Behold, my cherished townsfolk, the hour doth strike when the goddess shall draw back the veil from tales too rich for virgin eyes to bear! And what doth this swift month promise more than a bloom of love so pure and tender? Of fair maidens whose cheeks, like roses kissed by summer's blush, glow and burn beneath the bedsheets with hearts most wickedly inclined! The goddess thus shall here present each word she penned and each volume her mind was fed!
liah's most beloved ones
ââ đ¤ everything the goddess has written
001. Not a lot, just forever đ¤ Alien!Gojo Satoru x Physics teacher!Reader đ¤ inspired by Project Hail Mary
002. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Noor of my eyes đ¤ Fem!Geto Suguru x Fem!Reader
003. Chapter four and five for the series loving you was really hard đ¤ Yandere!Satosugu x F!Reader
004. Legendary lovers đ¤ Hades!Choso Kamo x Aphrodite!Reader
005. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Special treatment đ¤ CEO!Fem!Geto Suguru x Assistant!Fem!Reader
006. First chapter for under your spell đ¤ Satosugu x F!Reader đ¤ Coraline AU đ¤ series
007. Tainted love đ¤ Killer/Stalker!Geto Suguru x Slutty!Reader đ¤ part of my summerween collection
008. Sleeping beauty đ¤ Eros!Reader x Psyche!Gojo Satoru đ¤ drabble
ââ đ¤ chosen by the crows [june favourites]
001. Steel ball run by @uzugeto đ¤ Cowboy!Suguru Geto x Cowrgirl!Fem reader đ¤ I swear I was waiting so long for this fic, and when it finally dropped... UGHHH. AMAZING. I've recently become such a sucker for Wild West AU stories, and this one filled my craving oh so perfectly.
002. Satosugu are cheating on each other with you by @doviled đ¤ Satosugu x F!Reader đ¤ Spectacular, great idea. I loved every second of this fic. It was genuinely so much fun to read and felt a bit refreshing, yn? I simply enjoy everything involving Satosugu, hihi.
003. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Just Satoru by @laeyliaa đ¤ Fem!Gojo Satoru x Fem!Reader đ¤ This one is inspired by the film Obsession, and we all already know where it's going, right? I haven't seen any dark wlw stories for so long, and honestly, I think about this fic every single day! Waiting for part two while gnawing on my fingers...
004. Toji F. x Fem!Reader x Choso K. by @6x-x9 đ¤ Honestly, I don't know why the reader is here. Ana, why are we third-wheeling? Because the tension between Toji and Choso was so intense, I was going mad whenever the reader was mentioned. I don't know this bitch. Someone take her away from them! This fic changed something in my brain, and I reread it from time to time... in the evening.
005. Beach day with Suguru by @rengoatku đ¤ Suguru Geto x F!Reader đ¤ There's nothing better than fucking on the beach with your hot man. 10/10, fun and nasty read; I loved it.
006. đłď¸ââ§ď¸ Long distance gf!suguru geto giving you replica of her cock by @moviecritc đ¤ Transfem!Suguru Geto x F!Reader đ¤ NOW HOLD ON. You know how obsessed I am with my transfem Satoru, so when I saw Nora drop this fic, my ovaries literally burst. Transfem Suguru is so hot; she's such a minx, literally pls get me pregnant. Spectacular. Nora never disappoints with her wlw fics!
007. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Your girl-friend a menace! by @/6x-x9 đ¤ Gf!Shoko Ieri x Fem!Reader đ¤ Shoko buying a lipstick in the colour of the reader's nipples... do I have to say more? Go, read it and touch yourself.
008. Make a man outta you! by @xchosos-wifex đ¤ Li Shang!Toji Fushiguro x Mulan!Reader đ¤ Omg, Mulan has always been one of my favourite films, and Li Shang is JADNBjbfe. A crush since I was 10. This fic was so much fun and original; I absolutely loved the whole concept, and ngl, Toji has such an amazing commander aura! Also, I was laughing so hard at the sudden speed face link. Like, okay, you're funny; join my court of jesters.
009. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Like sugar on my tongue by @jazzthatonewriterchick đ¤ OF Girl!Femjo x Camgirl!Reader đ¤ YOU KNOW I'M SO WEAK FOR MY WIFEY FEMJO. Jazz, I hope your pillow is always cold because I was reading this fic with clenched thighs. I absolutely love slutty, sly femjo, and you wrote her so perfectly here, ugh! I need more queer content from you, begging on my knees...
010. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Equal rights, equal fights by @reignpage đ¤ Femjo x Fem!Reader đ¤ Gojo lets himself be struck by a gender-bending curse, and he's using it to the fullest. It was so much fun and HOT AHH. I love everything Reign writes, but it was my first time reading a wlw story by her! More, more, more!
011. A bouquet of brambles by @sukunahs đ¤ God!Ryomen Sukuna x Priestess!Reader đ¤ Listen, the stories Iris writes are a true blessing from the heavens themselves. So rich and beautifully written, you can feel the weight of each word! I adore this story so much, and the simple fact that it's a Greek mythology au should be enough to make you read it!
012. The story of Princess Sita and Prince Rama by @httpskrys đ¤ Prince Rama!Satoru x Princess Sita!Reader đ¤ One of the best things about my 3k even is how many new cultures I was introduced to! Krys's story was amazing, the cutest, I loved reading the little introduction to the tale itself and eating up the whole fic. Thank you so much and tbh I would love to see more similar stories from you :((
013. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Mom's best friend!Yuki Tsukumo by @/moviecritc đ¤ Yuki Tsukumo x F!Reader đ¤ Dad's best friend.... MOM'S BEST FRIEND? Give me two seasons, merch, books and a movie. I already said it, but Nora is one of the best (if not the best, shall I say) wlw writers on Tumblr and her stories are a literal blessing to the small sapphic JJK community!
014. éťé大ç!Sukuna x Dead!reader (Enma DaiĹ!Sukuna) by @bearlovestea đ¤ Sukuna fits the King of Hell so freaking well! I loved the whole concept of the story, how original it was, and THE SMUT PART, arhhh, amazing! Bear, I need more stories from you inspired by Japanese culture <3
015. đŠââ¤ď¸âđâđŠ Guilty pleasure by @indiewritesxoxo đ¤ Mermaid!Yuki x F!Reader đ¤ I have no words... doomed yuri, they could never make me hate you. And also inspired by The Little Mermaid? I need 10k words for yesterday, please...
Do you want to read more wlw stories? Check wlw list by @hotties4gojo !
I had soo little time in June, and it's a pity I haven't read and written more queer stories :( I will try to make up for it during the summer holidays <3
lesbian art by Hannah Alexander Artwork (@HannahArtwork) on X
dividers by @diviniyae and @strangergraphics
Hello everyone â¤ď¸â â¤ď¸â the second chapter will unfortunately be delayed as there are a lot of things going in my life thatâs affecting me negatively. đ
Update below
Life hasnât been treating me well lately, but I hope that in the end itâll be all better đ I usually donât share information like this to anyone, though I think saying this will somehow lessen the weight I feel right now.
My parentâs debt still continues to pile up everyday. Monthly dues still unpaid. I try to help them within my capabilities, paying some of the dues to decrease their problems. Worst of all, my beloved dog got diagnosed with pyometra.
Since sheâs a large breed, the surgery is pretty costly. Sheâs also a tad bit old and you know what I mean. I know that sheâs strong and will make it. I know she will. I continue to pray for her and ask people to also do the same.
I just donât know what to do anymore.
Worry not, even when I say stuff like this, I know that itâll always get better in the end. I believe in that.
I wont disappear. Tho i might delete this sooner than later
omg this. bb somehow managing to survive out the backrooms (stay with me) so bobby starts introducing him as âthis is myâŚestranged brotherâ and bb is like â?? iâm not strange?â
bb trying to temper entity behaviours more but letting loose in private and while youâre beaming and lost in him bobby is like âdude, youâre weird creature eyes are showing, put them awayâ and bb glares at him until bobby backs off with a scoff.
bobby trying to have a private moment with you, kissing you with your back against the kitchen counter and bb appears in the doorway like âis it that time? đ shall i get undressed?â and youâre laughing while bobby just groans into your neck
i love them your honour
the "estranged brother" bit is doing so much heavy lifting because what else is bobby supposed to say? what is the alternative?
"this is my duplicate." "this is my backrooms doppelganger." "this is an ancient entity that wore my face and is now living in my apartment because my girlfriend has a type and apparently the type is me but worse." estranged brother is the ONLY option đ
and bb hearing "estranged" and going "i'm not strange?" with genuine confusion on bobby's face is the funniest thing in this entire universe because he's not doing a bit. he's not being cute. he's parsed the word "estranged" as "strange" with a prefix and is now mildly offended because he's been working SO HARD to pass as human. he's been practicing his blink rate thank you very much. he's been monitoring his head-tilt angles to stay within normal cervical range. he bought a jacket. he's TRYING.
and bobby just pinches the bridge of his nose and goes "it means we haven't seen each other in a while" and bb says "oh. that's true" and bobby says "yeah" and whoever they're being introduced to is standing there watching two identical men have the most strained interaction they've ever witnessed and they're like "so... you guys aren't close?" and bobby and bb both say "no" at exactly the same time in exactly the same tone and the person walks away more confused than when they arrived.
the entity behaviours in private though. that's where the real comedy lives.
because bb in public is a masterclass in human performance. he's nailing it. blinks at the right speed, breathes at the right intervals, maintains appropriate eye contact duration. stands with the correct amount of fidgeting to look natural rather than doing the statue thing. it's exhausting. it takes active concentration. he's running a full-time simulation of being a person and the processing power required is immense.
so when he gets home he just. stops.
the breathing goes first. he just stops doing it because he doesn't need to and maintaining the rhythm for eight hours is like holding a flex. you'll be on the couch and realise the body next to you has gone completely still. no rise and fall. no chest movement. just a perfectly motionless shape wearing bobby's face and watching the TV with eyes that have stopped blinking.
"baby, you're not breathing."
"i'm home."
"I know but it's a bit unsettling."
he resumes breathing. begrudging. does it for you, because it feels less like a chore when he's matching you.
the eyes are the bigger issue. because in public he keeps them bobby's blue, locked in, consistent. but in private when he's relaxed (when you're close, when you're touching him, when you do something that makes that pleased-feline expression cross his face) the blue drains out. slow. like ink diffusing in reverse. and what's behind it is that black.
that ancient, depthless, void black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. and he doesn't notice it happening because to him that's just. his eyes. the blue is the costume. the black is home.
and you love it. you're sitting in his lap running your fingers through his hair and his eyes go black and you light up because that means he's comfortable. that means the mask is down, means you're seeing HIM and not the bobby filter.
you beam. you're lost in it. tracing the edges of his jaw where the bone structure is pressing just slightly sharper than bobby's template allows, watching the black swirl in his eyes like deep water, and he's making that low, pleased rumble in his chestâ
"dude." bobby, from the kitchen doorway, beer in hand. "your weird creature eyes are showing. put them away."
bb's head turns. slowly. the black eyes fix on bobby with a flatness that, in the backrooms, would precede something being torn apart.
bobby takes a sip of his beer. holds the stare. doesn't blink. because bobby has exactly one advantage over an apex predator and it's that he genuinely does not care. fear requires imagination and bobby has been emotionally avoidant for so long that his fight-or-flight response has been replaced by a shrug.
bb glares.
bobby takes another sip.
bb glares HARDER. the room drops a degree. one degree. his version of a warning shot.
bobby raises an eyebrow. scoffs. walks away. "freak," he mutters, affectionately, the way you'd mutter at a weird dog. bb's glare follows him out of the room and you have to physically turn his face back toward you because the black eyes are now doing the territorial thing rather than the intimate thing and the mood is very different.
"ignore him."
"he called meâ"
"baby. ignore him."
bb refocuses on you. the black settles. the rumble restarts and he nuzzles into your neck. bobby turns the TV up in the other room. equilibrium restored.
but the kitchen incident. oh the kitchen incident.
bobby has you against the counter. because bobby in the real world post-backrooms is different. he's trying. he's present. he's doing the work.
and part of the work is that he doesn't take this for granted anymore. doesn't take you for granted, doesn't treat your body like something he has automatic access to. so when he reaches for you now there's an intentionality to it that wasn't there before. a question in his hands. and tonight, in the kitchen, you answered it.
he kissed you first. soft. testing. his mouth barely brushing yours, tasting the yes before he committed to it. and then you pulled him in by the shirt and the softness evaporated.
he's got you pressed against the counter edge. his hips pinning yours. one hand gripping the counter beside you and the other on your waist, thumb hooked under the hem of your shirt, pressing into the bare skin above your hip bone. his mouth is on yours and he's kissing you the way bobby used to (before the drifting, before the distance, before he forgot how) deep and hungry. and you can feel him everywhere. the heat of him. the realness of him. the right pressure. the right everything.
and it's building.
you can feel it building. your fingers in his hair, pulling, and the sound he makes against your mouth (low, rough, starving) goes straight through you.
his hand slides further under your shirt. palm flat against your ribs. warm skin on warm skin. his thumb traces the underside of your bra and your breath catches and he swallows the sound and presses closer and you can feel what this is doing to him, pressed against you, hard through his jeans.
bobby's mouth drags from your lips to your jaw to the spot below your ear that he remembers, he still remembers, after everything he still knows exactly where toâ
"is it that time?"
bobby's whole body goes rigid. his hand stops. his mouth stops. his breathing stops. you feel him die a small, complete death against your neck.
bb is in the doorway. bobby's face. bobby's exact smile. but wider. brighter. with an enthusiasm that makes him glow. he's already reaching for the hem of his shirt.
"shall I get undressed?"
you start laughing. you can't help it. it erupts out of you, helpless, shaking against bobby's chest. bobby groans into your neck. guttural, defeated, the groan of a man who was thirty seconds from having his girlfriend on the kitchen counter and is now dealing with this.
"GET OUT."
"but she's laughing. she likes when Iâ"
"OUT."
bb looks at you. you're still laughing. tears forming. hand over your mouth. bobby's forehead pressed against your collarbone, his body still hard against yours, his hand still under your shirt. he's radiating a frustration so intense it's practically visible.
bb looks genuinely puzzled because from his perspective he read the room correctly. arousal was present. participation was implied. he was being AVAILABLE and ENTHUSIASTIC and these are qualities you have specifically praised and the signals are very confusing.
"baby," you manage, between laughs, your voice still thick from the kiss, "give us a minute."
"a minute," bb repeats. processing.
"a few minutes."
"how many is a few?"
"oh my GOD," bobby says into your collarbone. you can feel his teeth against your skin. not a kiss. frustration given a physical outlet. biting down gently on your shoulder because it's either that or actually killing his duplicate.
bb retreats. not far. you can hear him in the hallway. he's humming. he's waiting. he's counting the minutes because you said a few and he's going to hold you to that.
bobby lifts his head. looks at you. bobby's blue eyes. dark. blown. still wanting you so visibly it makes your stomach clench. his hand hasn't moved from under your shirt. his hips haven't moved from yours. he's stubbornly, pointedly, refusing to let the moment fully die.
"I hate him," he says. low. his mouth an inch from yours.
"you don't."
"I hate him a little." his thumb moves on your ribs. slow. reclaiming.
"you made him coffee this morning."
"lapse in judgment."
you pull him back in. kiss him. harder than before. your teeth catch bobby's bottom lip and he makes that sound again. the surprised, rough one, and his hand tightens on your ribs and his hips press forward and you're right back where you were, building, climbing. bobby's mouth hot on your throat and your back arching off the counterâ
from the hallway: "it's been four minutes."
bobby's forehead hits your shoulder.
you laugh until you can't breathe. bobby stays pressed against you, face buried in your neck, his body slowly coming down from something it very much did not want to come down from.
you can feel him breathing hard. can feel the frustration and the want and underneath both of them, very quietly, the laugh he's trying not to let out. because it is funny. it's objectively, devastatingly funny. and bobby franklin may be sexually frustrated and sharing his girlfriend with an eldritch abomination but he's not immune to comedy.
"i'm going to kill him," he mumbles into your neck, but his shoulders are shaking.
"no you're not."
"i'm going to kill him and it's going to take less than forty-two seconds."
from the hallway: "I heard that. no, you won't."
bobby laughs. actually laughs. the real one. the loud, sharp, too-much one he hates. muffled against your throat. your favourite sound in the world pressed into your skin.
Aerion Targaryen x f!reader x Valarr Targaryen (part 1, part 2, part 3. But can also be read as a oneshot.)
Summary: Based on the request "A fic where you tried to give Valarr a love potion but Aerion drinks it instead (like what one of Egg's sisters did)". Reader is a Baratheon (but no physical descriptions are given), who is a childhood friend of Valarr's.
Chapter summary: Aerion's "Why don't you love me?" moment, Targaryen style secret first date in the streets of King's Landing. And the girlies are fighting (Aerion and Valarr.)
a/n: The last chapter of Growing Strong series is out, btw, for those not yet aware! <3
You had not expected the kiss to continue. When Aerion first pressed his mouth to yours, you had thought it would be brief, a moment of impulse caused by the dress, easily broken, easily dismissed. But his arm had locked around your waist before you could step back, pulling you flush against him with a firmness that left no room for retreat, and when you instinctively shifted against his hold, his murmur vibrated against your lips.
"Stop wriggling."
The command was soft, almost distracted, as though his mind were elsewhere entirely. His mouth did not leave yours. It moved with a slow pressure that made your thoughts scatter before you could gather them into something useful.
You bit his lip.
It was not hard enough to draw blood, but it was enough to make your point, or so you intended. Aerion groaned, a low sound that rumbled from his chest into yours, and instead of pulling away as any sensible man might have done, he kissed you harder. His free hand came up to grasp your neck, his palm warm against the side of your throat, fingers curving along the line of your jaw to guide your mouth more firmly against his.
You let him.
That was the worst of it. You let him. Your hands, which had risen to push against his chest, remained where they were, neither shoving nor gripping, simply resting against the fine fabric of his doublet as though your body had not yet decided whether to resist or surrender.
Only when he pulled away, just enough to draw breath, just enough to let the air cool the space between your mouths, did you try to step back.
He followed.
One step, then another, matching your retreat until your spine met the edge of the table. He did not cage you there, precisely. He simply did not allow the distance you sought.
"You have loved Valarr for years, have you not?"
The question came from nowhere, searching, and it struck you harder than any blow could have.
You stared at him. Aerion's violet eyes were fixed on your face, but there was no mockery in them. He looked, bewilderingly, almost like a child. His brows were drawn together in contemplation, his mouth set in a line of mild frustration, as though he were working through a problem that refused to resolve itself.
"Could you not love me too?"
You could not speak. The words lodged in your throat like stones.
He did not seem to require an answer. His gaze grew distant for a moment, reflective, and when he spoke again his voice was lower, rougher, as though he were recounting something he had never intended to share.
"I could see you, you know. When my father would make us come visit the Red Keep. You were always following him around. Valarr." He said the name with a particular weight, not quite disdain, not quite resignation. "A pretty little girl, but not remarkable enough to torment. I saw you only in passing."
Your jaw tightened. He did not seem to register it.
"Then we came again, years later, and you wereâŚ" He paused, his eyes dragging over your face, as though reconstructing a memory in real time. "A woman grown. Flowered. Filling out your dresses in ways that made it impossible not to look. And still beside him. Still following."
His hand had not left your neck. His thumb traced a slow line along the edge of your jaw.
"I assumed he had deflowered you by then," he said, and the bluntness of it made your breath catch. "Taken you to his bed. Broken you in a bit. How could he not? Having you next to him every day, looking at him the way you did." His eyes darkened, something flickering behind the violet that you could not name. "I could not imagine the restraint. Or the stupidity."
Your heart was beating too fast. You could feel it in your throat, in your wrists, in the places where his body nearly touched yours.
"Only for him to get betrothed to someone else." Aerion's mouth curved, but there was no humor in it. "A merchant's daughter from Tyrosh. And I wondered then if I had misjudged him. If my courteous, perfect cousin Valarr had it in him to use a woman and abandon her once he tired of her. That would have been a surprising discovery of cruelty. Almost impressive, in its own way."
He leaned closer, nosing along your cheek, pressing his lips in a way that were not quite kisses to the corner of your mouth, your jaw, the tender skin beneath your ear.
"But then you told me the truth. That the potion was meant for him. And you had the expression of a maiden grasping for attention, not a woman scorned." He paused, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. "He had simply never noticed the doe offering herself up willingly. Without so much as a chase."
You remained silent. What could you say? It was all true. Every word of it.
You remembered those years with a clarity that still ached. The hours spent at Valarr's side. The way your heart had leapt when he sought you out, when he smiled at you, when he trusted you with his fears and his uncertainties. You had thought, foolishly, desperately, that proximity would breed something more. That devotion would be rewarded. That he would look at you one day and see what had always been there, waiting.
He had not.
Aerion was wrong about one thing, at least. Valarr had not deflowered you. He had not even come close. There had been only one kiss, years ago, when you had wondered aloud what it felt like and he had offered to show you.
"To satisfy your curiosity," he had said. "And soothe your fears. That is all."
That was all. A single kiss, chaste and brief, and you had spent years afterwards lying awake at night wondering if he had ever wanted to kiss you again. If he had ever thought about it. If it had meant anything at all.
"What a dreadful waste."
Aerion's voice cut through your thoughts, and you realized he had been watching your face.
"All those years," he continued, shaking his head slowly. His tone sharpened with something that might have been disgust, though it was not directed at you. "Wouldn't you rather have fun with me?"
Before you could answer, he dragged his tongue along your parted mouth, an obscene gesture, and then pulled back entirely. The loss of warmth was jarring.
You heard the click of the lock.
He had crossed the room while you were still in a daze, and now he stood by the door with his hand still on the bolt, surveying the chamber with a new expression. Thoughtful. Calculating. The look of a man who had just conceived of something and was already deciding how to execute it.
"Change," he said.
You blinked. "âŚwhat?"
He was already moving toward your trunks and flipping them open. He rummaged through the folded gowns with the carelessness of a man who had never had to pack his own belongings in his life, tossing aside silks and velvets until he found what he was looking for.
"Put this on." He straightened, holding up a dress. It was the plainest thing you owned, wool, not silk, a muted grey-brown. Serviceable. Unremarkable. He found a cloak as well, dark and heavy, and thrust it toward you. "Quickly."
"Aerion..."
"I have decided," he said, as though that explained everything, "to show you something you have not seen before."
"What would that be?"
His mouth curved. "A life outside these walls."
You stared at him. "You are mad."
"Possibly." He did not seem troubled by the assessment. "But you are going to put on that dress and that cloak, and you are going to come with me, and for one night you are going to see what it is like to not be a lady in a cage."
"A cage I am only still in because of you," you pointed out.
"Yes," he agreed, entirely unrepentant. "So you may consider this my penance. Now change. Unless you would prefer I stay and watch?"
You snatched the dress from his hands and pointed toward the door. "Turn around."
He turned, though not before you caught the flicker of amusement in his eyes.
You changed quickly, pulled the cloak around your shoulders and drew the hood over your hair. The woman who looked back at you from the mirror was not a Baratheon lady. She was not a prince's betrothed. She was simply a woman in a plain dress, indistinguishable from a hundred others in the city below.
Aerion turned back at the sound of your movement, and his eyes swept over you with an approval that made something in your stomach tighten.
"Passable," he said. "Come."
He did not take your hand. He simply opened the door and waited, and after a moment's hesitation, you followed.
The passages he led you through were not the ones you knew. They were narrower, darker, clearly meant for servants or for those who did not wish to be seen. Aerion moved through them with the ease of long familiarity, and you wondered, not for the first time, what sort of prince spent so much time in hidden corridors.
The city beyond the Red Keep was another world entirely.
You had seen it before, of course: from windows, from carriages, from the high walls that separated royalty from rabble, but you had never walked through it. Not like this. Not on foot, with the press of bodies around you and the smell of cooking meat and unwashed skin and something sour that might have been spilled ale.
The market was still alive even at this hour, torches flickering in iron sconces, vendors calling out prices in voices hoarse from use. Aerion guided you through the crowd with a hand at the small of your back, a light pressure that steered you away from the worst of the press without ever seeming to direct you.
"Keep your hood up," he murmured against your hair. "Your face is too memorable."
You did not know whether that was a compliment or a warning.
He bought you food from a stall, fried and greasy dough, wrapped in paper that grew translucent with oil, and laughed when you hesitated to eat it.
"It will not kill you," he said. "Probably."
You ate it. It was, against all expectation, delicious.
He showed you the stall where a woman sold ribbons dyed in colors so vivid they seemed to glow in the torchlight. You saw the corner where a man with no teeth told fortunes for a copper penny, and the alley where a boy no older than ten was teaching a dog to dance on its hind legs. The blacksmith's forge, dark now but still radiating heat, the weaver's shop with its shuttered windows, and the fountain in the small square where the water ran clean and cold.
You stopped when you saw the play.
It was being performed on a makeshift stage at the edge of the market, boards laid across barrels, a painted curtain fluttering behind the players. The actors were not skilled, their voices too loud, their gestures too broad, but there was an energy to the performance that drew you in. You grabbed Aerion's sleeve without thinking and pulled him toward the crowd that had gathered.
He came willingly, standing close behind you as you watched.
The play, as it turned out, was not the sort of thing performed in the Red Keep.
It was vulgar. Obscenely, unapologetically vulgar. The plot, such as it was, seemed to revolve around a milkmaid, a travelling merchant, and a donkey, and the jokes grew progressively filthier with each passing minute. The crowd around you roared with laughter. You scrunched up your face.
You turned sharply, intending to leave, and found Aerion already watching you. He had not been watching the play at all. His grin was half-hidden against your hair, his shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, and when he saw your expression he only laughed harder.
"Not to your taste?" he murmured.
"You knew what this was."
"I had my suspicions." He tugged on your hand, drawing you away from the crowd. "Come. Before the donkey returns for the second act. It does not improve."
You were laughing by the time you reached the Red Keep.
You could not remember when the laughter had started, somewhere between the market and the gates, somewhere between the grease-stained paper crumpled in your hand and the way Aerion had nearly slipped on a pile of something unspeakable in the alley, but it had not stopped. Your sides ached with it. Your cheeks hurt. Aerion was no better, his composure utterly shattered, his hair disheveled from where you had shoved him in retaliation for a joke you refused to repeat.
The laughter died the moment you stepped through the doors.
Maekar Targaryen was waiting.
Beside him stood Baelor Breakspear, his expression troubled but composed, and beside Baelor...Valarr.
Your stomach dropped.
"Where," Maekar said, his voice carrying the particular calm of a man who was restraining himself only with great effort, "have you been?"
Aerion straightened, the last traces of mirth fading from his face. "Sightseeing."
"Sightseeing."
"The city is quite lovely at night, father. You should try it sometime."
"Do not play games with me, boy." Maekar's gaze moved to you, taking in the plain dress, the cloak. "You took your betrothed out into the streets. Alone. At night. Unchaperoned. Without guards. Without so much as a word to anyone."
"We did nothing inappropriate," Aerion said, and there was an edge creeping into his voice now. "We merely walked. I only wished to show her the city, she obliged me."
"She wished..." Maekar cut himself off, visibly struggling for control. "You are a prince of the blood. She is a lady of a great house, newly betrothed, and you thought it appropriate to drag her through the filth of the city like a common..."
"Like a what?" Aerion's voice sharpened dangerously.
Baelor raised a hand, stepping between them with the practiced ease of a man who had spent years mediating Targaryen tempers. "Enough. The question is not what was done, but what will be perceived. Aerion, you must understand how this looks. An unchaperoned outing, in secret, at night...it invites speculation. It invites scandal."
"There is no scandal," Aerion said flatly. "There is only a man showing his betrothed the city she will one day help rule."
"And there will be time enough for that after the wedding," Maekar snapped. "When she is your wife, not your..."
He stopped. The word hung unspoken in the air, and you felt your face heat for an entirely different reason.
"She is my betrothed," Aerion said, very quietly. "And I will thank you not to imply otherwise."
Valarr spoke for the first time.
"This is reckless, even for you." His voice was controlled, but there was something simmering beneath it, something that made Aerion's head turn slowly toward him. "She deserves better than to be dragged into your whims."
"Who asked your opinion?" Aerion's hostility flared so suddenly that even Baelor looked taken aback. "Who asked you to weigh in on this, cousin? You, who could not be bothered to notice her when she was right in front of you? You, who..."
"Aerion." Baelor's voice was sharp now. "That is enough."
"Is it? Because I find myself quite interested in why Valarr has suddenly developed such a concern for my betrothed's welfare. A year ago he could not see her beside himself. Now he cannot stop looking."
Valarr's jaw tightened. "I have always cared for her."
"Have you?" Aerion tilted his head, and his smile was not pleasant. "How convenient that you discovered this only after she was no longer available."
"Enough!"
This time it was Lyonel Baratheon who spoke, his voice cutting through the tension like a war horn. He had been standing near the back of the hall, silent until now, his arms crossed over his chest. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes moved between Aerion and Valarr with a calculation that made you nervous.
"You," he said, pointing at Aerion, "will learn to control your tongue and your impulses, or I will teach you myself. I have no objection to a man showing his betrothed the city. I have done worse in my youth, and I will not play the hypocrite. But I do object to a man whose every action threatens to dishonor my niece and my house through sheer carelessness."
Aerion opened his mouth, saw the look in Lyonel's eyes, and closed it again.
"You will not be alone with her without a witness until the wedding," Maekar said, seizing the opening. "That is not a request. It is a command. I will not have this alliance jeopardized by your inability to exercise restraint."
"Father..."
"You are dismissed."
Aerion stood motionless for a long moment. Then he turned, and his eyes met yours. There was frustration, defiance, and something else that you could not quite name, and then he bowed, stiffly, and strode from the hall.
You did not watch him go. You did not look at Valarr, though you could feel his gaze on you like a weight. You simply inclined your head to Maekar, to Baelor, to your uncle, and retreated to your chambers with as much dignity as you could muster.
You barely slept.
The morning came gray and cold, and you rose with the first light, your head aching from too little rest and too much wine the night before. Your maids had not yet arrived. The castle was quiet.
You did not hear him enter.
One moment you were alone, standing before the mirror in your shift, and the next his arms were around you from behind, his mouth pressing hot against the curve of your neck.
"Aerion..." you gasped, trying to twist away. "The command...there must be a witness..."
"There is no one here to witness the lack of witness," he murmured against your skin, "and I will be gone before anyone knows I was here. Turn around."
You turned.
He kissed you.
This time, you kissed him back.
Your hands rose to grip the front of his tunic, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. Your mouth moved against his with an enthusiasm that surprised you both. The taste of him was familiar now, and you chased it, rising onto your toes to press closer, closer, until there was no space left between your bodies.
When he finally pulled back, his eyes were dark, his breathing uneven. He looked at you for a long moment.
"Well," he murmured, his thumb tracing the line of your swollen lower lip. "That is more like it."
Then he was gone, slipping through the door as silently as he had come, leaving you standing alone in the morning light with your heart pounding and your lips still tingling.
part 5: pending...
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YASSSS THE FIC REQUESTS R OPEN, IâVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ONE. I was thinking more of an atypical yandere situation where the reader is ok with it. Idk I hardly see any kind of fics like that. For characters I was thinking someone from the batfam? Not sure tho. Please and thank you đđ˝ đ
A/N: Hiiii!! Finally getting through my request inbox, yay!.
WARNING: I encourage all readers to make informed decisions about the content they read. Some of the content moving forward may be unsuitable for specific audiences. Please read at your own discretion.
Enjoy, Reader
The first time you realized Tim Drake was watching you, you did not feel afraid.
You probably should have. That was the joke, the part you kept rolling over in your mind later, private and greedy, until it gleamed. There were rules for people like you, the ones who counted rent and groceries and the humiliating math of survival. Tim Drake lived by different rules. He could stand under the chandeliered lights at a Wayne gala, untouched champagne in hand, looking bored by the weight of his own money. He was beautiful in a sleepless, knife-bright way, all dark hair and pale focus, his suit so expensive it faded into the background, his eyes too sharp for the soft mask he wore. Rich boys usually looked through you, past you, their attention sliding off like rain on glass. Tim didn't. He looked at you like he had found something worth keeping.
So you smiled.
Not too much. That mattered. A smile could be an invitation, mockery, nerves, gratitude, all in the teeth and the timing. You had learned that people gave themselves away when they thought they were being offered something. Tim gave himself away by holding still. His conversation with a silver-haired board member faded, then stopped. He didn't turn his head. He didn't stare. He just became aware of you, so completely that for one sharp second, the whole room seemed to bend around the line of his attention.
Bingo, you thought.
By then, you already knew enough. Tim Drake, Wayne-adjacent royalty, tech prince, adopted son, former boy genius, current insomniac in tailored wool. He had enough money to treat five figures like pocket change. Enough loneliness to make it dangerous. You had read the profiles, the gossip, the business blurbs, even old paparazzi comments about how he looked sadder in person. That was the detail that caught you. Maybe it should have made you wary, but you had always recognized that particular shade of sadness, the kind that paired longing with hunger. Once, a less careful version of you had trusted people who promised safety, leaving you emptier in the end. Loneliness was the one inheritance you still kept polished. It made you selective, hungry in your own way, drawn to the possibility of control instead of the pretense of belonging. Sad rich boys were useful. Sad rich boys with control issues were better. They liked to rescue. They liked to fix. They liked people who made them feel needed, only to punish them for it.
You were not afraid of obsession when it came wrapped in money.
You made him come to you by pretending not to see him again. You drifted through the gala like you belonged, though your invitation was a favor wrapped in a lie. You touched a donor's arm while laughing. You let your eyes pass over Tim once, twice, never long enough to give him certainty. When you finally stepped onto the balcony, you did it slowly, leaving behind the heat and perfume and old money, letting the winter air bite your cheeks until your eyes watered just enough.
He followed three minutes later.
Not two. Not five. Three. Close enough to be intent. Far enough to pretend to be a coincidence.
âNeeded air?â he asked.
His voice was softer than you expected, a little rough from underuse, threaded with that careful Gotham politeness people used when they had learned too young that every word could become evidence. He stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, not trapping you against the railing, not yet. He was good. Better than you thought. That made your pulse kick, not with fear, but with interest.
You looked over your shoulder. âSomething like that.â
âYou donât seem like youâre enjoying yourself.â
You laughed under your breath and turned back toward the city. Gotham spread below in black glass and wet neon, its buildings cut into the night like old teeth. âIs anyone?â
âThat depends.â
âOn?â
âWhether they came here for the cause, the cameras, or the escape route.â
You glanced at him again, letting your expression flicker. Surprise first. Then amusement. Then a slip of sadness, lashes lowered, mouth softening like you'd been seen in a way you didn't want to admit. It was theater, but good theater needed a little truth. You were tired. You hated the room behind you. You wanted someone to choose you, even if you planned to charge them for it later.
âI came for the free food,â you said.
Timâs mouth twitched. âBold strategy.â
âIâm very brave.â
âI noticed.â
There it was. Too quick, too quiet, almost swallowed. A little confession in a black suit.
You let the silence stretch. Men like Tim always wanted to fill silence with proof. You had expected compliments, questions, maybe some awkward attempt at charm. Instead, he watched the reflection of the city lights move across your face and said, âYou shouldnât trust most people in there.â
You smiled faintly. âIncluding you?â
âEspecially me.â
You should have taken that as a warning. Later, when you replayed the balcony in your head, when every word rearranged itself into a map you had mistaken for weather, you would understand he had been honest from the beginning. That was the most obscene part. Tim had not lied. Not really. He had simply let you misunderstand the shape of the truth.
At the time, you only thought, Oh, this one wants to be dangerous.
So you gave him something to chase.
Not all at once. Never all at once. You let him have your number after making him work through a conversation about terrible coffee, Gotham rent, and your alleged reluctance to date anyone with a Wikipedia page. You made him smile twice and look wounded once. You let your fingertips brush his when he handed you back your phone, and you pretended not to notice how his pupils widened. The next morning, you waited six hours before replying to his first text.
Tim: I found the coffee place you mentioned. You were right. Itâs terrible.
You: I warned you.
Tim: I thought you were exaggerating.
You: Thatâs your first mistake.
Tim: Whatâs my second?
You: Thinking I give warnings twice.
It became a game, and you were good at games when the prize came with a trust fund. You gave him pieces of yourself, carefully chosen, a little bruised. A story about an ex who made you feel watched, just to see his reaction. A complaint about your landlord raising rent, because you wanted him to ask how much. A joke about needing a new laptop, because Tim Drake worked in tech and men loved to solve problems they could buy. He didn't offer right away. That almost disappointed you. Then, three days later, your laptop died in a cafĂŠ while you sat across from him, and Tim's gaze flicked to the blank screen with an expression so mild it was suspicious.
âThatâs inconvenient,â he said.
You sighed, pressing the power button again. âItâs fine. Itâs basically held together with spite anyway.â
âI can take a look.â
âOh? Wayne Tech support make house calls?
âFor you,â he said, and the words landed gently, almost shy, while his eyes remained too steady.
Your heart gave a pleased little kick. Hooked.
You let him walk you home that night. You made sure your apartment looked just vulnerable enough: thrifted furniture, a half-dead plant on the windowsill, cheap curtains, a blanket tossed over the sofa like you hadn't expected company. The nicer things were hidden in your closet. One drawer left slightly open, nothing inside. You wanted him to feel the urge to fix things. You wanted him to imagine himself as necessary.
Tim set your laptop on the table and opened it with long, precise fingers. He looked too natural in your space, dark coat folded over the back of a chair, sleeves rolled to his forearms, hair falling slightly into his eyes. It irritated you for a moment, how easily he belonged somewhere he had not earned. Then he glanced up and caught you watching him.
âWhat?â he asked.
âNothing.â
âThat didnât look like nothing.â
âYouâre very serious about a dying laptop.â
âIâm serious about most things.â
âSounds exhausting.â
âIt is.â
There was no self-pity in it. That made the line work better than it would have if he had tried. You softened your face on instinct, because people were locks and expressions were keys. âYou could try being unserious sometime.â
âWith you?â
âIf you survive.â
He smiled then, small and tired, and you felt the first strange tug of something that wasn't calculation. You stepped away from it fast.
The laptop revived because, apparently, Tim really was that good. You acted thrilled. He acted like the praise did not matter while absorbing every drop of it. The next day, a courier delivered a new laptop to your apartment, sleek and expensive, with no note except a little card tucked beneath the ribbon.
For when spite is no longer enough.
You laughed for a full minute.
Then you sold your old laptop, paid two overdue bills, and texted him a picture of the new one open on your kitchen table.
You: This is ridiculous.
Tim: Is that a complaint?
You: Itâs an observation.
Tim: Do you like it?
You waited. Made tea. Counted to one hundred. Let him feel the little cliff edge of your silence.
You: Yes. Thank you, Tim.
His reply came instantly.
Tim: Anything.
You stared at that word for a long time, heat unfurling behind your ribs like a wicked flower.
After that, you got bolder. Not reckless. Reckless people got caught; you preferred choreography. You complained about things he could fix. You arranged little misfortunes for him to solve. Your tire went flat two blocks from Wayne Tower because you let the air out yourself, and Tim arrived in twenty-two minutes, coat open, jaw tight, eyes scanning the street before he looked at you. Your phone 'accidentally' shared your location one night while you walked through a neighborhood safe enough to worry him, not dangerous enough to hurt you. He called in thirty seconds.
âWhere are you?â he asked.
You let your voice come out breathless. âWalking home.â
âWhy are you on Ninth?â
âItâs faster.â
âItâs not safer.â
You smiled into the dark. âAre you stalking my location, Tim?â
A pause. Not long. Not guilty enough.
âYou shared it with me.â
âBy accident.â
âYou havenât turned it off.â
You looked up at a flickering streetlamp, rain misting silver through the light. âMaybe I forgot.â
âNo, you didnât.â
Your smile faded, not from fear, but from the sudden cold edge in his voice. For a second, the game sharpened. "You sound very sure."
âI am.â
A black car turned the corner at the end of the block, headlights washing over wet pavement. It pulled up beside you without haste. The passenger window lowered, revealing Timâs face half-lit by the dashboard, expression calm and unreadable.
âGet in,â he said.
You should have been frightened. Instead, you felt triumphant enough to nearly laugh. He was already there. He had come when summoned without being summoned. He had placed himself exactly where you wanted him.
Still, you made him wait.
You leaned down toward the open window. âThat sounded like an order.â
âIt was.â
âTry again.â
His gaze traveled over your face, taking in the damp hair at your temples, the thin jacket you had chosen specifically because it made you look underprepared. His hand tightened once around the steering wheel. When he spoke again, his voice had gone softer, which somehow made it worse.
âPlease get in the car.â
You did.
The inside smelled like leather, rain, and coffee. There was a half-empty cup in the holder, three charging cords coiled too neatly, a tablet asleep on the console. Tim turned up the heat without asking. You watched him do it and felt the satisfaction of a plan unfolding exactly as designed.
âYou canât keep doing this,â he said.
âWalking?â
âTesting me.â
You let your head tip against the seat. âIs that what Iâm doing?â
âYes.â
âAnd are you passing?â
He did not answer immediately. Gotham slid past the windows in streaks of blue-black and gold, the cityâs reflections crawling over his face. At a red light, he turned to you. âDo you want me to?â
The question settled between you, velvet over wire.
You could have kissed him then. You almost did, not because it was time, not because it was useful, but because Tim Drake looking at you like that felt like standing too close to a locked door and hearing something breathe on the other side. Instead, you looked away first, giving him the victory because victories made men generous.
âI donât know,â you said.
A lie. You knew exactly what you wanted.
Money first. Safety second. Attention as needed. Affection negotiable. Tim, increasingly, as both resource and entertainment.
He became easier after that, and harder too. He bought you things, but only what you could accept without feeling bought. A better winter coat after yours went missing at a restaurant. Groceries when you joked that your fridge held only a lemon and a jar of mustard. A deposit for a new apartment disguised as a loan, terms so vague they felt like a ribbon around your throat. He never asked for repayment. He never asked for anything obvious at all, which made him feel less like prey and more like a room locking from the outside.
You ignored that sensation because the apartment was beautiful.
Not ostentatious. That would have made you suspicious. A renovated one-bedroom in a secure building, warm wood floors, deep windows, good locks, a doorman who knew your name the first day. Tim said the building belonged to a Wayne subsidiary, and he got you a reduced rate. You pretended to protest. He pretended to believe you. The dance was elegant by then.
The first night there, you stood barefoot in the living room among half-unpacked boxes while Tim installed something in the security panel by the door.
âWhat is that?â you asked.
âUpdated system. The old one had vulnerabilities.â
âNormal people just say congratulations on the apartment.â
âCongratulations on the apartment.â
âYou sound thrilled.â
âI am.â
âYouâre installing surveillance.â
âSecurity.â
âDifference?â
âConsent.â
You laughed, but his hands stilled on the panel, just for a second.
When he looked back at you, the city lights caught in his eyes and did not soften them. âDo you want me to stop?â
It was a trap, though not one you recognized. You thought the trap was yours, baited with need and helplessness and flirtation. You did not realize he was offering you a door and measuring whether you would close it yourself.
You folded your arms. âNo. I like feeling safe.â
Something moved across his face, too quick to name. Hunger, maybe. Relief. Possession, quiet and polite.
âGood,â he said.
From then on, Tim knew when your door opened. He knew when you came home. He knew when you stayed out late, and his texts would appear with unnatural timing.
Tim: Did you eat?
You: Hello to you too.
Tim: Did you?
You: Yes, Dad.
Tim: Ew, don't call me that.
You: Bossy.
Tim: Only when you make bad decisions.
You: Then you must be bossy a lot.
Tim: Constantly.
You flirted with other people in front of him. That was one of your favorite tools, cruel as it was. Nothing serious. A laugh held too long at a Wayne fundraiser. A hand on someone's arm in the lobby. A date you arranged mostly to cancel after Tim saw the reservation flash on your phone. He never exploded. He never begged. He just got quieter, and the quiet was addictive, the way storms are when you're safe behind glass.
One evening, after a man from your building offered to help carry your groceries and you accepted with a bright smile, Tim appeared in your apartment twenty minutes later without knocking.
You were arranging oranges in a bowl when the door opened. You looked up, startled for real that time, and Tim stepped inside with your spare key in his hand.
You stared at it. âWhere did you get that?â
âYou gave it to me.â
âNo, I didnât.â
âYou left it in my car last week.â
âThat was an accident.â
âNo, it wasnât.â
The oranges sat between you like small suns, absurdly cheerful. Your mouth went dry. Tim locked the door behind him. Not a slam. Just a click, clean, and final.
âYouâre very confident tonight,â you said.
âYou like that.â
You laughed, but it came out thinner than intended. âYou think you know what I like?â
âI know you hate being ignored. You like being chased, but not caught too quickly. You like gifts more when you can pretend you resisted them. You like making me jealous because it proves Iâm watching. You like leaving doors open and pretending it was carelessness.â He set the key on the table. âAnd you liked knowing I had this.â
The room seemed to tilt, just a little. Not enough to fall. Enough to notice gravity had shifted.
âYouâre making a lot of accusations.â
âIâm making observations.â
You hated that he used your own words. Hated the little echo of your earlier game. Hated more that your pulse had started to beat too quickly, not entirely from fear.
Tim crossed the room slowly, stopping on the other side of the kitchen island. He did not touch you. That restraint felt deliberate, almost surgical. âDid he touch you?â
âThe neighbor?â
âDid he?â
âHe carried groceries, Tim.â
âThatâs not an answer.â
âThatâs exactly an answer.â
His jaw flexed. âYou shouldnât invite strangers up.â
âI didnât invite him up. He helped me to the door.â
âDonât.â
You arched a brow. âDonât?â
âDonât make me watch someone else put their hands where I should be.â
The words should have frightened you more. Instead, your body responded first, heating your spine, annoyance and thrill tangled together. Fear fizzed behind your ribs, but it never made it all the way to the surface, too muddled with anticipation, with something that felt dangerously close to satisfaction. You wanted to recoil from him, but a part of you leaned in, hungry for the validation and repulsed by what it cost. Beneath it all, guilt pricked at you; a sharp, almost shameful reminder that you were as much to blame for this slow spiral as he was. This was what you had been coaxing out of him, wasn't it? The obsession, the crack in the Wayne mask, the proof you mattered enough to unmake him. You wanted the monster to show its teeth. You just hadn't expected them to look so familiar up close.
âYouâre not my boyfriend,â you said.
âNo.â
âYouâre not my keeper.â
His eyes dropped briefly to your mouth. âNo.â
âYou donât own me.â
âNo,â Tim said again, and the softness of it was almost tender. âNot yet.â
The silence that followed had a pulse.
You should have ended it then. You should have thrown the key at him, told him to leave, changed the locks, deleted his number, found another mark with less shadow behind his eyes. Instead, you stepped around the island and stopped close enough to smell the rain in his coat.
âCareful,â you said. âYouâre starting to sound obsessed.â
Tim looked down at you. âStarting?â
That was the first time he kissed you. Or maybe you kissed him. Later, the distinction became another useless little object at the bottom of a dark drawer. His mouth was controlled for exactly three seconds before control became something hungrier. He kissed like he had been thinking about it too long, like restraint was a debt he had grown tired of paying. His hand came to your jaw, firm enough to angle you where he wanted, gentle enough to let you pretend you could stop him. You did not. You wound your fingers into his shirt and felt his heartbeat hammering beneath the expensive fabric.
It was supposed to close the con.
That was what you told yourself when he started sleeping over. When half his wardrobe appeared in your closet as if the apartment had slowly accepted him. When he began bringing work to your kitchen table, Wayne Enterprises code glowing across his screen while you pretended not to understand any of it. When he paid for things before you could ask and watched you accept them with that same unnerving, patient satisfaction. You told yourself you were winning because your bills were paid, your fridge was full, your body was warm at night, and Tim Drake looked at you like the world was a problem he would solve with blood if necessary.
Then people began disappearing from the edges of your life.
Not many. Not enough to make a pattern anyone else would notice. A man who had cornered you outside a bar and refused to take no for an answer. A landlord from your old building who kept sending âaccidentalâ messages. The neighbor with the groceries, who suddenly moved out without saying goodbye, leaving behind a rumor about debt, fraud, something ugly found on his work computer. You asked Tim about that one because the timing bothered you.
He was making coffee in your kitchen at dawn, barefoot and half-dressed, dark hair sleep-tangled, looking almost human in the blue-gray light.
âDid you do something to Evan?â you asked.
Tim poured coffee into your favorite mug. âWho?â
You watched him. âMy neighbor.â
âYour former neighbor.â
âTim.â
He slid the mug toward you. âHe had problems.â
âWhat kind?â
âThe kind that make it hard to stay in Gotham.â
Cold moved through your stomach. âDid you cause them?â
Tim leaned against the counter, studying you over the rim of his mug. âWould it bother you if I did?â
That was another door. Another test. You saw it this time and still could not tell which answer was safer.
âIt depends,â you said.
âOn?â
âWhether he deserved it.â
Timâs gaze softened in a way that made you feel, absurdly, rewarded. âHe did.â
You believed him because it was easier. Evan had been too friendly. The old landlord was awful. The man outside the bar had scared you. Every disappearance had a justification, and Tim removed only people you wouldn't miss. That was how he trained you, though you didn't call it that. You let yourself believe it was protection, not erasure. You told yourself it was fate, not blame. And every time you smoothed over a worry, you wondered, briefly, guiltily, how much you were pretending, and how much you actually agreed. He made violence feel like service. He made your silence feel like complicity. He made complicity feel intimate.
By spring, you had stopped pretending the relationship was normal, but you had not stopped pretending you were in control.
Your plan had evolved. The first goal had been money. The second was leverage. If Tim ever became too much, you thought, you would gather enough evidence to protect yourself. You kept screenshots. Notes. Dates. Little records hidden in a cloud account under a false name, because you were not stupid. You documented the gifts, the installed security system, the suspicious disappearances, the way Tim sometimes knew things he had no reason to know. You saved it all like an insurance policy.
Then, one rainy Thursday, the folder vanished.
Not deleted. Not hacked in the flashy way movies promised, with skull icons and dramatic warnings. It simply became empty. Your backup drive is corrupted. Your burner email locked you out. Your notes app showed blank pages where careful lists had been. For ten full minutes, you sat on the edge of your bed with your phone in your hand, all the blood in your body turning slow and cold.
Tim texted at 9:07 p.m.
Tim: Donât panic.
You stared.
You: What did you do?
Tim: Cleaned up something dangerous.
You: That was mine.
Tim: It was a liability.
You: You went through my private files?
Tim: Yes.
There was no apology. Not even a decorative one.
You called him. He answered before the first ring finished.
âWhere are you?â you demanded.
âAt work.â
âDonât lie to me.â
A pause. Then the faint sound of keys, a door closing, rain against glass. âIâm not.â
âYou deleted my files.â
âI removed evidence that could hurt you.â
âThat could hurt you.â
âYes,â he said. âThat too.â
Your laugh broke sharply and humorlessly. âAt least youâre honest.â
âI try to be with you.â
âThatâs psychotic.â
âI know.â
Something about the calmness of it made your throat tighten. âYou know?â
âYes.â
âAnd what? Thatâs supposed to make it better?â
âNo.â
âThen why say it?â
âBecause you like knowing what I am.â
You went still.
Timâs voice lowered, not seductive, not pleading. Simply certain. âYou liked it from the beginning. You saw the shape of me before most people do, and instead of running, you stepped closer. You pulled strings. You left openings. You wanted proof I couldnât stop looking. You wanted my money, my attention, my jealousy. You wanted the cage as long as you thought you were holding the key.â
Your apartment felt suddenly too full of cameras, too full of locks, too full of him, though he was not physically there. You stood and moved to the security panel by the door. The screen glowed quietly. Armed. Watching.
âYou donât know anything,â you said.
âI know everything.â
It was not boastful. That was the problem. Tim did not sound triumphant. He sounded tired, almost gentle, as if he were telling you the weather had changed and you should bring a coat.
âNo,â you said, because denial was a small animal in your chest trying to survive.
âI knew about the gala invitation. I knew who got it for you. I knew what you searched before you came. I knew when you looked up my net worth, my job, my dating history, old photos, rumors about my family. I knew when your laptop was going to âdieâ because you downloaded the wrong thing on purpose and I let it happen. I knew about the tire. I knew about the location sharing. I knew about the folder.â
Your hand gripped the edge of the table. âYou let me think I was scamming you.â
âI needed to see how far youâd go.â
âYou needed?â
âI needed to know if you would choose me when you thought you were choosing yourself.â
The words slid under your skin, sharp as a blade.
âYouâre insane,â you whispered.
âIâve been worse.â
The call ended.
For one second, nothing moved. Then your security panel chirped, and the lock clicked open.
Tim stepped inside, soaked with rain, black coat dripping on your floor, face pale in the hallway light. You hadn't heard the elevator. You hadn't heard footsteps. No umbrella. His hair stuck to his forehead. There was something almost beautiful about him then, something ruined and devoted, like a saint made from sleeplessness and bad intentions.
You backed up.
He noticed. Of course, he noticed. Pain flickered across his face, quickly swallowed. âDonât do that.â
âYou broke into my apartment.â
âYou gave me access.â
âI gave you a key.â
âYou gave me more than that.â
âBecause you manipulated me.â
âBecause we manipulated each other.â Tim closed the door behind him. The lock clicked. âYou just didnât know I was better at it.â
Your breath shook. Anger arrived then, hot and grateful. It saved you from fear for a moment. âSo what now? You tell me Iâm trapped? You reveal the master plan? Very dramatic, Tim. Do you have a villain monologue prepared?â
His mouth twitched without humor. âIâm not a villain.â
âYouâre stalking me, controlling my apartment, deleting my evidence, and apparently ruining peopleâs lives when they annoy you.â
âWhen they threaten you.â
âWhen they annoy you,â you snapped.
He flinched, just barely. Not from guilt. From the edge in your voice. He hated when you sounded afraid, you realized. Hated it and wanted to be the cause anyway. That contradiction sat in him like a second skeleton.
âI have never hurt anyone who didnât deserve it,â he said.
âThat is exactly what dangerous people say.â
âYes.â
You stared at him, trembling now, though you refused to let it become visible enough to satisfy him. âWhat do you want?â
Tim looked at you for a long time, and the answer was already everywhere: in the locks, the gifts, the disappeared files, the wardrobe in your closet, the way he had entered your life like a man accepting an invitation you did not remember sending.
âYou,â he said.
âPeople arenât things.â
âI know.â
âYou donât get to keep me because youâre lonely.â
âIâm not lonely when Iâm with you.â
âThatâs not an answer.â
âItâs the only one that matters.â
You moved toward your bedroom, not because there was anywhere to go, but because your body needed direction. Tim did not grab you. He followed at a measured pace, giving you just enough room to feel hunted rather than seized. You snatched your phone off the bed, thumb flying toward emergency call, and the screen went black.
Not dead. Locked.
A small red icon pulsed once in the corner and vanished.
Your stomach dropped.
âWhat did you do?â you asked, your voice very quiet.
âI made sure you wouldnât make a call youâd regret.â
âYou mean a call youâd regret.â
âThe Bats wouldnât help you the way you think.â
The sentence was wrong. Wrong in shape, wrong in weight. You turned slowly.
Tim stood in the bedroom doorway, rainwater darkening his collar, his expression unreadable.
âThe Bats?â you repeated.
His silence opened like a trapdoor beneath your feet.
It happened stupidly, then. Not with a grand confession, not with a cape unfurling under moonlight, not with a dramatic mask pulled from a drawer. It happened because lightning flashed beyond the window and lit the room for half a second, catching on the narrow shelf behind him where you had once seen a small locked case. The case is open now. Inside lay red armor, black fabric, a folded domino mask, and the unmistakable stylized emblem you had seen on news footage a hundred times.
Red Robin.
Your mind tried to reject it, then rearranged every fact with nauseating speed. The impossible timing. The silent entrances. The surveillance felt too professional. The injuries he hid beneath expensive shirts. The way he spoke about dangerous people. Bruce Wayneâs son. Tech genius. Gotham nights. Missing hours.
Hmmmm, some hysterical little part of you thought, bright and absurd through the terror, maybe this was a bad idea.
Your knees almost laughed for you.
âYouâre Red Robin,â you said.
Timâs gaze did not leave your face. âYes.â
âYouâre Red Robin.â
âYes.â
âAnd I thought I was scamming a rich kid with stalking issues.â
A strange softness passed through him, nearly fond. âI know.â
âOh, thatâs humiliating.â
That startled a laugh out of him. Just one breath, cracked at the edges. It would have been sweet in another life. In this one, it made your skin prickle.
You sat down on the bed because standing seemed overly ambitious. âBatman knows youâre like this?â
Timâs expression cooled. âBruce knows what he needs to know.â
No fucking way. Bruce is Batman. Tim Drake is Red Robin. Which means you just stepped into a mansion full of crazy psychos in spandex and metal boomerangs.Â
âThat sounds like no.â
âThat sounds like Iâm careful.â
âYouâre not careful. Youâre deranged.â
âIâm both.â
You looked at the armor again, then at the apartment, the locks, the dead phone in your hand, your beautiful secure building owned by a Wayne subsidiary, your life moved piece by piece into a place Tim could control. You hadn't found a mark. You'd found a vigilante with a billionaire's resources, a detective's patience, and a wound where normal attachment should be. Worse, he had found you first.
âYou set me up,â you said.
His eyes softened. âYou set yourself up. I just made the path easier.â
âYou made me think I was winning.â
âYou were.â He stepped closer, slowly, as if approaching a frightened animal. âYou got the apartment. The money. The attention. The protection. You got everything you wanted.â
âAt what cost?â
âMe.â
Its simplicity took your breath away.
He knelt in front of you. Not submissive. Never that. It was worse because he made kneeling feel like possession from below, his hands resting on either side of your knees without touching, his eyes lifted to yours with terrible devotion.
âI know what you did,â he said quietly. âI know why you did it. I know you were going to leave once you had enough. I know you told yourself I was a problem you could manage. I know you thought, if it got bad, you could expose me.â His voice gentled further. âBut you canât expose Red Robin without exposing yourself to Batman, Nightwing, Oracle, the entire family. You canât run without me finding you. You canât go to the police with gifts you accepted, lies you told, evidence you tried to gather and hide. You canât disappear because every system you use has already learned my name before yours.â
A tear slipped down your cheek before you could stop it. Tim watched it fall with naked hunger and pain, as if it hurt him to see it and fed something starving in him anyway.
âYouâre scaring me,â you whispered.
âI know.â His hand rose, slow enough for refusal. You did not move. His thumb brushed the tear from your cheek with devastating tenderness. âIâm sorry.â
âNo, youâre not.â
His eyes flicked to your mouth. âNot enough to stop.â
There it was. The whole ugly cathedral of him, all at once.
You should have hated him. Part of you did. Another part, the worst part, the part that had smiled on the balcony and thought obsession looked like opportunity, understood with a sick little twist of recognition that Tim had not created the game alone. He had only been willing to play it to the end. You had baited the hook. He had swallowed it and dragged you into deeper water.
It was almost funny, the way you felt a flicker of pride burning under the fear, knowing you had finally found someone playing at your level. There was a thrill in the realization, a sick exhilaration, like two predators circling, each waiting for the other to blink first. You could not even pretend you were innocent. You craved the danger of being understood. Somewhere beneath the guilt and the anger, you recognized the satisfaction of being chosen not for your weakness, but for your sharpness, for every mask you wore and every lie you shaped to survive. You had always wanted to win, but you had hungered even more for a real opponent. In Tim, you saw your reflection; hungry, cunning, desperate for proof you existed. Responsibility tasted bitter on your tongue, but you could not deny that some part of you reveled in the symmetry of being matched, even as it threatened to undo you.
âWhat happens if I say I want out?â you asked.
Timâs hand stilled against your face.
The room seemed to listen.
âYou can say it,â he replied.
âThatâs not what I asked.â
âI know.â
You laughed once, broken and breathless. âGod, Tim.â
His expression tightened at the sound, not displeased. Your fear hadn't made him retreat. Your anger hadn't made him defensive. Even your disgust seemed to become part of the collection, proof you were here, proof you were feeling something because of him.
âI wonât hurt you,â he said.
âYouâve already hurt me.â
His brows drew together, and for one terrible second, he looked young, almost lost. âI wonât break you.â
âComforting distinction.â
âYou can hate me for a while.â
âFor a while?â
âAs long as you need.â
âGenerous.â
His hand slid from your cheek to the side of your throat, not squeezing, only resting there where your pulse betrayed you. âYouâll understand eventually.â
âThat sounds like something a kidnapper says.â
Tim looked at you, and the silence answered before he did.
Your blood chilled.
âAm I allowed to leave this apartment?â you asked.
âYes.â
âAlone?â
His thumb moved once against your pulse.
âNot tonight.â
No chain. No locked basement. No dramatic violence. Just a beautiful apartment, a dead phone, a vigilante kneeling between your knees, and the slow, crushing understanding that every exit you could imagine had already been mapped by someone who loved you like a crime scene. You thought Tim Drake's obsession would be a vault you could crack. Instead, it was a citywide system of doors, cameras, favors, masks, brothers in capes, and one dark-eyed genius who decided you were safer as a permanent thing.
You swallowed. âWhat do you want me to do?â
âFor tonight?â he asked.
âFor tonight.â
âStay.â
âAs if I have a choice.â
âYou do,â Tim said, and there was the lie at last, soft as snowfall over a grave. âYou just wonât like the consequences of the other ones.â
You stared at him until your eyes burned. âYouâre horrible.â
âI know.â
âYouâre not supposed to agree.â
âI told you,â he murmured, leaning closer until his forehead nearly touched yours. âI try to be honest with you.â
âYou used me.â
âYou used me first.â
âYou wanted me to.â
âYes.â
You closed your eyes, and his breath trembled. That was the thing that would ruin you, if anything did. Not the money. Not the danger. Not even the secret identity folded in the corner like a nightmare with Kevlar seams. It was the trembling. The proof that under all the planning, all the surveillance, all the cold patience, Tim Drake was still barely holding himself back from clutching you like salvation and catastrophe wore the same face.
âI hate you,â you whispered.
His lips brushed your temple. âNot forever.â
âYou donât know that.â
âI do.â
âHow?â
âBecause you hate losing more.â
Your eyes opened.
Timâs gaze met yours, dark and brilliant and unbearably awake. âAnd youâre going to want to prove you can still win.â
The worst part was that he was right.
A slow, horrified smile tugged at your mouth before you could hide it. Tim saw. Of course, he saw. His expression changed, deepened, something possessive and adoring moving through the exhaustion.
âThere,â he whispered.
You wanted to slap him. You wanted to kiss him. You wanted your laptop, your old apartment, your foolish little folder of evidence, your belief that you could put a leash on a monster and sell tickets to the show. Instead, you sat very still while Red Robin, Tim Drake, the rich boy with stalking issues who had never once been only that, rested his head against your lap as he had come home.
Outside, Gotham glittered wet and watchful beyond the windows. Somewhere, sirens wailed, thin and distant. Somewhere above, Batman moved through the dark with his own judgment, unaware or unwilling to see what his son had built in the quiet of your apartment. Tim's arms circled your waist, careful, almost reverent, and you realized with a cold bloom of awe that the trap didn't feel like snapping shut.
It felt like breathing in and finding his name already in your lungs.
âYou planned everything,â you said, your voice faint.
âNo,â Tim murmured against you. âNot everything.â
âWhat didnât you plan?â
His hold tightened, just enough to be felt.
âHow much Iâd love you.â
You looked down at him, at the damp dark hair, the bruised shadows beneath his eyes, the vigilante armor waiting open in its case, the beautiful disaster you had mistaken for prey. Your fingers hovered above his head. You did not touch him. Not yet. That was the only power you had left in the room, and both of you knew it. Even now, with his body kneeling at your feet and the apartment mapped in his design, the room paid attention to that pause. Your restraint bent the balance, the decision to touch or withhold granting you a sliver of control. For all his planning, Tim waited. And in that waiting, you reminded him he did not own every move; some were still yours to play.
Tim waited.
Patient. Devoted. Dangerous.
You let the silence stretch until his breathing changed.
Then you lowered your hand into his hair, very lightly, and felt him shudder like you had forgiven him, though you had done no such thing.
Fine, you thought, the word bitter and bright inside you. New game.
Tim smiled against your thigh.
And that was when you understood he had heard you without needing a single word.
WARNINGS : Yandere. Dark content. Toxic relationships. Entity summoning. More warnings to come. Not proofread đą
SYNOPSIS : You've developed feelings for your friend, Satoru for quite a long time already, but you can never seem to find the courage to confess your feelings to her. What better way to make your crush like you back than by using the One-Wish-Willow?
A/ N : You could say that I was very inspired by Obsession..
You like your friend, Satoru.
You want to confess, but you lack the self-confidence to push through. Youâre scared of how sheâs gonna react to it, plus, you donât want to ruin your friendship with her.
Youâre her biggest confidant in everything. She tells you her problems, about her parents, her professors, her everyday life, her crushes⌠yeah, she basically tells you almost everything.
She only sees you as a friend.
Satoru met you during sophomore year in highschool. After that, your friendship just bloomed faster than you can blink.
She values you and your friendship so much.
You and her are so close that people are dumbfounded by how someone like Satoru chooses to hang out with you.
Someone who doesnât belong in Satoruâs world.
â
The television was on, playing some random movie. Maybe it was a romance(?) one.
Youâre really not the type to watch these kinds of films, yet you didnât switch the channel. Choosing to listen to it while still mindlessly scrolling on your phone.
âTo love is to suffer, the woman on the screen said. To avoid suffering, one must avoid love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffââ
You switched it to a different channel.
You went back to aimlessly scrolling on your screen, until you suddenly let out a small gasp, surprised that you were on Satoruâs profile page.
You didnât even notice that you were looking at her posts. Nevertheless, you stayed at her page, continuing to look at her pictures, how can someone look this beautiful? Flawless? Men donât deserve her beauty, you thought to yourself.
Heat started to crawl up on your face the longer you looked at her photos.
I should stop. Thereâs no use, she doesnât like me back.
Just as you were supposed to put down your phone to head to your kitchen, your phone unexpectedly rings.
Satoru?
You stared at the vibrating phone for a moment, unsure whether you should answer it.
You picked it up.
âHello?â
â(Y/n)! You are so lucky that youâre not in here right now! Mr. Anderson has gone nutsââ
Didnât she tell you last night that she was gonna skip class?
âAnyway, Shokoâs brooding again. Oh! Oh! The worst thing had just happened earlier!â
âWhat is it?â You question.
âRemember that necklace that Suguru gifted me?â
âYeah, that crystal one? And didnât he give you that a month ago?â
âYes! It fucking got lost..! It mustâve dropped when I was walking.â
âThatâs awful, Satoru..â Faux sympathy in your voice. That necklace never looked good on her anyway. You could probably give her a better and more fitting necklace than Suguru can.
âMhm, this day is so awful⌠By the way, what time will you arrive tonight? I wanna pick the booth that has the best view for the gram! I'll head out early just for this. See you at eight?â
âI can meet you early.. I mean, if you want, of course! So that you wonât be alone there.â Ugh, why did you even say that..!
âActually, I wonât be alone sitting and waiting there, silly! Suguruâs meeting me.â
Oh.
âAlright, then. Cool. I think⌠Iâll show up around nine. A bit busy today.â You said, trying to hide the dejection in your tone.
âOkay! Bye!â
After she hung up, you sat back on your sofa, forgetting your supposed agenda in the kitchen. You knew you had no chance, but it didnât hurt to try and let your feelings dwell, right?
Even though you had no right to get jealous whenever she mentions another person, why did it hurt so much? Suguru likely just knows Satoru on surface-level. While you know all about her. Itâs obvious by the necklace that he gave herâyou mean, you could have chosen a more fitting necklace that complements her rather than what he gave.
â
âLook⌠I um, I felt like this for quite a long time. I.. I like you. I know weâve been friends since forever, but I really want to change things between us. I feel like youâre my other half, my soulmate, we basically have almost the samââ
You were lying on your bed, on the phone with your trusted friend, Shoko. You and her go way back before you even met Satoru. Sheâs currently the only one that knows about your crush on Satoru.
Practicing your confession speech feels so nerve-wracking! Itâs like, like youâre already face-to-face with the person intended for said confession.
Shoko interrupted your monologue with a snort, âSeriously? Soulmate and other half? That sounds like something a high schooler would say. Satoru would either laugh or cringe at that. Remove that sappy line, I tell you.â She sighed. You can physically imagine herâon the other side of the screenâraking her fingers through her hair.
You looked to your left, where your phone was lying on with an annoyed look. âWell, thatâs how I truly feel. Is that wrong?â You questioned Shoko.
âOkay, fine. Just maybe try to replace that wording, alright? Now continue.â
You thought on what youâre about to say next.
âSatoru, when we first met, I felt likeââ You were cut off again by your friend on the phone.
âNo. Too corny.â
âUgh! What can I say then? I think I should just not confess. You know, continue that admiring her from afar shit⌠If things do indeed go wrong, our relationship would be destroyed and end up awkward.â Who knew orchestrating a confession speech would be this hard for your longtime crush?
You were both left in silence for a minute, only Shokoâs soft breaths can be heard, until she breaks the absence of noise.
âJust say what you want, (Y/n). I honestly think you don't need any advice on this. Especially coming from me,â You heard a chuckle on the other line, âas I canât imagine receiving a message like this and I would keep on cutting you off whenever you mention a line.â Her voice sounded soft now, a complete 180 change from her tone earlier.
âWhat if I lose her forever, Shoko?â You responded back to her. You canât comprehend a future without Satoru. Sheâs like the air that you need to breathe. Is that bad to say out loud?
She sighed again. âThen take the chance. At least thatâll ease future you's overthinking on âwhat if?â questions.â
âOkay⌠Thank you, Shoko. Youâre coming tonight, right?â Maybe having Shoko beside you for the whole night would boost your courage to carry through your mission.
âI will. Canât miss our weekly tradition now, canât we?â
âYou better not.â
The call ended. Recalling your speech for Satoru got you feeling like puking your guts. Maybe Shoko was right about it being too sappy. You should take a walk outside. To calm your nerves.
You get ready to head out.
â
You were browsing through the stalls of this store that you saw while passing by.
Itâs so witchesque inside. Maybe thatâs the reason that drew you in. Would you look crazy if you felt like this random store told you to âcome in.. come in.â In an ominous voice when youâre supposed to walk past it?
âHey, if you need anything, let me know!â A girl with a peculiar hairstyle and a brown choker around her neck calls to you.
As if on the right moment, you remember about that necklace Satoru lost.
âDo you have any crystal necklaces?â You looked up to the clerk.
âWe absolutely do! Let me show you.â The clerkâMomo, on her nametagâbeckoned you to follow her.
You finally saw necklaces. Each with a different stone.
âWell, this is all we have. These stones hold their own unique energies, yâknow? This one right here is for healing mentally and physically, it also inspires joy. This one.. is for forgiveness and overcoming and this is for love and attraction!â The girl happily explains the quality of each stone. She mustâve loved her job, by the looks of it. Canât relate though.
âWow, whatâs good for hmm.. love and serenity..?â You cringed to yourself.
âThat would probably be the turquoise!â
âOh okay, thank you.â You said to her. The girl finally walked away, returning back to her spot.
You took glanced at the crystals once again, admiring the beauty of it, yeah, turquoise sounds good. It also matches Satoruâs eyes.
You were about to head to the cashier, until one shelf caught your whole attention.
One-Wish-Willow?
You stepped closer to the shelf, reading the sign on it.
THE ONE WISH WILLOW! SPARK THE MIDDLE AND BREAK IT IN HALF. YOU ONLY GET ONE WISH, DECIDE CAREFULLY.
Seems interesting enough⌠You took one and made your way to the check out.
You approach the friendly clerk.
âOne-Wish-Willow? Youâre the first to buy this week! The first time we brought this out, it was always sold out! Guess everyone back then wanted a wish, haha!â The blonde laughed, staring at your eyes, but it looked more like she was talking to herself.
âYeah.. Itâs not for me, haha..â You awkwardly responded to her.
âWell, Iâll tell you this, donât come back complaining.â She warns as she then winked at you.
âI.. I wouldnât. Also, what do you mean about complaining? Others complain about this thing?â You were baffled. This thing isnât even real. Can people be that gullible to believe that this cheap looking halloween shit can make their wish come true?
âTheyâre like a collectible. Buying it purely for decoration, those who do break it come back bitching.â
You were surprised by her last word, she looks like the last person you would expect to say something foul.
âOh, uhm, okay. Iâll have it.â
The girl finally scanned your items. You paid and left that store. With one thought in your head.
Satoru will like this. Hopefully.
â
You were about to develop a migraine in this bar youâre currently in. Itâs not like you don't like the place. Whenever Satoru is, the place automatically turns good. She brings charm to everywhere she stumbles into.
Can it be because of the sight that youâre seeing? Satoru and Suguru sitting right beside each other? Heâs nice, he has that look that says heâll treat you right for the rest of your life. Youâre sure many mothers would be proud to have him as a son or as a son-in-law.
He helped you once back then, a few months ago? You canât really tell, but he basically saved your ass from being lectured and possibly getting a point deducted from your final grade.
You canât blame Satoru for choosing him over little olâ you. Only her friend and will always stay like that.
âHey!â Someone snapped their fingers in front of your vision. Who else could it be if not the person sat the closest next to you? Shoko.
You blinked a few times before directing your attention to her.
âWhat?â You asked, confused.
âYou were glaring at them,â She refers to Suguru and Satoru, âso much that it's enough to drill a hole in them.â Shoko said quietly.
Oh. It was that obvious?
You turned back to the rest of your friends, paying no mind to the brunetteâs word. You hear Satoruâs rambling again.
âOh my god! You know that almost bald man in psych? He acts way too much for a substitute! Oh, Ms. Gojo, keep that tardy streak of yours and youâll be dropped from this class,â She mimics his voice to the best of her ability, âLike man, It only happened two times, okay?? And thatâs more than the strands on top of your head!â She laughed.
âI agree with Sir Hawkins, Satoru. You should stop attending late.â Utahime, on your right side, butted in. Seemingly annoyed at her friendâs behavior.
âWhatever, youâre boring anyway, Utahime, always the goody two shoes.â You can tell that Utahimeâs words irritated Satoru a bit. You donât get how they still hang out when every time they do, theyâre always clashing with each other.
You force a smile to form on your face, merely listening to your friendâs chatter. You take a look at Satoru again, blue really is her color, you thought to yourself.
âWhat happeââ You tried to join the conversation, but miserably got cut off. Whatâs with people and you always being cut off today?
âNow, now, Satoru, you should listen to Utahime. Wouldnât want to repeat the class, donât you?â Suguru softly said as if he didnât talk over you.
Satoru merely sighed.
After just one try to join the convo and being miserably cut off, you gave up. You take your phone out to distract yourself instead.
The chatter continues between your friends.
âAnd what about (Y/n)? What have you been up to?â
You jumped in your seat, not expecting for your name to be mentioned.
âI, uhm, actuallyââ
A phone started ringing.
Motherfucker.
It was Suguruâs
âOh my, I'm sorry, (Y/n).â He apologized before standing up to take the call. Satoru looked at him, eyes following where he moved.
The table got silent after that.
Minutes passed and Suguru came back with a crestfallen look etched on his sharp features.
He looked at Satoru first before looking at all of you.
âMy mom called. Said that itâs urgent and she needs me at her house right now.â He explained to the group.
âWhat? Let me come with you.â Satoru stared at Suguru, already packing her stuff to join him.
You take a look at Shoko beside you, she too shares a look.
âNo. Please. I wouldnât want to ruin your night. Please excuse me.â His voice leaves no room for objection. He left the bar just like that.
Satoru huffed and muttered something under her breath.
A tense silence settled in the air after that.
â
You all finally left the bar.
Utahime went home early too, claiming that she has work tomorrow, which must've suck for her. You canât imagine drinking then attending work the next morning.
Suguru? He already left early as he received a call from his mom, stating that itâs an emergency.
Only you, Satoru, and Shoko were left behind. Shoko has her own car to drive home and so do you.
Satoru came up to the bar with Suguru driving her. She has her own carâcars you meant. Yet she still chose to let Suguru take her here.
All of you were heading toward the parking area.
âWanna smoke and drink at my place tonight, (Y/n)?â Shoko turned to you, itâs been a while since you last visited her place. It always smelt like smoke and febreze. You told her to stop her habit of smoking a box everyday because sheâll die first before she can even receive her degree.
â⌠I mean, im not that busââ
You heard Satoru let out a loud groan.
âI guess Iâll just book a cab tonight. So annoying. Couldnât even bring me home.â She mumbles to herself, eyes focused on her phone. All sheâs getting are canceled bookings left and right.
When you heard this, you immediately took the opportunity.
âI can drive you home!â You eagerly said to her. Shoko looked at you in disbelief.
Satoru looked up at you, âReally? You sure? Shokoâs inviting you to her place though.â
âHey. I thought we were gonna drink at my place tonight?â Shoko asked once again, looking in your eyes for reassurance that youâll come.
Would you be called a bad friend when you say you momentarily forgot about what Shoko said because of Satoru?
âOh, sorry, Shoko. Maybe next time, yeah?â You smiled at her, offering an apologetic smile. Sheâll understand this. She knows about your crush. Youâre just taking her advice seriously and putting it on action.
She gives you a look.
âUgh.. Buy me a pack of cigarettes in return.â She responded disappointingly, she was really looking forward to this.
You laugh.
âI will!â
After watching the whole ordeal between you and Shoko, Satoru looks at you expectantly.
âWell? Letâs go, (Y/n).â She started to walk to your car, beckoning for you to unlock the door.
Shoko stares at you, you give her a look that said thanks and sorry.
-
You were now driving while Satoru occupied the passenger seat. The silence was okay, you think. Not awkward or anything. You can even hear Satoru faintly humming.
âI think.. We need to make up for lost time. Sorry.â Satoru abruptly said. You were taken aback, not expecting her to say this. Maybe sheâs just drunk.
âAh! No, no itâs fine. I know that our time doesnât collide that much compared to second year. We have our own stuff now.. We're all occupied.â
âYeah. I know.â She sighs, looking at the passing view outside the window.
It was silent again. This time, you wanted to break the silence.
Should you tell her that you got her something or would it be too much of a try-hard and obvious that you like her more than a friend should?
âSatoru?â
âYeah?â
âI got you something.â You finally say, looking at her face for a second to gauge her reaction before redirecting your attention at the road ahead of you.
She smiles.
âReally? Is there an occasion that I don't know of? You donât usually give gifts unless for events.â She turns to look at you, amusement written on her face.
âUm,â You were unsure what to say. It was like your train of thought caught you off, âno..â
âŚ
You stopped. You were already at Satoruâs driveway.
She stopped asking you after that. Was it because you arrived at her place or that she didnât care that much to continue pressing on for answers?
Youâll gladly take the former.
Looking outside the window, Satoru leaned her face against it. Not attempting to open the door or anything.
You donât know what to say. Speak out the obvious and say that youâre both parked in front of her house?
âI think he doesnât like me.â She suddenly spill out. Suguru? What made her think of that?
ââŚWhy?â Should you just have kept quiet or were you overthinking it? Yes, youâre just overthinking it.
âI donât know.. Heâs not happy with me, I think.â Satoru sadly told you, looking down at her fingers that were interlaced together.
âDid he tell you that?â You press a bit.
She looks at you, were her eyes always like that? Glowing a light shade of blue in the night? You take a look at her lips briefly.
She looked sad.
âYou know, youâre the only one I talk to about my problems.â She brings up. You remember her countless rants about her different exs.
âIâll always be here for you, Satoru.â You reassure her.
You have always been a good listener in your relationship with her, always available when she decides to talk your ear off until it bleeds.
She doesnât respond.
She unlocks the door, when sheâs finally out of your car, she bends down to thank you.
âThank you for the ride, (Y/n).â She was about to close the door, untilâ
âToru, wait!â The nickname slips from your lips.
She looked back at you. Surprised.
âYuck! Donât call me that! UghâŚâ She glares at you, disgust apparent on her face.
Oh. Why did you even say that? Now you definitely messed up!
âSorry, sorry, I wonât.â
Satoru chuckles, âYou know I don't like nicknames! Itâs so corny and shit!â She laughs it off.
âAnyway, goodnight, (Y/n). Drive safe.â She glances at you for the last time before she heads to her expensive looking house thatâs probably funded by her parents.
You watch her as she opens her front door and closes it. You look at your reflection at your window.
You rest your forehead on the steering wheel.
Wow, such a loser.
You take one good look at Satoruâs house again before finally driving home.
-
You arrived home.
Having no energy to clean up the mess you left behind hours ago, you head to your bed, bag in hand.
You take a look inside your bag.
Fuck.
You forgot to give Satoru the necklace!
Something catches your eye. Itâs the weird toy that you bought.
Make a wish and itâll come true, huh? Bullshit.
You try it anyway. You peel the packaging off, reading the instructions clearly before you sit at your bed, taking a deep breath before breaking it in half.
I wish⌠that Satoru Gojo only has eyes for me and will love me more than anyone in the whole wide world!
The willow broke in half. Ew. Did you really just believe this crap? You cringed at yourself, if past you knew youâd end up like this, wishing on this willow bark, sheâd die of laughter.
It was at least worth a try, right?
You put said crap on your bedside, reaching for your bag again to get your beloved phone.
You took ahold of your phone, about to unlock it when suddenlyâ
You dropped it from shock.
On the screen, it was Satoruâs number, calling you.
What?
You were stuck in place, is this the lack of sleep catching up on you? Youâre starting to imagine things that arenât real.
You stared at it, gauging if it was indeed Satoru calling you.
It stopped ringing. A minute had passed after the call. Shock filled you up, leaving you unable to move. Was it a coincidence or was it because of the wish?
You were about to take the phone until she called you back again.
You didnât answer. You canât bring you to. Did the wish really work? No, thatâs dumb⌠That canât be. Itâs just a toy, a collectible.
Satoru ceased on calling you. Opting to text instead, exploding it with messages right after another.
Satoru : (Y/n)
Can we talk? Please
I donât wanna be alone here
Can you come over?
I shouldnât have left likeâŚ.
That was all that you can read on your home-screen.
You shut off your phone, then you gently place it on your sideâafraid that youâd accidentally open your phone right to Satoruâs messagesâhandling it so carefuly like the moment you bought it.
a text. just one, from the lock-screen of your phone thatâs full of fingerprints of paint.
the message that youâve been anticipating for, the one that youâll always immediately reply to.
despite the other countless unread messages that await for you to answer, you open his profile without hesitation thatâs been marked up with paint, his name on the screen covered with red paint.
read from the screen of your phoneâ
iâll text you later iâm busy
you put away your paintbrush, wiping your hands on your apron, carefully typing each word and adding an emoji even with the colors smudging on the screenâthat youâve been swiping and checking for his message to arrive, only to be left disappointed.
of course. no worries :))
sent.
seen.
you watched your phone slowly dim until it turns into total darkness with a blank stare at the screen. you even seemed a bit ashamed at your reflection on the screen, a fool thatâs always ready to give time for someone who wouldnât even give an ounce of time to you.
i want a nintendo switch :cc _(:ââšăâ )_
and so i askkkâŚ. what did she have that i dont haveeee !!
Pairing: Prince Valarr x Lannister!Reader (She/Her, "You" and "Y/N" referred ), Prince Daeron X Lannister!Reader (strictly platonic)
Part 2 of "What a lonely thing it was, to be his wife"
Summary:
The court calls her blessed for carrying Prince Valarr Targaryenâs third child. They see the jewels, the sons, the future queen consort, the kind of marriage songs that are written about. What they do not see is the grief beneath it â the loneliness, the silence, the humiliation of loving a man who can keep her, touch her, father her children, and still leave her starving in every place that matters. And when Valarr finally realizes something is wrong, he does not bridge the distance between them with tenderness. He crosses it through another womanâs ears.
Warnings:
pregnancy, pregnancy anxiety, âgood husband, awful at being loved correctlyâ marital grief, emotional neglect, arranged marriage misery, domestic loneliness, domestic sorrow, betrayal of trust/confidence, surveillance disguised as care, creepy little emotional surveillance, maid-as-emotional-spy, jealousy, old feelings / old ghosts resurfacing, children noticing the sadness in the house, children catching the vibes, maternal guilt, wife at the end of her rope, painful confrontation, devastating yearning, hurt with little to no comfort, beautiful wife / foolish man tragedy, husband doing literally everything except communicating, Valarr fumbling the woman of all time, Valarr making the worst possible choices with his full chest, angst to the filthiest degree
Additional warnings for later sections:
graphic childbirth, blood, difficult labour, birth trauma vibes, fear of maternal death, brief body horror-ish hatching imagery, mention of pregnancy loss/miscarriage grief (Kiera)
By the time you carried his third child, the court had already decided you were blessed.
They said it with smiles, with jewelled hands, with the soft, pleased certainty of people who had never had to live inside your marriage. Blessed. Fortunate. Favoured. The golden princess from the west, wife to Prince Valarr Targaryen, mother to two sons, now with another child beneath her heart. They spoke as though the gods had leaned down and touched your life with mercy.
No one asked whether a woman might still be lonely beneath a miracle.
No one asked whether she might lie beside her husband at night and still feel, in all the places that mattered, untouched. At court, blessing was counted in children, in beauty, in rank, in how many people envied you across a hall. No one thought to count the quieter things. The silences. The distance. The terrible ache of being admired by everyone and truly held by no one.
No one asked whether the child they praised had first come to you in the shape of dread.
And perhaps that was the cruellest part of all. That while the court smiled and called you blessed, you had first laid a hand over your belly and felt not joy, but grief so soft and frightened it hardly knew its own name.
It was Myria who knew first.
The smell of the morning tray turned your stomach before she had even crossed the threshold. Sausages gleaming with rosemary fat, hot bread torn open to steam, butter steeped in herbs, rich enough to sit heavy in the air. By the time she reached you by the window seat, you had gone pale enough that she caught your wrist in alarm. Beyond the shutters, the bells from the sept tolled soft and distant through the morning, and somewhere below in the yard one of your boys was laughing at something a page had done with a hoop and stick.
You sat very still, one hand braced hard against the carved arm of the chair as if the room had tilted beneath you.
âI think,â you said, so quietly she almost did not hear it, âthat I know what this is.â
Myria, who had been kneeling to unfasten your slippers, stilled at once. âMy lady?â
You looked down at her. Your hair had come half-loose and spilled over one shoulder, pale as old gold in the morning light. Your face was too composed for such words, which frightened her more than tears would have.
âI have been late.â
The room seemed to gather itself around that truth and hold its breath.
Myria rose slowly. You did not smile. You did not cry. You only lowered your hand, very gently, to the still-flat place low beneath your gown.
âOh,â she whispered.
It was not much, that little sound, but women who loved you had long since learned that joy did not always arrive bright. Sometimes it came trembling. Sometimes it came wrapped in fear. Sometimes it looked too much like grief to be known for anything else at first glance.
You sat in silence for a long while after that. The bells still tolled. The sun lay warm across the stone floor. Dust drifted in the slant of light. In the passage beyond your chamber a maid hurried past with folded linen over her arms, her soft-soled shoes whispering over the rushes. Somewhere farther off a door shut, and the sound went echoing down the corridor like something dropped and not picked up again.
At last you asked, âDo you think it cruel?â
Myria stared at you. âCruel?â
âTo a child,â you said. âTo begin its life in such a season.â
Her eyes filled at once. âMy sweet lady.â
But you only looked away.
That was the first grief of the third child, not that it was unwanted, but that you wanted it so desperately while feeling so unable to welcome it as it deserved.
When you had carried Aelor, there had still been hope enough to gild everything. Hope had turned each ache into promise. Hope had made you blush when Valarr rested a hand upon your belly and smiled, faint but real, at the first movement beneath your skin. Hope had made the future feel survivable. Hope had made the silence in your marriage seem temporary, as if time and patience and children might yet soften it into something warmer.
With Baelon there had still been some pale thread of that hope left.
But now you knew too much.
You knew what it was to lie beside your husband and hear another womanâs name in the dark. You knew what it was to be loved dutifully, and how duty, polished and princely and perfectly correct, could leave a woman starving in all the same places as cruelty. You knew what it was to stand in your own chambers while Valarr crossed first to his sons with warmth on his face, and only then, remembering some secondary obligation, turned to ask whether you had eaten, whether you had slept, whether you had taken broth.
You knew how a marriage might remain whole in the eyes of the realm while quietly failing in every room where no one sang of it.
So when the maester confirmed what your body had already told you, and left with his grave assurances and the faint rustle of his chains, and the chamber stood empty save for Ellyn, Myria, and Ysilla, you bent your head and wept.
Not loudly. Never loudly at first.
You cried with one hand over your mouth and the other over your belly, as though you meant to shield the child from your own sorrow.
âI should be happy,â you whispered. âGods forgive me, I should be happy.â
Ellyn crossed the room in two quick steps and dropped to her knees before you, drawing your hands gently down from your face. âYou are allowed to be frightened.â
âI am not frightened,â you said, and the laugh that came with it was broken clean through. âI am ashamed.â
Ysilla, quietest of them all and therefore often the cruelest where truth was concerned, said from beside you, âAshamed of what?â
Your breath caught.
âThat I still care what he feels.â
That was the true humiliation of it.
Some part of you, bruised and wiser and sadder than before, had still imagined this child might feel like renewal. Not in some girlish, foolish way, but in the slow soft manner of domestic life. You had thought perhaps one day Valarr would look upon you and the babe and their brothers and see not duty, not heirs, not a fortunate arrangement made between crown and Rock, but his family. Something chosen. Something cherished.
It shamed you to know you still wanted that.
âDo not tell him yet,â you said at last.
The maids exchanged a glance.
âMy lady,â Myria began carefully.
âNot yet.â
They obeyed because they loved you, and because they knew there were truths a woman had the right to hold in her own two hands for a little while before surrendering them to the world.
So the child lived first as a secret between your body and the women who dressed it.
It lived in the nausea at dawn, and in the strange fatigue that sent you back to the settle by the window after the smallest exertion. It lived in the unconscious way your hand drifted, whenever you were alone, low over your middle. It lived in the prayers you whispered before sleep, half-apology and half-plea. Forgive me for being sad. Forgive me for fearing the world you come into. Forgive me for already loving you in the middle of all this hurt.
The boys noticed before Valarr did.
Children always found the truest part of a room first. They had not the words for sorrow, nor the long experience to name distance when it settled into a house, but they felt it all the same. In silences. In the way a mother smiled too quickly. In the way a fatherâs warmth came and went like weather. They felt cold long before they knew the word for winter.
Aelor climbed up beside you one morning while you sat near the window with a cool cloth at the back of your neck. The day beyond the shutters was bright, but the chamber itself still held that soft early chill that clung to stone before the sun had fully warmed it. He touched your cheek with one small warm hand and frowned at you with the grave concern only children could wear without shame.
âAre you ill, Mother?â
âNo, sweetling.â
âYou look like Baelon did when he had fever.â
At the sound of his own name, Baelon toddled across the chamber on unsteady little feet and came at once to bury his face against your skirts. At two years old he loved with his whole body. If he wanted you, he came. He had not yet learned rank or pride or the careful little distances adults laid between one another when love had grown difficult.
You drew both boys close at once and bent to kiss their hair.
âI am only tired.â
Aelor considered that with solemn seriousness. âThen Father must not bother you.â
It startled a laugh out of you. A real one, soft and sudden, enough to make both boys beam merely for having won it. For one fleeting moment, the chamber seemed warmer.
Then Baelon, with all the unknowing certainty of babes and fools and perhaps little souls still near enough to heaven to hear what others could not, patted your belly and said, âBaby.â
All three maids froze.
You stared at him. He only grinned, pleased with himself, one little hand still spread over the place where your secret sat hidden beneath silk and sorrow.
Something in your face changed then, too small for the boys to understand, but not too small for women who loved you.
âNo one told him,â Ellyn whispered later, once the children had run laughing out toward the gallery.
No. No one had.
But children knew things before language reached them. Or perhaps mothers did, and the little ones still close enough to their making merely felt it in the pulse of them.
You sat very still after they had gone, your hand resting where Baelonâs had been. Then, all at once, you rose and went after them.
They had not gone far. Aelor was only just at the turn of the passage, Baelon stumbling after him with one nursemaid hovering close enough to catch him if he fell. At the sound of your skirts, both boys turned.
âMother?â Aelor asked.
You sank to your knees there in the corridor, heedless of the cold stone beneath your skirts, and opened your arms.
They came at once.
Aelor with the eager trust of a child who still believed all hurts could be mended by being held, Baelon with his usual wholeheartedness, nearly toppling into you. You gathered them both so tightly your arms trembled with it. Their little bodies were so warm. They smelled of milk and soap and sleep and the faint dust of the nursery floor.
And because they were too small to understand, because that was the mercy and the cruelty of it both, the tears came then.
Only one at first.
It slipped free before you could stop it and caught in Aelorâs hair like a drop of rain.
He drew back at once, alarmed. âMother?â
You shook your head quickly and pulled him close again, kissing the crown of it. Baelon had already lifted one tiny hand to your cheek, puzzled by the wetness there.
âI am sorry,â you whispered.
The words were not meant for children, and yet you could not seem to stop them.
âI am so sorry, my sweet boys.â
Aelor had gone very still in your arms now, not frightened yet, only listening. Baelon pressed his face beneath your chin, content simply to be held.
You shut your eyes.
âI wish,â you said, and your voice broke so softly it scarcely seemed your own, âI wish this house were warmer for you. I wish it were full of more love.â
The nursemaid at the end of the passage turned away at once, pretending not to hear. Ellyn, farther back, pressed a hand to her mouth.
Aelor did not understand the words, not fully. But he understood enough to wind his small arms about your neck and cling. âIt is warm,â he said stubbornly, in the way children contradicted sorrow when they could not bear it. âYouâre here.â
That was what undid you.
You bent your head between them and held them tighter, as if you might shield all three of your children from the life they had been born into, from the cold places in it, from the silences, from the careful hurts, from the love that existed and still somehow failed to fill a room.
âI am here,â you whispered, though it came out more like a prayer than a promise. âI am here, I am here.â
And in that moment, with one boy clinging and the other heavy against your breast, you loved them so fiercely it felt almost like grief.
Because children knew.
Children always knew. And long before they learned the words for distance, for marriage, for loneliness, they had already begun to feel the want of warmth in the walls around them.
Valarr learned not from you, but from the shape of the household, and that in itself felt like failure.
It happened at the midday meal. The table had been laid with trout in cream, still warm enough to send up pale curls of steam, fresh bread, greens dressed in sharp vinegar, sugared pears for Aelor, and a bowl of stewed apples that Baelon wore more often than he ever managed to eat. Sunlight fell wan and thin through the high windows, striping the polished floorboards and the legs of the table. Two servants moved quietly against the wall, practiced in that particular invisibility good servants learned early, their eyes lowered, their hands quick and silent. You sat between your sons in pale gold silk, your food untouched, one hand wrapped lightly around your cup as if merely holding it were effort enough.
Valarr came in from council with a folded parchment in one hand and the look of a man who had spent the morning among older men and worse ideas. The leather of his boots struck softly against the floor. He smelled faintly of cold air, candle smoke, and the wool of council chambers. He bent first to kiss Aelorâs hair, then lifted Baelon with that absent ease fathers sometimes had, settling the boy back in his seat before turning at last to look at you.
âYou have not eaten.â
âI will.â
His brow furrowed. âYou said that this morning.â
Ellyn, who should have known better, hesitated just long enough while pouring the wine for him to notice.
âShe is not to have that?â
Silence followed.
The dangerous sort.
His gaze moved from the untouched wine to Ellyn, and then to you, and all at once he understood there was knowledge in the room from which he had been excluded. Something in his face changed, not visibly enough for a stranger to mark it, but enough for you, who had studied all the little failures of his expression for years.
âHow long?â he asked.
Aelor stopped chewing. Baelon, sensing only that the air had sharpened, leaned hard against your side and pressed one sticky hand into your sleeve. You laid your napkin down very neatly beside your plate.
âA few weeks.â
Valarr stared at you.
âA few weeks.â
His tone made Aelor flinch.
The child looked from you to his father, uncertainty dimming the brightness of his face. âIs Mother ill?â
âNo,â you said at once, because the boys came first. Always. âNo, sweetlings. Hush.â
Valarrâs hand tightened on the back of the chair beside him. You saw the tendons rise beneath the skin.
âAnd you said nothing?â
You kept your gaze on your plate. To look at him before the children would have felt too much like being stripped. âI had not meant to tell the whole hall.â
His voice lowered then, though not into softness. Only lower, tighter, more dangerous for the effort it cost him.
âYou mean to go through this half-ill and half-alone because you would rather keep silence than ask for what you need?â
It was such a Valarr sentence. Not monstrous. Not truly cruel. Only wrong in every place that mattered.
Because the true wound was not those few hidden weeks. The true wound was that you had already gone through years half-alone.
You could not say that before your sons.
So instead you answered, âThe babe is not harmed.â
His jaw set. Under the anger, something else flashed and vanished before it could settle into a name. Fear, perhaps. Hurt pride. Guilt. Valarr wore all his feelings badly. They moved through him like storms through deep water, felt more than seen.
Aelor, solemn as a little lord, looked between the two of you and asked, âIs there truly a baby?â
You turned to him at once and made yourself smile. âYes,â you said. âThere is.â
The room changed.
Aelorâs face lit at once, wonder washing clean away the uncertainty. Baelon slapped both palms against the table and crowed, âBaby,â as if he had personally arranged the matter and was very pleased with himself for it.
Valarr looked at the boys and then at you.
For one suspended heartbeat, you saw what might have been had life been kinder. Two sons delighted. A wife carrying a third child. A husband startled into some rough, awkward joy. A family, plain and simple, without all the cold spaces in between.
Then the moment passed.
He said only, âWe will speak later.â
You nodded.
That was all.
At supper the boys argued happily over whether the babe would be another brother or a sister with hair like sunlight. Their little voices filled the chamber brightly enough to hide the strain beneath them. You smiled where you ought to smile and broke your bread into pieces so small you never had to actually eat them.
Later, after the children had been taken to the nursery and the corridors beyond your chambers had gone quiet, Valarr stood at the hearth and asked again, âHow long?â
The room was lit only by fire and two lamps. Shadows moved low along the walls. The wind pressed faintly at the shutters, and somewhere far off in the passage a servantâs hurried footstep echoed and was gone. You sat on the settle with a shawl about your shoulders, though the chamber was not cold enough to require it.
âThree weeks, perhaps a little more.â
He looked at you as he looked at council failures and broken harnesses and anything else that ought, in his mind, to have been mended before it became a larger trouble.
âYou should have told me.â
âYes.â
âDo you think I would not have arranged what was needed?â
At that, something like laughter moved through you, though it made no sound at all.
Arranged.
Always that.
Not comforted. Not held. Not reassured. Arranged.
Valarr saw it in your face and went still.
âWhat?â
You lowered your gaze. âNothing.â
âNo.â He turned from the hearth fully then, the firelight catching the hard line of his cheek. âWhat?â
The anger had left him. What remained was worse. Confusion. Honest confusion. He did not understand why what he had said was not enough. Why what seemed plain and practical and sufficient to him landed like another wound in you.
You looked at the fire because it was easier. The flames licked low around the blackening wood. The heat touched one side of your face while the rest of you felt curiously numb.
âI know you would have arranged what was needed,â you said softly. âThat has never been the difficulty.â
He stood motionless.
After a long silence, he asked, with effort, âAnd what is the difficulty, wife?â
The old answer rose at once. Nothing, my prince. Only weariness. Only the weakness of women. Only humors and softness and foolishness. But perhaps the child had made you braver, or perhaps only more tired of swallowing hurt until it turned bitter inside you.
âThat I no longer know whether I bring you joy or burden.â
Valarr stared at you as though you had spoken another tongue.
The words seemed to strike him and go no farther, as if they had hit armor he did not know how to unfasten. For a moment, something almost like pain crossed his face. Then, because he was Valarr, and because men like him reached for practicality whenever feeling threatened to swallow them whole, he nodded once and said,
âYou should have more help.â You closed your eyes.
Two days later he gave you a fourth maid.
Her name was Jeyne.
She came with downcast lashes, deft hands, and the sort of face great households prized in women meant for service, pleasant, soft, and easy to forget unless one was looking closely. She was clever enough to learn a room before crossing it, pretty enough to please the eye, plain enough not to alarm anyone. The morning she was brought in, the light in the solar was pale and watery, thin from a sky veiled in cloud, and the warmth from the hearth did little against the damp that old stone held in its bones. Aelor and Baelon were upon the carpet with their carved beasts spread between them, and Aelor, with all the solemn authority of the elder-born, was teaching his brother how lions ought properly to hunt dragons.
âShe is sensible,â Valarr said, presenting the girl with the grave satisfaction of a man who believed he had solved something. âYou have greater need of attendance now.â
You sat in the morning room with your embroidery untouched in your lap. Silk thread lay loose between your fingers, forgotten. You looked at Jeyne. Jeyne curtsied low, her hands folded neatly over her skirts, her eyes lowered in the proper measure of humility.
âHow kind,â you said.
Valarr seemed relieved.
That should have warned you.
At first you thought nothing of it. Why should you. Great ladies were forever being attended, undressed, fed, brushed, eased, watched, and measured. A princeâs wife belonged to more hands than her own. Her body, doubly so when with child, became a household concern. There were always women fastening sleeves, arranging cushions, bringing broths, counting bites, drawing baths, lowering candles, and telling one another in low voices what color had come or gone from your face. You had been looked after all your life in one way or another. It ought not to have felt strange.
And Jeyne was very good at gentleness.
She learned quickly that rosemary turned your stomach and had it quietly removed from your chambers before the scent could cling to the hangings. She remembered which pillows eased your back and which worsened it. She carried Baelon when he grew too heavy in your arms and tied Aelorâs cloak correctly on the first attempt, which delighted him beyond reason. She moved softly, spoke softly, and had a way of making care seem unforced, as though she had come into the world knowing how to smooth a blanket or cool a brow without being told.
More dangerously still, she listened.
At court there were women who spoke only so they might hear their own voices returned prettily to them. Men asked questions only to hear their own thoughts reflected back with better phrasing and a more flattering tilt. Even among your own household there were certain things you no longer said because you had grown tired of sounding sorrow aloud, tired of hearing your own heart made too visible in the air. Silence, over time, had become easier. Safer. More graceful.
But Jeyne listened.
When she loosed your hair in the evening and you murmured that you had begun to hate the sea-green gown because it made you look broad and ill, she did not rush to contradict you with some bright little lie. She only said, âThen we shall not lay it out again.â
When you admitted you had not slept more than two consecutive hours in a moonâs turn, she did not prattle that all pregnant women suffered the same. She brought warm milk sweetened with honey and sat near the hearth while you drank, her hands folded in her lap, saying nothing until your eyes began to droop.
When you said, very quietly, âI miss the sound of the sea,â she answered, âThen no wonder the river here seems too small.â
It was such an understanding thing to say that for one shameful instant you nearly wept.
That was your mistake.
Not loving too deeply this time. Not Valarr. Not Keiraâs shadow. Not duty mistaken for devotion.
Only loneliness mistaking quiet for safety.
And because loneliness, once given a sympathetic face, grew greedy, you told her more.
Not all at once. Never all at once. Sorrow did not spill so easily from you anymore. It came in fragments while she unpinned your sleeves, while she folded gowns, while she brushed your hair before the fire. Small offerings first, the sort that seemed harmless enough once spoken aloud.
You told Jeyne that you dreaded great hall suppers because the watching had become unbearable. The glances. The soft smiles. The way every woman seemed to count how much you ate and every man seemed to look at your belly as if it belonged more to lineage than to you.
You told her that some days the pregnancy felt less like joy than like carrying a jewel through a room full of men who thought it theirs to appraise.
You told her that Kiera unsettled you not because she was cruel, but because she was honest in ways that left bruises. That she had a talent for saying only a little and leaving the wound to deepen on its own after.
You told her you could not decide whether your pity for the woman made you nobler or only more pathetic.
The room would be dim when some of these things were said, the candles guttering low, the fire collapsed into red coals, the shadows deep in the corners. Outside, servants passed in the corridor and their soft footfalls went by like thoughts one did not want to keep. Within, it would be only the brush moving through your hair, the rustle of linen, the quiet of women after dark, and the dangerous ease of being heard.
You told her, in an hour of greater weakness, that Prince Daeron was easier company than most courtiers because he spoke as though he did not expect women to pretend before him. You told her he asked strange questions and gave stranger answers. That he looked at people too directly when sober and too knowingly when drunk, and that both could be unsettling in their own fashion.
You told her, foolishly, fatally, about Lucan.
Not all of it at once. Not the old childish promise beneath the stair-arch. Not the summer heat at the Rock with a carved lion pressed into a boyâs hand. Not the whole shape of that softer, smaller grief. But enough.
That there had once been a red-cloak from the west who remembered the girl you had been before marriage turned you into use and title and careful silence.
That he had looked at you once in a corridor and said you looked tired, and no prince in Kingâs Landing had asked you that in earnest in a very long while.
That part of you hated yourself for how much such a small kindness could still wound.
Jeyne had listened with damp eyes and soft sympathy. She never reached too far. Never pressed too hard. She only held the silences properly when they came and answered in the small, understanding ways that made a lonely woman foolish.
And you, in your stupidity, had thought she was keeping your heart for you a little while.
The signs came one by one.
At first they were small enough to excuse, if you were minded to excuse them. A passing remark. A question too timely by half. The sort of thing a wife might once have mistaken for attentiveness and treasured like a starving woman making a meal of crumbs. The first time, Valarr only remarked, while fastening a clasp at his wrist before the fire, âDo not wear the sea-green today. It makes you look wan.â
You looked up sharply, though he had already lowered his eyes again to his sleeve.
Another evening, with no lead into it at all, he asked, âHas the smell of rosemary ceased troubling you?â
Your throat tightened.
A week later, after you had confessed in private that the silence after the children were abed had become the worst hour of the day, he said over supper, while Aelor chattered about a carved wooden horse and Baelon, sticky with stewed apple, was trying to feed the hound beneath the table, âYou may take your evening meal privately more often if the great hall tires you.â
Another time, in a chamber full of courtiers and candle-smoke, with pages moving quietly between the tables and old men talking over their cups of wine, he had a western musician brought in, a narrow-faced greybeard with silver in his beard, who played a sea-song from Lannisport your mother used to hum beneath her breath when the winds off the Sunset Sea ran high. The first notes struck you like a hand closing hard about your throat. You turned to Valarr in startled pain, and he only said, âYou seemed homesick lately.â
Homesick.
You had used that very word to Jeyne.
Each thing alone might have passed for thoughtfulness.
Together, they became a net.
It was not merely your gowns, or your appetite, or the herbs in your broth.
It was Daeron too.
One afternoon Valarr said, too casually, âYou spend a fair deal of time in the west gallery these days.â
You stilled. âDo I?â
âWith my cousin.â
The words were neutral. That frightened you more than anger would have.
âHe speaks of dreams,â you said.
Valarrâs mouth changed. It was no more than that, a slight hardening, a minute shift at the corners, but you saw it. âAnd what do you speak of?â
There it was.
The shape of another womanâs ears between you.
That night you lay awake with one hand over your belly while cold understanding crept through you inch by inch, like winter finding the cracks in stone. Beside you Valarr slept heavily, one arm flung loose across the blanket, his face turned toward the dark as if rest had always come easily to him. You stared up into the black rafters above the bed and felt the truth settling into you with a chill so deep it seemed to reach the child itself.
He had not learned you.
He had learned around you.
He had set another woman close enough to hear the things he still did not know how to ask with his own mouth.
And still you may have lied to yourself a little longer, had he not spoken of Lucan.
It happened in the dressing chamber.
Jeyne had just finished hooking the back of your crimson gown, the velvet too tight now through the breasts, the weight of it dragging at your shoulders until you had laughed bitterly and told her it made you feel like some brood mare dressed for display. The mirrors caught candlelight and dimly reflected it back over the chamber. The air smelled of beeswax, brushed silk, and the faint sweet smoke from the brazier. You had gone out to the evening room afterward with your face composed and your jewels in place, and Valarr, seated with a parchment in his hand and the fire at his back, had looked up only briefly before saying, âThat gown is a poor choice. Wear the dark gold instead. The crimson sits badly on you now.â
The room did not spin.
It only went very still.
Then, because perhaps he had already gone too far in his own thoughts to stop, he set the parchment aside and said, in that same measured tone, âWas Lucan the knight you spoke to when your fatherâs retinue was here? The westerman with the red cloak.â
You looked at him.
He had not asked before. Not when Lucan had bowed over your hand in the yard. Not when he had spoken to you in the corridor with that old softness of the Rock still clinging to him like the smell of sun-warmed stone. Not when Valarr had watched from a distance with that unreadable face of his.
Your silence seemed to answer more than words might have.
Valarrâs gaze sharpened.
âSo it was.â
âHe is nothing to you,â you said quietly, though your heart had already begun to pound.
âTo me?â His laugh was short and joyless. âNo. To me he is nothing.â
He rose then, folding the parchment once in his hand before setting it aside altogether. Firelight moved over the hard planes of his face, caught in the silver-white of his hair, turned one side of him to bronze and left the other in shadow. There was something in him now that had not been there when he first spoke. Not rage exactly. Something meaner for being held in so tightly.
âBut he is not nothing to you.â
You stared at him.
Valarr took one step closer. âYou think of him.â
Something hot and humiliated rose in your chest. âAnd how would you know that?â
His jaw tightened.
That told you enough.
For a long moment neither of you spoke. The fire shifted behind him. Somewhere in the passage beyond the chamber a servant hurried by and the faint soft echo of their steps was swallowed by stone.
Then he said, quieter now and somehow more dangerous for it, âYou are my wife, are you not?â
The words struck like a slap.
You felt your spine go very straight.
âThere is no reason,â he continued, each word too controlled, âfor you to be keeping another man in your thoughts.â
You laughed then, but there was no warmth in it. It was a small, breaking sound, too wounded to be called amusement.
âJealous?â you asked. âOf whom?â
Valarrâs jaw tightened. âDo not mock me.â
âI am not mocking you.â Your eyes burned now, but you would not look away. âI am astonished.â
The fire cracked softly behind him. Somewhere beyond the chamber door, footsteps passed and faded. The whole room felt too still, as if even the walls were listening.
âYou are astonished,â he repeated.
âYes.â Your voice sharpened. âBecause I have been loyal to you in thought, in body, in all the miserable little ways that matter when no one is looking, and still you stand there speaking to me as if I have wronged you.â
He took a step toward you. âYou said yourself that man is not nothing.â
âHe is not my husband.â
That stopped him.
You were breathing too hard now. You hated that he could see it, hated more that your hands had begun to tremble.
Valarr took another step, slower this time, and lifted a hand as if to touch you, perhaps your wrist, perhaps your face. You stared at it, then at him, and gave a short, disbelieving laugh that hurt your own throat.
âReally?â you asked. âNow?â
His hand stopped in the air.
For one suspended heartbeat he did not move. Then, slowly, he let it fall.
That hurt him. You saw that it did. You did not care. Or rather, you cared too much, and that was the misery of it.
âI love you,â you said, and the words came out angrier than tenderness had any right to sound. âYou foolish, fucking man, I love you.â
Valarr went utterly still.
You laughed again, and this time there were tears in it.
âDo you think I would have done all this for duty alone?â
His face changed, but you did not let him speak.
âI learned you, Valarr. I learned the look on your face when you are holding back laughter. I learned your dry little jests, the ones no one else notices because they come too late and too quiet. I learned how you pretend not to care for songs and yet always listen when the good ones are played badly.â Your breath caught. âI learned how you read with one hand against your mouth when something truly holds you. I learned how you go softer with the boys when you think no one sees. I learned which wine you reach for in winter, which books you favor when troubled, how you stand when you are angry, how you go silent when you are hurt.â
He stared at you as though he had never seen you before.
âAnd you are not lacking,â you said, more quietly now, which was somehow worse. âYou are not some failed knight or lesser man. You show up for our sons again and again. You are the picture of what a father and an heir ought to be. You are not faulted in every way. You are clever, honorable, careful, and good in more ways than you seem to understand.â Your voice shook. âYou only fail where feeling is concerned. That is the tragedy of you.â
Still he said nothing.
âAnd I admired you,â you went on, your tears falling freely now. âGods help me, I admired you. I admired the way you carry duty as though it weighs nothing, even when it is bowing your whole back. I admired how clever you are beneath all that silence. I admired how careful you can be with our sons. I admired how you keep showing up for them, every day, whether anyone praises you for it or not. I admired you when there was hardly enough tenderness from you to live on, and still I admired you.â
Valarr swallowed hard. âDo not.â
You stared at him. âDo not what?â
âDo not say these things,â he said, and his voice had gone rough with something close to panic. âNot like this.â
âWhy?â The word came out sharp. âBecause now you must hear them?â
His mouth opened. Closed again.
You wiped angrily at your cheek, but more tears followed.
âSo do not stand there and speak to me of another man,â you whispered. âDo not make me answer for scraps of kindness or old ghosts when all I have ever done is love you with more patience than you ever deserved.â
Valarr opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
âIf I had wanted someone else,â you said, âI would not be standing here half-broken from trying to be enough for you.â
That landed.
You saw it land.
He took another half-step, as if some part of him still meant to reach for you, still thought perhaps he might close the space between you if only he moved carefully enough. This time you stepped back.
Not far.
Only enough.
But he saw it.
Gods, he saw it.
And the look that passed across his face then was almost worse than anger. It was the look of a man arriving late to a wound and finding it closed against him.
âThe misery of it,â you said, because some cruel part of love always wanted to be understood even after it had been wounded, âis not that you think I could love another man.â
Your voice shook.
âIt is that I loved you so plainly, and you still did not know.â
The silence after that was terrible.
Because that was the truth. If he had been openly vile and openly disloyal, perhaps hatred would have come more easily. But Valarrâs cruelty had always been of the quieter kind, the kind that could hide inside decency and still leave bruises no one else ever saw.
By the time Jeyne came to unpin your hair that night, your face had settled into something pale and composed and almost aristocratically blank, as though women were not betrayed every day in quieter ways than adultery.
At last you said, âStay.â
Jeyneâs fingers stilled.
âEllyn,â you said to the older maid in the doorway, âtake the boys to the painted gallery. Let them see the dragons.â
Ellyn looked from you to Jeyne and, because she had known you since the wedding day and the sound of your voice had changed, bowed at once and withdrew.
When the chamber had emptied, you turned in your chair.
Jeyne was already pale.
âHow long?â you asked.
âMy lady?â
âIf my husband wished to know me,â you said softly, âhe ought to have done it to my face. How long?â
Tears rose in her eyes at once.
That angered you more than if she had stood dry-eyed. It meant she had perhaps come to care for you at all. It made the thing fouler.
âHe only asked after your health at first,â she whispered. âWhether you were eating. Whether you slept. Whether the sickness worsened.â
âYou reported my gowns.â
She swallowed. âHe feared you would not tell him what was wrong.â
You stared at her.
That answer hurt most of all.
Not malice. Not spite. Not some neat little household treachery for coin.
Only this.
Valarr, too proud and too helpless in feeling, had done what he always did. Reached for control where tenderness was required.
âI thought,â you said after a long moment, âthat you were sent to comfort me.â
âI was,â she said, crying now. âTruly, my lady. I only, he asked, and he is the prince, and I.â
âYou were sent to supervise me.â
âNo.â
Your voice did not rise. That frightened her more.
âDid you tell him of Daeron?â
She covered her mouth.
You felt something inside yourself go very still.
âDid you tell him of Lucan?â
Her silence answered faster than speech could have.
You closed your eyes.
âDid you tell him what I said of Lady Kiera?â
âMy lady, I only said you pitied her, and that you feared offending her, and that you thought.â
You opened your eyes.
âWhat I thought,â you repeated.
Jeyne sank to her knees.
âI am sorry.â
You looked at her for a long time. Your fingers, almost of their own accord, had gone to the little lion token you still kept tucked away among your things, worn smooth by years and by the pressure of your own hand. You held it now as if it might anchor you, the blunted little ear pressing into your palm.
When you spoke again, your voice was no colder than before. If anything, that gentleness made the scene crueler still.
âDo you know what is worst in this?â
She shook her head, tears slipping down her face.
âThat I have so little.â You swallowed. âSo very little that is only mine. My three women, my children, a few corners of this castle where I can still breathe, and I asked almost nothing of you but honesty.â
Her mouth trembled.
âI do not begrudge you your bread,â you said softly. âNor your safety. I will not be the cause of your dismissal. I will not make pain for you because I have been given more than enough of my own.â
At that, Ellyn, who had not gone far and had come back silent as a shadow, turned her face away. Myriaâs eyes had filled. Ysilla stood like carved stone, but her hands were white where they clasped one another.
Because they understood then too.
Not only that Jeyne had betrayed you, but that some wall had gone up inside you with the knowing of it.
âI would not have taken your place from you,â you said. âI would not even have hated you, had you only been honest with me.â
Jeyne bowed lower, weeping.
âI do not want an apology,â you said. âIt will not mend the thing itself.â
âMy lady, please.â
The plea broke on a sob.
You brushed one tear away from your own cheek with your thumb, almost absently, as though even that small tenderness must now be done for yourself.
âYou may keep your place,â you said. âContinue your service. If my husband wishes to know things of me through you, then let him hear them plainly.â Your fingers tightened around the little lion. âIf he asks what he wishes to know, you will tell me, and I will answer plainly. There is no reason for me to hide anything from him now.â
Jeyne made a broken sound.
More quietly, almost as if speaking to yourself, you said, âI am his wife. He is owed the knowledge of me.â
Then, after a long moment, you said the thing that wounded her worst precisely because it was so gentle.
âBut please stay away from me.â
Jeyne covered her mouth and bowed until her forehead nearly touched the floor.
The other women said nothing.
They did not need to.
They knew. You knew. Jeyne knew.
Something had ended in that room, and no apology would raise it again.
A knock came then, careful and light.
Myria opened the door a crack. âMy lady? The prince asks whether the boys are ready. He means to take them to the river terrace to see the fishing nets drawn.â
Of course.
Of course the world still required cloaks and shoes and little princely hands washed clean.
You rose slowly. Jeyne still knelt at your feet.
âNow my husband wants the boys,â you said. âPlease prepare their things.â
Then you stepped past her.
Only in the empty turn of the corridor did you stop with one hand braced to the wall because your eyes had blurred at last. The stone was cold beneath your palm. From below came the faint sound of boys laughing somewhere in the yard, unaware of the small death that had just taken place above them.
You did not go to Valarr.
That was the important thing.
In other years, in other hurts, some part of you would have gone to him even then, gone trembling and foolish and still somehow hoping that if only he understood the wound he might finally gather it in and make it smaller.
Not now.
Now your feet carried you elsewhere.
You found Prince Daeron where one most often found him when he wished not to be found, in an old gallery off Maegorâs Holdfast, where dust lay thick in the corners and the narrow windows let in bars of late gold light that turned the floating motes to fire. The place smelled of cold stone, old vellum, and the wine he wore like a second shadow. The walls were close and high, built for defense rather than beauty, yet age had made a kind of melancholy grace of them. The mortar was cracked in places, the tapestries long since removed, and only a faded painted border of dragons remained near the ceiling, half lost to soot and years. Somewhere beyond the wall a rook called from a parapet, harsh and lonely. The sound echoed thinly through the passage like something unanswered.
Daeron lifted his head at the sound of your step.
âMy lady cousin,â he said.
You had always been startled by how kind he could sound when no one else was listening. In hall or feast or yard he was too often careless, too often laughing too sharply or drinking too freely, wearing mockery the way some men wore mail. But here, with the light falling sideways across his face and the cup loose in one hand, there was no performance in him at all. He looked at you only once, properly and not politely, and something in his expression shifted at once.
âAh,â he said quietly. âToday is not a day for lies.â
It was such a Daeron thing to say that, had you been even a little less miserable, you might have smiled.
Instead you crossed the room and sat opposite him with less grace than you would once have allowed yourself. The bench was hard beneath you. A draft came down some hidden stair and touched the nape of your neck. For a little while neither of you spoke. The late light striped the floor red and gold. Dust drifted through it. In the distance a door closed somewhere in the keep, and the sound went hollow through the stone.
At last you said, âI thought I had made a friend.â
Daeron drank, because he was Daeron and because the cup had become part of the way he sat with human sorrow. He tipped it back only once, then lowered it to his knee and looked at the floor between you.
âIn this castle?â he asked after a moment. âThat was brave.â
A laugh broke from you then, thin and too close to crying. It was not much of a laugh, only the sad little shape of one, but it seemed to pain him more than if you had wept outright.
He let the silence sit a while longer. Then he asked, âWas it your husband?â
You looked at him in surprise.
He gave one shoulder a slight lift. âIt usually is, where highborn women are concerned.â
You looked down at your hands, clasped too tightly in your lap. âHe gave me another maid for the child.â
âAnd instead gave you another pair of eyes.â
âYes.â
Daeronâs mouth twisted. âValarr means well in the manner of men who were raised by command.â
You nearly laughed again. âThat is a very neat cruelty.â
âIt is also true.â
The wind scraped faintly at the casement. Somewhere deeper in the holdfast voices passed, low and indistinct, then faded. Daeron sat with his cup and his old book open across one knee, and for a strange moment the quiet of the place felt almost merciful, as if the stone itself had agreed to keep what was said there.
Then, because the wound was open and because Daeron was strange enough to let truth in through the side door, he asked, âWhat did she hear?â
âEverything.â
He waited.
You swallowed. âMy preferences. My sleeplessness. My worries about the child. My fear of Lady Kiera. My talks with you.â
That made his brows rise.
âAnd Lucan,â you whispered.
Daeron looked at you more sharply then.
âThe red-cloak from the Rock?â
You stared. âYou know of him?â
He gave a soft, humorless snort. âI know of many things people assume I am too drunk to notice.â
Your face heated despite your misery. He saw it and did not press. That was one of the strange kindnesses in him. He knew when to speak and when to let silence do the gentler work.
After a moment he said, with surprising softness, âTell me.â
You did not know why you obeyed. Perhaps because he had already heard so much of your grief in fragments that this only felt like giving the thing its proper outline at last. Perhaps because he looked at you as though he wanted the truth rather than the performance of it.
So you told him.
Not all of Lucan. Not every childish promise. Not the whole secret shape of that smaller, sadder longing. But enough. That there had once been a boy at the Rock with wind-burnt cheeks and a wooden sword and a way of looking at you as though your silences were worth waiting through. That you had given him a small carved lion with one blunted ear. That years later he had stood in a crimson cloak beneath slanting light and spoken to you like the girl you had been rather than the arrangement you had become.
Daeron listened without interruption. He did not smile. He did not mock. He only turned the cup slowly in his hand, his thumb moving once along the stem as though he were thinking through something too delicate to handle roughly.
When you finished, he said, âAnd did you love him?â
âNo,â you said, quieter now. âNot as one loves a husband. I was very young, and I had not yet learned how hard this world could be. Perhaps in another life, one gentler than this, it might have become something more. But I do not think I should like to reach into that imagined life and steal it from whatever self of mine was allowed to keep it.â
Daeronâs expression softened in a way you had not expected.
âThat is not sin,â he said.
You looked at him. âNo?â
âNo.â He glanced down at the cup and back again. âIt is only grief with a face on it.â
That struck you silent.
Then, because he was Daeron and could not remain wholly solemn for long without seeming to feel foolish in his own skin, he added, âBesides, if all we counted as infidelity was imagining kinder spouses, half the marriages in Kingâs Landing would collapse before breakfast.â
That startled a real laugh out of you.
He looked absurdly pleased, though he tried to hide it behind the cup.
After that, the friendship deepened.
Not scandalously. Not in any way a singer might set to harp and call romance. Nothing so simple, and nothing so easy to condemn. It deepened in the quiet, dangerous manner by which two lonely people grew used to being honestly seen. Sometimes you found him there in the old gallery. Sometimes in a dusty little solar with a narrow fire and a shelf of cracked books no one else bothered with. Sometimes in the west gallery when the light was turning and the windows cast long pale bars across the floor. A prince and a princeâs wife, speaking of things that ought perhaps to have been too strange or too intimate for easy conversation, yet somehow were not.
You asked him of dreams.
He asked you whether the court still praised endurance as though it were joy.
You asked what red smoke meant.
He answered, âSometimes blood. Sometimes forge-heat. Sometimes warning. Sometimes only fire before a hatching.â
You asked him once, very softly, âWhat is it to know something dreadful is coming and be unable to prevent it?â
He considered for a long while, his gaze on the light turning amber in his cup. âVery tiring,â he said at last.
Another time, when you confessed that you feared Lady Kiera thought ill of you, he answered, âShe thinks ill of fate, of herself, of the gods, of the narrowness of womenâs lives, and of my fatherâs bloodline by turns. You rank nowhere near so high.â
You smiled despite yourself.
That, too, was one of his gifts. Not comfort, exactly. He did not speak the soft, easy lies women were so often handed in place of truth. But he had a way of making sorrow feel less singular, less shameful. He spoke as if pain were a thing one might examine by candlelight rather than merely endure in silence, and there was mercy in that.
In time you came to understand that he was lonelier than anyone at court truly knew. The mockery that clung to him, the drink, the prophecy, the odd sharp humor, all of it had made him easy to dismiss. Yet beneath those things there was a tiredness in him that answered something tired in you. He had been misunderstood so long he no longer seemed to expect understanding, which made his gratitude for it all the more painful to witness. And you, who had spent years trying to make yourself smaller, gentler, easier to keep, found in his company the strange relief of not having to pretend that you were not hurting.
It was not love.
That would have been simpler, in its way. Easier to name. Easier to condemn.
It was something far more dangerous to lonely people. It was recognition.
By your sixth month, the friendship had become a fact of the castle, though not yet one anyone named aloud. If anyone saw you in the long west gallery with Daeron bent over some worm-eaten text on dragon dreams, they thought perhaps the pregnant princess sought novelty, or distraction, or some harmless learned pastime to fill the slower hours of her confinement. If anyone noticed that the prince men mocked for drinking too much had grown soberer in your presence, or that you smiled more after such talks than you did after whole evenings beside your husband, they kept it behind their teeth. Castles lived on such observations. They were built of stone, secrets, and the discipline of knowing when not to speak.
Prince Maekar did not.
Maekar noticed everything. He only spoke on half of it.
He saw Daeron leave one of the old solars with you at his side, your maids gathering themselves and walking a few respectful paces behind after allowing their lady the privacy due her, and he saw that your face was less shuttered than usual. He saw, too, the way his eldest son, his impossible, dream-haunted, often-drunken eldest son, turned his head slightly toward you when you spoke, not with the softness of a man courting a woman, but with an attentiveness no less intimate for being chaste. It was the look of a man listening not merely to words, but to the spirit beneath them. Maekar had not seen him grant that many people at all.
And because he was Maekar, and because his first instinct in all troubled matters was caution before mercy, he worried.
Not because he truly believed you dishonorable.
That was the uncomfortable part.
No. What unsettled him was that he did not believe you were cheating, and yet some intimacy clearly existed all the same, one the court might choose to name foul whether or not it was. Courts did not require sin to ruin a woman. They required only closeness, loneliness, and someone willing to speak the uglier version of a harmless truth.
So one evening, after a feast had thinned and the candles burned lower beneath the painted dragons of the hall, Maekar spoke first to Daeron. The boards were sticky in places with spilled wine. Servants moved between the trestles clearing trenchers and bones. Farther down the hall, some lesser lord was still laughing too loudly at something no one else had found worth hearing. The smoke from the wall torches clung beneath the rafters in a faint dark haze.
âWhat business have you so often with your cousinâs wife?â
Daeron, already two cups in and therefore perversely clearer than most sober men, looked at his father with open annoyance. âConversation.â
Maekarâs face did not move. âDo not try my patience.â
Daeron gave a low, bitter laugh. âYou might try patience with me once, Father. It would be novel.â
Maekarâs mouth tightened.
Then Daeron, perhaps because he knew mockery would only worsen things, said more quietly, âShe asks of dreams.â
âAnd that requires half the galleries in the castle?â
âIt requires someone who does not treat me as though prophecy were either a jest or a sickness.â
That silenced Maekar more than anger would have. He knew enough of storms to recognize one, and Daeron had been living inside a storm for years. Maekar was a man bred to meet weather with steel in hand and his feet planted firm, to ride through rain, through battle, through grief, and come out on the far side bloodied perhaps, but standing. Yet even he could not wholly deny that a storm might leave damage behind even when it did not kill. Roofs held. Trees remained rooted. Men survived. But the earth was changed after. So too with Daeron. The boy had lived through dragon dreams, through prophecy, through the haunting knowledge of things half-seen and half-understood, and if he wore the bruise of it strangely, in wine and bitterness and laughter too sharp by half, still the bruise remained. It was easy for harder men to call such wounds weakness. Harder still to admit that the mind, once riven by enough fear and foreknowledge, did not always mend cleanly.
Maekar looked hard at his eldest son. Daeron met the stare with tired steadiness.
âAnd she,â Daeron said after a moment, âis kind enough to try and understand what even her betters cannot be troubled to.â
That night Maekar said nothing further.
But the thought followed him.
A few days later he crossed paths with you alone in the outer walk above the inner yard. The day was all pale wind and thin autumn light. The sky hung white as old wool overhead. Your veil stirred where the breeze caught at it, and one hand rested at the small of your back while the other lay over the roundness of your belly, not protectively, but with the absent heaviness of a woman long accustomed now to bearing life beneath her ribs. Below, your sons were with a nurse and two pages, all bright hair and shrill delight, darting in and out of the watery sunlight like little banners come loose from their poles. Daeron was nowhere in sight.
Maekar stopped.
You curtsied as much as the child allowed. âPrince Maekar.â
âMy lady.â
For a moment he only looked at you.
You were beautiful, yes. Any fool could see that. But beauty had nothing to do with what unsettled him now. It was the tiredness in you. The effort. The strange quiet dignity with which you seemed to go on carrying both hurt and child and expectation without turning bitter enough to poison the whole castle. Most people mistook silence for peace. Maekar was not most people. He knew the difference between calm and endurance.
At length he asked, blunt as ever, âWhy do you spend so much time with my son?â
You did not pretend not to know which one he meant.
âBecause he is lonely,â you said.
Maekar stared.
Then, because you had already been too honest to retreat, you added, âAnd because he is kinder than people allow him to seem when they are not making sport of him.â
Maekarâs face did not soften. But something in his gaze altered, however slightly.
âYou are very sure of that.â
âNo.â A faint smile touched your mouth and vanished. âOnly willing to listen long enough to learn it.â
He looked away then, out across the yard where Aelor had climbed up on the low edge of the fountain and the nurse was already hurrying toward him in alarm. âDo you think yourself equal to the task?â
You followed his gaze to where your sons ran beneath the open sky, their laughter carrying upward through the cold like little bells.
âNo,â you said. âBut I think trying matters.â
That answer stayed with him.
Later still, in a chamber off the council rooms where the air smelled of wax, old parchment, and damp wool drying before the fire, Maekar said to Prince Baelor, âThat girl is trying very hard.â
Baelor looked up from the report in his hands.
The room was a narrow one for princes, crowded by shelves and chests and a long table half-buried beneath maps, sealed letters, and the bones of some meal long gone cold. A fire muttered low in the hearth, doing more to redden the chamber than to warm it. Outside, the keep went on about them in muffled sounds, boots on steps, a distant latch falling shut, the faint call of a guard changing watch beyond the wall. Candlelight trembled over parchment and steel and the strong planes of Baelorâs face, catching in the first threads of grey at his temples. He was dressed as simply as ever, dark wool, plain leather, no needless ornament, yet even seated he had that same grave weight about him, the stillness of a man other men yielded space to without knowing they had done it.
Maekar, who did not often admit fault because fault admitted in princes became weakness all too easily, went on in the flat voice of a man forcing honesty through his teeth.
âI do not say she is without danger. Courts will make danger of anything. But I think we were wrong to take her measure so early, and so poorly.â
Baelor sat very still.
Maekar frowned at him. âDo not look so stricken. I only say what is there.â
For a moment Baelor did not answer. He folded the parchment once, then again, too carefully. His broken nose cast a harder shadow in the candlelight. At last he said, quietly, âI know.â
Maekar leaned one hand upon the table. âShe makes an effort where more arrogant women would have given up. She is gentle with the boys. She has patience enough for Daeron, which is more than can be said for half our blood. She has borne Valarrâs failings more quietly than he deserves.â He let out a breath through his nose, harsh and brief. âHard thing to admit, but I think we made a mistake in losing the girl inside the lady before we ever truly got to know her.â
For once Baelor had no ready princely phrase to smooth the edge of it.
He only looked down at his hands.
Because he knew it too.
He had seen you standing at the edge of Targaryen conversation, smiling with your hands folded while old blood spoke around you as though you were furniture in your own marriage. He had seen how carefully you managed the children, the household, the court, and the tempers of everyone but yourself. He had called you dutiful because it was easy. Quiet because it was useful. Good because goodness was convenient in women. It had pleased him, in some thoughtless and practical part of himself, that his sonâs wife was not troublesome, not vain, not loud, not difficult in the ways great ladies so often were when unhappy.
And all the while he had missed the cost of it.
That was the part that sat ill in him.
Baelor was a man used to seeing clearly. Men trusted his judgment because it was usually worth trusting. He could read a battlefield at a glance, measure another knight by the seat of him in the saddle, tell when a bannerman lied, when a levy would break, when mercy would bind a foe more tightly than fear. He had made a life of being right in the moments that mattered.
And yet he had looked on a lonely girl doing her utmost not to fail his son, and had mistaken her effort for ease.
He had seen your quiet and thought it peace. Seen your grace and thought it nature. Seen your patience and thought it endless. Worse, he had seen the Lannister gold, the useful match, the beauty, the sons already at your skirts, and let all of that stand in place of understanding. A princeâs daughter by marriage, a great lordâs child, a fortunate alliance, a wife who caused no scandal. It had all seemed enough.
Now it seemed a poor and ugly arithmetic.
âWe paid for in gold,â Baelor said at last, almost to himself.
Maekar said nothing.
Baelorâs hand tightened once upon the folded parchment. âAnd thought that explained everything.â
The words seemed to darken the room.
For a little while neither man spoke. The fire shifted. A coal broke with a soft red sigh. Somewhere outside in the passage a pair of servants passed in low conversation, their voices fading almost as soon as they were heard.
Baelor stared into the hearth, but what he saw was not flame.
He saw you as he had first seen you at court, bright-haired, soft-spoken, too composed for a girl so new to dragonstone halls and Targaryen tempers. He saw all the times he had mistaken your carefulness for confidence. All the moments he had accepted your smile and not troubled to wonder what effort it cost. He saw you standing a half-step too far from the center of a conversation, never interrupting, never demanding, learning and learning and learning the shape of a family that had never once thought to learn yours in return.
He saw, too, his son.
Valarr, dutiful and honorable and blind in the places where blindness did the greatest harm.
And for perhaps the first time, Baelor felt not only disappointment in the match, nor concern, nor even princely regret, but something sharper and more personal.
Shame.
Not the loud sort. Not the kind that made men confess or fall to their knees.
Only the hard, bitter knowledge that a just man could still fail someone thoroughly while never once meaning to.
âShe was young,â Baelor said at last, and his voice had gone lower than before. âWe brought her here among strangers, and dragons, and old griefs that were not hers. We asked her to smile, to bear sons, to offend no one, to fit herself to us so neatly that we need never feel the edges.â His gaze remained on the fire. âAnd when she did it, we praised her for being easy.â
Maekarâs silence was answer enough.
Baelor gave one short, humorless breath, not quite a laugh. âGods.â
That one word carried more weight than any curse.
Because the true wound of it was plain now. You had not failed them.
They had failed you first, and so quietly none of them had thought to call it failing at all.
At length Maekar said, âThere may yet be time.â
Baelor lifted his head then, and whatever lay in his face was too tired to be hope.
âFor what?â he asked.
The question was simple. The grief in it was not.
Maekar did not answer at once.
For men like them, time had always seemed a thing that could be ridden down, commanded, spent wisely, won back by action and strength and sufficient will. But houses were not battlefields, and hearts did not mend because a prince had finally decided they ought.
Baelor looked back into the fire.
By then he knew enough to fear that the great mistake had already been made, not in some single cruelty that might be named and atoned for, but in a hundred smaller neglects. In all the times you had tried and no one had noticed the trying. In all the times your goodness had been taken for granted because it came so softly. In all the years his son had been given a woman who might have loved him down to the bone, and had answered that devotion with duty, silence, and the kind of injury decent men did not even know they were capable of inflicting.
When Baelor spoke again, it was so quiet the fire nearly swallowed it.
âI think,â he said, âthat by the time a man learns the worth of what was given him, he has too often already taught it how to live without him.â
This time, Maekar had nothing to say at all.
By the time Kiera spoke plainly to you, the leaves had begun to brown at the edges and the first true coolness of autumn was in the air.
You found her in the queenâs garden at dusk, beneath a pear tree gone nearly bare. The branches above her were thin and black against the dimming sky, with only a few curled leaves still clinging stubbornly to them. The last of the evening light had gone soft and grey. It caught faintly on the gravel paths, on the clipped hedges, on the marble rim of a dry fountain streaked green with age. Somewhere beyond the garden walls, a bell sounded from the keep, low and distant. The smell of damp earth and bruised herbs rose when the wind stirred. Kiera stood very still in Tyroshi blue that made her look colder than ivory, and there were shadows beneath her eyes no jewels could hide.
âYou have been speaking often with my husband,â she said.
There was no accusation in it at first. That made it worse.
You stood with one gloved hand over the roundness of your belly, where the child shifted slow and heavy beneath silk. The movement was small, but you felt it all the same, a private tug inside your body. âWe speak of dreams.â
Kieraâs mouth twisted. âThen he has told you more than he tells me.â
The sadness in that was too naked to answer.
You looked at her properly then, and all at once your old jealous dislike had to make room for something rougher and more uncomfortable. She looked tired. Not feast-tired. Not court-tired. Bone-tired. The sort of tiredness grief laid into a woman and never wholly withdrew. Even her stillness seemed heavy with it.
âHas he not?â you asked quietly.
Kiera looked away toward the hedge. The wind worried one loose strand of dark hair against her cheek. For a long moment she said nothing. Then, with the flatness of something repeated too often to still draw blood on the speaking of it, she said, âI have conceived three times.â
The whole garden seemed to still.
âNone lived,â she went on. âNot long enough to be named. Not long enough for the court to remember after.â
Your throat closed.
She laughed once. Ugly and brief. âThey whisper, of course. Some unions are fruitful. Some are not. Some brides are favored. Some are merely decorative.â
You had no answer fit for that. The gravel path, the dark hedges, the dying light, it all seemed suddenly too sharp, too close. You only stood there with your hand over your child and your pity rising like shame.
Kiera looked then, not at your face, but at your belly.
âI do not hate you,â she said at last. âI thought perhaps I might. It would have been simpler.â
You swallowed. âI never wishedâŚâ
âNo. I know.â Her voice sharpened, though not with anger so much as weariness worn raw. âThat is part of the misery.â
She glanced away again, toward the keep looming dark beyond the garden wall. When she spoke next, her voice had gone quieter, and stranger for it. âWhatever lived between Valarr and me is gone.â
You did not breathe.
She gave the faintest shrug, but it looked less like carelessness than surrender. âHe buried it as men bury many things, by saying nothing and going on. Poorly, perhaps. Clumsily, certainly. But he buried it.â
The words landed harder than if she had wept.
Kiera looked back at you, and there was something almost cruel in her honesty, though cruelty was not what she meant. âDo not comfort yourself with ghosts, my lady. He is not mine to lose. Not now.â Her gaze flicked once more to your belly, then away. âWhatever else he has failed to do, whatever tenderness he has denied you, whatever blindness he wraps himself in like armor, he is bound to you. To your sons. To the life already built around him. He may wear that bond badly, but he has not slipped it.â
Your fingers tightened against the silk over your child.
It was not the thing you had expected her to say. Not balm. Not accusation. Not even rivalry. Something colder than all of those, and harder to bear.
Kieraâs mouth thinned. âDo not think I am praising him.â
âI did not,â you said, though your voice came out smaller than you liked.
âNo.â Her expression did not change. âI thought not.â
The wind moved through the garden again, and the last leaves above you whispered together like dry paper. Somewhere a servant crossed a far arcade with a lantern, the light bobbing briefly through the dark before vanishing behind stone.
Then, after a pause, Kiera said more quietly, âDo not think the gods love you merely because they permit you to keep what they denied me. Gods are not so simple.â
She left you with that.
You watched her go, her blue skirts passing between the hedges like the last color of evening sinking out of the world. For a long while after she was gone, you did not move. The child stirred once beneath your hand, and all at once the garden felt too large, too empty, too cold for the smallness of your own breathing.
That night, when Daeron found you in one of the old solars with the painted dragons on the ceiling gone smoke-dim with age, he took one look at your face and did not bother with courtesy.
âShe told you.â
âYes.â
The room was half-dark, lit only by a low fire and three candles guttering in their brass cups. The painted beasts above had once been vivid, red and black and gold, but years of smoke had dimmed them into ghosts. Dust clung in the corners. The air smelled of ash, old vellum, and the wine Daeron had set down near his hand. Outside the narrow window the night had come on fully.
He poured wine into a second cup, then remembered and set it aside untouched.
For a long while you sat with the fire burning low. It snapped softly now and then, and each little sound seemed too loud in the quiet. Daeron did not press. That was one of the strange mercies in him. He let sorrow speak at its own pace.
At length you asked, âDid you love them?â
Daeron stared into the flames. Their light moved over his face and caught in the hollow beneath his eyes. âThe children? Or the hopes?â
You shut your eyes. âThat answers me.â
He drank.
Then, very softly, he said, âA man may mourn what he never held. There is no law against it.â
You turned your face aside. The words hurt because they were kind, and because they did not try to diminish anything.
Daeron watched you a moment longer, and when he spoke again his voice was low enough that it seemed made for the room and the hour and nothing beyond them.
âThey call you blessed because they have never mistaken endurance for joy.â
That was the kindest thing anyone had said to you in months, and it felt, for that very reason, almost unbearable.
At seven months, he told you the dream.
You were in the west gallery, where the windows stood open just enough to let in air sharp enough to sting. Autumn had come properly by then. The light was thin and pale, the sort that made the stone look colder than it was. Below in the yard, Aelor and Baelon chased one another around the fountain, shrieking with laughter while a nurse and two pages failed nobly to keep them from soaking their hems and boots. Water flashed silver when their little shoes struck too near the edge. One page caught Aelor by the sleeve and lost him again at once. Baelon slipped, righted himself, and kept running with all the stubborn dignity of a child too young to accept defeat.
Valarr stood on the steps with one hand ready whenever Aelor went too near the stone lip. He did not smile often these days, yet he watched the boys with that grave, instinctive attentiveness fathers had, as though their bodies tugged some string in his own whether he willed it or no. Lately, he had begun to linger nearer whenever you sat in the galleries or solar rooms, especially if Daeron was there too. Not hovering, not quite. Not foolish enough now to forbid a comfort he had been too blind to provide himself. He would come with the boys, or find some reason to remain within call, joining you at times, withdrawing at others, as if he were trying to learn by instinct what the proper distance was and failing slightly no matter where he stood. It was an effort. You saw that. It only hurt that effort had come after so much else.
Still, he was trying.
Not gracefully. Not well. But truly.
The boys made it easier than either of you did. They climbed into your lap, tugged at Valarrâs sleeves, interrupted silences before they could grow sharp, and stitched the four of you together in those small domestic ways children had, heedless of the damage already done. Some days it almost felt natural. Others, the old soreness sat between you like an unseen third presence, quieter now, but not gone.
You had been smiling faintly at them when Daeron said, without warning, âI dreamt of your child.â
Every instinct in you stilled.
He sat with long fingers loose about the stem of a cup he was not drinking from. The wind lifted his pale hair and worried at the sleeves of his dark coat. The old book in his lap lay open and forgotten, its parchment leaves fluttering once in the draft before settling again. When you turned to him, the expression on his face was not drunkenness, not mockery, not even fear. It was something stranger and more solemn, the look of a man who had seen something in sleep that had followed him into waking and would not let go.
âWhat did you see?â
His mouth tightened. For a moment he only watched the boys below, as if their bright, careless little movements made what he meant to say harder. âA cradle lined in lion-red. A dragon egg inside it instead of a babe.â He swallowed once. âThere was blood on linen. Women weeping. A golden-haired mother with her hands red to the wrists. Then the egg cracked. I heard a child cry, and something cried back.â
Your hand went to your belly of its own accord.
The child shifted beneath your palm, slow and heavy now, real enough to answer fear with movement. The stone bench beneath you felt suddenly too hard. The wind too cold. Somewhere down the length of the gallery, beyond the turn in the wall, a servant passed with folded linen in her arms, soft shoes whispering over the rushes, and even that small sound seemed too loud for the stillness that had come over you.
âIs it a bad dream?â
Daeronâs smile was strange and tired. âThat is always the question, is it not? Men hear blood and think doom. Dreamers hear blood and think birth.â
He looked at you then, properly, and for all the oddness in him there was pity in that look. Not the soft, easy pity that sought to soothe. The grimmer kind. The kind that saw too much and did not lie about it.
âI do not think the child dies.â
You let out a breath you had not known you were holding.
âBut I think,â he said very softly, âthat the mother is very lonely.â
That nearly undid you more than the blood.
For a moment you could not answer. Below, Aelor shouted something triumphant as Baelon slipped on the wet stones and landed on his bottom with all the offended dignity of a prince twice his age. Valarr bent and hauled him back up one-handed. The nurse rushed in too late, scolding. The pages laughed under their breath. It was such an ordinary little scene, so bright with life, that the dream Daeron had laid between you felt all the more terrible for it.
You looked down into the yard again because it was easier than looking at him.
âDo you ever grow used to it?â you asked after a while. âKnowing such things.â
Daeron turned the cup once in his fingers. âNo,â he said. âYou only grow more tired.â
The answer sat between you in the cold air.
You kept your hand on your belly. Below, Valarr lifted Baelon now, settling him against his hip while Aelor tugged at his sleeve and demanded judgment on some fresh childish dispute. He looked solid there, broad-shouldered in the pale light, every inch the prince the realm saw. Yet from where you sat above him, with Daeronâs dream still in your ears and the weight of the child beneath your hand, he seemed oddly far away. Not in distance. In something else. Something harder to cross.
âI think,â you said at last, and stopped.
Daeron did not press you.
You tried again. âI think I was meant to find that comforting.â
âThe dream?â
âNo.â Your eyes stayed on the yard below. On your sons. On your husband with one child against him and another circling close. âThat you do not think the babe will die.â
Daeron was quiet for so long you wondered if he meant to let it pass unanswered.
Then he said, âPerhaps on another day it would have been.â
You turned to him then.
He gave one faint lift of the shoulder. âBut that is the trouble with fear. It is greedy. It never comes alone.â
That, too, was true enough to hurt.
The wind moved through the gallery again and touched the back of your neck. Aelor laughed below. Baelon, secure in his fatherâs arms now, had begun patting impatiently at Valarrâs shoulder as if he owned him. Valarr turned his face up then, perhaps at the sound of your voice drifting down, perhaps by chance alone. For one brief instant his eyes met yours through the pale afternoon light.
Something moved across his face.
You could not have named it.
Not before. Not now.
He only looked. Then Aelor was demanding him again and the moment was gone.
Beside you, Daeron watched the yard with the strange stillness of men who had seen too much of endings.
The child moved once more beneath your hand.
And all at once the west gallery, with its cold stone and narrow light and the ordinary sounds of pages laughing below, felt like the edge of something vast and unseen. Not doom. Not yet. Only the terrible knowledge that joy and grief so often approached dressed in the same colors, and that by the time one learned which had come, it was already too late to bar the door.
At eight months, the whole keep had begun to watch you differently.
Not openly. Not enough that any lady might be called cruel for it after. But you felt it all the same. The longer looks that lingered half a heartbeat too long. The lowered voices when your hand went to the small of your back. The way old women in service crossed themselves when you passed, as if prayer alone might strengthen bone and blood alike. By then the child sat low and hard in you, a heavy, insistent presence that altered the whole shape of your body and every hour within it. Some days the weight of her made your steps slow and careful on the stone stairs, one hand trailing the wall for steadiness. Some nights you woke already aching, one palm spread over your belly while the dark breathed softly around you and the dying brazier gave off the faint red pulse of a failing heart.
Even the maester had begun to frown too much.
âIt is early yet,â Myria had whispered once, after he had gone with his chain clicking softly against his chest, the sound of it lingering down the corridor long after the man himself had passed from sight. âToo early for him to wear that face.â
But women knew what men dressed up in grave tones and swallowed looks too often meant. Hard pregnancy. Heavy burden. Too much strain. Too much blood likely. The old words went from woman to woman without ever needing to be spoken aloud. They lived in glances, in the way hands lingered when fastening your gown, in the way Ellyn watched how you sat, how you rose, how long you stood before the ache forced you down again. You knew it too. You only did not say it aloud. To give fear a name was sometimes to make a chamber of it, and you had little wish to sleep inside one more.
So the keep watched.
It watched in all the small, quiet ways castles did. Servants stepping aside too quickly in torchlit corridors. Ladies pausing in conversation as you passed beneath arched windows full of pale autumn light. Pages staring and then remembering themselves. The whole great stone body of the place seemed to know you were carrying something fragile through it, and had begun, without ever saying so, to fear the cost.
Daeronâs dream haunted the chamber long before the labor came for you.
Blood on linen. Women weeping. A golden-haired mother with her hands red to the wrists. An egg cracking. A child crying, and something crying back.
You could not look at the cradle egg warming near the brazier without thinking of it. Could not wake in the night with pain in your back or the child shifting heavily beneath your ribs without hearing again the strange low weariness in Daeronâs voice when he had spoken of it. The dream settled over everything after that, not loudly, not like some wild terror, but like weather creeping into stone. It lived in the curtains. In the glow of candlelight. In the stillness after the boys had been put to bed and the chamber went quiet save for the hiss of the fire and the soft sounds of your own breathing.
He had not known the ending.
That was perhaps the most terrible part of prophecy.
Not that it lied.
That it spoke in pieces.
It showed enough to wound and never enough to soothe. That it laid grief in your hands without telling you whether grief was all you held. That it gave blood and weeping and cracking shell and answering cries, but not the shape of mercy, if mercy was there at all. And so you carried that too in the eighth month, along with the child herself, along with the ache in your back and the weight low in your body and the knowledge in every womanâs face. The dream had no ending, and so your mind gave it a hundred of its own, each one darker than the last.
The labor came in storm.
Rain struck the tower walls so hard it sounded like fists. The shutters rattled in their frames, and the wind came shrieking in off the bay like something hunted and furious, clawing at the stone, worrying every crack and seam as if it meant to pull the whole tower down into the black water below. You woke before dawn with one hand clenched in the sheets and pain already moving through you low and deep, not sharp at first, but dreadful in its certainty. For one half-blind moment you lay still beneath the blankets, breath trapped high in your throat, and hoped perhaps it might yet be some lesser thing, some ordinary ache of the eighth month. Then the pain came again, heavier, more sure of itself, and all foolish hope went out of you at once.
Valarr woke to the sound you made trying not to cry out.
âWhat is it?â
You could not lie well enough through that first pain. âThe child.â
He was up at once.
After that the chamber became movement and heat and womenâs hands. Candles were lit. More candles. Basins brought. Linen fetched. Fire stirred until the room glowed red and gold and stifling, the shadows driven back only to gather again in the corners, thick and watchful. Myria sent pages flying for the midwife, the maester, more hot water, more cloth, more everything. Ellyn went for the birthing stool with shaking hands. Ysilla braided your hair back from your face with a steadiness that looked almost cruel in its calm. The room filled quickly with the smells of hot wax, damp wool, wet stone, bitter herbs crushed under hurried fingers, and the clean metallic edge of fear.
Outside, the storm went on battering at the tower as if it meant to be let in.
Somewhere in the passage, the boys woke crying.
Children always knew when fear changed shape in a household.
Their voices carried once, thin and frightened through the door, Aelor asking something too quickly to be understood, Baelon only sobbing because his brother did, before a nurse hushed them away. That sound hurt almost worse than the pain, because it was so small and helpless and familiar, and because you knew they would be frightened now without understanding why, tucked away in some distant chamber while the keep seemed to shake around them.
Valarr stood in the middle of it all like a man caught in battle without armor.
The midwife, an old, hard woman from Driftmark who feared no prince alive and had little patience for men in birthing rooms however royal, took one look at him and snapped, âEither hold her upright or get out of my way.â
So he held you upright.
For hours.
The storm raged. Your cries broke and rose and broke again, torn from you whether pride would allow them or not. Sweat ran down your spine and cooled and ran again. Your fingers bruised his wrists where you clung. Once you bit him hard enough to leave marks, and he did not even flinch. He held the basin when you retched. He wiped your face when Myria thrust a cloth at him. He steadied your shoulders when your strength failed and caught you when the pain bent you too far forward. The candles guttered and were replaced. More water came. More linen. The room grew hotter. The air thicker. Time loosened itself until there was no hour, only the next pain and the next breath and the next time Valarr said your name as if that alone might keep you tethered to the world.
He had never looked less princely.
Never looked more like a husband.
Never looked more afraid.
His hair had come half-loose in the labor of tending you. Blood and water marked his sleeves. Fear had stripped the polish from him so thoroughly that there was nothing left but the man beneath, broad-shouldered, white-faced, shaking at the mouth when you could not catch your breath, all his old distance burned away by helplessness. He spoke your name like prayer and command and apology all at once, and if there were other words in him, better words, more careful words, the storm and your pain and his terror had scoured them out of him. What remained was rough and desperate and real.
And that, perhaps, was the cruellest thing of all. That it had taken blood and storm and the threat of losing you to make him look at you as though your life were the whole of his.
Outside the chamber, the news spread in fragments.
Not the birth. Not yet.
Only this: the princeâs lady was in labor, and a month too soon.
That was enough.
Daeron heard it first from a page who came tearing through the torchlit passage half out of his wits. âMy prince, the lady, Prince Valarrâs lady, they sent for the midwife, it has begun, it is too soonââ
Daeron was moving before the boy had finished. His cup struck the floor behind him, wine spreading black across the stones.
Maekar saw him at the stair. âWhat is it?â
âHer labor.â
Maekar went still, then followed at once. âWhat do you know?â
Daeron did not answer.
Maekar caught his arm hard. âWhat do you know, boy?â
Daeron turned then, and there was no wine in his face now, no bitterness, no mockery. Only dread.
âI know enough,â he said.
Maekarâs grip tightened. âEnough for what?â
Daeron looked toward the upper passage, toward the shut birthing door neither of them could yet see.
âEnough,â he said, his voice gone flat, âto wish I had seen the end.â
That silenced Maekar.
Baelor heard the same word a moment later from a guardsman who had sense enough to lower his voice, though not enough to hide the fear in it.
âIn labor, my prince. Too soon.â
Baelor needed no more than that.
So the three of them came by different corridors and met outside the chamber beneath shaking torchlight and the stormâs relentless muttering against the walls.
Daeron reached first.
He stopped dead before the shut door.
From within came womenâs voices, the clatter of basins, the low orders of the midwife, and once, terribly, your cry.
Daeron closed his eyes.
Not in prayer.
In knowing.
Blood on linen. Women weeping. The motherâs hands red. He had seen all of it. But never the end.
When Maekar reached him, wet from the rain and dark with temper sharpened by helplessness, he said more quietly, âTell me.â
Daeron did not open his eyes.
âThere was blood,â he said.
Maekarâs jaw hardened. âThere is always blood.â
âNot like this.â
That gave even Maekar pause.
Daeron opened his eyes then, and something in his face made his father fall silent at last.
âI saw women weeping,â he said. âI saw her hands red to the wrists. I saw the egg crack.â His voice roughened. âI heard a child cry, and something answer it.â
Maekar stared. âAnd you said nothing?â
âI told her what I could.â
âWhat you could,â Maekar said, low and dangerous, âor what you dared?â
Daeron gave one short, ugly laugh. âDo you think I know the difference anymore?â
Before Maekar could answer, another cry came from behind the door, ragged enough to make every man in the corridor go still.
Daeronâs shoulders bowed.
Only slightly.
But both of them saw it.
Baelor came then, broad-shouldered and grave, still in his day clothes, damp at the hems. He looked at the door, at Daeron, at Maekarâs face, and the silence deepened around the three of them.
âWhat has he seen?â Baelor asked.
Maekar answered first. âEnough to be afraid.â
Baelor looked to Daeron. âWill she live?â
Daeronâs face changed.
That was answer enough for a moment.
Then he said, âI do not know.â
Baelorâs mouth tightened.
Daeron looked back at the shut door. âThat is the curse of it. I saw enough to fear it. Not enough to spare anyone.â
The whole corridor seemed to go colder after that.
Servants gathered and scattered farther off like frightened birds. A kitchen girl cried openly until an older woman hushed her. A guardsman changed watch with his voice lowered. The keep held itself very still around that one closed door.
Then, softly, as if he no longer meant the words for anyone but himself, Daeron said,
âGods let me have been wrong.â
No one answered.
Because that was the one thing none of them believed.
Inside, the labor turned vicious.
There was more blood than with the boys.
You knew it by the speed of the linen, by the way the cloths vanished from the bed and came back redder each time. By the way the midwifeâs mouth hardened. By the way Myria stopped speaking except when she had to, as if words themselves had become a waste beside the work of keeping you in the world. By the looks that passed between women who loved you and could not bear to say aloud what they feared. The chamber had grown stifling with heat, thick with the smells of blood, hot water, damp wool, and bitter herbs bruised beneath hurried hands. Candles guttered in every corner. The storm still battered the tower walls beyond the shutters, but even that wild noise seemed farther off now, as if all the world had drawn inward to the bed and the body upon it.
Valarr saw it too.
It made him wild.
When the maester, grey-faced and damp with sweat beneath the crushing heat of the room, looked once at the blood and once at the midwife and said in the careful voice men used when they wished horror to sound like reason, âMy prince, if the child cannot be turned, we may have to cut her open,â the room itself seemed to stop.
Not movement. Not breath.
Something deeper.
Valarr turned so slowly it was worse than if he had shouted at once.
âWhat did you say?â
The maester swallowed. His chain clicked softly against his chest. âIf it comes to it, my prince, there are cases in which the babe may yet be saved, though the motherââ
He did not finish.
He did not need to.
Valarr stepped toward him.
There was blood on his sleeves, on his hands, across one cuff where you had clutched him. His hair had come half-loose. His face looked carved from something harsher than flesh, pale with fear, sharpened by fury, all the princely restraint in him stretched so thin it had become almost transparent.
âThe mother lives,â he said.
The maester went pale. âMy prince, I only meant that should the choiceââ
âThere is no choice.â
His voice was low. It shook the room more than shouting would have.
âThe mother lives.â
The maester tried again, perhaps because learned men were too often fools where terror was concerned. âIf the babe is lost, the realm may yet have others, but if there is some chance to preserveââ
Valarrâs restraint broke.
He seized the front of the manâs robe and slammed him hard enough against the stone that the candles trembled in their holders and one basin rang sharply where a servantâs shaking hand struck it against the table. No one moved. Even the storm seemed to draw back to listen.
âGuarantee her life,â he said.
The maesterâs mouth opened once and closed again.
Valarr leaned closer, his face white with fury and fear. âYou hear me? Her life. The babe is secondary.â
The words shocked the room.
They shocked you, even through pain.
The maester stammered, âMy prince, no man can guaranteeââ
Valarrâs hand tightened.
âThen do not speak to me of cutting her open unless you mean to lie upon the table after her and feel the same blade in your own flesh.â
The chamber had gone utterly still. The women did not look at one another. The servants did not breathe. The fire snapped once in the hearth, small and ugly in the silence.
âIf any fate is laid upon her by your counsel,â Valarr said, each word like something forged, âit will be followed through with you. Do you understand me?â
The maesterâs lips trembled. âYes, my prince.â
The midwife, old and hard and wiser than most men of learning, snapped, âThen stop frightening fools and help me keep her breathing.â
Valarr let go of him.
The man nearly fell.
Then at once Valarr turned back to you, all that terrible violence collapsing into something rawer the moment his eyes found your face again. He came to your side and dropped to his knees, one hand sliding beneath your damp hair, the other finding yours where your fingers had clawed uselessly at the sheets. His palm was hot and shaking. His breath came harsh. In the firelight he looked younger and older at once, stripped down to something more frightened than princely.
âI am here,â he said.
You could barely hear him through the pain.
He bent closer, forehead against yours, breath unsteady, his voice breaking on the edges now where fear had worn it thin.
âLook at me.â
You did. Barely.
âStay.â
It was desperate.
âStay with me,â he said again, and now his voice was breaking outright. âDo you hear me? Stay.â
Another pain tore through you before you could answer, hard enough to blind the room white at the edges. But his hand was still there, bruisingly warm around yours, his voice at your ear, rough and shaking and real, and for the first time in all your marriage he sounded like a man who had finally understood what your life meant to him only when the thought of losing it was already standing in the room.
Outside, Daeron heard your cry and knew.
Or thought he knew.
He shut his eyes against the torchlight and saw the dream again, more vivid than waking. The blood. The linen. The women. The red hands. He had told you the truth as far as he could bear it, but not all of it. Not the sheer scale of the blood. Not the force of the grief in the dream. Not how the chamber in it had felt like a tomb and cradle both, like death and beginning laid down side by side and dressed in the same colors.
Maekar saw his face and said, âWhat?â
Daeron did not answer.
He stood with one hand braced against the cold stone wall, his head slightly bowed, as though if he did not hold himself upright by force he might fold altogether. Torchlight shook along the corridor and caught in the strain of his mouth, the terrible stillness in him.
Baelor looked from one son to the other, and in that moment all the old strength in him was of no use at all.
For once there was nothing to do but wait.
And somewhere else in the keep, where the storm sounded farther away and the walls were colder, Kiera heard the change first in the bells.
Not the bells of alarm.
Not the bells for prayer.
The bells for life.
One. Then another. Then more, until the sound rolled through the stone like something jubilant and merciless. It came down the passages and under the doors and through the cracks in the old walls, bright and brazen and impossible to mistake. Somewhere outside her chamber a servant girl ran laughing and half-crying at once, her shoes slapping too fast against the floor.
âA daughter,â the girl gasped to someone farther down the passage. âA daughter, and a dragon, gods save us, a dragonââ
The words broke apart in her wake.
Kiera stood very still.
The room around her was dim, lit only by one lamp and the red coil of a brazier burning low. The shadows had gathered thick in the corners. Her hands had gone cold. She could hear the keep rejoicing in pieces now, footsteps hurrying, voices rising, doors opening, the whole place brightening with the news of another womanâs child as if dawn had come early and chosen every chamber but hers.
A daughter.
Their third child.
A dragon hatched.
A life bells would toll for.
And all at once Kiera sat down hard on the edge of her bed as though her knees had ceased to belong to her.
For a while she did not cry.
She only sat there with her hands fallen useless in her lap while the bells kept going and the keep went on becoming brighter around her grief. She thought of the little lives she had carried and lost before they could be named, before they could be blessed, before any bell had ever rung for them at all. She thought of how quietly women were expected to bury certain griefs. How neatly. How prettily. She thought, too, of the girl from the west, blood-spent now perhaps, pale and trembling and alive, with a daughter at her breast and a dragon waking beside her.
Then the bells went on.
New life.
New blood.
Joy.
Miracle.
Kiera lowered her head into both hands and wept soundlessly, because the whole castle was ringing for a life that was not hers and would never be hers, and there was something unbearable in hearing joy made public when grief had always had to be borne in private.
âThat is not my life,â she whispered to the empty room.
The bells kept tolling.
Toward dawn, as the storm finally began to break itself against the paling eastern sky, the child came.
You screamed once, a terrible raw sound that stripped every layer of princessly composure from you, and then there was the wet rush of life into waiting hands and the brutal, suspended silence before the babe chose whether to breathe.
Valarr stopped breathing first.
Then the child cried.
A high, furious, living sound.
The room broke around it.
Myria wept openly. Ellyn laughed and sobbed in the same breath. The midwife barked orders no one heard because relief had turned the chamber bright and strange, as though the world had tipped and righted itself in one shaking instant.
âA daughter,â she announced.
Valarr made some low, broken sound and came at once to your side.
âA daughter,â he said, as though he had not believed such a thing possible until it lay bleeding and living before him.
You were too weak to answer. They laid her to your breast, small and red and furious, with damp gold already on her head, and for one suspended moment the whole world shrank to the astonishing heat and weight of her.
Then something cracked in the next room.
Every woman froze.
Another crack. Sharper.
Then the unmistakable shatter of shell.
Daeron moved first.
He crossed the antechamber just as the old egg split open down the middle, steam and heat spilling from it in a rush that smelled of iron, ash, and something ancient waking. The brazier flame bent toward it. For one impossible moment the air itself seemed full of remembered wings. The hatchling clawed free, slick and black-red, no larger than a cat, with wings half-glued to its sides and tiny jaws opening in a furious cry.
Behind him, from the bed, your daughter cried back.
The dragon answered.
And in that instant Daeron understood.
Not death.
Not doom.
Blood for blood.
He had seen so much blood because something had to be paid. He had seen the women weeping because birth and terror had always stood too near one another. He had not seen the end because the end had never been death at all.
It had been hatching.
He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, there were tears standing there. âIt was the egg,â he said softly, to no one and everyone. âGods. That was it. Blood for blood. It was the egg.â
And outside in the corridor, where Maekar and Baelor had been waiting beneath the torchlight with all the uselessness of fathers and princes before a birthing door, they heard first the childâs cry, and then, stranger and sharper, something smaller answer it with fire in its throat.
Maekar went white.
Baelor did not move for one whole heartbeat.
Then the door opened and the news came at last, too large for the passage to hold cleanly.
A daughter.
She lives.
The lady lives.
And a dragon.
Baelor closed his eyes only briefly.
His third grandchild.
A granddaughter.
And your life spared.
When he opened them, the stern heir to the throne was there still, but something in the man beneath him had softened and split all at once.
âA daughter,â he said, almost to himself.
âAnd a dragon, my prince,â the servant whispered, still shaking.
Baelor looked toward the chamber door, and for one fleeting instant he did not think of the realm at all. Only of how small she must be. How hard your labor had been. How Valarr must be looking at you now.
Then duty returned.
âKeep the keep orderly,â he said, his voice low but carrying. âLet no drunken fool shout this through the halls before the women in that room have had peace enough to draw breath. Ring the bells now, since fools have ears already, and let the sept know.â He paused. âAnd send the boys up. Washed.â
The servant ran.
Baelor remained where he was for a moment longer beneath the wavering torchlight, his broad shoulders still, his broken nose casting a hard shadow down his face. Maekar stood beside him in silence. From below, the bells had already begun to toll.
A daughter.
A dragon.
And the mother had lived.
For a man like Baelor, it struck in two places at once, the prince and the grandfather.
Then the keep erupted.
The news ran like fire through dry straw. Bells rolled through the dawn. Servants cried in the passages. Guards grinned like boys. The whole castle seemed to wake at once to joy.
Down in the yard, Aelor shouted that his sister had a dragon. Baelon, understanding only that the world had suddenly become wonderful, spun in circles until he fell laughing. Later, scrubbed and straightened and wild-eyed with delight, they crowded your bed without ceremony or fear.
âIs that truly ours?â Aelor whispered, staring at the hatchling like the gods themselves had dropped it from the sky.
âOur sister,â Baelon declared, patting at the blankets before Ellyn caught his wrist.
You lay pale against the pillows with your daughter in your arms and the dragon wrapped near the brazier in red cloth, its tiny sides fluttering with each breath. Your sons pressed close at either side of you, bright-haired and flushed and utterly certain that this was where they belonged.
Valarr stood very still.
Not because he did not want to come nearer.
Because he did.
That was the cruelty of it.
He had been there for every cry. He had held you through the labor. He had seen the blood and thought, in one sick, blinding moment, that he might lose you before he had ever truly made himself worthy of you.
And now, with the child alive and the dragon hatched and the boys climbing over the bed to press themselves against you, he felt like the outermost figure in a painting he had helped create and no longer knew how to enter.
Your daughter rooted weakly against your breast. Aelor asked three questions at once, all bright and breathless and tumbling over one another. Baelon laid his head in your lap as though there had never been, in all the world, a safer place left for him to rest it. And you, ruined and blood-weary and scarcely done trembling, still found something soft for them. Something warm. Something instinctive. Something that seemed to rise from you even now, even after pain, even after fear, even after all that had been taken from your body in the bringing forth of them.
Valarr stood a few feet away and watched it as if the bed held the whole of his life opened before him.
Wife. Sons. Daughter. Dragon. The fragile, terrible miracle of all of it.
Love too.
Love most of all.
Not gone. Not withheld. Not even diminished, perhaps, in the cruelest accounting of it. Still there. Still living. Still turning outward from you in all the ways that mattered most. Given to your children without hesitation. Given even now to the room itself, to the little lives gathered close, to the babe at your breast and the boys pressing against your side.
And for the first time, Valarr understood something so plainly that it seemed to strike him like a physical blow.
He had not lost your love.
That would have been simpler. Cleaner. Easier to grieve, perhaps, than this.
No â the horror of it was that you still loved him.
He knew it suddenly with the sick, helpless certainty by which men knew the worst truths of themselves. You still loved him. Patiently. Faithfully. In that bruised and steadfast way gentle women sometimes did, when they had given their hearts once and never wholly learned the trick of taking them back.
But somewhere along the way, piece by piece, silence by silence, disappointment by disappointment, he had done something perhaps even crueler than driving love from you.
He had taught it to expect so little.
He had made a life in which your heart still made room for him, and yet no longer leaned toward him first. No longer reached for him with the same blind sweetness. No longer waited, perhaps, in all the quiet hopeful places where a wife ought to be able to rest.
Not because you had cast him out.
Not because you had ceased to care.
But because he had loved you too poorly, too cautiously, too late, until the deepest part of you had learned what to do with the emptiness he left.
It had learned how to carry on.
How to mother through it. How to smile through it. How to endure it. How to keep tenderness alive for others, even where he had failed to tend it in you.
That was the wound.
Not that you did not love him.
That you did.
And he did not know, standing there with the bells beginning to ring below and the storm-broken dawn creeping pale through the windows, whether he still knew how to come back from what he had made of that love.
For what was he meant to do with a thing so faithful when he had mishandled it nearly unto breaking?
What balm was there for a wife who had not stopped loving him, only stopped expecting to be held rightly by it?
What repentance could mend years?
What tenderness, offered now, would not seem like panic arrived too late?
The bells below began to peal in earnest then, loud and jubilant and full of news the realm would devour gladly. A daughter. A dragon. Old blood waking. A prince blessed beyond measure. They would turn all of it into song by dusk. They would speak of miracles and legacy and the favor of the gods. They would see the bed and call it glory.
No one would speak of the quieter thing standing just beyond it.
No one would name the man who had been given the very heart of a gentle woman and only understood its worth once he no longer knew how to reach it cleanly.
Valarr looked at you then â at your face drawn pale with weariness, at the damp hair clinging to your temples, at the babe at your breast, at the boys folded into you as though every road in the world still led back to your body â and something inside him went hollow with fear.
Because he loved you.
Gods, he loved you.
Loved his sons. Loved the small red-faced daughter now crying weakly in your arms. Loved the dragon in the brazier, loved the strange holy terror of the life you had made together.
He wanted his family.
Wanted you.
Not as duty. Not as arrangement. Not as the mother of his heirs or the lady at his side.
You.
And standing there with all of it before him, more precious than anything he had ever been promised by birth or blood, he understood at last the most miserable truth of all:
love did not tell him how to mend this.
Love did not give back the years.
Love did not teach a clumsy man how to repair, in one moment, what he had neglected in a hundred smaller ones.
He had thought there would be time. That was what undid him.
He had thought there would be more ordinary mornings. More evenings by the fire. More chances to grow softer at his leisure. More seasons in which to say what ought to have been said long ago. He had thought a loving wife would keep waiting if only he came to her properly in the end.
Now dawn spread pale and merciless through the chamber. The bells rang for his daughter. The keep roared with joy.
And Prince Valarr Targaryen, standing only a few feet from the bed that held everything he loved in this world, knew with a dread so deep it seemed to hollow out his very bones that a man might come late not merely to his own heartâ
but to the mending of it.
He did not kill her love. He exhausted its innocence.
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