pairing: aerion targaryen x fem! valarr's wife! reader
tags/warnings: mdni! (18+), explicit nsfw / smut, major infidelity / cheating, toxic relationships, degradation, marking / bruising, you are responsible for the content you consume, reader understands high valyrian
w/c: 11.7k
summary: a royal hunting celebration at summerhall melts into a violent fever dream soon to be shattered. you are prince valarr's dutiful wife, yet you have willingly traded his devotion for the ruinous, intoxicating cruelty of aerion's bed.
a/n: author's first akotsk fic. honestly, there were lots of writing "firsts" for me overall in putting this piece together, and it was such a fun experience getting to branch out a bit. a massive thank you to @solstice-lullaby for all the help with this. i appreciate you so much!
The merciless Dornish sun slices through the gauze curtains, pinning you to the mattress before your eyes even open.
Then came the heat, thick and suffocating. The relentless, dry breath of the Marches crawled across the cold marble floor until it illuminated the alabaster silk sheets the castle servants had laid out three days prior.
Those sheets were twisted now.
Knotted at the foot of the low bed, half-dragged onto the marble floor, damp at one corner with sweat of a high treason you had willingly committed. The light finds them and turns them amber, and you lie in that amber suspension with your eyes half-open as you catalogue the room the way you have learned, these past seven days, to catalogue everything.
Above you, the ceiling boasted King Daeron II’s expensive fantasies. An artist from the Free Cities—a man with trembling hands and extraordinary eyes—had filled the plaster with dragons. Not the fire-breathing monsters of the tapestries in the Red Keep's tapestries, but courtly beasts, elongated and formal, their scales coiled around the molding in elegant repose.
You had spent considerable time staring at that ceiling in the dark and in the intervals between. You know the dragons well enough now. The largest one, positioned directly above the bed, has its head turned at an angle that gives it the appearance of watching the room below with great interest.
You watch it back as you grow conscious of the gravitas holding you down.
Aerion's arm lay across your hip.
It is not a gentle thing, that arm. It has a warden's weight—as heavy the grip of a man who takes hold of objects until he decides they are no longer worth holding.
The weight of his hand rests heavy against your hip bone, long fingers curled inward like a dormant claw, and though the grip is slack, your skin hums with the ache of what those hands are capable of.
Morning light spills across the twisted sheets, gilding his forearm in strokes of molten gold. It feels like a bitter jest of the gods to make a nightmare so beautiful to look at. Everything about Aerion Targaryen is drenched in the agonizing colors of excess, entirely too much for one mortal man to wield. A sprawl of silver-gold hair spreads across the pillow above your head, while his sun-bronzed skin stretches flawlessly over lean musculature. With those terrifying violet eyes finally shuttered, it would be dangerously easy to mistake him for a simple man.
Breathing softly, his chin slightly tucked into the shadow of his collarbone, his expression has settled into something eerily blank. It is the closest to neutral his face has ever been. But studying him now, you know better than to mistake this stillness for peace.
You look at his chest instead—the part of it that is visible above the loose drape of his own arm. There are marks on it. Four of them, parallel, running from his left clavicle down across the slope of his pectoral, and they are red at the edges and dark in the center, the particular dark of dried blood on fair skin.
You are aware of this fact the way you are aware of all the facts you have accumulated this week. You had made them on the second night, when his hands had tightened at your throat and you had reacted without thinking, with pure reflex—your nails dragging down through the skin, and he had laughed.
He had actually laughed a short, delighted sound, and said something in High Valyrian that you had translated in your head: you have teeth after all—and then, he had proceeded to demonstrate that he too had teeth of his own.
The dragon on the ceiling watches you count your bruises.
There is one bruise high upon your left shoulder. Though obscured from this angle, you can feel it—a dull, blooming pressure chafing against the silk shift of his that you are wearing. Somewhere upon the marble floor lies your own discarded nightgown, utterly forgotten; and beneath the fabric you now wear, the contusion boasts a livid blue at its center and the outer edges have bled into a twilight-purple, creeping toward your collarbone.
Three others complete this brutal tally. A dark band shadows the delicate skin at the inside of your right wrist where he had held you still. Another stains the high, soft curve of your left waist.
As for the fourth—it is a vivid, throbbing ache that you refuse to pay any heed.
Beside you, Aerion draws breath in the slow, heavy rhythm of sleep. Each exhale blooms hot against the nape of your neck.
Beyond the tangled silk, the light has already surrendered its fragile dawn. The tentative blushing pinks of the horizon have completely burned away into the hard gold of full morning. The Dornish Marches are merciless in summer, and Summerhall, for all its painted dragons, remains but a castle of pleasure. It may drape the world in velvet but it can never truly lock the cruelty out.
The heat stews in the room even now, thick as a wool mantle and impossible to fight. A single sheet is enough to leave a body drenched by dawn in a place like this.
…Or rather, it would be, if you had slept much at all this week.
You have existed, instead, in a state that is adjacent to sleep but is more properly described as a kind of sustained wakefulness—a physical state rather than a mental one; as if your body is running at a frequency that ordinary rest cannot touch.
Lying tangled in the sheets beside Prince Aerion, you are made aware of every point of contact between his body and yours with startling clarity. His arm rests heavy across your waist; his bent knee presses intimately against the back of your thigh. Then there is the sheer heat of him flush against your spine. He runs hot—hotter than any man you have ever been beside. He seems wholly unconscious of this, as his body seems to generate warmth without effort as a simple property of what he is.
Your eyes lay fixed on the painted dragon coiled across the vaulted ceiling. Tracing its scales offers a fleeting reprieve from the truth, but eventually, your heavy eyelids flutter shut to face the grim calculation you have been avoiding since you first opened them:
Today is the seventh day.
Come midday, your husband’s hunting party will return.
There is a moment, in the interval between sleep and full waking, when the mind is honest.
You have learned to dread that moment. It is a fleeting window—perhaps two seconds, maybe three—that has become a profound source of dread. For those brief heartbeats, all good sense lay dormant; and the raw, unmediated truth sits heavy in your consciousness, stripped entirely of the elaborate justifications you’ve meticulously constructed over the past seven days.
Within that terrible, lucid stillness, the reality of the morning strips bare: Prince Valarr Targaryen, third in line to the Iron Throne, is your husband. Yet the bed you currently occupy belongs to his dear cousin.
Thankfully, the clarity passes. Once the mental scaffolding snaps back into place, it becomes bearable, and then it becomes something else entirely—a sensation that defies every neat, polite word available in the Common Tongue. Obsession is far too imprecise. Recklessness sounds like the scolding of a septa. It carries a moralistic weight that wholly ignores the intelligence with which you have carried behind the affair; because make no mistake, this choice was made with open eyes and a clear mind.
On every single morning of this past week, the path down the east corridor back to the rooms assigned to you and your prince lay open. Each time, the choice was made to stay.
You are not a woman given to foolishness either.
Foolishness has never been a trait tolerated by your bloodline as competence was the bread and salt of your upbringing. Marrying the prince was an inevitable outcome thereof—a flawless political maneuver that yielded a very good match. Playing the role of his devoted wife came easy. You have been, by every external measure, content.
What a pale lifeless thing contentment turned out to be. The difference between that polite satisfaction and the fever occupying your flesh these last seven days… It is the gulf between the safely banked embers of a winter hearth, and a wildfire meant to consume the castle stone itself.
Even now, you feel it in this morning stillness: a residual heat in your skin, accompanied by a heavy, thoroughly pleasant sourness. It is a particular hyper-awareness of your own body that Aerion summons without seemingly exerting any effort.
Sleep renders him entirely oblivious to you, a fact that somehow deepens both the thrill and the ruin of it all. There is no conscious performance at play. He simply breathes, and the wild nature of his blood disrupts the ordered cadence of yours. You turn a word over in your mind, a word trained into you since childhood, and the only one that fits the upheaval: necessary.
It is a terrifying thought. Never before has necessity applied to anything outside the protection of your marriage bed.
Your lord husband offers a fortress. He provides wealth, standing, and a considerate tenderness that far exceeds the standard lot of noble wives. He anticipates your needs. With his diligent instructions, your morning cup is always steeped with honey and no milk, no matter whose keep lays host to you. He reads your books; he debated them by the hearthside with genuine interest. To put it simply, Valarr is the very picture of steady, even-tempered grace—and that is precisely what induces this sudden, sickening vertigo.
Beside him, you were a perfect mirror. Faultless, even, and correct.
Here, you are none of those things; not in this bed with this arm across your hip. Here you are unpredictable in ways that startle you when you catch yourself—reaching for Aerion before you have decided to reach, or speaking in High Valyrian when you have always been careful to keep your fluency private. You find yourself laughing at his cruelties, at a dark and jagged humor that possesses no conventional grace.
You do not recognize the shape of yourself here and you have spent considerable time trying to untangle the madness of it. Does it represent an authentic self breaking free from its cage, or a dark reflection he is casting upon you?
The answer escapes you and you are not even sure the question matters.
Three seconds of clear-eyed honesty fade at the edge of your consciousness, leaving you anchored in the amber morning light with his arm draped heavy across your hip. The truth of the matter is simple enough: regret has not come.
Though you have hunted for it with the ruthless diligence of a maester seeking out a plague-spot, pressing mercilessly at the tender spots of your conscience, the answer is clear. What lives in your chest now is far too complex to be called mere guilt. It contains regret as an element among several but is not reducible to it. The consequences of this treason are arrayed before you—yet they pale the moment your gaze falls to the angry red half-moons your nails left clawed into his skin.
You remain there with the knowledge that your reputation and your future will be irrevocably scarred by this single act, yet you do not feel any desire to change what has happened.
The pressure in your chest is a simple acknowledgment of a fact, a recognition that you have prioritised your own immediate needs over the standards of behavior that others expect of you, and you accept that your current situation provides you with more individual satisfaction than any concept of righteousness or purity.
Aerion’s breathing breaks its steady rhythm. He is not waking, not quite yet, but drifting back toward the surface. His grip tightens fractionally, fingers pressing into the crest of your hipbone in an unconscious claim. Closing your eyes, you remain perfectly motionless. The reckoning will come, but for now, you only want to breathe in this suspended amber morning.
You want to keep the world at bay, just for a little while longer.
One moment he is asleep; the next he is awake, and his eyes—strikingly violet in the morning light, framed by pale lashes—snap open and fix upon the ceiling.
He does this every morning.
You have observed it four mornings now. He takes a few seconds to account for the room; then he sits up. The arm draped across your hip lifts, and the sudden absence of its weight is wholly physical as an abrupt emptiness not unlike the jolt of a missed step on a dark stair.
Without so much as sparing a glance at you, he rolls from the mattress. The motion carries the fluidity of a man in peak physical condition—narcissistically, rigorously, consciously so. Summerhall sees him at his training yard daily, a fact casually dropped by your husband in recent weeks. The fruits of that discipline show in how Aerion crosses the room.
Dressed only in linen sleeping trousers, he steps into the sun. The morning light spills over the half-moons scratched into his chest—your marks—illuminating them with the same indifferent thoroughness with which it applies to dust motes.
There is a paradoxical languidness in how he approaches his own reflection.
The mirror in this room is a long looking glass from the eastern Free Cities, floor-length, framed in gilded bronze. No doubt Aerion himself ordered it placed here upon arriving at Summerhall, perfectly angled to catch both the bed and the dawn from the eastern window. He stands before it, radiating entitlement. The carved stone dragons above the main gates, the ornamental fountains in the gardens, his own striking reflection—they are all the same to him. Mere aesthetic objects in which he holds a proprietary interest.
His hand finds the scratches marring his chest and traces them slowly with two fingers, expression caught between satisfaction and cruel amusement. That minute expression is perhaps the most legible thing he ever allows the world to see.
He turns to where his own discarded cup of wine sits from the prior evening on the nightstand—dried dark at the bottom now, the color of old blood—and he picks it up and examines it as though the residue contains some interest for him. He holds it a moment; then, with no change in expression, with no more effort than a man swatting a fly, he drops it onto the floor and watches it shatter against the marble with a crack that rings through the morning quiet. Unfazed, he steps right through the wreckage. Not a single shard dares to catch the sole of his bare foot.
Already, the broken thing is forgotten. This, it seems, is the shape of Aerion’s violence when boredom takes him. It is the casual, reflex erasure of anything that no longer entertains a prince who has never once been forced to sweep up his own glass.
Propping your back against the carved headboard, you draw his discarded shift around your shoulders. The coarse fabric reeks of him—a scent of cedar resin layering something fundamentally, undeniably his. Watching him watch himself, you offer no pretense of sleep.
After a time, a servant knocks at the outer door. Aerion does not raise his voice; he simply says enter.
A servant from the Summerhall household slips inside, pale and meticulously careful. Without once daring to lift his eyes to either the prince or the bed, the young man sets a breakfast tray on a low table near the window. It is an act of practiced invisibility, perhaps a testament to the fact that Aerion has undoubtedly used these chambers for this exact purpose before. That little detail gets filed away in your mind alongside the rest.
Cold meats and summer fruits weigh down the silver tray. There are sliced figs, a cluster of pale green grapes, and the dark red southern plums currently in season, alongside soft cheese, warm bread, and carafes of water and thinned wine. With an effortless, throwaway wave of his hand, Aerion dismisses the boy like a hound that has performed its trick. He wanders to the table without rushing, plucks a grape, studies it against the sunlight, and eats.
Pouring a cup of wine, he drifts to the window. With his back to the room, he stares out over the grounds of Summerhall.
"Your lord husband," he announces, his tone flat, "was seen in the lower stables last night."
Beneath the silk sheets, your fingers remain perfectly still. "The hunting party camped at the river," you murmur, recalling the itinerary.
"So it was believed." Aerion turns the cup slowly. "A man I trust brought word at midnight. The party cut their camp early, it seems—if my man's eyes did not deceive him in the dark. Either may be true."
Genuinely, he sounds unbothered by the threat of discovery. It is exactly what should be expected; Aerion Targaryen is simply not troubled by the petty fears that plague ordinary men. Obstacles that breed terror in others spark nothing in him but a kind of interested contempt.
"You are not alarmed." Turning from the window, he pins you with that fixed, appraising stare. A look that carries a particular quality—fixed, assessing regard, the sense of being catalogued—that you have become addicted to in a way you cannot fully account for this week. It is not comfortable to be looked at by Aerion. It is not a comfortable sensation, in that regard, but you have noticed that the discomfort is not the kind that drives you away from it.
"I am aware of the facts," you state, keeping your voice perfectly level.
A sound escapes him—short, amused, not quite a laugh. "Your prince will go to your rooms and he will be there," he says, "waiting."
The word cousin comes out of him clipped and cold. "He is very patient with the things he believes are his. He will tell himself that you are with the ladies of the court, or walking in the gardens, or at your prayers. He will furnish your absence with a virtuous occupation."
Taking a slow pull of his wine, he smirks. "—because that is what my cousin does with facts he finds inconvenient. He gives them softer, more flattering shapes. Valarr has always lacked the stomach for the truth of things. It is the great deficiency of good men."
Holding his gaze across the span of the room, you tip your head. "You have been considering this."
He sets the cup down and crosses to the chair beside the low table, and sits, spreading his legs, resting his elbows on his knees with the ease of a man entirely at home in himself at all hours. The morning light falls full across his face and it is, as it has been every morning, a face of extraordinary construction—the sharp lines of it, the pale brows, the wide mouth that can be pleasant or terrible in the space of a breath.
"Your dear lord husband," he repeats. This time, the phrase carries a weight of saccharine contempt—the word dear doing a great deal of work, none of it charitable—"has always been incredibly confident in your loyalty. He said so at dinner, the first night of this retreat." He pauses. "While you were sitting beside him."
"To the table at large. He was recounting your qualities." Aerion picks up a sliced fig, turning the soft flesh over in his fingers. "It was a solemn parade. Your virtues, listed off the way a Pentoshi merchant haggles over his wares. Loyal, gracious, composed… accomplished in all the womanly arts." His violet eyes flick up, latching onto yours. "He did not mention the other things."
The room is stiflingly warm. That hard, golden light refuses to soften the sharp cruelty of his features, and part of you is glad it does not.
"He does not know the other things," you reply.
"No," Aerion agrees, his smirk returning as he pops the sweet fruit into his mouth. "He does not."
Scraping the heavy chair right to the very edge of the bed, he settles in.
Rearranging rooms, furniture, and people is simply in his nature. He claims authority as though it were a divine right, perhaps it is, and lately—specifically over the last seven days—the sharp objections that ought to rise in your throat remain stubbornly absent. That was before, of course—before you learned the exact weight and warmth of his hands.
With one knee brushing the mattress, he deposits a tray upon the bedside table and plucks up the silver blade left by the servants. It is a delicate fruit knife, narrow and wickedly bright, the hilt forged into the shape of a wingless serpent. From the silver platter, he selects a southern plum. Four deliberate, effortless cuts quarter the dark fruit.
A single piece is offered on the flat of the blade.
He doesn't offer the point, nor does he offer a single word, merely holding the metal steady between you. Meeting his gaze, you let the silence stretch for a heartbeat before plucking the fruit from the steel to eat it.
The plum is cold and very sweet, the flesh carries a sharp, tart edge. As a stray drop of juice escapes down your chin, dashed away quickly by the back of your hand, his eyes track the movement—a thoroughly proprietary look and the deeply invested expression of a man watching a favored possession perform a parlor trick.
He cuts another quarter and holds it out—then another.
Cut by cut, he feeds you the entire plum from the flat of his knife, a mute ritual accepted without a breath of protest. Beyond the heavy doors, you could hear the castle stirring to life. A muffled clatter echoes from the kitchens below, servants murmur in the corridors, and from the eastern gardens comes the shrill cry of King Daeron II’s decorative peacocks—a dreadful noise that always sounds precisely like grief poorly performed.
You understand—eating from his blade—that this is a particular thing he is doing. It is not care in the way that your husband's consideration for your tea preferences is care. It is a form of control administered through the vocabulary of service—he is feeding you with the implicit understanding of who holds the meat and who merely opens their mouth to receive it. Recognizing the snare, however, does absolutely nothing to cool the sudden, electric flush racing along your forearms as you swallow another bite.
What your husband offers is compassion. The word anchors itself in your head. From your prince, there is unfailing consideration, enduring affection, and the steady benevolence of a fundamentally good man who chose you deliberately.
What Aerion gives you is not care for your comfort nor is it interest in your ease. What he gives you is an acute, consuming focus—a quality of focus that is almost violent in its concentration. Pinned beneath that stare, you feel yourself existing with an intensity under that gaze that you have not felt before.
A husband sees his wife through the soft, benevolent haze of courtly affection. Aerion, however, observes much like the painted dragon coiled upon the ceiling. It is a comprehensive, unblinking scrutiny that strips the world to its bones, judging every flaw against some inaccessible, sovereign standard; and gods help you—that merciless judgment is intoxicating! Never in your life have you craved something safe the way you crave that dangerous scrutiny.
Across the table, Aerion is carving a cut of cold meat with his dagger, entirely unhurried, though his heavy gaze never wavers. At the corner of his eye rests a subtle crease. It appears when he is pleased in the particular way that thrills him. It graces his features when the Valyrian tongue rolls perfectly off your lips, or when you match his temper without retreating. It appeared the first night, in the dark, when you had stopped performing the careful deference of a well-raised noblewoman and had been simply, entirely present instead.
The look appeared just as the sweet fruit was swallowed—a heavy frown of focus as his gaze dropped to the plum juice lingering on your lips. It painted a mark he looked seconds away from tasting.
Anticipation was a familiar ache by now. You knew what came next, learned in the stifled heat of these stolen mornings and in the press of his body against yours. Then his hand rose to the loose collar of the borrowed shift. Grazing the material with unhurried, possessive certainty, his touch made the air hum against your skin. Aerion pulled it down carefully, the shift sliding over your shoulders and pooling at your waist before you shrugged it off entirely, letting it fall away.
Resistance had long since become a hollow gesture, one that served only to heighten the tension coiling in your belly.
His eyes dropped to your body then, tracing the bruises on your body. The livid blue on your shoulder bloomed under the morning light, a dark flower of pressure and color that he touched first, his thumb pressing into the center with just enough force to make you draw in a sharp breath, the sensation radiating outward like a pulse of heat through your veins.
It wasn't exactly pain—more a throbbing reminder of how he'd gripped you last night, his fingers digging in as he drove into you—but the way he watched your reaction, his lips curving into that same amused crease, made your skin flush with a mix of nausea and something deeper, a slick heat that pooled low in between your legs. You didn't flinch away; instead, your body arched slightly, unbidden, the soreness in your wrist surfacing as he shifts his touch there, tracing the faint purple rings where he'd pinned you down.
He presses harder, his thumb and forefinger squeezing just enough to elicit a soft gasp from you. He looks at you with unblinking regard, as if he were mapping every twitch and throb, every bead of sweat that gathered at the base of your neck. You feel it in the heavy throb of your cunt, the way your nipples harden under his stare, leaving you aching and exposed.
Aerion leans closer then, his breath warm against your skin as his other hand moves to the curve of your waist, where another bruise lay hidden, his fingers splaying over it.
"Your lord husband," he murmurs, his voice dropping into that saccharine-contemptuous drawl, "would weep if he could see you now, wouldn't he? All marked up like this, your pretty little cunt still dripping from me."
He says it not to hurt you—not in the way that implies anger nor jealousy—but as if the idea of Valarr’s devastation was a fine wine he savored on his tongue, his eyes gleaming with genuine delight at the thought. You could hear the truth in it, the way he relishes the contrast, and it twists in your gut, not as remorse but as an insistent heat that makes your thighs clench.
His words slithers over you, crude and unfiltered, painting pictures of Valarr's imagined grief—him kneeling in some shadowed hall, tears tracking down his face while you lay here, spread out and willing under Aerion's hands—and the vulgarity of it only made the ache between your legs more insistent, your cunt throbbing with a wetness that you couldn't ignore.
You don’t think of love; there was no room for it in this moment, only the physical weight of Aerion’s attention, the way his fingers now trailed lower, brushing over the soft swell of your tits, pinching one nipple hard enough to draw a low moan from your lips. The sound was guttural, escaping before you could swallow it.
His hand slides down to the juncture of your thighs where you were already slick, your folds swollen and sensitive from the night's exertions. Your legs are parted with a firm press of his knee, his fingers stroking your cunt with unhurried circular motions that made your hips buck involuntarily.
"Look at you," he says, his voice low and rough, "so fucking eager, even after I've wrecked you. He could never make you feel like this, could he? He'd fuck you gentle like the fragile thing you are, but we both know what you need."
His words were a taunt, laced with contempt, but they fuel the fire in your blood. The soreness from his cock pounding into you last night flaring up as he slides two fingers inside you, curling them deep to hit that spot that made your vision blur. You gasp, the intrusion stretching you, your cunt clenching around him in greedy pulses, and the wet sounds of his fingers working in and out filled the room, obscene and rhythmic.
Satisfied with your reaction, Aerion shifts closer, his other hand gripping your hip to hold you steady as he adds a third finger, thrusting them in with a slow, punishing rhythm that had you arching off the bed. Your breath comes in sharp, ragged bursts.
The fullness was overwhelming, your cunt stretching around him, the slick heat building until it was all you could feel—the pounding in your core, the way your clit throbbed under the heel of his palm as he ground against it.
"That's it," he growls, his voice dropping to a crude whisper, "take it like the greedy little slut you are. A dutiful wife by day, but my filthy whore in the dark."
The words were brutal, designed to degrade, yet they only stoked the fire. Your body responds with a surge of wetness that coats his fingers, making each thrust easier and deeper.
You could feel the sweat beading on your skin, the salt tang mixing with the remnants of plum juice on your lips, and your moans grew louder, unrestrained, as he works you harder, his thumb circling your clit.
There was no escaping the raw intensity of it, the way his cruelty bled into intoxicating pleasure, and you surrendered to it, your hands fisting in the sheets as the pressure built, coiling tighter in your belly until it threatened to shatter you.
His free hand moves to his own trousers then, pushing them down just enough to free his cock, already hard and thick, the head glistening with precum that he smears along your thigh.
"Look at this," he says, wrapping his hand around his shaft and pumping it once, twice, the vulgar display makes your mouth water despite the ache still lingering from how he'd fucked you before.
"This is what you crave, isn't it?" He positions himself between your legs, the tip of his cock pressing against your entrance, not entering yet, just teasing, making you whimper with need.
The heat of him was palpable, his balls heavy and full as they brush your ass, and when he finally thrusts in, it was with a force that steals your breath, his cock filling you to the hilt in one smooth stroke.
You cry out, your cunt clamps down around him as he sets a brutal rhythm, pounding into you with deep, grinding thrusts that hit every sensitive spot inside.
The room echoes with the wet slap of skin on skin, your moans mingling with his grunts, and you lose yourself in the sensation, the physical dominance of him overwhelming everything else.
He doesn’t let up, his hands bruising your hips as he drove deeper, faster, the cruelty of his words fading into the background as the pleasure built to a fever pitch, your body trembling on the edge of release.
The aftermath is a harsh return to the waking world, the heavy silence of the bedchamber broken only by the ragged tempo of your own breathing.
Tangled in the damp sheets, the cooling air felt like a sudden admonishment. Aerion had already abandoned the ruin of the bed, crossing to the low oak table where a platter of roasted game awaited.
"You are thinking of him." Rising to carve a thick slice of meat, Aerion keeps it for himself.
He chews slowly, his dark gaze pinned upon the bed, watching over the gleaming steel of his blade. He laid the carving knife down—aligning it perfectly parallel to the rim of the silver tray.
"I am thinking of the difference," you tremble. This is true and it is also, you realize as you say it, the most honest you have been with him—perhaps with anyone—in recent memory.
"There is no difference worth your contemplation." Reaching for a silver goblet of wine, he merely cradled it in his palm, making no move to drink. "Valarr is a painfully routine man."
He looks at the cup for a moment, rotating it in a single, slow turn. "He shall provide you with a routine life. Heirs, courtly affairs, and the grinding machinery of duty executed to the letter, hour upon hour."
Lifting his chin, he locked onto his target with eyes terrifyingly certain.
"You shall grow old within it… performing."
"It is what you were doing when first I saw you across the feast table. You played the entirety of that first day with an admirable, sickening rigor." A heavy pause descended into the room. "Tell me—does he know how thoroughly you have studied the art of appearing satisfied?"
Gripping the rumpled edge of the bedsheet, there was nowhere to hide from that penetrating stare. Meeting it took every ounce of your remaining pride.
"And now..?" came your whispered challenge. "What is it you see now?"
He weighed the question, his gaze raking over the messy, bruised reality of what he had left in his bed.
"Now," Aerion murmured softly, "you perform nothing at all."
The balcony of the east guest wing looks out over the lower gardens of Summerhall, and beyond them, over the long, pale brown expanse of the Dornish Marches stretching to the horizon.
Early morning in the Marches possesses a ruthless sort of beauty. Beyond the balcony, summer has bled the scrubland into a bruised canvas of tawny golds and parched greens, beneath a sky already shimmering with a white-hot, oppressive heat. The land is flat and enormous and it goes on to the edge of visibility with a kind of indifference to human habitation, to the summer castle set upon it with its painted ceilings and its peacocks and its careful aesthetic program of royal enjoyment. The Marches do not care about Summerhall. They simply continue.
You are standing at the balcony railing with your hands on the warm stone, the sun already heavy on your upturned face. Draped over your shoulders is his silk shift—a men's garment too wide at the shoulders that smells faintly of cedar. Heat rises through the soles of your bare feet planted on the flagstones. In the dry heat of the Marches, your unbound hair catches in the arid wind, drifting aimlessly, while your hand rests on the balustrade and the other hangs loose at your side.
Aerion is behind you, somewhere in the shadowed room. You can hear him dressing without looking back.
You look out at the land.
The High Valyrian phrase arrives in your head with the casualness of a thing you have known for a long time, which you have: Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon. Your governess—a woman from Old Volantis, thin-fingered and precise in her pedagogy—had drilled the words into your twelve-year-old mind, preaching it as a proverb from the glory days of the Freehold, long before the Doom.
Back then, you had taken it as a stern, unimaginative lecture on the value of present diligence. You understand it differently now, standing bathed in the summer heat, in a lover's silk and the echoes of a dead language, the past week lies behind you—leaving every single door flung recklessly open in your wake.
Flesh for the night, grave for the morrow.
How clean the language feels on your tongue… High Valyrian never softens the blow with pretty sentiment. It states the fact—the living moment is always teetering on the absolute precipice of its own destruction. You respect this about the language. Perhaps that was why the old Volantene woman had always looked so apprehensive when you conjugated those ancient verbs perfectly. She must have known, even then, that a talent for wielding truths could be turned toward things far more dangerous
Parting your lips, you offer the dead words to the living sky.
"Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon."
The words fall into the blistering air, snatched by the dry wind until they are utterly gone.
You know what this week is. By the second night, any pretense of an accident or a fleeting loss of control had evaporated—it is an undoing willfully chosen and re-chosen with every sunrise. You are the wife of an heir to the Iron Throne. Yet for seven days, the bed you have occupied belongs to a Prince of the Blood. Here is a man exiled from court for staggering cruelties, and welcomed back simply because his father demanded such—and because the King lacks the political spine to excise the rot from his own grandson.
Aerion Targaryen. He was the Prince Who Thought He Was a Dragon, yet his inner fire brought only cold terror to those of his own blood. His younger brother, Aegon, has told you how his pet cat vanished into the damp dark of a well; that Aerion had watched the water swallow the small, struggling creature. To Aerion, his brother’s terror was nothing more than a plaything, a soft thing to be broken by his whims.
He was a man who had a stablemaster beaten to a pulp on his word alone. There was no documented offense, no witness to recount the slight; there was only Aerion's word, and Aerion's word in any household is supreme and final.
Every grisly detail of it was known to you long before that very first night.
You look out at the Marches and you think about what a death sentence feels like, and you discover it feels like the sun on your face and cedar resin in your lungs and a bruise at your shoulder—the one currently being pressed, fractionally, against the edge of the balcony railing just to coax out a wince. The pressure is a highly useful, intoxicating reminder of the prior evening.
Hardly the inventory of a sane woman, admittedly.
Aerion joins you at the railing. He is dressed—properly dressed, in a light linen shirt and trousers appropriate for the heat. His pale hair is swept back, though the arid breeze is already teasing strands loose from the discipline of the comb. He comes to stand beside you at the railing, his gaze fixed on the horizon.
"You said something,” he remarks.
"It is nothing but an old Valyrian proverb," you answer.
"I heard it." He is quiet for a long moment. "Say it again."
The words feel like smooth stones in your mouth.
"Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon."
He does not turn. His profile is a jagged silhouette against the bleached white sky—the uncompromising line of his nose, the arrogant tilt of his chin. In this light, his face is simply what it is: extraordinary, and harder than the carved stone of the balcony railing, and without the softness that the common understanding of beauty tends to prefer.
"That is accurate," he says.
"I am never disturbed by accurate statements." He finally turns his head, his violet eyes locking onto yours. "Are you?"
The question requires a certain gravity, and you consider this with the seriousness it deserves. "No," you say at last. "I am disturbed by inaccurate ones and I have been living with several for quite some time…"
He moves then, turning from the railing to face you fully. You mirror him, two figures standing dangerously close on the scorching stone with the Marches behind you and the castle at your backs. His hand moves to your face, fingers find the hinge of your jaw with a grip that demands your gaze, tipping your head back.
You let your face be held.
"You are not what your prince believes you to be," he says as a statement of fact. "He believes you loyal."
"I have been loyal," you reply, keeping your voice steady. "For three years, I have been nothing but loyal."
"Yes," Aerion concedes. "You may have." There is no admiration in the word, nor is there contempt "And you have been bored. You have been correct, and you have been impeccable in your performance, and you have allowed his gratitude to slowly extinguish you."
"That is not a kind observation."
His thumb shifts, pressing harder against the bone of your jaw.
"I have been aching," he says—and the word aching is incongruous in his mouth and it is more unsettling than anything he has said this week—"to take you from him."
His gaze remains anchored, scouring every line of your expression as he speaks.
"Not because of what you represent as his consort, nor simply for the drama of the theft—though I confess, it has always called to me when the audience is my dear, dull cousin. There is a certain poetry in taking from him," he pauses. "But because you are the only thing he possesses that he did not receive through the accident of his birth. Everything else he owns—his standing, his title, his future throne—fell into his lap by the mere accident of his father's seed."
His hand is still at your jaw.
"You he chose," he continues, his voice dropping into a low rasp. "He had the standing to acquire you, and so he did, and he has spent every moment since being insufferably grateful in that solemn, gracious way of his. He prizes you."
"He spoke of it at that first dinner, ensuring every soul present understood the staggering quality of his contentment."
Silence stretches between you, heavy and thick with the scent of dust and impending rain.
"My nature is such," Aerion says, "that I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a prize in another man's keeping. It gnaws at me to see a spectacle of my cousin handling something so far beyond his meager understanding."
A hot, restless wind snakes between you, tugging at your hair.
"...that is an honest answer," you manage to say, your own voice sounding foreign.
"I told you I would be honest with you," he reminds you. He had. It had been his first declaration—before the night had been what it became. He had stood by the window of the shared sitting room while your husband was occupied elsewhere, standing with a glass of wine and his back to the room and his face to the gardens, and Aerion had said it as a kind of preemptory declaration: I shall be honest with you, because the alternative would bore me. You had stayed in the room when you could have left it. That was your first choosing.
"And the other part?" you ask.
He looks at you for a long time. The hand at your jaw does not move.
"You know what I am," he says.
"Tell me what you mean by it," you say.
Aerion does not answer immediately. He is considering—genuinely considering, which is rare for him in your limited experience. He looks at the marks he can see on your shoulder, above the collar of the borrowed silk shift, the bruise that has gone twilight-purple at its edges.
"You are equal in blood," he says. "Equal in the understanding that the world is a set of facts to be managed, not a set of sentiments to be indulged. You are the only person in this castle—in this court, perhaps in this kingdom—who has looked at me without the veil of pretty delusions and without fear wearing the mask of composure."
Your heart hammers a frantic rhythm against your ribs as you look at him.
"...I know the ruin you bring," You say softly.
"Indeed," he agrees, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw. "And that ruin is the only thing that has ever truly woken you.”
The words hang in the air between you. It is a confession stripped of warmth, but it was the closest his jagged heart will ever get to what ordinary men call love.
Reaching out, your fingers find the fabric of his shirt, pressing against the marks your own nails left in his flesh just hours before. He does not flinch, nor does he move to break the contact.
"Valarr is coming back today," you say, the reality of the court closing back in.
"Yes," he says. "So he does."
The horns come from the west.
Its brassy cry shatters the silence of the third hour past midday. They arrive at the third hour past midday, when the sun has claimed its full authority over the March landscape and the gardens of Summerhall lie heat-stunned and brilliant below the balcony where you have been standing, on and off, through the long morning. Two long blasts and one short, the standard signal of a returning royal party. The call slips through the open window to mingle with the dry heat of the room.
You are standing at the window when they sound. Aerion is at the table, reading; and even as the signal of his kinsman’s return vibrates in the air, his silver-gold head does not lift.
At the table behind you, Aerion remains entirely unmoved. A servant—the one that accompanied the morning’s breakfast tray—had brought him a book earlier. His long fingers lazily trace the edge of the parchment. The blaring of the horns doesn't so much as warrant a flicker of his violet eyes; the world outside his immediate interest simply ceases to exist.
"That will be the western gate," escapes your lips, the words tasting faintly of ash.
"Yes." A dry rustle of paper is his only other reply.
You stand at the window and you look out, though you cannot see the western approach from this vantage—seeing the procession would require a walk down the corridor to the gallery, or a descent into the main courtyard. Because of this, the reality of the horns remains agonizingly abstract. You know the hunting party is out there, loud with horses and hounds, boastful with trophies and fellowship; and at the head of it all rides your husband. He will be present, checking on the welfare of the men sweltering in their leathers, ensuring the hounds are watered. He is so hopelessly, wonderfully good.
That goodness twists like a dagger in your gut when you think of what he is returning to. What would Valarr do when the truth finally caught up to him? Unlike the man sitting at the table behind you, your husband is not prone to fiery, destructive rages; if he discovered his wife had spent the last seven days burning in the bed of his cousin, he wouldn't set the castle alight. He would simply break. You can almost picture those earnest, trusting eyes clouding with a quiet, devastating grief as he grappled with a betrayal profound enough to shatter the honorable foundation he built his life upon. Worse still, Valarr’s nature dictates that he would search for a way to blame himself for your wandering heart. The sheer cruelty of what you have done threatens to choke the air from your lungs.
A frantic arithmetic begins playing out in your mind.
The western gate is perhaps four hundred yards from the main house, and from the inner courtyard to your private apartments takes several minutes more. Fortunately, knowing Valarr’s predictable courtesy, he will not rush straight to your chambers. He is thorough and considerate in his transitions. First, he will hand off his horse, speak to the stablemaster, greet whatever members of the court have assembled to receive the party, and exchange words with the household steward about the evening arrangements. Thirty, perhaps forty minutes remain before he opens the door to the rooms you share.
You have been absent from those rooms for seven days. The court is not blind, and the ladies of the royal party have spent the last seven days noting your absence from the morning meals, the afternoon sewing circles, and the evening garden walks. Valarr does not know yet. But soon, whether through a servant's nervous report or a lady's poisoned pity, the truth will be dripped into his ear.
He will know it, at some point, in some form.
Aerion turns another page. Without raising his eyes from the text, he says, "He will speak to the stewards before he comes to your rooms. He considers it a point of courtesy to the household." His tone carries no heat and no interest. It is the tone of a man relaying the contents of a document he finds mildly beneath his attention. "Even as a boy, Valarr was so tediously burdened by the feelings of servants. It makes him tragically slow."
Finally, he looks up from the book. Aerion pins you with a paralyzing stare. "Long enough."
Eight inches. That is the approximate distance between your lips and his.
You know this because you have been standing in the center of the room for three minutes utterly motionless, and he has been watching you from his chair. Neither of you has spoken. Three years as a dutiful, courtly wife and seven days as a creature utterly ruined have formed in your mind the ability to hold competing truths without collapsing into madness. How easily one life bleeds into the next, crosses your mind as you watch him watch you from the comfort of his high-backed chair.
The western gate is a few hundred yards from the main house.
The main house's southern corridor, which leads to the private apartments, is approximately another hundred long.
Aerion's guest wing is at the eastern end of the private apartments, separated from the marital suite assigned to you and your husband by the length of a corridor, two antechambers, and a set of carved doors through which you have not walked since the second night of the retreat.
Exactly thirty minutes remain.
Every passing moment is a finite quantity of stolen opportunity, bleeding out into the ether at a rate of one minute per minute.
Yet your feet remain rooted to the woven rug, pointed entirely away from the corridor. Meeting Aerion’s gaze, there is a knowing amusement in his expression but he makes no move forward. His hands remain open, resting casually on the arms of his chair, because the act of surrender must be yours alone. To him, the prize is only worth taking if the prize begs to be taken. Cruel, beautiful bastard, your mind whispers. This twisted psychological warfare feels far more intimate than the illicit week of nights behind you. The choice was yours to make.
So the eight inches are crossed.
You take his face in your hands—both hands. Standing over him offers an intoxicating novelty and the sudden shift in power registers in your blood as heat. His hands come up to your waist and they do not gentle themselves, which you expected and for which you are grateful, because you need the sharpness of this moment. You need it to have edges.
You pull him to his feet by his collar.
"Careful," Aerion murmurs, a low, gravelly hum that vibrates through your wrists. "You’ll tear it."
He lets himself be pulled upward. The book tumbles from his lap, hitting the floor with a dull thud.
The illusion of submission shatters as his sheer size overtakes the space. Towering over your frame by a head and more, he forces your chin up, your arms drawn taut as the bunched fabric in your fists becomes a set of reins impossible to control. His hands find your waist the instant he's fully upright, fingers digging into the soft flesh just above your hips.
The heat of his palms seeps through the thin fabric of the shift you're wearing—his shift, still carrying the faint scent of sweat from the night before—and it radiates outward. A possessive burn travels down your thighs, pooling low in your belly, causing your breath to snag in the dry air of the chamber.
Faintly, through the open windows, the distant blast of hunting horns echoes from the wood.
But Aerion does not rush, even with the horns fading in the distance. If anything, the urgency of that sound only sharpens his resolve to ignore it. Let them come, a dizzying recklessness takes hold of your senses. Let the whole damned world burn outside this door.
His hands slide up your sides, thumbs tracing the curve of your ribs through the fabric. The weight of his unblinking stare strips away whatever courtly pretense remains, pulling a violent shiver from your spine despite the relentless afternoon heat.
Prickles of anticipation break across your skin as his fingers curl around the hem of the oversized shift, tugging it upward.
The fabric rasps against your skin as it rises, exposing your thighs first, then your hips, the cool air of the room brushing against the dampness between your legs—a wetness that's already building, your cunt throbbing with the anticipation.
He watches your reaction, and when he finally leans in, his mouth meets yours. Lips parting under his ruthless possession, his tongue thrusts deep and demanding.
The kiss deepens, and you can feel the hard line of his cock pressing against your belly through his trousers, already stiff and insistent, the bulge thick as he grinds it slowly against you in a rhythm that matches the steady beat of your heart.
Aerion breaks away just enough to speak, his breath hot against your lips.
"My cousin thinks he holds you," he says, voice low and even, like he's stating the inevitable turn of the seasons, no trace of mockery or sugar-coated disdain. "But he's been grasping at air for seven days, hasn't he? All that careful affection—smoke, dissolving in the heat of what's real."
His hand moves then, sliding down to cup your ass, fingers squeezing with that same possessive grip, pulling you harder against him so you can feel every inch of his erection, the way it throbs through the fabric, demanding to be noticed.
The words hit you as a confirmation, a stark recognition that slices through the haze; he's right, and you've known it all along, chosen it with every breath in this room, every mark he's left on your skin.
It's not guilt that flares in your chest but a fierce, clarifying heat, your cunt clenching at the truth of it, at the way his declaration mirrors the ache building inside you, making you wetter, your slickness starting to soak through the shift as you press closer, your hands fumbling at the laces of his trousers, needing to feel him bare.
He lets you undo them, his hands steady on your body as you work, but he doesn't hurry the process; instead, he turns you slightly, guiding you back toward the edge of the bed with that same deliberate slowness, as if the horns' call is nothing more than a distant irritant, beneath his notice.
When his trousers finally fall open, his cock springs free, thick and heavy, the head already glistening with precum that beads at the tip.
You wrap your hand around it instinctively, feeling the hot, velvety skin stretched over the rigid length, your fingers barely meeting as you stroke him once, twice, the motion drawing a low, approving hum from his throat.
He doesn't thrust into your grip; he lets you feel the weight of it, the way it pulses in your palm before he pushes the shift up and over your head entirely, leaving you naked under the golden light filtering through the curtains.
His eyes rake over you then, taking in the bruises and the sweat-slicked sheen of your skin, and without another word, he lowers you onto the bed, his body following yours down, pinning you with his weight.
His cock presses against your thigh and when he shifts his weight to align himself at your entrance, it's with excruciating slowness, the head of his cock nudging against your soaked folds, teasing the sensitive flesh without fully breaching you.
You're aching for it, your cunt throbbing with need, the wetness dripping down to your ass as he holds back, making you wait, his breath steady against your neck as if to prove he controls even this.
Finally, he thrusts in, but not with the frantic urgency you might expect. His cock fills you inch by inch, stretching your cunt around his thickness until you're gasping, the sensation a burning mix of fullness and friction that makes your walls clench greedily around him.
He doesn't start slow. Each stroke long and powerful, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in, the wet slap of skin echoing in the room as your juices coat him, making every thrust smoother and filthier.
A second volley of horns bleeds through the heavy stone walls—distant, yet loud enough to announce that the riding party has reached the inner gates. The sound drifts into the bedchamber, washing over the tangled linens. Your mind shuts it away.
Out there, breathing the dust of the road, is the man you married. To dwell on him is to invite the grayscale back into your life. He represents an even, steady warmth, and a patient regard that has defined three years of perfectly measured, entirely bloodless contentment.
A good, safe man, you remind yourself, though the thought tastes horribly like ash on your tongue. Eventually, of course, that is the life you will resume. For rebellion is only a temporary indulgence for women of your station, and the ironclad laws of blood and highborn obligation will always come to collect. A grim understanding of what the realm demands will drag you back to his side, and you know this surrender is already etched deep into your marrow.
You know you will return.
But you are here, now, on the eastern side of the heavy carved doors, the world dissolved into the stifling, the amber heat of Summerhall's deepest afternoon.
"Are you listening to the horns, sweetling?" Aerion murmurs, his breath a sudden, scorching ghost against your collarbone. His eyes, bright and volatile as wildfire, dare you to pull away or show even a sliver of regret. A cruel smile plays on his lips. "Let him blow his horns. A dragon does not concern himself with the bleating of sheep."
Perhaps not, you think, your fingers twisting into the damp, silver-gold silk of his hair, but the sheep's wife certainly might. Still, the cynical retort goes unspoken. Let the dutiful wife stay dead for just a few hours more.
There is no need for sundials in this blazing little purgatory with Aerion above you; time has simply ceased to matter.
Stepping back onto the balcony, you find the world has shifted.
The sun sits lower now, stripped of its midday tyranny, its colors bleeding toward the west where the hunting party has already vanished through Summerhall’s gate. The Marches in this light are amber and ochre and a dark, almost wine-colored red at the horizon where the dust of the day has caught and held the declining sun.
Standing at the railing, the warm breeze presses the fabric of his oversized shift against your thighs. Your hair hangs loose, heavy and unpinned, while the sun-baked stone scorches the bare soles of your feet. This marble has hoarded the day's heat and will stubbornly refuse to relinquish it until well past midnight, if it does at all. At your shoulder throbs a dark, blooming bruise. Hours ago, you pressed your own fingers into it, deliberately coaxing the ache, and now it is a fixed presence on your body.
You look out at the Marches.
Down in the lower gardens, a lone figure moves along the manicured gravel paths. There is no need to discern his features from this height; that deliberate, unhurried stride and streak of white hair betrays him instantly. His head is tilted in that habitual posture of his. He has the bearing of a man who is forever making room for the world around him. He still wears the same dusty riding jacket he departed in five days ago, its fabric creased and stained with the reality of a week's camp in the Marches.
Predictable to his very bones, he has not changed. He would have ridden through the gates, spoken a gentle word to the steward, and sought out your chambers. Finding them empty—exactly as you had thought he would—he has retreated to the gardens. Because he is who he is, you think, watching him. A quiet stroll among the roses is what a good man does with his wife's absences.
Pacing the gravel with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, he studies the flower beds in oblivious solitude.
You stand at the railing and you look down at your husband. Your husband whose kindness is genuine and unfailingly consistent. Whose warmth he shares with equity to every lord and servant within his sphere.
You look at him for a long time.
Behind you, Aerion is lounging somewhere in that velvet dark. You do not need to look over your shoulder to know exactly where he rests.
"He paces like a penned," his voice slithers out from the gloom. You can hear the smirk twisting his mouth. "Shall I call down to him? Ask my dear cousin if he enjoyed his time in the mud?"
You do not turn around. You can feel the heavy, suffocating quality of his attention pressing against your spine.
"Leave him," you murmur, though the words lack any real venom.
Down below, your husband’s pacing ceases. He stands motionless on the pale gravel.
He finds you immediately—directly, as though he knew the angle, as though he had looked at this particular balcony on purpose, with a destination in mind. The distance is considerable, and the dying sun glares directly into his eyes while casting you in silhouette. Yet, you are standing in a man's shift with your hair wildly undone in the middle of the afternoon. None of this paints a picture he does not already possess some silent, unvoiced awareness of. Your prince is a good man, after all, not a blind one.
Between the two of you, the gardens remain indifferent. Peacocks drag their iridescent tails across the paths, pacing with the oblivious, mechanical elegance of creatures bred only to be looked at. The central fountain babbles its continuous, cool song, a mocking soundtrack to the stillness of the afternoon. And beyond it all, the Marches stretch out in their vast, indifferent amber.
From this height, his face is a blurred oval, its finer lines illegible.
But you do not need to see his eyes to know the expression they hold. You know the way he processes information he does not want—the compression of his jaw, his grief wearing the costume of composure. You know this face. You have lain beside it for three years, in public and in private, in the morning and in the dark.
He looks at you for a long time.
His gaze drops back to the gravel. He unclenches his hands from behind his back and places them at his sides, and he begins to walk again along the gravel, at the same unhurried pace, with the same attentive tilt of the head. He walks as though he has simply been admiring the flora all along. As though that agonizing upward glance was entirely ordinary. As though it contained nothing.
A bitter, rueful smile touches your lips. There it is. This is what your prince does with facts he finds inconvenient.
He gives them more flattering shapes.
Long after your husband breaks eye contact and disappears down the garden path, the stone railing remains warm beneath your palms.
The sun continues its descent toward the horizon. The Marches go darker gold, then ochre, then the deep wine-red you had watched them approach. Peacocks shriek their twilight complaints as they retire to hidden corners of the gardens, while the fountain babbles on. Far below, your husband has turned the corner of the path and is gone from your sight, absorbed back into the belly of the castle and the machinery of the day—the feasts, the endless social pleasantries, the steady, metronomic rhythm of a life conducted with suffocating virtue.
He knows. He looked right at you, his eyes catching the truth, and he deliberately chose blindness. But feigned ignorance is a fragile shield in a world governed by vultures. Summerhall is built on whispers, and a prince’s averted gaze cannot hold back the tide of court politics forever. Eventually, the dark will spit this secret out into the harsh daylight. The realm will demand a sinner, and it will be your absolute undoing.
You stand at the railing and you think about what you are choosing. There is no desire to dress this treason in comfortable, poetic garments: not passion, nor a temporary madness, nor the romantic tribulations of a neglected woman.
You are choosing Aerion Targaryen. You are choosing the bruises and the cruelty and the narcissism and the blade with the fruit on it and the quality of attention that is violent in its concentration. Who has told you, stripping away all chivalric nonsense, that he has taken you from your prince not for anything so pedestrian as love, but for the greedy, singular satisfaction of possessing the only thing his cousin prizes unconditionally. Who would not hesitate—not for a breath, not for a prayer—to destroy every comfortable and considered thing your husband has built around you, if the destruction served his appetite for a given moment. And when the truth inevitably breaches the walls of your husband's willful deafness, a prince of the blood will not take the fall. It will be your head on the block.
Bantio syt ñellyr, ñāqeso syt nopon.
You turn from the railing.
Aerion is still in the room, in the shadows. He has not moved—he is at the far wall, in the angle where the fading light does not reach, and he is watching you with that full-weight regard. His shirt is open at the collar and the marks on his chest are in shadow but you know the exact position of them. His face in the shadow is the face he has when no one is watching: the hard, sharp structure of it, the pale eyes, the complete and unperformed absence of any social masks he wears in public.
Crossing the distance between you makes you aware of every element of the space around you and the sheer weight of the doom you are inviting. You carry the awareness of your husband's deliberate absence, the intoxicating poison of the last seven days, and the absolute certainty of the reckoning that waits at the end of this road. You do not shed a single ounce of this dread, because a choice made in ignorance is merely a mistake. This is a treason committed with open eyes, possessing the dark dignity of a true choosing.
When you offer your hand, his fingers close around yours with a warden's grip. His thumb drags across your knuckles, a slow, abrasive friction.
"He saw," Aerion says, his voice low and scraping.
"He did," was all you could reply.
He looks at you for another moment, hand tight around yours. "And?"
Meeting that pale, shadow-darkened gaze, you hold the entirety of the inevitable fallout in your mind. The whispers, the trial, the disgrace, the cold stone of a black cell, and the final swing of the executioner's blade.
"And he will continue to look away, until the day the realm forces him to see," you say, your voice perfectly steady. "Until then, it means nothing."
Aerion turns the statement over in his mind, picking at the seams of your composure, hunting for the fragile, terrified prey he so loves to break. But there is no prey here tonight. Only a mirror to his own consuming fire.
A faint crease of amusement appears at the corners of his eyes. He forces your hand over, exposing the pale skin of your wrist. His thumb finds the dark, blooming bruise where he had constrained you earlier, pressing directly into the center of the ache. He watches your pupils dilate, reading the pain in your face with satisfaction.
"Then you stay," he says. It is not a question.
Outside, the sun finally surrenders Summerhall to the night, dragging the Marches into complete darkness. Standing in the shadows of King Daeron II's summer castle, your hand locked in the grip of a man who believes he breathes fire, there is only a serene, terrifying clarity. You have weighed the cost of your soul, dimensions of the tragedy that will destroy your life, and willingly stepped into the inferno.
But until the flames finally consume you, the grave will keep.
Summerhall, in the years to come, will be spoken of in the histories as a place of beauty and catastrophe—a castle built for joy that became a site of ash. There are scholars who will note the irony of this. There are women who will understand, reading the accounts, that certain choices have always smelled of cedar and a summer afternoon. That certain choices are made with perfect clarity, in the full light of their own consequences, and are made anyway. Not despite what they cost. Because of what they are.
