a weight as welcome as it was hated.

He ripped your linen shift, the sound tearing through the music air. “You should have stayed,” he snarled against your throat, his lips mapping the frantic beat of your blood. “You should have been safe. You should have been pure. Now look at you. Look what you’ve made me do.” His hands were everywhere, scorching paths over your breasts, pinching your nipples into aching peaks, palming the flat of your belly. “Look what you’ve made us.”

“You wanted me to stay so you could dream of me,” you gasped, bucking against the hard ridge of his cock already straining against his breeches. “So you could pretend your corruption was yours alone. But I am here, brother. I am real. And I am just as corrupted as you are.”

With a roar of fury and need, he tore his own clothes away, the fabric giving way to reveal the lean, powerful lines of him, pale skin sheened with a light sweat, the dusting of silver-gold hair across his chest trailing down his taut stomach to where his erection stood, thick and veined and already leaking at the tip. You drank the sight in, this mirror of your own flesh made foreign and demanding. He was magnificent in his ruin.

He shoved your thighs apart, his violet eyes burning down at you with a possessiveness that bordered on the divine. “You see this?” he hissed, wrapping a hand around the base of his cock, guiding the flushed head to your entrance, which was already slick with your own treacherous want. “This is your throne now. This is your kingdom. This is all you get for your loyalty.”

He drove into you in one brutal, unforgiving thrust, a splitting, burning stretch that made you cry out, a sharp “Ah!” that was swallowed by the perfumed night. There was no gentleness, no pretense at lovemaking. This was a reconquest, a punishment, a sacrament. He seated himself to the hilt, his pelvis grinding against yours, and you felt the breath leave your lungs in a sobbing rush. Your nails carved half-moons into the sculpted muscle of his shoulders.

“Fuck,” he groaned, his forehead dropping to yours, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. “You feel…by the blood of the dragon…you feel like home. You feel like my own skin turned inside out.”

Then he began to move.

It was a savage, driving rhythm, each withdrawal a near complete loss, each thrust a deep, claiming slam that jolted your body up the silks. The wet, filthy sound of your joining filled the room, a counterpoint to the distant lyre. His breath came in ragged gusts against your ear, punctuated with words, with promises, with curses.

“You followed me,” he chanted, his pace relentless. “My foolish, beautiful, insane little princess. You gave up everything…uh!…to be my whore in exile.”

“I am…nngh!…no one’s whore,” you managed, but the protest was weak, broken by the sensations coiling tight in your belly.

“Aren’t you?” he bit your earlobe, his hips pistoning. “Look at you. Taking your brother’s cock in a rented bed in Lys. Moaning for it. Dripping for it. Your cunt is greedy for me, isn’t it? Tell me.”

You shook your head, squeezing your eyes shut, but your body betrayed you, clenching around him in a vicious spasm. He laughed, a dark, triumphant sound.

“It speaks the truth your mouth denies. It knows its master. It aches for its master.” He shifted then, hooking your legs over his elbows, spreading you wider, sinking deeper. The new angle stole the last of your breath. A high, keening whimper escaped you. “Yess,” he hissed. “Sing for me. Let the whole fucking city hear what the Targaryen princess sounds like when she’s being thoroughly fucked by her brother.”

His dirty talk was a litany of possession and depravity, each word a velvet wrapped blade. “Think of them all, back in that cold stone castle,” he rasped, his thrusts becoming shorter, harder, aimed directly at a spot that made stars burst behind your eyelids. “Think of the septas who taught you maidenhood. Think of the lords who dreamed of your hand. If they could see you now…if they could see this perfect cunt stretched around my cock…ah, gods!…see how you milk me… they’d burn you as a witch. But you’d burn with me, wouldn’t you? We’d burn together.”

You were unravelling, the coil within you pulled taut to breaking. Your pride, your sharpness, your cold precision, all melted in the furnace of his body and his words. You were just feeling, just needing, just his. “Aerion…” you choked out, a plea and a surrender.

He heard it. His eyes locked on yours, the madness in them softening for a fraction of a second into something unbearably raw. “Look at me,” he commanded, his rhythm faltering into a deep, grinding roll. “Look at me when you come. I want to see my face in your eyes when you shatter.”

The command, the intimacy of it, was the final key. The tension snapped. A wave of pure, blinding pleasure crashed through you, wracking your body with convulsions. Your back arched off the bed, a silent scream on your lips as your cunt clenched and fluttered around him in relentless, rhythmic pulses. “Aaahhh-hhhnn!” The sound was torn from you, a raw, guttural release.

The sight of your ecstasy, the feel of your tight heat milking him, broke his control. With a roar that was more pain than triumph, he buried himself to the root and spilled his seed deep inside you. His release was violent, a series of jagged thrusts as he poured himself into your womb, his own cries a broken litany: “Mine…mine…fuck…yesss…take it…my seed in your belly…my mark on you…”

The heat of his cum flooded you, a shocking, intimate warmth that seemed to seal the act, to make the bond physical, permanent. He collapsed atop you, his body heavy and spent, his face buried in the sweat-damp hollow of your neck. For long minutes, there was only the sound of your mingled, ragged breathing and the faint, ever present music from the street below.

Slowly, his weight shifted, but he did not leave you. He rolled to his side, pulling you with him, your back to his chest, his arms a steel band around your waist, his softened cock still nestled within you, a sticky, profound connection. His lips brushed the shell of your ear.

“You should have stayed,” he whispered again, but the fury was gone, replaced by a weary, devastating truth. “And yet, if you had…if you had stayed…I would have died in this place. Not of hunger or a knife in the dark. I would have died of the silence. The emptiness. The lack of you.”

You said nothing. You placed your hand over his where it splayed across your stomach, over the place where his seed still seeped from you. The ultimate claim. The ultimate consequence.

Outside, Lys danced and sang under a moon like a silver coin. Inside, in the perfumed dark, the last dragons held each other, twin hearts beating a syncopated rhythm of ruin and absolute, undeniable belonging. The cage was of their own making. And neither would ever seek the key.

“It’s just a mug,” your best friend, Lana, had laughed, nudging you. “Don’t be so intense.”

Lana was gone now. Off to a study group for her art history midterm. She’d been anxious all week, picking at her nails, because Aerion had been distant. “He’s just like that,” she’d said, more to herself than to you. “He’s got a lot on his mind.” Before she left, she’d paused at the door, her oversized sweater swallowing her frame. “You’ll keep an eye on him, right? Don’t let him burn the place down. And try not to kill each other.” She’d smiled, a nervous, fluttering thing, and then she was gone, leaving the apartment heavy with the silence she’d filled with chatter.

The silence didn’t last. You heard the sink run, then stop. Footsteps, unhurried, crossed the short hallway from the kitchen to the living room. He appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame, your blue mug in his hand. He wore a worn black t-shirt, grease stained jeans from his diner shift, and the scent of old coffee, and cigarette smoke.

“She thinks I’m a stray cat,” he said, his voice a low, rough scrape. He didn’t smile. He never really smiled. His mouth just did something, a twist that was more threat than expression. “Don’t let him burn the place down. Like I’m some fucking hazard she’s leaving in your care.”

You didn’t look up from your book. “Aren’t you?”

He pushed off the doorframe and walked into the room, dropping onto the opposite end of the secondhand couch. The springs groaned under his weight. He set your mug on the scarred coffee table, right on top of your highlighted notes.

“You tell me. You’re the one with the moral compass. The better student.” He lit a cigarette, the match hissing to life. He didn’t ask. He blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Nietzsche. Appropriate. Rereading the parts about how morality is a fiction for the weak?”

“I’m reading the parts about how resentment poisons the soul,” you said, finally looking at him. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, the blue of them almost violent in their clarity. “You should try it.”

He took a drag, held it, let the smoke curl from his nostrils. “I don’t have resentment. You rejected me. That was your choice. I accepted it. I just…restructured the playing field.” He gestured loosely with the cigarette, ash falling on the carpet. “Lana wanted to be chosen. You wanted to be wanted without the inconvenience of admitting it. I just gave you both what you wanted. It’s practically altruism.”

Your fingers tightened on the paperback. “You’re dating my best friend to punish me. To get close to me. That’s not a playing field. That’s a pathology.”

“Is it?” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. “You knew what I was doing the moment I asked her out. You saw right through it. And you let it happen. You watched me sit on this shitty couch with my arm around her. You watched me kiss her goodnight. You listened through that thin fucking wall when I fucked her in her room. And you never said a word. Not to protect her. You just sat there, in your righteous silence, watching me watch you.” His voice dropped, became intimate, venomous. “So who’s the pathological one? The guy who acts on his desires, or the girl who gets off on being the secret center of the universe?”

Heat flooded your face, a mix of shame and fury so acute it felt like nausea. “You’re disgusting.”

“I’m honest.” He crushed the cigarette in your mug, the hiss of the ember dying in the dregs of coffee. “You hate me because I’m a mirror. And you don’t like what you see.”

“I hate you because you’re using a vulnerable person as a tactical maneuver.”

“She’s using me, too!” he snapped, the first real crack in his controlled, sleazy demeanor. His eyes flashed. “She wants the badge of dating someone dangerous. She wants to feel special because someone like me would choose someone like her. She doesn’t see me. She sees a fucking accessory. So don’t paint her as some innocent victim. She’s a selfish, shallow little bitch who’s happy to have you clean up her messes as long as she gets to feel chosen.” He leaned back, the anger receding into a colder, more deliberate malice. “Just like you’re happy to feel wanted as long as you don’t have to get your hands dirty by saying yes.”

You stood up, the book falling to the floor. “Get out.”

He didn’t move. He just looked up at you, a slow, appraising look that traveled from your face down your body and back up. It wasn’t a leer. It was an assessment. A philosopher considering a proof. “No.”

“Get out of my apartment, Aerion.”

“It’s Lana’s apartment, too. And I’m her guest.” He spread his arms along the back of the couch. “She asked you to keep an eye on me. So do your duty.”

The air was too thick to breathe. The rattling heater, the smell of his smoke, the weight of his gaze. All the arguments, all the needling comments, the stolen mugs, the notes in your books, ‘naive,’ ‘sentimental bullshit,’ ‘try harder’, it had all been winding tighter and tighter, a spring coiling in the pit of your stomach. This was the tension he lived for. This was the game.

“You love this, don’t you?” you whispered, the anger turning into something else, something bleak and recognizing. “You love that I’m stuck here with you. You love that I can’t make you leave without causing a scene she’ll never forgive me for. You engineered this whole pathetic scenario just so you could have me trapped.”

For the first time, something like real pleasure touched his expression. Not happiness. Triumph. “Finally,” he breathed. “There she is. The girl who sees the board. The girl who understands the move.” He stood up, slowly, closing the distance between you. He was taller, and he used it, looking down at you with that intense, grimy beauty. “You think I’m cruel? You’re right. You think I’m using her? You’re right. You think this is all about you?” He brought a hand up, but didn’t touch you. He just hovered it near your cheek, letting you feel the heat of his skin. “You have no idea how right you are.”

His other hand came up, fingers brushing a strand of hair from your forehead. The touch was shockingly gentle, at odds with everything about him. It made your breath catch.

“You rejected me,” he said, his voice now a low, private thing, just for the space between your mouths. “You looked at me and you said no. You humiliated me. So I made a world where your no didn’t matter. I walked right into your life through a door you left open. I sat at your table. I drank from your cup. I fucked your friend in the next room thinking about you. And you let me. Because part of you wanted to see how far I’d go. How badly I wanted it. How badly you wanted it.”

His fingers finally touched your jaw, a firm, claiming pressure. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

You couldn’t. The words were ash in your mouth. All the moral high ground, all the justified anger, it crumbled because he was right. You had watched. You had felt a thrill, dark and shameful, every time his eyes slid from Lana to you. You had treasured his insults because they were a form of attention no one else gave you. You were complicit. You were corrupt.

He saw the admission in your eyes. The victory in his was blinding, and ugly, and hungry.

He kissed you.

It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t an exploration. It was a claim. His mouth was hard and demanding, tasting of nicotine and bitter coffee. His hand on your jaw held you still, his other arm snaking around your waist to yank you flush against him. You made a sound, a muffled gasp of protest, and he swallowed it, h is tongue pushing into your mouth, deep and possessive. It was filthy. It was a violation and a confession all at once. You didn’t kiss him back at first. You stood there, rigid, letting him take. But your body betrayed you. A shiver ran through you. Your hands, which had come up to push at his chest, curled into the fabric of his shirt.

He broke the kiss, breathing harshly against your lips. “Say it,” he growled. “Say you hate me.”

“I hate you,” you choked out.

“Good.” He kissed you again, more brutally, biting your lower lip until you whimpered. “Now show me.”

He turned you, pushing you back toward the couch. You stumbled, your calves hitting the edge, and you fell backward onto the cushions. He was on you before you could right yourself, his knees bracketing your hips, his weight pinning you down. The cold from the window was gone, replaced by the scorching heat of him. He looked down at you, his brown hair falling into his eyes, his sharp features etched with a frantic need.

“You’ve been watching me,” he said, his hands going to the hem of your sweater. “Watching me play her boyfriend. Watching me pretend. It made you wet, didn’t it? Knowing it was all for you. Knowing every time I touched her, I was thinking about my hands on you.”

He yanked the sweater up and over your head, tossing it aside. His eyes dropped to your chest, covered by a simple bra. There was no reverence in his gaze. It was pure, avaricious hunger. “Fuck. Look at you.” He palmed you through the fabric, his thumb rubbing rough circles over your nipple until it peaked painfully. “You’re so fucking tense. All that morality, all that judgment, locked up tight in this perfect little body. I’m gonna ruin it.”

He unsnapped your bra with a quick, practiced twist of his fingers. The air hit your skin, and then his mouth did. He didn’t kiss your breast. He devoured it. His mouth was hot and wet, his tongue laving, then his teeth grazing, then biting down just enough to make you cry out. You arched off the couch, a jolt of pure, electric sensation shooting straight to your core. He moved to the other breast, giving it the same brutal attention, his hand squeezing and kneading the flesh he wasn’t mouthing.

“Aerion—” you gasped.

He lifted his head, his lips swollen, his chin wet. “What? Gonna tell me to stop? Gonna tell me this is wrong?” He rocked his hips down, and you felt the hard, insistent length of him pressed against your thigh through both your jeans. A low groan rattled out of his chest. “You feel that? That’s for you. That’s been for you since the first day you argued with me about Kant in seminar. While I was fucking her, this is what I was thinking about. Pinning you down. Making you admit it. Making you come on my cock while your best friend’s scent is still on my sheets.”

His words were filthy, deliberate, designed to degrade and arouse in equal measure. And they worked. A hot, shameful pulse of desire throbbed between your legs. You were wet. Soaked. He could probably feel it through the denim.

He saw it in your face. His grin was feral. “Yeah. That’s it. No more hiding.” He shifted back, his hands going to the button of your jeans. He popped it open, dragged the zipper down, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of your jeans and your panties and pulled them down your legs in one rough motion. The cold air hit your bare skin, and you were exposed, sprawled on the couch under his ravenous gaze.

“God,” he breathed, not a prayer but a curse. He ran a hand up your inner thigh, his fingers rough with calluses from the diner work. He didn’t tease. He went straight to your cunt, his fingers sliding through your slickness with a filthy, wet sound. “Fuck. You’re dripping. You’re fucking dripping for me. For this. After all that shit you talked.” He pushed two fingers inside you without warning, deep and curling, and you cried out, your back bowing off the couch. “You’re so tight. Clenching around me like a little bitch who’s been waiting for it.”

He fucked you with his fingers, a ruthless, punishing rhythm, his thumb circling your clit with harsh, unrelenting pressure. Pleasure, sharp and coiling, built in your belly. It was too much. It was crude and nasty and it stripped you of every pretense. You were panting, your hips moving against his hand, chasing the feeling.

“That’s it,” he snarled, watching you fall apart. “Let go. Be the greedy, jealous, hypocritical cunt I know you are. Come on my fingers. Show me how much you wanted this.”

His words, the crude, relentless stimulation, the sheer wrongness of it...it tipped you over. The orgasm crashed through you, violent and shuddering, a silent scream tearing from your throat as you clenched around his fingers. He worked you through it, his fingers pumping, until you were oversensitive and twitching, tears of overwhelm and shame pricking your eyes.

He pulled his fingers out, glistening, and brought them to his mouth. He sucked them clean, his eyes locked on yours, and the sight was so profoundly debauched it made your spent body clench again. “You taste so fucking good,” he said, his voice guttural.

He stood up from the couch, unbuckling his belt, the metal clinking. He shoved his jeans and boxers down just enough to free his cock. It was hard, thick, flushed an angry red, the tip wet. He was big, and he looked it, stroking himself slowly as he looked down at you, a nasty, possessive pride on his face.

“You see this?” he said. “This is what you said no to. This is what you made me work for. Now you’re gonna take it. All of it.”

He didn’t give you time to prepare. He knelt on the couch again, pushed your thighs apart wider, and notched the head of his cock at your entrance. He was still slick from your arousal. He pushed in.

The stretch was intense, burning. You gasped, your nails digging into the couch cushions. He didn’t stop. He pushed deeper, inch by relentless inch, his jaw clenched, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. When he was fully seated, buried inside you to the hilt, he paused, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. He was so deep it felt like he was in your throat.

“Fuck,” he moaned, the arrogance momentarily shattered by raw sensation. “Oh, fuck. You’re so deep. I’m so deep in you.” He dropped his forehead against yours, his breath hot and ragged. “You feel that? That’s me. That’s where I belong. In your tight, traitorous little cunt.”

Then he started to move.

There was no gentle rhythm. It was fucking, pure and simple. A hard, driving, nasty piston of his hips, slamming into you with a force that shook the old couch, the springs screeching in protest. Each thrust punched a choked sound from your lungs. Uh. Uh. Uh. The slap of skin on skin was loud, lewd, echoing in the shabby apartment. He fucked you like he hated you, like he wanted to break you apart and remake you in his image.

“You like that?” he grunted, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise. “You like getting fucked by your best friend’s boyfriend? You like being the other woman? The secret? The dirty little secret?”

You couldn’t answer. Pleasure was building again, a tighter, darker coil this time, fed by the sheer physical brutality of it, by the venom in his voice, by the devastating truth of his words.

“Look at me,” he commanded, his pace never faltering. “Look at me when I fuck you.”

You forced your eyes open. His face was a mask of fierce, unhinged concentration. Sweat dripped from his brow onto your chest. His blue eyes were black with pupil, fixed on yours, drinking in every flicker of shame and pleasure.

“I knew it,” he panted. “I knew you were this. Under all the books, all the arguments. A nasty, beautiful bitch who gets off on betrayal.” He shifted his angle, driving deeper, and you saw stars. “Come for me. Come on my cock while I’m inside you. I want to feel you come. I want to feel you give up.”

His hand slid between your bodies, his fingers finding your clit again, rubbing fast, rough circles. The dual assault was too much. The pressure broke. Your second orgasm tore through you, a silent, seizing convulsion that clamped down on his cock like a vise. A raw, guttural cry was ripped from your throat: “Ah! Fuck!” as you shattered, your vision whiting out.

The sensation of you pulsing around him broke his control. With a ragged, broken shout, “Yes! Take it, baby!” he slammed into you one last, brutal time and came. His shout wasn’t a release...it was a detonation. A raw, guttural “Fuck!” that tore from his throat as he buried himself to the hilt inside you, his body locking into a rigid, shuddering arc.

You could feel it, the hot, pulsing rush of his come flooding you in thick, relentless spurts. It was an obscene, intimate violation, a physical claim that went deeper than skin. He kept thrusting through it, shallow, desperate jerks of his hips, milking his own orgasm as he watched your face with a kind of glazed, triumphant horror.

The air reeked of sex, sweat, and cheap tobacco. The only sounds were the ragged symphony of your shared breathing and the wet, sticky sound of him still moving inside you, slowly now, as the last tremors subsided. He didn’t pull out. He stayed there, slumped over you, his weight crushing, his forehead damp against your collarbone. His breath was hot and uneven on your skin.

For a long moment, there was just the aftermath. The brutal clarity of what you’d done.

Then he laughed. It was a low, shaky, nasty sound, devoid of humor. “God,” he breathed into your skin. “Look at us.”

He pushed himself up on his elbows, his cock still lodged inside you, softening but present. He looked down at the mess between your bodies. Your thighs were slick, a mixture of your arousal and his spend already starting to cool. His gaze was fascinated.

“Ruined,” he murmured, dragging a finger through the mess on your lower belly. He brought it to his lips, tasting it, his eyes never leaving yours. “You’re ruined. And you love it.”

You tried to summon the anger, the shame. It was there, a cold knot in your stomach. But it was smothered under a heavier, more terrifying weight...a satiation so profound it felt like dying. You didn’t push him off. You laid there, letting him look, letting him own the devastation.

He finally pulled out. The sensation was a slow, wet drag, followed by a hot trickle down your thigh. The physical evidence of the betrayal. He stood up, his movements loose limbed with satisfaction. He looked down at his own cock, glistening, spent, and gave it a lazy, proprietary stroke before tucking it back into his jeans. He didn’t zip them up. He left them hanging open, the denim dark with cum.

“Get up,” he said, his voice back to that rough, commanding scrape.

You didn’t move. You felt hollowed out, boneless.

“I said get up.” He reached down, his fingers closing around your wrist. His grip was iron. He hauled you off the couch. Your legs buckled, and you stumbled against him. He caught you, his arm banding around your waist, holding you upright against his solid, heated body. “You don’t get to check out now. We’re not done.”

He half walked, half dragged you the short distance down the hallway, past Lana’s closed door with its stupid, cheerful “Live, Laugh, Love” decal, and into the cramped, cold bathroom. He flicked the switch. The harsh fluorescent light buzzed to life, exposing everything...the chipped tile, the mold in the grout, the damp towels on the floor. And the two of you in the mirror above the sink.

You looked wrecked. Your hair was a wild tangle. Your lips were swollen and bitten. Your eyes were wide, dark, shell shocked. There were red marks blooming on your hips, your breasts. You were naked, shivering in the chill. He stood behind you, still mostly dressed, his chin resting on your shoulder, his blue eyes meeting yours in the glass. He looked like a predator who’d cornered its prize. Arrogant. Sated. Malicious.

“Look,” he whispered, his breath hot against your ear. “Look at what we did. Look at what you are now.”

You tried to look away. His hand came up, fingers tangling in your hair, holding your head still. “Look.”

You stared at your reflection. At the stranger who had let this happen. Who had come apart under him.

“You’re mine,” he said, the words a soft, venomous promise. “You said no, but your body said yes. Your cunt said yes. Every time you argued with me, every time you pretended to be disgusted, you were just begging for this.” His other hand slid around your front, palm flattening low on your belly. “You think this is just sex? This is a fucking philosophy. I proved my thesis. You are not better than me. You are not cleaner. You are right here in the mud with me. And you like the mud.”

He turned on the faucet with his elbow. The water ran cold, then grudgingly warm. He wet a hand towel, wrung it out. Then, with a shocking, intimate gentleness, he began to clean you. He started between your legs, wiping away the sticky evidence of him with slow, deliberate strokes. The rough fabric against your oversensitive flesh made you flinch.

“Sensitive?” he mocked softly, continuing his task. “Good. You should feel it. You should remember every fucking second of this every time you sit down.” He moved the cloth up your thighs, over your belly, wiping his spend from your skin. It was a perverse act of caretaking, a way of extending the possession. He was marking you, then cleaning the mark, only to leave the memory of the stain.

He rinsed the cloth, the water turning cloudy. He wiped your chest, your neck. He was thorough. Degrading. When he was done, he dropped the wet towel on the floor. He kept his hand on your belly, his other still fisted in your hair.

“Now,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, filthy whisper. “You’re going to get on your knees.”

Your eyes flew to his in the mirror. You saw the challenge there. The test. This wasn’t about pleasure. This was about submission. About finishing the corruption.

“No,” you whispered, the first word of protest since it began.

His grip in your hair tightened, not enough to truly hurt, but enough to promise he could. “Yes.” He leaned closer, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. “You don’t get to be the victim now, baby. You participated. You came. Twice. You’re a willing accomplice. So get on your fucking knees and taste what you did. Taste your betrayal. Or I walk out that door, and you can explain to Lana why you’re shaking and why my smell is all over you.”

It was the cruelest possible choice. A final, ugly layer to the act. He was forcing you to make it active. To choose the degradation.

A sob caught in your throat. You were breaking, and he was watching it happen in the mirror, his eyes alight with a feverish, intellectual hunger. This was the moment he’d wanted all along. Not just the sex. The shattering.

Your knees gave out. You didn’t have to be forced. You sank down onto the cold, hard tile of the bathroom floor. The position was profoundly exposing, kneeling naked at his feet while he stood over you, his jeans still open.

He looked down at you, a god of grime and spite. He freed his cock again. It was half hard, wet, glistening with your combined fluids. He stroked it slowly, watching your face. “Open your mouth.”

You did. You hated yourself. You hated him. And a deep, sick, undeniable part of you was more aroused in this moment than you had ever been in your life.

He guided himself to your lips. The smell was musky, intimate, brutally sexual. “Lick it clean,” he commanded. “Clean your mess off me.”

You closed your eyes. You couldn’t look at him. You extended your tongue, tentatively touching the slick, salty head. The taste was bitter, primal, unmistakably him. A low groan rumbled in his chest.

“That’s it,” he coaxed, his voice thick. “Taste it. Taste where you’ve been. Taste what you let me do.”

You took him deeper into your mouth, your tongue swirling, cleaning him with a slow, mortifying thoroughness. You could taste yourself on him, the tang of your own arousal mixed with the bitter salt of his release. It was the most debasing thing you had ever done. It was also, perversely, an intimacy more profound than the sex. This was acceptance. This was consumption of the sin.

He let you work, his hand coming to rest on the back of your head, not pushing, just holding. His breathing grew ragged. “Fuck. Your mouth. So fucking good. You’re a natural at this. A natural little cocksucker. All that smart talk…and you were born to kneel.”

His words should have killed the arousal. They fed it. A hot, shameful pulse throbbed between your own legs, and you were horrified to feel fresh wetness there. You were getting off on this. On the humiliation. On being reduced to this by him.

He felt the subtle shift in your posture, the way your shoulders slumped in surrender. He saw everything.

“You’re getting wet again,” he stated, awed and vicious. “Right now. On your knees. You’re dripping for me again.” He pulled himself from your mouth with a wet pop. “Stand up.”

You swayed as you got to your feet, your legs trembling. He turned you roughly to face the sink, bending you over it. The porcelain was icy against your feverish stomach. He kicked your feet apart. In the mirror, you saw him drop to his knees behind you.

You felt his breath, hot, against the back of your thigh. Then his mouth.

He didn’t kiss you. He ate you. Like a man starving. His tongue was a flat, ruthless stroke from your entrance all the way up to your clit, lapping up the new arousal he’d drawn out. You cried out, your fingers scrambling against the slick sink. He hooked his arms under your thighs, pulling you back against his face, holding you open. He fucked you with his tongue, deep, then focused on your clit, sucking it into his mouth, nibbling, lashing it with a relentless, expert precision.

“Aerion—!” His name was a shattered plea.

He didn’t let up. He was punishing you with pleasure. Rewarding you for your depravity. His tongue worked you over, crude and perfect, until you were sobbing, pushing back against his face, your hips moving of their own volition. The orgasm he wrung from you this time was silent, a total systemic collapse that left you shuddering and weak, held upright only by his grip under your thighs.

As the last tremors faded, he stood. You heard the tear of foil, a condom this time, pulled from his wallet. He sheathed himself. He was hard again, fully, impressively. He didn’t ask. He just positioned himself and pushed back inside you from behind.

You were oversensitive and utterly spent. The stretch was a sweet, burning ache. He fucked you like this, bent over the sink, with a slower, deeper, more possessive rhythm. Each thrust was a statement. Mine. Mine. Mine. He watched in the mirror, his eyes glued to where your bodies joined, to the helpless expression on your face.

“This is it,” he panted, his hands gripping your hips, his thrusts gaining speed. “This is the truth. No more books. No more arguments. Just this. You. Me. This filthy, nasty, perfect thing.” He leaned over you, his chest pressed to your back, his mouth at your ear. “Tell me you want it. Tell me you want me to come again.”

You were beyond words. Beyond thought. You nodded, a frantic, desperate movement.

“Say it.”

“I want it,” you gasped, the admission tearing from a place of pure, ruined id. “I want you to come. Please.”

It was the ‘please’ that did it. That final surrender. With a choked off roar, he slammed into you, his body locking as he emptied himself into the condom deep inside you. His hips jerked through the pulses, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades, his whole body trembling with the force of it.

He stayed there for a long time, slumped over you, both of you breathing in ragged unison, reflected in the cruel fluorescent light of the bathroom mirror: a portrait of mutual destruction.

Slowly, he pulled out. He disposed of the condom. He zipped his jeans. He ran a hand through his sweaty brown hair. He looked at you, still bent over the sink, utterly broken open.

He didn’t help you up. He didn’t offer comfort. He walked to the door and paused, looking back. His expression was unreadable. The arrogance was there, but it was tempered by something darker, more complicated. A recognition.

“She’ll be back in an hour,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Clean up. The couch. The bathroom. Yourself.” He nodded toward the towel on the floor. “Get rid of that.”

He was leaving you with the mess. Literal and metaphorical. It was his final lesson.

“This changes nothing with her,” he added, his blue eyes cold and clear. “I’m still her boyfriend. I’ll still be here tomorrow. On your couch. Drinking from your mug.” A nasty, satisfied smirk touched his lips. “And you’ll still be watching. Knowing.”

He turned and walked out of the bathroom. You heard his footsteps cross the living room. You heard the front door open, then click shut. Silence.

You slid down the cabinet onto the cold tile floor, pulling your knees to your chest. The apartment was freezing. The heater rattled. In the other room, on the couch, the evidence of what you’d done was slowly cooling.

You had never felt more sober, or more completely ruined. He was right. It changed nothing. And it changed everything. He had proven his point, down to the last, nasty detail. And you, the better student, had finally understood the lesson.

warnings: explicit sexual content, humiliation/degradation, infidelity

word count: 5k

read here: [link]

the dragon in the star / aerion targaryen

pairing: aerion targaryen x targaryen reader

synopsis: a beautiful targaryen princess, beloved daughter of baelor breakspear, is worshipped by the realm as a perfect star of house targaryen. but her monstrous cousin aerion brightflame sees the hidden dragon beneath her beauty, and his lifelong obsession draws her into a dangerous bond of desire.

warnings: targaryen incest themes

word count: 6k

read here: [link]

salt and silver / aerion targaryen

pairing: aerion targaryen x targaryen reader

synopsis: when aerion targaryen is exiled to lys, his twin sister is meant to remain in westeros: untouched, obedient, and safe. instead, she follows him into disgrace, proving what he has always believed...that no law, title, god, or kingdom could keep her from sharing the same ruin.

warnings: explicit sexual content, targcest

word count: 2k

read here: [link]

notes

all works are fiction and individual warnings will be listed on each post. please check tags before reading, especially for darker aerion content.