MJ, 26, She/Hers - MDNI! Just woke up from an 11-year coma (AKA deleted my Tumblr account when 1D broke up and came out of retirement specifically for AKOTSK). Treat me like I was born yesterday, please
// A HOTD X AKOTSK AU // BAELOR TARGARYEN X OFC //
SUMMARY: There used to be no such this as the realm of men. It was the realm of gods, and man just happened to live there. The Seven are cruel, fickle, and easily bored. When they took the minor gods and left to control the cosmos from beyond the veil, they left something else behind.
Which means the ruling bloodlines of Westeros are immortal, touched just enough by divinity to refuse the ordinary shape of human life and to carry some of it with them, but not enough to be considered above the realm of men. So they conquered it instead.
Somewhere along the way, the gods became distant. Abstract. Safe. Something to pray to. Not something that walks.
But true divinity did not leave with the Seven. She remained, quiet, buried. Misnamed as blood, as temperament, as madness.
Aeleanora Targaryen does not indulge. She does not reach. She does not want. She removes the part of herself that tries.
She was raised not to. She was raised to contain The Divine Pulse. To starve it. But it does not yield. You cannot separate the god from the girl. And she finds, to her quiet horror, that she is ravenous.
Baelor Targaryen is very, very good at starving. He has made a life of it. He knows the shape of her hunger, he’s seen this before. This is worse. Some mistakes are not meant to be learned from. Some return, whether you would have them or not.
AU Premise: Divine blood-line Westeros (not standard canon rules).
OC: Aeleanora Targaryen.
Themes: Control vs. hunger, divinity, power, restraint, inevitability.
Tone: Dark, psychological, slow-burn tension.
Relationships: Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen x OFC
Relationship Vibe Note: This is a secret romance between two people who are entirely too good at lying in public and entirely too bad at staying away from each other in private. Baelor is not here to tame Aeleanora into sweetness, and Aeleanora is not here to be handed to him like a prize mare with a crown. She is his political equal, his sanctuary, his worst headache, and the bratty little godling testing every inch of his restraint. He is her safest place in a world that keeps trying to make a weapon of her, which naturally means she spends half her time trying to bite the walls of that safety to see if they hold. Secret meetings, council work, stress relief, dangerous tenderness, and a very exclusive dirty mistresses club <3
CONTENT WARNINGS [PLEASE READ]: 18+ // MINORS DO NOT INTERACT (MDNI); Dark/mature themes; Explicit sexual content; Virginity loss / first-time sex; very soft Dom/sub undertones; Praise kink; Power imbalance dynamics; Age gap relationship; Targcest (I couldn't bring myself to do full blooded niece and uncle so these two are technically distant cousins by blood); Possessive romantic dynamics; Trauma, implied & discussed; Non-graphic references to sexual assault; Blood, violence, and political coercion; Run-on sentences; Themes of Self-hatred; Adultery (dw Jena has a ReachDaddy rearranging her spine every night); Infertility; Its just a litttleeee psychosexual horror in here sorry; Lil bit of breeding kink.
No tradwife shit here <3 || Aeleanora is for my fellow oddballs. My pretty and off-putting girls :)
[MASTER LIST] || WIP - WC: 360.9K and counting :) || I update 1-2x weekly!
Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3A // Part 3B // Part 3C // Part 4 // Part 5 // Part 6A // Part 6B // Part 7 // Part 8 // Part 9A // Part 9B // Part 9C // Part 10 // Part 11 // Part 12A // Part 12B // Part 13 // Part 14 // Part 15A // Part 15B // Part 15C // Part 16 // Part 17 // Part 18A // Part 18B // Part 19 // Part 20 // Part 21
⚔︎Read it on: AO3 ⚔︎ || ⚔︎Read it On: Wattpad⚔︎
READER GUIDE + AU Summary:
[Setting]
Takes place in a canon-divergent Westeros. Magic flourishes throughout the realm.
Dragons still exist and are central to power. Since no Aegon/Rhaenyra/Alicent I made it so the Blackfyre rebellion happened earlier and served as the Dance but a few adult dragons survived and were able to replenish a bit of the population.
The ruling class are immortal, magical beings that were the result of generations of gods and demigods breeding with humans called Valyrians. (Was originally a vampire AU!! but i needed the divinity element to be huge and didn't want to incorrectly execute fae or vampire rules so hence odd immortal species is born. I couldnt come up with a good original name even though I tried)
The realm operates under both political and unseen divine systems.
Dragonstone remains the seat of power instead of Kings Landing. I fucking hate the Red Keep for some reason I need them to be able to get to their dragons the same way I can get to my car in the driveway. They also have magical infrastructure so like, terraforming. The Red Keep still exists, but Kings Landing crawls with humans and they use it for dealings with mortals. They're still blood magickers and tyrants who stole lands and enslaved people. The immortal/mortal divide plays a big role in unrest.
[Core Power Structure]:
The Crown → External authority, rule of the realm.
The Hand → Strategy, governance, internal control.
The Council → Specialized power (coins, ships, whispers, etc.)
Aeleanora's Role → Intermediary authority (petitions, envoys, internal disputes)
**This becomes important very quickly in the story.
[Religion & the Divine]:
The Seven are real, but they are not as mortals understand them. They operate within the divine realms, separated from the realm of men by the Veil.
Most religious knowledge in this AU consists of incomplete and distorted versions of ancient history. The Faith remembers the gods through softened symbols, moral lessons, and thousands of years of mistranslation. The beings behind those symbols are older, stranger, and far less benevolent.
The Seven, very briefly:
The Father governs judgement, law, lineage, and the keeping of the dead. He is less a kindly patriarch than the divine principle that everything must possess a proper place.
The Mother governs life, healing, creation, and continuance. She is not simply maternal mercy. Life can be generous, possessive, ravenous, and willing to preserve itself at any cost.
The Maiden governs love, beauty, sex, desire, and obsession. Mortal doctrine remembers innocence because mortals found the truth considerably less comfortable.
The Crone governs fate, foresight, consequence, and the paths by which one moment becomes another. She carries a lantern because someone must see where every road ends.
The Warrior governs courage, conquest, violence, and conflict. He represents both the strength that defends civilization and the appetite that repeatedly destroys it.
The Smith governs creation, craftsmanship, structure, and transformation. He gives form to possibility, though even the gods cannot always control what becomes of the things they make.
The Stranger governs death, endings, passage, and the unknown. The Faith depicts the Stranger without a face because there are some truths even worshippers know better than to look upon directly.
These descriptions are still only mortal approximations. The Seven are not neatly divided into good and evil, nor are they distant embodiments of virtue. They are coded more like the gods of Greek mythology: cruel, fickle, petty, passionate, extreme, and capable of loving something so fiercely that entire realms suffer for it.
Some divine forces still influence the mortal world directly, and the boundary between gods and mortals is…unstable.
Different gods once ruled the creatures and peoples of different lands, but what if the Seven Who Are One were themselves responsible for a war among the gods that ended in the Doom of Valyria? What if it was not merely their followers who carried the Faith into Westeros? What if the Seven Heavens and Seven Hells were created so they could govern the divine, the living, and the dead?
[The Order of the Veiled Hand]: A hidden order within the Faith. Lead by the Lady Mysaria, Master of Whispers. (aka AU in which I give the Targs an intelligence agency like B613 from Scandal and Mysaria is Command).
Publicly: Silent sisters, Septas, Scullery maids, Ladies maids, Whores, handmaids, Ladies, governesses. You would never, ever know.
Privately: assassins, spies, thieves; huntresses and keepers of dangerous knowledge.
They serve as a covert extension of both religion and state power. Think like female version of the Faceless Men and Sorrowful Men but ran in Westeros by The Crown. Immortality of the ruling houses lessen the gap between Gods, Targaryens, and Men. Ruling the realm through secrets where the dragons are the decoy.
[Tone & Themes]:
Political control vs. personal autonomy.
Power as structure, not spectacle.
Grief, restraint, and inherited responsibility.
Divine systems operating beneath mortal ones.
The Gods are coded like Greek Mythology, they're cruel, fickle, petty, extreme.
Women as controlled power, and what happens when that control shifts.
OC/AU CHARACTER GUIDE
❥Princess Aeleanora Targaryen "The Dragonheart" (OFC)
*Daughter of: Queen Aemma Targaryen [deceased]; King Viserys I Targaryen [deceased].
*Sister of: King Jacaerys Targaryen.
Role: Princess of Dragonstone, Heir to the iron throne, Emerging political intermediary, Cosmic anomaly.
Rider Of: Dreamfyre. She also has a cradle egg that has not hatched.
Weilder Of: Aeleanora's abilities are unknown to the public. Many presume her abilities are intangible, nothing of consequence.
Notable Traits: Aeleanora is a winter-bright blade left in sunlight, but when she goes cold, she does so completely, leaving nothing behind that resembles warmth.
Physical Description: Aeleanora’s beauty is too deliberate and too precise to be entirely natural, even here. All sharp lines and soft contradictions, with feline eyes and a mouth made to unmake restraint. Pale hair falls in long, silken waves, her silver-blue gaze heavy-lidded and quietly knowing. Her skin catches light too easily, holding it a fraction too long, as though it does not pass through her the way it should. She moves with a predator’s grace, all control and intent, as if nothing around her happens without her allowing it.
❥Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen (AKA: The Hammer)
Son Of: King Daeron II Targaryen [Deceased]; and Queen Myriah Martell [Deceased].
Brother Of: King Viserys Targaryen [Deceased]; Prince Aerys Targaryen; Prince Rhaegal Targaryen; Prince Maekar Targaryen.
Husband of: Lady Jena Dondarrion.
Father of: Prince Valarr Targaryen; Prince Matarys Targaryen.
Role: Hand of the King.
Rider of: Vermithor "The Bronze Fury"
Weilder Of: Storm.
Notable Traits: Disciplined; Politically intelligent; Dryly affectionate; Deeply dutiful; Emotionally self-denying; Stabilizing presence; Capable of immense tenderness buried under control; Frightening when he finally chooses selfishness. He does not break easily, but when he does, it is not quietly.
Biography:
King Daeron II Targaryen and Queen Myriah Martell always wished that their second son, Baelor, had been born first. Their firstborn, Viserys, would be more content traveling the realm and poring over his Old Valyrian and Westerosi histories. Baelor understood duty, responsibility, discipline, and restraint far more than Viserys ever could.
It was because of this that he never even thought of pushing his brother to abdicate; instead, he pushed his brother to be a better King. Why? Because someone believed that if the two worked together, Westeros would reach new heights that Old Valryia ever could, even when the gods lived among them.
That someone was right. As his brother's Hand and Heir, Baelor had singlehandedly brought Westeros to its height as a civilization, with 300 years passing since the last hint of conflict (i.e, an uprising that resulted in the loss of King Daeron and the ascencion of Viserys as king). However, as the years passed, his shoulders became heavier and heavier with the weight of expectation. He soon realized that while he excelled at ruling, he hated the external pressure that came along with it. The hand pin he wore on his shoulder weighed nothing compared to the weight of the crown looming over his head, should anything happen to his brother. When the opportunity came to abdicate under the guise of love and honor, he made a selfish decision for the first time in his immortal life.
Physical Description: Canon - Bertie Carvel as Baelor Targaryen in AKOTSK.
❥King Jacaerys Targaryen "The Young King" (OC)
Son Of: Queen Aemma Targaryen [deceased]; King Viserys I Targaryen [deceased]
*Brother Of: Princess Aeleanora Targaryen.
Husband Of: Queen Laena Velaryon.
Role: King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm.
Rider Of: Silverwing "The Lady of the Sky"
Weilder Of: Ice
Notable Traits: He is a whimsical king in the Old Valyrian sense: artistic, thoughtful, dreamy, prone to beauty, ideas, and symbols. But beneath that softness lies the potential for genuine strength. He was crowned too young and burdened too early, and much of his early reign is defined not by a lack of ability but by the simple fact that he has not yet lived long enough to grow into his immense potential.
Biography:
His uncle, Prince Baelor, passed his claim to the Iron Throne to Jacaerys after the birth of Princess Aeleanora. Jacaerys was crowned the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms shortly after his parents were killed after his 16th nameday. The youngest king to ever sit the throne.
Jacaerys swore an oath to love and protect his younger sister in the wake of the loss of their parents. He named her the heir apparent to the Iron Throne right before her 9th nameday.
With the help of the remainder of his parents' inner circle (especially his uncle), The Young King quickly rose to the occasion in filling his father's shoes, soon to outgrow them.
For reasons even Baelor does not fully understand, his uncle finds shaping Jacaerys into a king far more rewarding than propping up his elder brother ever was. Viserys had to be carried; Jacaerys can be taught. He wants to be worthy and has what it takes to do so. To his uncle, that makes him easier to love and far more painful to watch struggle.
Physical Description: I’ve always had such a thing for Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen in GOT like hes SUCH a cutie so this is what I imagine Jacaerys looking like. Also he has violet eyes.
❥Princess Rhaenys Targaryen
Daughter Of: Lady Jocelyn Baratheon [Deceased]; Prince Aemon Targaryen [Deceased].
Wife Of: Lord Corlys Velaryon.
Mother Of: Leanor Velaryon; Queen Laena Velaryon.
Role: Matriarch of House Targaryen.
Rider Of: Meleys "The Red Queen"
Weilder Of: A form of spatial manipulation often mistaken for movement. Rhaenys does not simply cross distance, she folds it. To those who witness it, she appears to vanish and reappear in a single breath, as though space has yieled to her will.
Notable Traits: Composed, calculating, and immovable. Rhaenys does not raise her voice to command or attention. Where others rule through presence, she rules through inevitability.
Biography: Rhaenys has outlived kings, wars, and expectations. She understands power as something to endure. In a court that bends toward spectacle and volatility, she remains constant in watching, measuring, and ensuring the survival of her bloodline at any cost.
Physical Description: Canon (book/tv mashup) - Eve Best as Rhaenys Targaryen in HOTD but with the ASOIAF dark hair and violet eyes.
❥Queen Laena Velaryon
Daughter of: Lord Corlys Velaryon; Princess Rhaenys Targaryen.
Wife of: King Jacaerys Targaryen.
Role: Queen of the Seven Kingdoms; emotional and social counterbalance to the Crown.
Rider of: Vhagar
Wielder of: Water.
Notable Traits: Effortless, perceptive, and dangerously intuitive. Laena understands people in ways that cannot be taught. What they want, what they hide, and what they refuse to name. She moves through the world as though it belongs to her, and more often than not, it does.
Function in Story: Laena acts as both mirror and catalyst to Aeleanora. Where Aeleanora is controlled, Laena is instinctual. Where Aeleanora resists desire, Laena recognizes it immediately.
Physical Description: Canon - Nanna Blondell as Laena Velaryon in HOTD (with the violet eyes bc lets match with mama).
❥Lady Mysaria "The White Worm"
Daughter Of: Bastard born to a Valyrian lord and sold in a land she didn't get a chance to learn the name of before she was sold off to the slave trade.
Role: Master of Whispers; Leader of the Order of the Veiled Hand.
Weilder Of: Cerebromancy. Mysaria can see into anyone's mind, and can rearrange it accordingly, to her will.
Notable Traits: Omniscient in practice, if not in truth. Mysaria does not need to be seen to exert control. She exists in information, in secrets, in the unseen currents of power. Nothing moves in the realm without her knowing why.
Function: The bridge between divine knowledge and mortal manipulation.
Biography:
At 20 years old, Mysaria was bought in Essos by a Westerosi lord who wanted her company on his sail home. She ventured into his mind one night and found that him and his house were planning an attack in protest of a new tax allowed by the crown for houses that hold important crossings.
When she arrived in Westeros, she knew of nothing, and did not even speak the common tongue, but she remembered venturing into the mind of her madame one night when she was a teen and learned the truth of the Silent Sisters. She was instantly enamored by them. When the lord who bought her brought her back to Westeros was asleep one night, she slipped out of the keep and escaped with the help of a stable boy and scullery maid that she had befriended when they helped her learn some words in the common tongue.
After weeks and weeks of travel by foot and slipping into the minds of others to compel them to do her bidding, she made it to the citadel and sought out the Silent Sisters and presented herself as a widow. After years of working as handmaiden of death, she wondered if what she saw in the mind of her madame was only a fever dream or a story the woman had made up.
Throughout this time, she tried to slip into the minds of her fellow sisters and her elders, but for the first time in her life she couldn't breach their mental barriers. Out of frustrating, she tried slamming into the mind of one of her elders after she was punished for something Mysaria couldn't bring herself to care about. Mysaria thought the elder was going to dispose of her, but instead, she was offered the blood oath and initiated into the secret order of Silent Sisters, where she met Princess Seraphyra.
They quickly became eachothers dearest friends, and upon their initiation and completion of their training, Sera brought Mysaria back to court with her and told her lord father, King Daeron, about Mysarias telepathic nature. King Daeron agreed that she was too powerful to pass over when she showed him what she could do. Mysaria was taken under the wing of King Daeron's Master of Whispers and trained to serve him and the king.
After the death of the Master of Whispers, who served King Daeron's grandfather, his father, and then King Daeron, Mysaria was initiated as King Daeron's new Master of Whispers towards the end of his reign. At this point, Mysaria was running a world wide network of whores, spies, assassins, urchins, merchants, servants, etc.; a major information market that some of the histories argue was where the true power of the Targaryen dynasty lay.
Lady Mysaria feels personally that she now owes her life both to the Silent Sisters and to Seraphyra, and to the family that took her in and treated her like she was a part of it. She pays this debt through her service to King Jacaerys and her love for her dear friend Sera by proxy of her daughter.
Physical Description: Canon - Sonoya Mizuno as Mysaria in HOTD
❥King Viserys I Targaryen [deceased] - (OOC-ish)
Son of: King Daeron II Targaryen [deceased]; Queen Myriah Martell [deceased].
Brother Of: Prince Baelor Targaryen; Prince Aerys I Targaryen; Prince Rhaegal Targaryen; Maekar I Targaryen.
Husband Of: Queen Aemma Targaryen [deceased].
*Father Of: King Jacaerys Targaryen; *Princess Aeleanora Targaryen.
Rider Of: Meraxes [Deceased].
Weilder Of: Wind.
Biography:
Viserys never wanted to be king. He would, however, go down as one of the greatest Kings in history due to the help of his beloved Hand and younger brother, Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen.
He and his lady wife Aemma died dragon riders' deaths in a battle in Essos, where divine influence put their daughter's identity and life at risk.
❥Queen Aemma Targaryen [deceased] - (OOC-ish)
Daughter of: Daella Targaryen [deceased]; Rodrick Arryn [deceased]. I'm making it so royal children are named for the royal house instead of taking the fathers name.
Mother Of: King Jacaerys Targaryen; *Princess Aeleanora Targaryen.
Rider Of: Dreamfyre
Weilder Of: Dreamwalker. She did not have Dragon Dreams, but she could manipulate the dream realm and was a huge part of the Targaryens' coming out on top in the rebellion. Despite losing many dragons, the information she plucked from the heads of lord commanders while she slept was what ultimately won them the war, sending the realm into an era of peace.
Biography:
At the time of her birth, there was a human uprising that led to her parents sequestering themselves in the Vale. Shortly after the birth of her and her twin sister, the Vale was stormed by rebels, which resulted in the death of their parents. The pair of Targaryen princesses, twin sisters, were brought safely back to Dragonstone, where King Daeron and Myriah Martell raised them like they were their very own daughters.
Died a dragon rider's death with her Lord Husband, Viserys, and Meraxes, in a battle that occured 9 years before the beginning of the story. The realm thanks The Seven. for blessing her with an immortal heir and an immortal spare before her death.
She and her husband raised her neice, Aeleanora Targaryen, as their beloved daughter and second child; however, no one outside of their inner circle knows this.
By the time the babe was born, the story had already prepared itself for the realm: Queen Aemma had suffered a difficult confinement, but both mother and child survived. No one looked twice. A royal pregnancy hidden behind closed doors was ordinary, but a god-born child hidden in the cradle of a queen was not, which is precisely why the deception worked.
It helped that Aeleanora was born with eyes that could easily be read as kin to Aemma's Arryn coloring, especially by those who saw only what they expected to see. It also helped that, in childhood, she appeared to possess no remarkable power beyond a princess's rank, a dragon's favor, and the ordinary strangeness of the blood of Old Valryia. Hidden in plain sight, she became invisible in an impenetrable fortress
Queen Aemma discovered that divine influence put her daughter at risk when she was manipulating the dream realm, causing her death shortly after her and her husband neutralized the threat in ambush disguised as a meeting of the minds.
Wife Of: Seraphyra has never been married, according to public knowledge…
Mother Of: Princess Aeleanora Targaryen.
Rider Of: Balerion, The Black Dread [presumed deceased]
Weilder Of: Healing magic. One of the most powerful the world has ever seen.
Role: Haunting the narrative.
Biography: Seraphyra is assumed to be deceased by the realm. During the reign of King Daeron II, the legends say she dismounted The Black Dread during an old uprising to heal her favorite cousin, Prince Baelor, who was crushed under his own mount when the dragon was struck out of the air by a scorpion. Baelor and his dragon both should've died that day, but Seraphyra was able to bring them both back at the cost of her own life. So filled with rage and grief, Balerion brought Seraphyra's body back to his homeland, Valyria, to grieve. No one has heard his song in the wind or seen his giant shadow across the horizon since.
Seraphyra does not leave the story when she disappears from it. She lingers in every chamber she once brightened, every grief she left behind, and every person forced to go on loving a woman memory has made even more dangerous than life did.
𝐓𝐎𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐘 2026 : resources are intended for decorative use on tumblr and must be credited to the creator when used. unauthorized claims of ownership are not permitted. for both light and dark mode use.
"I will not have any beast harmed" Helaena's little smile at Alicent after she says this, as if saying look, I did it, I made an order as Queen, are you proud of me. She's too good, too pure
Working in social services and allied health as an early-career professional is so miserable and isolating. I was on this high of finishing all of my degrees, but now I'm like back at the bottom again, working 80 hour weeks, a few hours outside my hometown.
It's so fucking hard to meet people outside of work when I'm constantly fucking there!!!!!! Can't even find anything to join bc I'm on the clock 7A-7P 6 days a week, and everything is closed or I don't have the energy to go do anything. Everything is also so expensive so most of the time I just end up working a 7th day.
It's even worse bc I have one of those jobs where you get a decent amount of free time on the clock, but the actual job gives you no time for free time bc of staff ratio requirements so when I try to take time off I just get mandated or asked to cover shifts that are so insanely not in my job description and stuff they're refusing to let me set aside time to properly be trained for.
Sometimes at work I just shop through Etsy witch hexes and consider buying them or fantasize about a Trial of Seven with sr lvl mgmt.
Also for some reason my stockholm syndrome to my mentor is telling me I miss her when she literally made me miserable half the time ??
genuine writers getting wrongly accused of using ai because of witch hunt and proper grammar/structure in their works must be what being a woman in the 1600s who is wrongly accused of being a witch because she can read and is intelligent feels like
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Sneak up on you, really quiet Whisper, "Am I what your heart desires?"
- Lana Del Rey, Serial Killer
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❤️🔥Pairing: Aerion Targaryen x Fem!Cousin!Reader
[Rhaegal's daughter; no mention of physical features/characteristics]
❤️🔥ONE SHOT || WC: 5.8K
❤️🔥Summary: You and Aerion have spent years provoking each other without crossing the final line. When your families decide to marry you elsewhere, jealousy finally strips the pretense away.
❤️🔥Warnings: Explicit sexual content - unprotected PinV, fingering, nipple play, biting, kind of blood play if you squint and cover your ears, internal ejaculation, restraint; possessiveness and jealousy, Canon-typical incest; Canon-typical misogyny (a little ashamed of myself for this one but I'll live); Bruising; Threats of violence;
NSFW. 18+ only. Minors do not interact.
The Red Keep had always felt like a handsome trap. Its towers rose above the city in red stone and gilded glass, splendid enough to make captivity resemble privilege. Everywhere you looked, dragons crawled across carved doors, coiled around pillars, or spread their wings through tapestries darkened by smoke, yet every passage ended before a guarded chamber where some older man waited to decide what the blood of the dragon required of you. The castle celebrated conquest on every wall while quietly measuring you for surrender.
Your grandsire had summoned your father and Uncle Maekar to King’s Landing shortly after you and Aerion reached eighteen. No one had written the purpose plainly. Rhaegel had spent most of the journey insisting that the king merely wished to see his family, while refusing to meet your eyes whenever marriage was mentioned. By the third day you had exhausted every argument against the visit, including a fever poorly feigned with bathwater and an elaborate claim that the jolting wheelhouse had permanently damaged your womb. Your father had laughed at that one. He had stopped laughing when you promised to be the most terrible wife in the realm.
Now you stood in the narrow gallery outside the king’s solar with one hand wrapped around the cold stone of the window ledge. The door had been left open scarcely the width of two fingers. It was enough.
“The girl needs steadying,” Maekar said. “A Reach match would serve the crown.”
Your father made the weary sound he used whenever someone required him to defend you. “She has the blood. Her temperament is another matter.”
You lowered your eyes to the pale marks your nails had left in the stone dust. Rhaegel had once called that temperament charming when you emptied a flagon of hippocras over Lord Butterwell’s son for putting his hand on your knee. It had become less charming now that men wanted to marry it.
A Tyrell was mentioned. You missed the name because your pulse had begun beating too loudly in your ears. They spoke afterward of estates, loyalties, and the advantage of placing you somewhere fertile and far from court. No one asked whether you liked the Reach. No one mentioned that its endless green fields made you feel as though the world had been flattened for want of imagination.
Then Maekar began discussing Aerion. You leaned nearer before pride could stop you. The proposed girl was a Baratheon cousin, sixteen years old, well-mannered and handsome, with the proper sort of stormlander blood. Maekar said she possessed good sense. The king said Aerion required a wife who would neither provoke nor indulge him.
You nearly laughed. Aerion could turn breakfast into a declaration of war if a servant brought him the wrong spoon. A sensible wife would survive him for half a year before developing a permanent pain behind one eye. The thought should have amused you more than it did.
You had known Aerion all your life, though knowing him had never made him easier to bear. At nine, he had thrown your favorite ivory comb into a brazier because you said his new cloak made him resemble a Lysene pillow merchant. At eleven, you broke his nose with a practice shield. At fourteen, he challenged a squire for laughing when you stumbled during a dance and afterward claimed the boy had insulted House Targaryen. You had both understood the lie. Neither of you had spoken of it.
The trouble had worsened during the past year. Aerion began noticing when you wore your hair differently. You began recognizing his footfall outside a room before he entered. At feasts, you could feel the moment his attention found you, usually when another man had drawn too close. Aerion would approach the two of you and watch from a few paces away until the young lord forgot what he had been saying or discovered some pressing reason to stand elsewhere.
Three months earlier, he had cornered you in the library after seeing Symon fasten your cloak beneath the stable arch. Aerion asked whether the stableboy had acquired ambitions above his station. You asked why he cared. He stood so close that the brass clasp of his doublet pressed into your breast and told you that he disliked seeing fine things handled by servants. You had slapped him, and he had not wiped the smile from his face for the rest of the day.
Symon had been waiting in an empty storeroom that night. You let him push your skirts up and tried to summon the same furious heat Aerion had left under your skin. Symon was handsome, willing, and careful whenever you demanded it. He also apologized when he pulled your hair too hard. Aerion would have pulled harder. The memory made you close your eyes. Inside the solar, a chair scraped violently across the floor. “I will not marry some thunder-faced little simpleton because you have tired of arguing with me,” Aerion said.
Maekar answered in the iron voice that had made grown knights reconsider their courage. “You will do as your house requires.”
Then the door flew open. Aerion emerged with one hand still curled as though it belonged around the hilt of a sword. His silver-gold hair was slightly disheveled, and a red mark ran beneath the collar of his doublet where he had dragged one impatient finger against his throat. He took three strides before seeing you beside the window. His gaze dropped briefly to your hand upon the ledge, then moved to the narrow opening in the solar door. “Eavesdropping?”
You didn’t retreat. “Hard to ignore when they’re deciding our futures like a couple of horses. Grandsire suggested a Tyrell for me.” You let your gaze rake over him slowly, and your mouth spread into a wicked smile. “And for you some sweet stormlander with soft hands and softer opinions. I wager she’ll smile prettily and thank you for every clumsy thrust as though you have bestowed a royal favor.”
His nostrils flared once, and his attention fell to your mouth before returning to your eyes. Aerion stopped a hand’s breadth away. He had always understood distance as another thing rules required of lesser men. He stepped closer, backing you toward the wall without touching you. “Jealous, cousin?”
You could smell the wine he had drunk inside the solar and the faint leather scent of the gloves tucked through his belt. A pale scar cut through one eyebrow, your work from the year he locked your cat in a wardrobe. You knew his face too well. You had spent half your life searching it for signs that you affected him and the other half punishing him whenever you found them. “Of her?” you asked. “She will not survive you long enough to inspire jealousy.”
“Afraid she might tame me?”
You laughed, sharp and bitter. “Tame you? She won’t even spark you. You’ll take her from behind in the dark, eyes closed, pretending it’s my cunt you’re buried in just to finish the job.” You should have stopped. The solar door remained ajar behind him. Maekar could emerge at any moment. A pair of guards stood at the turn of the corridor, near enough that one raised voice would bring them running. Instead, you leaned close enough for your breath to touch his mouth. “Will you whisper my name when you spill into your sweet lady wife? Or will you be too ashamed to admit the truth? That no one else will ever burn hot enough for you?”
Aerion’s hand struck the wall beside your head. The sound cracked through the gallery, and the guards at the turn looked toward you. You knew that blow. At twelve, he had split his knuckles against a stable post after you called him Maekar’s little shadow. Aerion had always preferred bruising his own hand to admitting you had wounded his pride.
“And your Tyrell?” Aerion countered, voice dropping to a dangerous purr. His body sheltered you from their view as he bent nearer. Your back met the stone. You could feel its cold through your gown and Aerion’s heat before you, though he had yet to lay one finger upon you. “He will fumble between your thighs. You’ll lie there counting the stones in the ceiling while he grunts and spends too soon. Will you think of me then?” His free hand ghosted down your side, not quite touching, but close enough to raise gooseflesh. “Or will you wait until your hand is between your thighs because he couldn’t finish you? Imagine that it is my cock you pulse around and my seed dripping down your legs afterward?”
“He may prove more interesting than you expect.”
“He will prove dead if he disappoints me.”
A laugh escaped you before you could smother it. “You mean if he satisfies me.”
Aerion’s eyes dropped again. This time they remained on your mouth. The gallery, the guards, and the voices inside the solar all seemed suddenly too close. You remembered his hand at fourteen, bloodied from striking the squire who had laughed at you. You remembered the library, the brass clasp digging into your breast, and the certainty with which he called you a fine thing. You remembered Symon afterward, apologizing into your hair while you stared at the storeroom wall and imagined a crueller mouth.
His thumb touched the corner of your lower lip. “Tell me you would not think of me,” he said.
A rush of heat flooded your lower belly, and you felt your nipples tighten against the fabric of your gown. You tilted your head, rising to the challenge. “Every time, my Prince. And I’ll come harder thinking of you than he could ever make me.”
The final word had scarcely left your mouth when a strangled sound caught in Aerion’s throat. His thumb pressed harder against your lower lip, slipping between them when you drew breath. You closed your mouth around the tip without looking away. That ended whatever remained of his restraint. He kissed you. His mouth caught yours so abruptly that your teeth knocked together. One of you made a low, startled sound, and you could not have said which. He caught the back of your neck and turned your face where he wanted it, kissing you with all the furious concentration he once brought to beating you in the practice yard. When you pulled away, he bit your lower lip until blood welled. He groaned and drew your wounded lip into his mouth, his tongue passing over the red bead before he forced his thigh between your legs.
Aerion lifted his head just far enough to inspect the blood on your mouth. His thumb pressed once against the small split in your lip, and the satisfaction in his face told you he had spent years wondering what mark he might leave there. “Pretty,” he said, smearing the blood across your lip with his thumb. “You should have let me do that years ago.”
His forehead settled against yours. The rigid length pressed against your hip answered the question you had carried for years: his body betrayed him every bit as readily as his temper. The open door of the king’s solar remained only a few yards away. Maekar’s voice carried from within, lower now, while a guard’s mail whispered at the bend in the gallery. “Chambers,” he rasped against your swollen mouth, barely pulling back. You opened your mouth to mock the command. “Now. Before I take you against this wall and let my father find the answer to his marriage problem himself.”
You should have told him that sounded remarkably like another problem. Instead, you caught his wrist and pulled him down the gallery. He knew the shortest route. Aerion had spent half his childhood finding passages where he was forbidden and the other half showing them to you only after exacting some humiliating price. At the first turn, where a faded tapestry concealed the old stair to Maegor’s Holdfast, he dragged you behind the hanging and kissed you until the tapestry’s metal clasps dug into your spine. His hand closed over your breast through your gown. You palmed him through his breeches and felt his whole body tense.
Aerion caught your wrist, though he made no attempt to pull your hand away. “Did you touch him like this?”
The question pleased you enough to be careless. “Symon never required so much encouragement.”
His fingers tightened. “That was not what I asked.”
“No,” you whispered, stroking him through the cloth while his jaw hardened. “You asked whether I thought of you while I did it.”
Aerion’s mouth found yours again before you could tell him the answer. Footsteps approached the stair. You both fell silent, pressed together behind the tapestry while two serving girls passed on the other side. One complained about carrying fresh sheets to Prince Aerion’s chambers. The other laughed and asked whether the prince ever slept long enough to soil them. You felt Aerion’s smirk against your temple. You buried your laugh against his collar. The absurdity of it made the moment more dangerous. His breath struck warm beneath your ear, and for one suspended instant you were fourteen again, hiding with him inside a linen press after stealing Maekar’s signet. His hand had covered your mouth then. You had bitten him hard enough to leave a crescent scar at the base of his thumb. The same thumb now traced your swollen lip.
When the girls had gone, Aerion seized your hand and pulled you onward. He stopped again beneath the narrow arch outside the royal sept. You had once hidden there during a feast, both of you drunk on stolen summerwine, while he wagered that he could make you blush. He had failed then. He did not fail now. He pinned your wrists above your head and pressed himself against you until your knees weakened. The old stones chilled your knuckles. His mouth moved over the place beneath your jaw that Symon had never found without being guided.
You hated that Aerion discovered it immediately. You hated more that he felt the shiver run through you and paused there, his lips resting against your pulse. “You remember where,” you breathed.
“I remember where you touched whenever you wanted me to look.”
The answer caught you harder than his mouth had. At feasts, during lessons, across crowded galleries, you had raised your fingers to that same place without knowing he had kept count. “You watched me that closely?”
Aerion lifted his head. “You have known the answer to that for years.”
You could still feel the admission lodged beneath your ribs when he dragged you from the arch and down the remaining passage. He had noticed the gesture, understood it, and watched often enough to remember. Aerion drove the bolt home behind you. The iron struck its bracket with a finality that silenced the distant castle. Here were the rooms Maekar had given him upon his arrival: the black-and-red hangings, the carved dragon consuming its own tail above the hearth.
He pushed you against the wall again. His mouth claimed yours once more as his hands yanked at laces and fabric. Clothes came away in impatient pulls. He tore at the laces of your gown rather than untying them. When your gown loosened around you, he stripped it from your shoulders with impatient jerks, catching the sleeve at your wrist and swearing when the close tailoring resisted him. You laughed and told him the Tyrell might have more respect for the workmanship. Aerion yanked hard enough to send three pearl buttons scattering across the rushes.
“Then he may marry the gown.”
You turned in his arms and pulled his doublet open. One clasp caught in his undershirt. He slapped your hand away, missed the clasp himself, and cursed again. “You have been imagining this for years,” you said, “yet made no allowance for buttons?”
“I imagined you less clothed.”
“You lack foresight.”
“I had hoped you might eventually learn obedience.”
“You have wasted your life.”
Aerion showed you his teeth, equal parts insulted and entertained, then seized the hem of his doublet with both hands. He pulled the doublet over his head and nearly caught one sleeve around his elbow. You laughed again, and Aerion pushed you backward onto the bed with enough force to bounce you against the feather mattress. That ungainly moment, his hair tangled and his abandoned doublet half inside out upon the floor, made him more dangerous than all his polished threats.
Prince Aerion had disappeared with his court clothes. The boy who had followed you through half the castle remained, furious that you had laughed at him and thrilled that you dared. He came down over you and caught one breast in his hand. His palm cupped the soft weight while his thumb worried the tightened nipple until your smile faltered. Aerion watched your face as he lowered his mouth.
His tongue circled the tender peak, his teeth catching beneath it before he drew it deep and bit. Pleasure lanced through you fast enough to make your back lift from the mattress. You twisted your fingers into his silver-gold hair and held him there. When he released you, the damp point of his tongue followed the path of his hand down your stomach. He paused beside your navel and pressed an open-mouthed kiss there, looking up at you before his fingers reached the slick mess between your thighs.
He gathered your wetness and pushed two fingers inside you without warning, curling them deep. You had imagined this too many times: in the library after he trapped you against a shelf, beneath the royal table while his boot pressed against yours, in Symon’s arms while staring at a patch of damp mortar. Imagination had made Aerion flawless and theatrical. The real man trembled against you. A lock of hair stuck to the corner of his mouth. His forearm shook where he held his weight.
“Look how wet you are for me,” he taunted, voice rough with satisfaction as he pumped them slowly. “You’re dripping, princess. Soaking my hand, you desperate little thing.” He crooked his fingers again, stroking that spot that made your hips jerk.
“They want to give a dragon to a gardener. I can already hear that prating, silk-clad Tyrell boy whispering his maidenly nonsense in your ear — ‘O-oh, my lady, my sacred flower, pray let me kiss your hand gently,’” Aerion continued, his voice going up a note. He laughed and brought the heel of his palm to your clit. “Will his sniveling fumbling weary you to tears? Will you have to bite your tongue to keep from laughing aloud at how bloodless and feeble he is, while you remember how a real dragon made you writhe?”
You moaned despite yourself, clenching around his fingers as he kept up the relentless rhythm. The taunting only made you wetter. “Then fuck me like you mean it, Brightflame,” you gasped, rolling your hips to take his fingers deeper, “or are you all talk?”
He withdrew his fingers, leaving your body clenching after them. He pushed your thighs wider and sank into you in one slow thrust. He was thicker than Symon, filling you until your toes curled against the bedding and your fingers dug into his shoulders. This was exactly how you had always imagined Aerion would feel, overwhelming and right. He bottomed out and stayed there, breathing hard against your neck, letting you both feel it.
You wrapped your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back as he began to move. He gave you deep, rolling thrusts that dragged against every inch of the cunt that had been aching for this. Your bodies found their rhythm with humiliating ease. Each wet meeting made those other nights feel thinner and more foolish, evenings spent using the wrong man because the right one had never asked.
“Tell me you’ll still feel me for days,” he muttered against your ear. His hips snapped forward in a sharper thrust that stole the breath you had meant to answer with. “Tell me every time he touches you, you’ll remember how much better this feels.”
You dug your nails into his back and met his next thrust. “Only if you swear you’ll close your eyes with her and see me instead.” Your mouth brushed his ear. “That you’ll hate how tame and bloodless she feels compared to this.”
You felt the muscles at his back tighten beneath your hands. He said nothing, though his next thrust struck deeper. He kept the pace steady as he lowered his mouth to your breasts again. He drew one tightened nipple into his mouth and moved to the other, tongue laving the sensitive peaks before grazing them with his teeth. The pressure of him inside you and the wet pull of his mouth proved too much together. You arched from the bed, fingers tangling tight in his hair. He switched sides again, sucking harder as if he could draw more desperate sounds from you with every pull of his mouth.
He lifted his head, dragging the back of one wrist across his wet mouth without taking his eyes from you. “Such a perfect little flame for me. Look how well you take me.” His voice was low, almost reverent, but the next words came out rough and taunting. “Your cunt is already pulling me deeper as if it knows exactly who you belong to.”
You clenched hard around him as your breath caught. The smile that he gave you decided your next move. You planted both hands against his chest and used his next thrust to roll him beneath you. Surprise crossed his face for scarcely a heartbeat before you straddled his hips, one palm braced against his chest while the other reached between you. You gripped his cock, still slick from you, and sank down onto him in one smooth, steady motion, taking him to the hilt.
A low sound slipped from you as you settled. Silver hair fell around your face, shutting out the chamber until only Aerion remained beneath you, flushed and staring as you caught your lower lip between your teeth to keep from giving him the sound he wanted. “Perhaps you should shut your fucking mouth,” you said, “and let me remind you who this cock belongs to.”
You started to move. At first, you gave him slow, deliberate rolls of your hips as you adjusted to the new angle, taking him deeper with every downward press. When his hands reached for you, you rose almost completely before sinking down again, hard enough to drag a rough breath from him. Your palms flattened against his chest. Your nails left pale crescents in his skin as the rhythm quickened.
When Aerion caught your hips, you knocked his hands aside and pinned his wrists above his head. You had held him this way once before, in the practice yard with his nose bleeding beneath you and half the household shouting for one of you to yield. Aerion remembered. You saw it in the sudden flash of his teeth. You leaned forward until your hair brushed his cheek and kept moving exactly as you had imagined on all those nights when imagining him was the nearest you could come.
Aerion strained beneath your grip, his shoulders lifting from the mattress as though he meant to throw you off by force. “Enjoy your little victory,” he said, each word roughened by the effort of remaining still. His gaze dropped to where your bodies joined and returned to your face with a promise that made your pulse leap. “You will pay for every moment of it when I put you beneath me again.”
You drove the pace faster, determined to wipe the amusement from his face. Your careful rhythm soon began to fray. Your knee slipped against the coverlet. Your breaths broke against his mouth, and loose strands of hair clung to your damp neck and lips. Each hurried descent filled the chamber with another slick sound, loud enough that the servants in the outer corridor would have no difficulty guessing how Prince Aerion occupied himself behind his bolted door.
“You make a lovely threat from down there,” you said, though the words emerged breathless and uneven. You tightened your fingers around his wrists and forced yourself through another hard roll of your hips. “Perhaps I shall keep you here until you learn whose pleasure matters more.”
Aerion’s eyes flashed, and he tore his wrists from your grasp, sitting upright in one violent motion. His arm locked around your waist before you could retreat, hauling you tight against his chest, while his other hand seized your hip and held you exactly where he wanted you. Then he drove up beneath you. Your head fell back. A strangled cry escaped before you could bite it down. Aerion did it again, watching your lips part, then adjusted his grip and struck the same place a third time. Each upward thrust came harder than the last until your taunts deserted you and your hands clung to his shoulders.
You felt his smile curve against your throat as he tested the angle again. When your nails bit sharply into his shoulder, he caught your chin between his thumb and forefinger and drove up into the same place, watching your mouth fall open. “Look at you,” he groaned, “made for a dragon.”
You dragged in enough air to recover some fragment of yourself. Your nails sank into the back of his neck, and you clenched deliberately around him, earning a broken hitch of breath that warmed your skin. A small, wicked laugh escaped you. “Will your sweet wife know how to ride you so?” Aerion’s hand tightened on your hip. “Will she know what that sound means?” you continued, grinding down against him despite the tremor running through your thighs. “Perhaps your little Baratheon maiden will lie very still and blush while you labor over her. Strong storm blood, they will say, while she stares at the canopy and wonders why her husband shuts his eyes whenever he spends.”
Aerion stopped smiling. His next thrust jarred you against his chest. The one after it came before you had recovered, driven by the image you had forced upon him. His breathing matched yours now, ragged and ill-timed, and the rhythm he had imposed began to break. Aerion caught you beneath the thighs and overturned you. Your back struck the mattress, setting the bed ropes groaning beneath the sudden weight. Before you could gather yourself, he had forced your wrists above your head and secured them in one hand. His body covered yours, taking away every scrap of leverage you had enjoyed moments earlier.
“My Baratheon wife will never know this bed,” he said. The quietness of his voice made you look at him. “And should my father drag her into it himself, she will learn quickly enough that there are places in me reserved for blood finer than hers.” His gaze traveled across your flushed face, pausing over your open mouth with naked possession. “She certainly will not make that expression,” he continued.
“What expression?”
Aerion answered by driving into you once, deep and punishing enough to wrench your mouth open. Your brows drew together, your breath deserted you, and your fingers curled helplessly against the hand restraining them. He remained there for a heartbeat, watching the shock and pleasure fight across your face as though he had arranged each detail for his private admiration.
“That one,” he said.
The sound he drew from you destroyed the measured pace he had maintained. His next thrust came too quickly, the following one harder, and within moments the bedframe was knocking unevenly against the wall. Every stroke he gave you carried the fury of the marriages waiting beyond his door. Aerion raised his head. One loose strand clung to his damp temple. You wanted one hand free only so you could twist that strand around your fist and drag his face down to yours. You twisted your wrists within his grip, unable to free them and unwilling to stop trying. Pleasure tightened viciously low in your belly, sharpened by the jealousy in his face and the knowledge that you alone had put it there. You wanted to worsen it. You wanted to hollow him out with the thought of another man and then fill every ruined place with yourself.
“You want to know what I do with Symon?” you whispered. Your voice shook with desperation, though your smile remained cruel.
Aerion’s grip bruised your wrists. “Do not say his name again.”
“Why?” You lifted your chin, baring your throat to him with deliberate insolence. “He is decent with his tongue. He likes to put his mouth against my neck while he fucks me with his fingers. Sometimes I let him lift me against the stable wall, still smelling of horse and leather, and tell him he must keep quiet while I use him.”
Aerion’s teeth closed with an audible click. His eyes moved once to the bruised place on your neck, as though deciding whether Symon’s mouth had left it. “I shall cut out his tongue,” he said. “Then I shall take the hands that touched you and hang them over the stable door.”
Your laugh broke into a gasp beneath another punishing stroke. “You would have to catch him first.”
“I know where he sleeps.” The answer came so readily that your laughter faltered. “I know how long a man remains conscious while each finger is broken separately.” His mouth brushed yours, though he denied you the kiss. “Tell me another thing he has done, and I will show you how inventive jealousy can make me.”
You turned your face into the pillow and bit down on its embroidered edge as the pleasure began to build. Dust and old lavender coated your tongue, yet when you looked back at him, your voice emerged ragged with jealousy and hunger. “Do you want to know what Symon does not get?”
Aerion’s jaw flexed. “There should be nothing left of him that gets anything.”
“He never gets this.” You pulled against his grip, suddenly desperate to touch him, mark him, and force his face nearer when scarcely any room remained between you. “When he nears his end, I make him withdraw. Every time. I make him spend himself across my thighs because I would never permit some stableboy to leave any part of himself inside me.”
Aerion stopped so abruptly that the bed ropes gave one final creak beneath you and fell silent. One breath passed. His chest pressed against yours on the inhale, and you felt the instant your meaning reached him. Then his hips drove forward hard enough to push you higher against the pillows. Whatever restraint remained in him burned away. His rhythm deteriorated at once, each thrust harder and less measured than the one before it. Whatever answer he might have given vanished into the rough sound in his throat. You wrapped your legs around him, locking your heels behind his back and refusing him even the smallest retreat.
“But you, Aerion,” you said. Your voice cracked over his name. “I want you to claim me so completely that they cannot give me to another man. I want every lord they parade before me to know he has already lost. I want no one else to have me.” His lips parted, though no taunt came.
For the first time that night, Aerion looked caught off guard. He had spent years demanding your attention, ruining your dances, keeping count of every man who touched you, and pretending all of it was contempt. Now you had offered him the truth beneath those years, and he had no clever cruelty ready. His violet eyes fixed upon yours, fever-bright and almost unrecognizable. You tightened your legs and pulled him closer. “Make me yours before they can,” you said.
A low sound tore from Aerion’s throat. He drove into you with one sudden thrust and caught your mouth beneath his. “You want to be claimed?” he snarled against your mouth, voice shredded. “Then take it.”
He released your wrists only to hook his arms beneath your knees, drawing you open and pressing deeper. The angle wrung a broken cry from you. His hips snapped hard, his gaze fixed upon every change in your face as though he needed proof that the words had been true. “Say it again,” he demanded, voice shaking. “Tell me you want no one else.”
“I want no one else,” you gasped, nails raking down his back. “Only you. Aerion, please.”
He groaned like he had just been struck. His pace turned savage. One hand slid between your bodies, fingers finding your clit and rubbing hard, fast circles that made your vision white out at the edges.
“Come for me while I put my claim where no lord can scrape it out of you,” he said against your lips. “Let them dress you in another man’s colors after this. You will still be carrying mine.”
You came with a sharp cry, your cunt clenching hard around him in sudden, rhythmic pulses. Your back arched off the bed and your thighs locked tight around his hips. The sudden grip of your body dragged a broken sound from Aerion’s throat. He thrust once, twice, then buried himself deep and came, hips jerking in short, uneven strokes as he spilled inside you. His forehead dropped to your shoulder. He kept moving through it in small, grinding rolls, pushing every drop of warmth as far into you as he could while his breath hit hot and ragged against your neck.
For several breaths, he could do nothing except cling to you, the same hands that had threatened Symon and torn your gown open now tightening helplessly against your skin. His weight settled heavier on you as the last tremors ran through him. He planted one hand beside your head, his fingers flexing against the mattress, while the arm beneath your thigh slowly relaxed. You felt him twitch inside you with every aftershock, still buried to the hilt. His fingers brushed lightly over the skin he had bruised.
When Aerion finally lifted his head, his eyes remained dark, though the fury had burned itself down into stunned possession. His gaze flicked toward the bolted door. His thumb passed once over the pulse in your throat, counting its frantic beat while he considered Maekar, the king, the Baratheon girl, and whichever Tyrell had been promised your body. Then he looked down at the bruises darkening along your thigh and covered one with his palm, as though even the evidence of his touch belonged to him.
“No one else,” he said quietly, voice hoarse. “Not ever.” He kissed you then, sliding his tongue slowly against yours as though he meant to seal the words into your mouth. His hand curved around the back of your neck, holding you as though the king’s men might arrive before he lifted his mouth from yours.
“Will his sniveling fumbling weary you to tears? Will you have to bite your tongue to keep from laughing aloud at how bloodless and feeble he is, while you remember how a real dragon made you writhe?”
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Sneak up on you, really quiet Whisper, "Am I what your heart desires?"
- Lana Del Rey, Serial Killer
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❤️🔥Pairing: Aerion Targaryen x Fem!Cousin!Reader
[Rhaegal's daughter; no mention of physical features/characteristics]
❤️🔥ONE SHOT || WC: 5.8K
❤️🔥Summary: You and Aerion have spent years provoking each other without crossing the final line. When your families decide to marry you elsewhere, jealousy finally strips the pretense away.
❤️🔥Warnings: Explicit sexual content - unprotected PinV, fingering, nipple play, biting, kind of blood play if you squint and cover your ears, internal ejaculation, restraint; possessiveness and jealousy, Canon-typical incest; Canon-typical misogyny (a little ashamed of myself for this one but I'll live); Bruising; Threats of violence;
NSFW. 18+ only. Minors do not interact.
The Red Keep had always felt like a handsome trap. Its towers rose above the city in red stone and gilded glass, splendid enough to make captivity resemble privilege. Everywhere you looked, dragons crawled across carved doors, coiled around pillars, or spread their wings through tapestries darkened by smoke, yet every passage ended before a guarded chamber where some older man waited to decide what the blood of the dragon required of you. The castle celebrated conquest on every wall while quietly measuring you for surrender.
Your grandsire had summoned your father and Uncle Maekar to King’s Landing shortly after you and Aerion reached eighteen. No one had written the purpose plainly. Rhaegel had spent most of the journey insisting that the king merely wished to see his family, while refusing to meet your eyes whenever marriage was mentioned. By the third day you had exhausted every argument against the visit, including a fever poorly feigned with bathwater and an elaborate claim that the jolting wheelhouse had permanently damaged your womb. Your father had laughed at that one. He had stopped laughing when you promised to be the most terrible wife in the realm.
Now you stood in the narrow gallery outside the king’s solar with one hand wrapped around the cold stone of the window ledge. The door had been left open scarcely the width of two fingers. It was enough.
“The girl needs steadying,” Maekar said. “A Reach match would serve the crown.”
Your father made the weary sound he used whenever someone required him to defend you. “She has the blood. Her temperament is another matter.”
You lowered your eyes to the pale marks your nails had left in the stone dust. Rhaegel had once called that temperament charming when you emptied a flagon of hippocras over Lord Butterwell’s son for putting his hand on your knee. It had become less charming now that men wanted to marry it.
A Tyrell was mentioned. You missed the name because your pulse had begun beating too loudly in your ears. They spoke afterward of estates, loyalties, and the advantage of placing you somewhere fertile and far from court. No one asked whether you liked the Reach. No one mentioned that its endless green fields made you feel as though the world had been flattened for want of imagination.
Then Maekar began discussing Aerion. You leaned nearer before pride could stop you. The proposed girl was a Baratheon cousin, sixteen years old, well-mannered and handsome, with the proper sort of stormlander blood. Maekar said she possessed good sense. The king said Aerion required a wife who would neither provoke nor indulge him.
You nearly laughed. Aerion could turn breakfast into a declaration of war if a servant brought him the wrong spoon. A sensible wife would survive him for half a year before developing a permanent pain behind one eye. The thought should have amused you more than it did.
You had known Aerion all your life, though knowing him had never made him easier to bear. At nine, he had thrown your favorite ivory comb into a brazier because you said his new cloak made him resemble a Lysene pillow merchant. At eleven, you broke his nose with a practice shield. At fourteen, he challenged a squire for laughing when you stumbled during a dance and afterward claimed the boy had insulted House Targaryen. You had both understood the lie. Neither of you had spoken of it.
The trouble had worsened during the past year. Aerion began noticing when you wore your hair differently. You began recognizing his footfall outside a room before he entered. At feasts, you could feel the moment his attention found you, usually when another man had drawn too close. Aerion would approach the two of you and watch from a few paces away until the young lord forgot what he had been saying or discovered some pressing reason to stand elsewhere.
Three months earlier, he had cornered you in the library after seeing Symon fasten your cloak beneath the stable arch. Aerion asked whether the stableboy had acquired ambitions above his station. You asked why he cared. He stood so close that the brass clasp of his doublet pressed into your breast and told you that he disliked seeing fine things handled by servants. You had slapped him, and he had not wiped the smile from his face for the rest of the day.
Symon had been waiting in an empty storeroom that night. You let him push your skirts up and tried to summon the same furious heat Aerion had left under your skin. Symon was handsome, willing, and careful whenever you demanded it. He also apologized when he pulled your hair too hard. Aerion would have pulled harder. The memory made you close your eyes. Inside the solar, a chair scraped violently across the floor. “I will not marry some thunder-faced little simpleton because you have tired of arguing with me,” Aerion said.
Maekar answered in the iron voice that had made grown knights reconsider their courage. “You will do as your house requires.”
Then the door flew open. Aerion emerged with one hand still curled as though it belonged around the hilt of a sword. His silver-gold hair was slightly disheveled, and a red mark ran beneath the collar of his doublet where he had dragged one impatient finger against his throat. He took three strides before seeing you beside the window. His gaze dropped briefly to your hand upon the ledge, then moved to the narrow opening in the solar door. “Eavesdropping?”
You didn’t retreat. “Hard to ignore when they’re deciding our futures like a couple of horses. Grandsire suggested a Tyrell for me.” You let your gaze rake over him slowly, and your mouth spread into a wicked smile. “And for you some sweet stormlander with soft hands and softer opinions. I wager she’ll smile prettily and thank you for every clumsy thrust as though you have bestowed a royal favor.”
His nostrils flared once, and his attention fell to your mouth before returning to your eyes. Aerion stopped a hand’s breadth away. He had always understood distance as another thing rules required of lesser men. He stepped closer, backing you toward the wall without touching you. “Jealous, cousin?”
You could smell the wine he had drunk inside the solar and the faint leather scent of the gloves tucked through his belt. A pale scar cut through one eyebrow, your work from the year he locked your cat in a wardrobe. You knew his face too well. You had spent half your life searching it for signs that you affected him and the other half punishing him whenever you found them. “Of her?” you asked. “She will not survive you long enough to inspire jealousy.”
“Afraid she might tame me?”
You laughed, sharp and bitter. “Tame you? She won’t even spark you. You’ll take her from behind in the dark, eyes closed, pretending it’s my cunt you’re buried in just to finish the job.” You should have stopped. The solar door remained ajar behind him. Maekar could emerge at any moment. A pair of guards stood at the turn of the corridor, near enough that one raised voice would bring them running. Instead, you leaned close enough for your breath to touch his mouth. “Will you whisper my name when you spill into your sweet lady wife? Or will you be too ashamed to admit the truth? That no one else will ever burn hot enough for you?”
Aerion’s hand struck the wall beside your head. The sound cracked through the gallery, and the guards at the turn looked toward you. You knew that blow. At twelve, he had split his knuckles against a stable post after you called him Maekar’s little shadow. Aerion had always preferred bruising his own hand to admitting you had wounded his pride.
“And your Tyrell?” Aerion countered, voice dropping to a dangerous purr. His body sheltered you from their view as he bent nearer. Your back met the stone. You could feel its cold through your gown and Aerion’s heat before you, though he had yet to lay one finger upon you. “He will fumble between your thighs. You’ll lie there counting the stones in the ceiling while he grunts and spends too soon. Will you think of me then?” His free hand ghosted down your side, not quite touching, but close enough to raise gooseflesh. “Or will you wait until your hand is between your thighs because he couldn’t finish you? Imagine that it is my cock you pulse around and my seed dripping down your legs afterward?”
“He may prove more interesting than you expect.”
“He will prove dead if he disappoints me.”
A laugh escaped you before you could smother it. “You mean if he satisfies me.”
Aerion’s eyes dropped again. This time they remained on your mouth. The gallery, the guards, and the voices inside the solar all seemed suddenly too close. You remembered his hand at fourteen, bloodied from striking the squire who had laughed at you. You remembered the library, the brass clasp digging into your breast, and the certainty with which he called you a fine thing. You remembered Symon afterward, apologizing into your hair while you stared at the storeroom wall and imagined a crueller mouth.
His thumb touched the corner of your lower lip. “Tell me you would not think of me,” he said.
A rush of heat flooded your lower belly, and you felt your nipples tighten against the fabric of your gown. You tilted your head, rising to the challenge. “Every time, my Prince. And I’ll come harder thinking of you than he could ever make me.”
The final word had scarcely left your mouth when a strangled sound caught in Aerion’s throat. His thumb pressed harder against your lower lip, slipping between them when you drew breath. You closed your mouth around the tip without looking away. That ended whatever remained of his restraint. He kissed you. His mouth caught yours so abruptly that your teeth knocked together. One of you made a low, startled sound, and you could not have said which. He caught the back of your neck and turned your face where he wanted it, kissing you with all the furious concentration he once brought to beating you in the practice yard. When you pulled away, he bit your lower lip until blood welled. He groaned and drew your wounded lip into his mouth, his tongue passing over the red bead before he forced his thigh between your legs.
Aerion lifted his head just far enough to inspect the blood on your mouth. His thumb pressed once against the small split in your lip, and the satisfaction in his face told you he had spent years wondering what mark he might leave there. “Pretty,” he said, smearing the blood across your lip with his thumb. “You should have let me do that years ago.”
His forehead settled against yours. The rigid length pressed against your hip answered the question you had carried for years: his body betrayed him every bit as readily as his temper. The open door of the king’s solar remained only a few yards away. Maekar’s voice carried from within, lower now, while a guard’s mail whispered at the bend in the gallery. “Chambers,” he rasped against your swollen mouth, barely pulling back. You opened your mouth to mock the command. “Now. Before I take you against this wall and let my father find the answer to his marriage problem himself.”
You should have told him that sounded remarkably like another problem. Instead, you caught his wrist and pulled him down the gallery. He knew the shortest route. Aerion had spent half his childhood finding passages where he was forbidden and the other half showing them to you only after exacting some humiliating price. At the first turn, where a faded tapestry concealed the old stair to Maegor’s Holdfast, he dragged you behind the hanging and kissed you until the tapestry’s metal clasps dug into your spine. His hand closed over your breast through your gown. You palmed him through his breeches and felt his whole body tense.
Aerion caught your wrist, though he made no attempt to pull your hand away. “Did you touch him like this?”
The question pleased you enough to be careless. “Symon never required so much encouragement.”
His fingers tightened. “That was not what I asked.”
“No,” you whispered, stroking him through the cloth while his jaw hardened. “You asked whether I thought of you while I did it.”
Aerion’s mouth found yours again before you could tell him the answer. Footsteps approached the stair. You both fell silent, pressed together behind the tapestry while two serving girls passed on the other side. One complained about carrying fresh sheets to Prince Aerion’s chambers. The other laughed and asked whether the prince ever slept long enough to soil them. You felt Aerion’s smirk against your temple. You buried your laugh against his collar. The absurdity of it made the moment more dangerous. His breath struck warm beneath your ear, and for one suspended instant you were fourteen again, hiding with him inside a linen press after stealing Maekar’s signet. His hand had covered your mouth then. You had bitten him hard enough to leave a crescent scar at the base of his thumb. The same thumb now traced your swollen lip.
When the girls had gone, Aerion seized your hand and pulled you onward. He stopped again beneath the narrow arch outside the royal sept. You had once hidden there during a feast, both of you drunk on stolen summerwine, while he wagered that he could make you blush. He had failed then. He did not fail now. He pinned your wrists above your head and pressed himself against you until your knees weakened. The old stones chilled your knuckles. His mouth moved over the place beneath your jaw that Symon had never found without being guided.
You hated that Aerion discovered it immediately. You hated more that he felt the shiver run through you and paused there, his lips resting against your pulse. “You remember where,” you breathed.
“I remember where you touched whenever you wanted me to look.”
The answer caught you harder than his mouth had. At feasts, during lessons, across crowded galleries, you had raised your fingers to that same place without knowing he had kept count. “You watched me that closely?”
Aerion lifted his head. “You have known the answer to that for years.”
You could still feel the admission lodged beneath your ribs when he dragged you from the arch and down the remaining passage. He had noticed the gesture, understood it, and watched often enough to remember. Aerion drove the bolt home behind you. The iron struck its bracket with a finality that silenced the distant castle. Here were the rooms Maekar had given him upon his arrival: the black-and-red hangings, the carved dragon consuming its own tail above the hearth.
He pushed you against the wall again. His mouth claimed yours once more as his hands yanked at laces and fabric. Clothes came away in impatient pulls. He tore at the laces of your gown rather than untying them. When your gown loosened around you, he stripped it from your shoulders with impatient jerks, catching the sleeve at your wrist and swearing when the close tailoring resisted him. You laughed and told him the Tyrell might have more respect for the workmanship. Aerion yanked hard enough to send three pearl buttons scattering across the rushes.
“Then he may marry the gown.”
You turned in his arms and pulled his doublet open. One clasp caught in his undershirt. He slapped your hand away, missed the clasp himself, and cursed again. “You have been imagining this for years,” you said, “yet made no allowance for buttons?”
“I imagined you less clothed.”
“You lack foresight.”
“I had hoped you might eventually learn obedience.”
“You have wasted your life.”
Aerion showed you his teeth, equal parts insulted and entertained, then seized the hem of his doublet with both hands. He pulled the doublet over his head and nearly caught one sleeve around his elbow. You laughed again, and Aerion pushed you backward onto the bed with enough force to bounce you against the feather mattress. That ungainly moment, his hair tangled and his abandoned doublet half inside out upon the floor, made him more dangerous than all his polished threats.
Prince Aerion had disappeared with his court clothes. The boy who had followed you through half the castle remained, furious that you had laughed at him and thrilled that you dared. He came down over you and caught one breast in his hand. His palm cupped the soft weight while his thumb worried the tightened nipple until your smile faltered. Aerion watched your face as he lowered his mouth.
His tongue circled the tender peak, his teeth catching beneath it before he drew it deep and bit. Pleasure lanced through you fast enough to make your back lift from the mattress. You twisted your fingers into his silver-gold hair and held him there. When he released you, the damp point of his tongue followed the path of his hand down your stomach. He paused beside your navel and pressed an open-mouthed kiss there, looking up at you before his fingers reached the slick mess between your thighs.
He gathered your wetness and pushed two fingers inside you without warning, curling them deep. You had imagined this too many times: in the library after he trapped you against a shelf, beneath the royal table while his boot pressed against yours, in Symon’s arms while staring at a patch of damp mortar. Imagination had made Aerion flawless and theatrical. The real man trembled against you. A lock of hair stuck to the corner of his mouth. His forearm shook where he held his weight.
“Look how wet you are for me,” he taunted, voice rough with satisfaction as he pumped them slowly. “You’re dripping, princess. Soaking my hand, you desperate little thing.” He crooked his fingers again, stroking that spot that made your hips jerk.
“They want to give a dragon to a gardener. I can already hear that prating, silk-clad Tyrell boy whispering his maidenly nonsense in your ear — ‘O-oh, my lady, my sacred flower, pray let me kiss your hand gently,’” Aerion continued, his voice going up a note. He laughed and brought the heel of his palm to your clit. “Will his sniveling fumbling weary you to tears? Will you have to bite your tongue to keep from laughing aloud at how bloodless and feeble he is, while you remember how a real dragon made you writhe?”
You moaned despite yourself, clenching around his fingers as he kept up the relentless rhythm. The taunting only made you wetter. “Then fuck me like you mean it, Brightflame,” you gasped, rolling your hips to take his fingers deeper, “or are you all talk?”
He withdrew his fingers, leaving your body clenching after them. He pushed your thighs wider and sank into you in one slow thrust. He was thicker than Symon, filling you until your toes curled against the bedding and your fingers dug into his shoulders. This was exactly how you had always imagined Aerion would feel, overwhelming and right. He bottomed out and stayed there, breathing hard against your neck, letting you both feel it.
You wrapped your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back as he began to move. He gave you deep, rolling thrusts that dragged against every inch of the cunt that had been aching for this. Your bodies found their rhythm with humiliating ease. Each wet meeting made those other nights feel thinner and more foolish, evenings spent using the wrong man because the right one had never asked.
“Tell me you’ll still feel me for days,” he muttered against your ear. His hips snapped forward in a sharper thrust that stole the breath you had meant to answer with. “Tell me every time he touches you, you’ll remember how much better this feels.”
You dug your nails into his back and met his next thrust. “Only if you swear you’ll close your eyes with her and see me instead.” Your mouth brushed his ear. “That you’ll hate how tame and bloodless she feels compared to this.”
You felt the muscles at his back tighten beneath your hands. He said nothing, though his next thrust struck deeper. He kept the pace steady as he lowered his mouth to your breasts again. He drew one tightened nipple into his mouth and moved to the other, tongue laving the sensitive peaks before grazing them with his teeth. The pressure of him inside you and the wet pull of his mouth proved too much together. You arched from the bed, fingers tangling tight in his hair. He switched sides again, sucking harder as if he could draw more desperate sounds from you with every pull of his mouth.
He lifted his head, dragging the back of one wrist across his wet mouth without taking his eyes from you. “Such a perfect little flame for me. Look how well you take me.” His voice was low, almost reverent, but the next words came out rough and taunting. “Your cunt is already pulling me deeper as if it knows exactly who you belong to.”
You clenched hard around him as your breath caught. The smile that he gave you decided your next move. You planted both hands against his chest and used his next thrust to roll him beneath you. Surprise crossed his face for scarcely a heartbeat before you straddled his hips, one palm braced against his chest while the other reached between you. You gripped his cock, still slick from you, and sank down onto him in one smooth, steady motion, taking him to the hilt.
A low sound slipped from you as you settled. Silver hair fell around your face, shutting out the chamber until only Aerion remained beneath you, flushed and staring as you caught your lower lip between your teeth to keep from giving him the sound he wanted. “Perhaps you should shut your fucking mouth,” you said, “and let me remind you who this cock belongs to.”
You started to move. At first, you gave him slow, deliberate rolls of your hips as you adjusted to the new angle, taking him deeper with every downward press. When his hands reached for you, you rose almost completely before sinking down again, hard enough to drag a rough breath from him. Your palms flattened against his chest. Your nails left pale crescents in his skin as the rhythm quickened.
When Aerion caught your hips, you knocked his hands aside and pinned his wrists above his head. You had held him this way once before, in the practice yard with his nose bleeding beneath you and half the household shouting for one of you to yield. Aerion remembered. You saw it in the sudden flash of his teeth. You leaned forward until your hair brushed his cheek and kept moving exactly as you had imagined on all those nights when imagining him was the nearest you could come.
Aerion strained beneath your grip, his shoulders lifting from the mattress as though he meant to throw you off by force. “Enjoy your little victory,” he said, each word roughened by the effort of remaining still. His gaze dropped to where your bodies joined and returned to your face with a promise that made your pulse leap. “You will pay for every moment of it when I put you beneath me again.”
You drove the pace faster, determined to wipe the amusement from his face. Your careful rhythm soon began to fray. Your knee slipped against the coverlet. Your breaths broke against his mouth, and loose strands of hair clung to your damp neck and lips. Each hurried descent filled the chamber with another slick sound, loud enough that the servants in the outer corridor would have no difficulty guessing how Prince Aerion occupied himself behind his bolted door.
“You make a lovely threat from down there,” you said, though the words emerged breathless and uneven. You tightened your fingers around his wrists and forced yourself through another hard roll of your hips. “Perhaps I shall keep you here until you learn whose pleasure matters more.”
Aerion’s eyes flashed, and he tore his wrists from your grasp, sitting upright in one violent motion. His arm locked around your waist before you could retreat, hauling you tight against his chest, while his other hand seized your hip and held you exactly where he wanted you. Then he drove up beneath you. Your head fell back. A strangled cry escaped before you could bite it down. Aerion did it again, watching your lips part, then adjusted his grip and struck the same place a third time. Each upward thrust came harder than the last until your taunts deserted you and your hands clung to his shoulders.
You felt his smile curve against your throat as he tested the angle again. When your nails bit sharply into his shoulder, he caught your chin between his thumb and forefinger and drove up into the same place, watching your mouth fall open. “Look at you,” he groaned, “made for a dragon.”
You dragged in enough air to recover some fragment of yourself. Your nails sank into the back of his neck, and you clenched deliberately around him, earning a broken hitch of breath that warmed your skin. A small, wicked laugh escaped you. “Will your sweet wife know how to ride you so?” Aerion’s hand tightened on your hip. “Will she know what that sound means?” you continued, grinding down against him despite the tremor running through your thighs. “Perhaps your little Baratheon maiden will lie very still and blush while you labor over her. Strong storm blood, they will say, while she stares at the canopy and wonders why her husband shuts his eyes whenever he spends.”
Aerion stopped smiling. His next thrust jarred you against his chest. The one after it came before you had recovered, driven by the image you had forced upon him. His breathing matched yours now, ragged and ill-timed, and the rhythm he had imposed began to break. Aerion caught you beneath the thighs and overturned you. Your back struck the mattress, setting the bed ropes groaning beneath the sudden weight. Before you could gather yourself, he had forced your wrists above your head and secured them in one hand. His body covered yours, taking away every scrap of leverage you had enjoyed moments earlier.
“My Baratheon wife will never know this bed,” he said. The quietness of his voice made you look at him. “And should my father drag her into it himself, she will learn quickly enough that there are places in me reserved for blood finer than hers.” His gaze traveled across your flushed face, pausing over your open mouth with naked possession. “She certainly will not make that expression,” he continued.
“What expression?”
Aerion answered by driving into you once, deep and punishing enough to wrench your mouth open. Your brows drew together, your breath deserted you, and your fingers curled helplessly against the hand restraining them. He remained there for a heartbeat, watching the shock and pleasure fight across your face as though he had arranged each detail for his private admiration.
“That one,” he said.
The sound he drew from you destroyed the measured pace he had maintained. His next thrust came too quickly, the following one harder, and within moments the bedframe was knocking unevenly against the wall. Every stroke he gave you carried the fury of the marriages waiting beyond his door. Aerion raised his head. One loose strand clung to his damp temple. You wanted one hand free only so you could twist that strand around your fist and drag his face down to yours. You twisted your wrists within his grip, unable to free them and unwilling to stop trying. Pleasure tightened viciously low in your belly, sharpened by the jealousy in his face and the knowledge that you alone had put it there. You wanted to worsen it. You wanted to hollow him out with the thought of another man and then fill every ruined place with yourself.
“You want to know what I do with Symon?” you whispered. Your voice shook with desperation, though your smile remained cruel.
Aerion’s grip bruised your wrists. “Do not say his name again.”
“Why?” You lifted your chin, baring your throat to him with deliberate insolence. “He is decent with his tongue. He likes to put his mouth against my neck while he fucks me with his fingers. Sometimes I let him lift me against the stable wall, still smelling of horse and leather, and tell him he must keep quiet while I use him.”
Aerion’s teeth closed with an audible click. His eyes moved once to the bruised place on your neck, as though deciding whether Symon’s mouth had left it. “I shall cut out his tongue,” he said. “Then I shall take the hands that touched you and hang them over the stable door.”
Your laugh broke into a gasp beneath another punishing stroke. “You would have to catch him first.”
“I know where he sleeps.” The answer came so readily that your laughter faltered. “I know how long a man remains conscious while each finger is broken separately.” His mouth brushed yours, though he denied you the kiss. “Tell me another thing he has done, and I will show you how inventive jealousy can make me.”
You turned your face into the pillow and bit down on its embroidered edge as the pleasure began to build. Dust and old lavender coated your tongue, yet when you looked back at him, your voice emerged ragged with jealousy and hunger. “Do you want to know what Symon does not get?”
Aerion’s jaw flexed. “There should be nothing left of him that gets anything.”
“He never gets this.” You pulled against his grip, suddenly desperate to touch him, mark him, and force his face nearer when scarcely any room remained between you. “When he nears his end, I make him withdraw. Every time. I make him spend himself across my thighs because I would never permit some stableboy to leave any part of himself inside me.”
Aerion stopped so abruptly that the bed ropes gave one final creak beneath you and fell silent. One breath passed. His chest pressed against yours on the inhale, and you felt the instant your meaning reached him. Then his hips drove forward hard enough to push you higher against the pillows. Whatever restraint remained in him burned away. His rhythm deteriorated at once, each thrust harder and less measured than the one before it. Whatever answer he might have given vanished into the rough sound in his throat. You wrapped your legs around him, locking your heels behind his back and refusing him even the smallest retreat.
“But you, Aerion,” you said. Your voice cracked over his name. “I want you to claim me so completely that they cannot give me to another man. I want every lord they parade before me to know he has already lost. I want no one else to have me.” His lips parted, though no taunt came.
For the first time that night, Aerion looked caught off guard. He had spent years demanding your attention, ruining your dances, keeping count of every man who touched you, and pretending all of it was contempt. Now you had offered him the truth beneath those years, and he had no clever cruelty ready. His violet eyes fixed upon yours, fever-bright and almost unrecognizable. You tightened your legs and pulled him closer. “Make me yours before they can,” you said.
A low sound tore from Aerion’s throat. He drove into you with one sudden thrust and caught your mouth beneath his. “You want to be claimed?” he snarled against your mouth, voice shredded. “Then take it.”
He released your wrists only to hook his arms beneath your knees, drawing you open and pressing deeper. The angle wrung a broken cry from you. His hips snapped hard, his gaze fixed upon every change in your face as though he needed proof that the words had been true. “Say it again,” he demanded, voice shaking. “Tell me you want no one else.”
“I want no one else,” you gasped, nails raking down his back. “Only you. Aerion, please.”
He groaned like he had just been struck. His pace turned savage. One hand slid between your bodies, fingers finding your clit and rubbing hard, fast circles that made your vision white out at the edges.
“Come for me while I put my claim where no lord can scrape it out of you,” he said against your lips. “Let them dress you in another man’s colors after this. You will still be carrying mine.”
You came with a sharp cry, your cunt clenching hard around him in sudden, rhythmic pulses. Your back arched off the bed and your thighs locked tight around his hips. The sudden grip of your body dragged a broken sound from Aerion’s throat. He thrust once, twice, then buried himself deep and came, hips jerking in short, uneven strokes as he spilled inside you. His forehead dropped to your shoulder. He kept moving through it in small, grinding rolls, pushing every drop of warmth as far into you as he could while his breath hit hot and ragged against your neck.
For several breaths, he could do nothing except cling to you, the same hands that had threatened Symon and torn your gown open now tightening helplessly against your skin. His weight settled heavier on you as the last tremors ran through him. He planted one hand beside your head, his fingers flexing against the mattress, while the arm beneath your thigh slowly relaxed. You felt him twitch inside you with every aftershock, still buried to the hilt. His fingers brushed lightly over the skin he had bruised.
When Aerion finally lifted his head, his eyes remained dark, though the fury had burned itself down into stunned possession. His gaze flicked toward the bolted door. His thumb passed once over the pulse in your throat, counting its frantic beat while he considered Maekar, the king, the Baratheon girl, and whichever Tyrell had been promised your body. Then he looked down at the bruises darkening along your thigh and covered one with his palm, as though even the evidence of his touch belonged to him.
“No one else,” he said quietly, voice hoarse. “Not ever.” He kissed you then, sliding his tongue slowly against yours as though he meant to seal the words into your mouth. His hand curved around the back of your neck, holding you as though the king’s men might arrive before he lifted his mouth from yours.
I learned something fucking terrible about myself tonight. I never understood the Aemond hype until that scene....and the armor I mean....phew. New ao3 tag UNLOCKED.
It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.
Not only this, but a parent's emotion regulation (ER) capacity is a major factor in the physical development of the central nervous system, especially the frontal lobe and HPA axis. Not only does it cause the child to have their own issues with emotion regulation, it affects all three aspects of executive functioning (EF)
Now EF is SUPER fucking important for ER, but its also important for learning and memory, attention and impulse control, the development of long-term decision making in adolescence, and their social development. It literally changes the anatomy and physiology of your brain and your behavior and it spills over to every aspect of the child's life.
Growing up in houses like this cause a spillover effect in the child's social life and their ability to connect with peers properly, their ability to handle emotional stimuli, their ability to process information. It essentially creates a negative bias that puts the child at a HUGE risk of dealing with psychopathology for the rest of their life.
This is just one of the hundreds of studies I have saved that explains the effects of it, and this just covers general emotion regulation. However there are SO many more nuances when it comes to breaking down the different causes of poor ER in parents like ADHD/ASD, personality pathology, parent-child personality fit, parental trauma, etc. Its very interesting and VERY sad. I grew up in a house like this and I definitely mourn what I could've been if I didn't inherit my dad's never ending irritation lol.
It kills me that people treat children like mini-adults, when they literally need to be taught EVERYTHING. Even in moments where parents don't feel like they're actively teaching, every single thing they do infront of their child is going to teach the child something.
Also I'm totally not bashing parents with mental illness, because I literally work with parents who have their own challenges they work through while helping their child overcome their difficulties. However, I do have a professional degree in psychology, specifically child and adolescent development and caretaking so I'm not coming from a place of un-educated opinionation. I'm not saying poor emotional regulation makes someone a poor parent, but it does contribute to harmful parenting practices even when they aren't conscious!!!!
Self-awareness in parenting is one of the most important things a caretaker can do for their child, simply being able to stop and think "how is my reaction to this going to affect my child" can do fucking WONDERS for your baby's development :)
Parents’ emotional functioning represents a central mechanism in the caregiving environment’s influence on adolescent affective brain functi
