Summary: A conquered daughter of House Blackfyre is given to the Prince of Dragonstone as both peace offering and prize. Each night, at the hour of the wolf, she is summoned in his chambers.
TW: dubious consent (dubcon), noncon, power imbalance, forced marriage, captivity, possessive behavior, obsessive dynamics, emotional manipulation, coercive intimacy, isolation, unhealthy relationship dynamics, explicit sexual themes, reader has valyrian features (plot relevant), skintone ambiguous, blackfyre reader, valarr targaryen has an inferiority complex, fixation on appearance and legacy, political marriage, post-war setting, targaryen vs blackfyre tensions.
WC: 10K
The knock came at the same hour it always did.
Three sharp raps against the iron-banded door of your chamber. Not loud enough to wake the dead, but loud enough to wake you. The rhythm was burned into your bones now, two quick strikes, a pause, then a final blow that seemed to reverberate through the cold stone walls like a death knell. It was the knock of a man who took no pleasure in his task but performed it with the grim efficiency of one who had long ago learned not to question the orders he was given.
Ser Alan of the Kingsguard. A broad shouldered Reachman with a face like weathered granite and eyes that had seen too many horrors to be surprised by anything anymore. He had been assigned to you the day you arrived at the Red Keep, a silent shadow who followed you everywhere and nowhere, appearing only when you were summoned to your husband's chambers or when you attempted to wander somewhere you were not permitted to go.
You were not asleep. You never truly slept anymore, not since the first night they had dragged you from your bed at this same wretched hour. Now you simply lay in the darkness, your violet eyes fixed on the embroidered canopy above you, counting the silver threads that formed the three headed dragon of House Targaryen. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. You had counted them a thousand times. You knew every stitch, every knot, every place where the thread had worn thin from age and neglect. The dragon's ruby eyes seemed to watch you in the darkness, patient and eternal, waiting for you to break.
The door opened without your leave. It always did.
"His Grace requires your presence, my lady."
Ser Alan's voice was flat, carefully neutral, stripped of anything that might be interpreted as either sympathy or satisfaction. He stood in the doorway like a statue come to life, his white enameled armor gleaming faintly in the light of the single candle that burned on your bedside table. His hand rested on the pommel of his sword, not in threat, but in habit. A Kingsguard was never truly at ease, even in the bedchamber of a traitor's daughter.
He did not look at you directly. None of them did. The servants, the guards, the ladies in waiting who had been assigned to attend you, they all treated you as if you were made of smoke and shadow, something that existed on the edges of their vision but could not be acknowledged without risking contamination. You were a Blackfyre. The blood of Daemon Blackfyre ran in your veins, the blood of rebels and usurpers and men who had dared to challenge the rightful rule of House Targaryen. Looking at you too long might be mistaken for sympathy, and sympathy for a Blackfyre was treason.
You had learned that lesson within your first week in the Red Keep, when a young kitchen maid had smiled at you in the corridor and offered you a warm roll fresh from the ovens. The girl had been dismissed the next day, sent back to her village with a black mark on her name and a warning never to seek employment in King's Landing again. You had not seen her go. You had only heard the whispers, carried to you by Lady Jeyne with a smile that did not reach her cold gray eyes.
"It seems some servants forget their place. A shame. She seemed a sweet girl."
The message had been clear: kindness to the Blackfyre was a crime, and crimes were punished.
You rose from the bed. The stone floor was cold beneath your bare feet, the spring chill seeping through the mortar despite the thin rushes scattered across the flagstones. The chamber was always cold. The servants who tended the fires in the royal apartments seemed to forget that this room existed, or perhaps they remembered all too well and chose to let the flames die out of quiet, spiteful neglect. The single candle on your bedside table guttered and smoked, casting long shadows that danced across the bare stone walls like specters at a feast.
You had been given this chamber on your wedding night. You had been naively grateful then. "Your own space," Valarr had said, his mismatched eyes warm with false consideration. "Every woman deserves a refuge. Somewhere she can be alone with her thoughts, away from the demands of court and husband. I would never deny you that."
A refuge. That was what he had called it. But there was no refuge in this cold, barren room with its bare walls and its threadbare tapestries and its single window that looked out over the black waters of the Blackwater Rush. There was only silence. Only the slow, grinding erosion of everything you had been before the war, before the surrender, before they had stripped you of your name and your family and your future and dressed you in Targaryen red.
You had not bothered with a robe. The first night, you had wrapped yourself in a heavy cloak, clutching it around your shoulders like armor as Ser Alan led you through the darkened corridors. When you had arrived in Valarr's chambers, he had looked at you with that gentle, puzzled expression he wore so well and said, "Why do you hide yourself, sweet wife? You are the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms. The blood of Old Valyria flows in your veins. You should be proud of what you are."
He had taken the cloak from your shoulders himself, his fingers brushing against your skin with deliberate, lingering softness. He had folded it carefully and set it aside, and you had never seen it again. The next night, you had worn a different robe. The same thing had happened. By the third night, you had understood the lesson he was teaching you.
You will come to me as you are. You will hide nothing. You belong to me, and I will see all of you.
So now you wore only your shift. Thin linen, pale cream in color, cut low enough to show the elegant soft swell of your breasts. It had been laid out for you by one of your ladies in waiting, Lady Alia, you thought, though it might have been Lady Mariene; they all blurred together in your mind, a procession of cold faces and colder eyes.
The shift was too fine for a prisoner, too revealing for a proper lady. It was a garment designed to display you, to emphasize every curve and hollow of your body, to remind you that you were an object to be looked at and touched and possessed.
And you hated it. You hated your beauty because it was the reason you were here, in this cold room, in this cold castle, married to a man who looked at you like you were a prize he had won in battle. If you had been plain, if you had been ordinary, perhaps they would have sent you to the Silent Sisters, like your sisters had been, or allowed you to join your brothers at the Wall. But you were beautiful, and your beauty was Valyrian, and Valarr Targaryen wanted to possess it.
You followed Ser Alan through the corridors of Maegor's Holdfast. The hour of the wolf, they called this time. The torches burned low in their iron sconces, their flames reduced to guttering embers that cast more shadow than light. The stone walls were slick with condensation, moisture beading on the ancient masonry like sweat on a dying man's brow.
The Red Keep was never truly silent. Even at this hour, there were sounds, the distant tread of guards on the battlements, the scurrying of rats in the walls, the mournful cry of gulls wheeling over the Blackwater. But the silence between those sounds was vast and empty, a yawning chasm that seemed to swallow everything it touched. You walked through it like a ghost, your bare feet making no sound on the cold stone, your breath forming small clouds in the chill air. The thin linen of your shift did nothing to ward off the cold, and you could feel your nipples hardening beneath the fabric, could feel the gooseflesh rising on your arms and thighs. By the time you reached the Prince's chambers, you would be shivering, your body betraying your vulnerability to him before you ever spoke a word.
You knew the way by heart now. Down the winding stair from your tower chamber, past the door to the servants' quarters where you sometimes heard muffled laughter that fell silent the moment you drew near.
At the end of the passage, a heavy oak door bound with iron bands marked the entrance to the Prince's private chambers. Two more Kingsguard stood on either side, Ser Roland Crakehall and Ser Gwayne Gaunt, their white cloaks hanging still in the motionless air, their faces hidden behind the gleaming visors of their helms. They did not acknowledge you as you passed.
Ser Alan pushed open the door and stepped aside, his duty discharged. His eyes met yours for the briefest moment, a flicker of something that might have been pity, quickly suppressed, and then he was gone, melting back into the shadows of the corridor like a wraith.
You crossed the threshold alone, as you always did. The warmth hit you first.
It was like stepping from a frozen wasteland into the heart of a dragon's lair. A great fire roared in the stone hearth, flames leaping high and golden, filling the room with a heat that seemed to seep into your bones and thaw the chill that had settled there during the long, cold walk. The air was thick with the scent of sandalwood and smoke and something sweet and faintly musky, like the perfume of night blooming flowers mingled with the clean, sharp scent of male skin. It was the scent of him, you realized. The scent of Valarr Targaryen, embedded in every tapestry and cushion and fur, saturating the very air you breathed.
The Prince's chambers were vast, easily four times the size of your own barren room. The furniture was dark and heavy, carved from exotic woods that had been imported from the Summer Isles and the forests of Qohor at unimaginable expense.
And there, in a high backed chair before the fire, sat your husband.
Valarr Targaryen did not look up when you entered. He was reading a leather bound book that lay open in his lap, its pages yellowed with age and covered in the spidery script of some long dead maester. The firelight played across his features, highlighting the sharp planes of his face, the strong line of his jaw, the slight furrow of concentration between his brows. He was dressed in a robe of black silk embroidered with red dragons, loosely tied at the waist, revealing a glimpse of his chest, lean and muscled, with a dusting of dark hair that matched the short cropped locks on his head.
He did not look like a dragon. That was the first thought that had crossed your mind when you had seen him at your wedding, standing before the High Septon in the Great Sept of Baelor as the realm watched and whispered. And it was the thought that returned to you now, as fresh and bitter as ever, each time you laid eyes on him.
He was handsome. You could not deny that, no matter how much you wanted to. His jaw was strong and sharp, his nose straight and aquiline, his brow noble. His mouth was perpetually curved in a half smile that never quite reached his eyes, giving him the look of a man who knew a secret that no one else did and found immense satisfaction in that knowledge. His body was lean and well made, not bulky like a tourney knight, but wiry and graceful, with the long muscles of a swordsman and the easy, coiled tension of a predator at rest.
But his coloring was all wrong.
His hair was dark, a deep, rich brown that bordered on black, and cut short, close to his skull in the martial style his father Baelor Breakspear had favored. It was thick and soft looking, and you had felt it beneath your fingers enough times to know that it was indeed as soft as it appeared. There was only a single streak of silver gold to mark his Targaryen blood, a narrow ribbon of pale brightness that ran from his temple to the nape of his neck like a brand. It was as if the gods had begun to paint him in the colors of Old Valyria and then grown bored, abandoning the work halfway through.
And his eyes. Those mismatched, unsettling eyes. One was a clear, piercing blue, the blue of the Stormlands sky, the blue of his mother Jena Dondarrion's bloodline. The other was a deep, warm brown, almost black in certain lights, flecked with amber and gold, the brown of his Dornish grandmother. They sat together in his handsome face like two strangers forced to share a room, never quite meeting, never quite agreeing. They gave him the look of something assembled from spare parts, something the gods had cobbled together from whatever materials they had at hand and then sent out into the world unfinished.
He looked like a Stormlander. He looked like his mother's son. He looked like a mongrel.
And there you stood, Y/N Blackfyre, the spitting image of Daena the Defiant reborn.
You were everything a Targaryen should be. You were the living embodiment of the bloodline that had conquered Westeros, the bloodline that had ruled for nearly two hundred years, the bloodline that Valarr Targaryen could claim by name but not by appearance. And you wore the name of his family's greatest enemy, Blackfyre, the house of the usurper, the house of rebellion and treason and broken oaths.
The irony was not lost on you. It was certainly not lost on him.
You could feel his attention on you even before he looked up. It was a physical thing, a weight, a pressure, like the heat of the sun on bare skin. He was always aware of you, always attuned to your presence in a way that made you feel like prey being stalked by a patient, methodical hunter. And when he finally raised his eyes from his book, the impact of his gaze was like a blow.
His mismatched eyes traveled over your body with the slow, deliberate thoroughness of a man savoring a fine wine. They lingered on the swell of your breasts, visible through the thin linen, on the curve of your hips, on the length of your legs. They traced the line of your throat, the soft hollow where your pulse fluttered visibly beneath your skin. They drank you in, consumed you, devoured you. And when they finally met your eyes, there was something in them that made your breath catch, a hunger so raw, so intense, so utterly possessive that it stole the air from your lungs.
He wanted you. That was nothing new; you had known that since your wedding night. But there was something else in his gaze tonight, something darker and more complicated. It was as if he resented you for making him want you. As if your beauty was a personal affront, a reminder of everything he was not, everything he could never be. He looked at you like a man starving, and hating himself for his hunger.
"My wife," Valarr said, his voice low and smooth. He did not look away from your face, though you could see the effort it cost him. His eyes kept flickering down, tracing the lines of your body, before he forced them back up. "How kind of you to join me. I was beginning to fear you had forgotten the way."
As if I could forget. As if I could ever forget anything about this nightmare you have constructed for me.
You said nothing. You had learned that too, in the long weeks since your wedding. Silence was safer than words. Words could be twisted, weaponized, turned back upon you with that gentle, reasonable smile he wore so well. Words could be used to trap you, to expose you, to give him more ammunition for the slow, grinding war of attrition he waged against your spirit every single day.
Silence, at least, was your own. He could not take your silence. He could not twist it or weaponize it or use it to humiliate you. He could only wait, and watch, and try to find new ways to make you speak.
He closed the book and set it aside, but he did not rise. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, his legs spreading slightly, his posture one of casual, arrogant ease. The robe fell further open, revealing more of his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, the trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath the silk. He was aroused, you realized with a jolt. The evidence of his desire was unmistakable, pressing against the fabric of his robe, and he made no effort to hide it. Why would he? This was his chamber, his kingdom, his world. You were the intruder here, the supplicant, the conquered.
"Come here," he said.
Just that. Two words. Soft as a lover's whisper, heavy as a command. It was not a request. It was never a request, no matter how gently he spoke it. Every word that fell from his lips was an order wrapped in silk, a demand disguised as consideration.
You walked toward him. Your bare feet made no sound on the thick Myrish carpet, and you moved with the unconscious grace that had been drilled into you since childhood, the posture of a noblewoman, the bearing of a lady, the carefully cultivated elegance that marked you as someone of consequence even when you had no consequence at all. The thin linen of your shift whispered against your skin as you walked, a constant reminder of your vulnerability, your exposure, your complete and utter dependence on his mercy. You could feel his eyes on you with every step, could feel the weight of his gaze like a physical caress, sliding over your breasts, your hips, the shadowed juncture of your thighs.
You stopped before his chair, close enough to feel the heat of the fire on your skin, close enough to smell him, that intoxicating blend of sandalwood and smoke and warm male skin that you had come to associate with long nights and tangled sheets and the slow, inexorable erosion of your will. He looked up at you, his head tilted slightly to one side, his mismatched eyes gleaming in the firelight.
His hand rose. You braced yourself for his touch, on your face, your throat, your breast. But instead, he caught a strand of your silver gold hair between his fingers, rubbing it gently as if testing the quality of fine silk. His touch was light, almost reverent, and his eyes softened with something that might have been mistaken for genuine admiration by someone who did not know him.
But you knew him now. You had spent a moon learning him, studying him, cataloging his every expression and gesture and word. And you knew that the softness in his eyes was not admiration. It was hunger. It was envy. It was a desperate, consuming need that he hated himself for feeling.
"Beautiful," he murmured. His voice was rough, almost pained. "Gods, do you have any idea what you do to me? What you've done to me since the moment I first saw you?"
He drew the strand of hair to his face and pressed it to his lips. His eyes closed for a moment, and you watched his throat work as he inhaled the scent of you, the faint perfume of the lavender soap you were permitted to use, the clean, sweet smell of your skin. When he opened his eyes again, they were dark with something that looked almost like anguish.
"You know," he said, still stroking your hair, still holding it against his lips as if he could not bear to let it go, "I used to dream of hair like this. When I was a boy, I would pray to the Seven every night, every single night, to make mine silver. To make me look like my grandfather. Like my uncles. Like a true Targaryen."
His voice was soft, musing, but there was an edge to it now. A bitterness that he could not quite hide.
"I would kneel before the altar in the royal sept," he continued, "and I would promise the gods anything, anything at all, if they would just change the color of my hair. I promised to be brave, like my father. I promised to be wise, like my grandfather the King. I promised to be pious and just and merciful and all the things a prince is supposed to be. And every morning, I would wake up and run to the mirror, hoping that this time… this time, they had listened."
He released your hair, letting it fall back against your shoulder. His hand moved to your face, his fingers tracing the line of your cheekbone with a touch so light it was almost not there at all. His thumb brushed the corner of your mouth, and you felt your lips part involuntarily, a small, betraying response that you could not control.
"They never did," he said. "The gods have a cruel sense of humor, don't they? They gave the Valyrian beauty to the Blackfyre, the daughter of traitors and rebels, the spawn of a usurper's bloodline. And they gave the dornish coloring to the Prince of Dragonstone, the heir to the Iron Throne."
His thumb traced your lower lip, pressing slightly, feeling the soft, full curve of it. His eyes were fixed on your mouth now, and you could see the conflict in them, the desire warring with resentment, the hunger battling with something that looked almost like hatred. Not hatred of you, you realized with a start. Hatred of himself. Hatred of his own weakness, his own need, his own desperate, consuming want for something he believed should be beneath him.
"You should have been mine by right of blood," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "You should have been born a Targaryen. You should have been my sister, my cousin, my equal. Instead, you are my enemy's daughter, and I have to pretend that I married you for politics. For duty. For the realm."
His hand slid from your face to your throat, his fingers wrapping around the slender column with a gentle but unmistakable pressure. He could feel your pulse beneath his palm, quick, fluttering, like a trapped bird. His thumb stroked the hollow of your throat, feeling the warmth of your skin, the life that beat just beneath the surface.
"But that's not why I married you," he said, and his voice cracked slightly, revealing a rawness that you had never heard before. "I married you because I couldn't stop thinking about you. Because from the moment I saw you, standing there with your family, defeated, kneeling, surrounded by guards, your head held high even in defeat, I knew I had to have you. I had to possess you. I had to make you mine."
He hated you because you made him feel weak, made him feel wanting, made him feel like a mongrel scrabbling at the gates of a palace he would never be worthy to enter.
And beneath all of that, beneath the hunger and the envy and the resentment and the hate, there was something that looked almost like tenderness. Almost like love. But it was a twisted, possessive, consuming love, the love of a dragon for its hoard, the love of a collector for his most precious acquisition.
His hand tightened on your throat, not enough to hurt, but enough to make you aware of his strength, his power, his absolute control over you. His mismatched eyes blazed with an intensity that was almost frightening, and you could see the muscles in his jaw working as he struggled to contain whatever was raging inside him.
"You are mine," he said, and it was not a statement. It was a vow. A curse.
His hand released your throat and moved to the back of your neck, tangling in your silver gold hair. He pulled you down, and you went willingly, or perhaps not willingly, but without resistance, which amounted to the same thing. His mouth found yours, and he kissed you with a desperate, consuming hunger that stole your breath and set your blood on fire.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was not the careful, controlled kiss of a husband performing his marital duty. It was raw and hungry and full of all the twisted, complicated emotions that churned inside him, the desire, the envy, the resentment, the need. His tongue swept into your mouth, claiming you, tasting you, devouring you. His hand in your hair held you in place, not allowing you to pull away, not allowing you to escape the intensity of his kiss.
And gods help you, you kissed him back. You did not mean to. You did not want to. But your body betrayed you, as it always did. Your lips parted beneath his, and your tongue met his, and your hands came up to grip his shoulders, whether to push him away or pull him closer, you could not have said. The taste of him filled your mouth, wine and smoke and something dark and addictive that you could not name. The heat of him surrounded you, enveloped you, consumed you.
When he finally broke the kiss, you were both breathing hard. His forehead rested against yours, and you could feel the rapid beat of his heart against your chest. His hand was still tangled in your hair, and his other hand had found your waist, his fingers pressing into the soft curve of your hip with a possessive grip.
"You are cold," he observed, his thumb tracing the line of your cheekbone. "The walk from your chambers is too long. I have told the servants to keep your fire burning through the night, but they seem to forget. Careless of them. I shall have to speak to the steward."
You will do no such thing, you thought. You want me cold. You want me to arrive here shivering and desperate for the warmth of your fire, the warmth of your bed, the warmth of you. This is by your design, as everything is by your design.
But you said nothing. You simply stood there, letting him touch you, letting him pretend to care about your comfort. What else was there for a traitor's daughter to do?
"The hour is late," he said, withdrawing his hand. He rose from his chair with the easy grace of a man who had never known a moment's true hardship, who had never had to fight for anything in his life. He was not tall, shorter than his father had been at his age, you had heard, and shorter than most of the knights who served in the Kingsguard, but he still loomed over you, close enough that you could count the flecks of lilac in his blue eye, the flecks of amber in his brown one. "I trust your chambers are comfortable?"
Cold. Empty. A prison with silk curtains and a bed that feels like stone. "Yes, my prince."
"Good." He smiled, and for a moment, he almost looked kind. "I would hate to think you were suffering. You have suffered enough, I think. Your family's choices… well. We need not speak of that. The past is the past, and you are my wife now. The future is what matters."
He reached down and took your hand. His fingers were long and elegant, a musician's fingers, a scholar's fingers. They wrapped around yours with a gentle but unmistakable firmness, a claim of ownership that needed no words to express.
"Come to bed," he said, his voice rough and low.
He rose from the chair, pulling you with him, and began to walk toward the great canopied bed. You followed, because you had no choice. Because your body was already responding to him, already softening and warming and preparing itself for his touch. Because some traitorous part of you wanted this, wanted his hands on your skin, his mouth on your throat, his body moving against yours.
He did not release your hand as you walked. His fingers were warm and strong around yours, and you found yourself gripping back, holding on to him as if he were the only solid thing in a world that had turned to water and smoke.
The act itself was never violent. That was the worst part. That was the part that made you want to scream, to weep, to claw at your own skin until you could feel something other than this terrible, suffocating gentleness.
If he had been cruel, you could have hated him. If he had hurt you, truly hurt you, if he had taken you with the brutal entitlement of a conqueror claiming his spoils, you could have built walls of rage and disgust to shield yourself from his touch. You could have retreated into the cold, clean fortress of your hatred and watched him from behind its battlements, untouched and untouchable.
But Valarr Targaryen was not cruel. He was gentle. And his gentleness was more devastating than any cruelty could ever be.
He laid you down on the bed with the care of a man handling something precious and fragile. The furs were soft beneath your back, the silk sheets cool against your heated skin. He loomed over you for a moment, his mismatched eyes traveling over your body with that hungry, reverent gaze, drinking in the sight of you spread out before him like a feast. The firelight played across your skin, gilding your silver gold hair, casting shadows in the hollows of your throat and the valley between your breasts.
"You are so beautiful," he breathed. His voice was thick with emotion, almost pained.
He lowered himself beside you, propped on one elbow, and his free hand began to explore your body. His touch was light, almost reverent, as if he were mapping the contours of a holy relic. His fingers traced the line of your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, the soft swell of your breast. They circled your nipple through the thin linen of your shift, feeling it tighten and peak beneath his touch, and he made a low sound in his throat, a sound of satisfaction, of possession, of hunger barely restrained.
"I want to see you," he said. "All of you."
He did not tear your shift away. He did not rip the fabric from your body. Instead, he gathered the hem in his hands and slowly, slowly drew it upward, revealing you inch by torturous inch. The mound of your sex. The skin of your stomach. The curve of your waist. The undersides of your breasts. And then, finally, your breasts themselves, full and round and perfect, the nipples a color that darkened as he watched, tightening in the cool air of the chamber.
He made that sound again, that low, almost pained sound, and lowered his head. His mouth found your breast, and you gasped as his tongue circled your nipple, hot and wet and devastatingly skilled. His hand found your other breast, his fingers rolling and teasing the sensitive peak until you were arching beneath him, your body betraying you with every shudder and moan. His tongue swirled around the bud, sucking gently at first, then harder, teeth grazing just enough to make you arch into him. A gasp tore from your throat, your fingers threading into his hair, tugging at the silver streak as pleasure warred with the haze in your mind. Was this what you wanted? His free hand slid up your thigh, pushing the hem of your dress higher, fingers brushing your wetness.
He took his time. Gods, he always took his time. He explored every inch of you with his hands and his mouth, learning you, memorizing you, claiming you. He kissed the hollow of your throat and the inside of your elbow and the sensitive spot just below your ear that made you gasp and clutch at his shoulders. He traced the curve of your hip with his tongue and pressed open mouthed kisses to the soft skin of your inner thigh. He touched you everywhere, tasted you everywhere, until you were trembling and desperate and utterly, completely his.
And through it all, he watched you. His eyes never left your face, cataloguing every reaction, every gasp, every involuntary arch of your body. He wanted to see your pleasure. He needed to see it. Because your pleasure was proof, proof that you were his, proof that your body recognized his claim even if your mind resisted, proof that the Valyrian beauty he coveted responded to the mongrel prince who should have been beneath you.
"Feel how wet you are for me," he growled, slipping a finger to stroke your slick folds. You bucked against his touch, a moan betraying your body's eagerness even as you bit your lip, eyes fluttering shut. He circled your clit with pressure, dipping lower to push one finger inside you, then two, curling them to hit that spot that made stars burst behind your eyelids. His mouth returned to yours, swallowing your cries as he pumped his fingers, stretching you, preparing you, your whispered 'wait' lost in the rhythm of his thrusts, but your hips rose to meet him, chasing the building tension.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice rough. "I want to see your eyes when you come apart for me."
You tried to look away. You tried to close your eyes, to retreat into the darkness behind your lids where he could not follow. But his hand caught your chin and turned your face back to his, and you had no choice but to meet his gaze as his fingers found the slick, aching center of you and began to move with devastating precision.
"Look at me," he repeated, and there was something in his voice, a desperate, almost pleading quality that made you obey. "I need to see you. I need to know that you feel this too. That I'm not the only one burning."
Your climax crashed over you like a wave, and you cried out, a sound you could not contain, a sound that was torn from you against your will. Your back arched, your fingers digging into his shoulders, your eyes locked with his as the pleasure consumed you. And through it all, he watched. His mismatched eyes blazed with triumph and hunger and something that looked almost like worship.
"That's it," he murmured, his voice thick with satisfaction. "That's my girl. My beautiful, perfect girl."
He moved over you then, settling between your thighs, and you felt the hot, hard length of him pressing against your entrance. He paused for a moment, his forehead resting against yours, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Say my name," he said. "I want to hear you say my name."
You did not want to give him that. It felt like too much, like a surrender too complete to be borne. But his hips shifted, the head of him pressing against you but not entering, and you knew, you knew, that he would wait all night if he had to. He would wait until you broke, until you gave him what he wanted, until you acknowledged that he was the one giving you this pleasure, that he was the one you needed.
"Valarr," you whispered. The name tasted like defeat. Like surrender. Like the death of everything you had been before.
His smile was a thing of terrible beauty, triumphant and hungry and impossibly tender all at once. "Again."
"Valarr."
He thrust into you in one smooth, devastating motion, and you cried out his name a third time, not because he asked, but because you could not stop yourself. He filled you completely, stretched you perfectly, and for one endless moment, you simply stared at each other, joined in the most intimate way possible, your breath mingling, your hearts pounding in tandem.
"Mine," he breathed, and began to move.
He made love to you slowly, reverently, as if you were something holy and he were a pilgrim who had traveled a thousand miles to worship at your altar. His thrusts were deep and deliberate, each one designed to draw out your pleasure, to make you feel every inch of him, to imprint himself on your body and your soul. He watched your face the entire time, his eyes dark with intensity, cataloguing every flutter of your lashes, every parting of your lips, every gasp and moan that escaped you.
"So perfect, so mine," he whispered, voice thick with emotion, slow thrusts that built like a gathering storm, pulling out almost fully before sliding back in, grinding against your clit with each hilt. His hands worshipped your body, one tangling in your silver hair to tilt your head back for his kisses, the other pinning your hip to the bed, controlling the pace. You wrapped your legs around him, heels digging into his ass, urging him deeper despite the lingering fog of consent's shadow.
The intensity mounted, his reverent touches turning possessive, gripping your thigh hard enough to bruise, sucking marks into your neck that would linger like claims. Sweat slicked your skin, bodies sliding together in a symphony of gasps and moans.
He shifted, angling to hit deeper, faster now, the bed creaking under the force. Your walls clenched around his cock, the coil in your belly tightening unbearably. "Come for me," he urged, thumb finding your clit again, rubbing in tight circles as he pounded into you.
The climax crashed over you like a wave, your pussy spasming around him, milking his length as you cried out, silver hair sticking to your damp forehead, purple eyes glazing with release. He followed moments later, thrusting erratically before burying himself deep, cock pulsing as he flooded you with hot cum, ropes spilling into your core, burying his face in your breasts as his body shuddered against yours. You felt the hot pulse of his release inside you, felt his arms tighten around you as if he were afraid you might disappear, felt his lips press reverent kisses to your throat and shoulder and the corner of your jaw.
For a long moment, neither of you moved. You lay tangled together, your breathing slowly returning to normal, your bodies still joined, your skin slick with sweat. His weight was warm and solid on top of you, and despite everything, despite the hatred and the resentment and the bitter knowledge of what he had taken from you, you felt safe.
It was a lie. You knew it was a lie. But in that moment, in the warm, firelit darkness of his chambers, with his body pressed against yours and his breath soft on your neck, you could almost believe it.
He stirred finally, rolling off you but not letting go. His arm remained wrapped around your waist, pulling you against his side, and his hand came up to stroke your hair with a gentle, almost absentminded tenderness.
He pressed a kiss to your temple and settled back against the pillows, his arm still wrapped around your waist.
"You may return to your chambers now," he said, his voice already growing distant, dismissive. "Ser Alan will escort you."
The words were the same as they always were. The dismissal was the same as it always was. And yet tonight, something was different. Tonight, the thought of leaving, of rising from this warm bed and walking back through those cold corridors to your cold, empty chamber, filled you with a despair so profound that it threatened to swallow you whole.
You did not move.
The silence stretched. One heartbeat. Two. Three. You could feel his attention shift, could sense him turning his head on the pillow to look at you. You kept your eyes fixed on the canopy above, counting the dragons. Five. Six. Seven.
"You are still here," he observed. There was no surprise in his voice, only a kind of clinical curiosity. "I gave you leave to go."
You swallowed. Your throat was dry. "I know."
"Then why do you linger?" He propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at you with those mismatched eyes. In the dim light, they seemed to gleam with an inner fire of their own, the blue one cold as ice, the brown one warm as embers. "Have I not been a considerate husband? Have I not given you your own chambers, your own space, your privacy? I would never force you to remain where you are not wanted."
Where you are not wanted.
The words hung in the air between you, heavy with double meaning. You were not wanted in his heart, you knew that, had always known it. He did not love you; he possessed you. He coveted you. He resented you and worshipped you in equal measure. But he did not love you, not in any way that you recognized as love. And you were not wanted in his chambers either, except when he summoned you, except when he wanted to use your body and watch you respond to his touch.
But here you were. Tangled in his silk sheets, breathing his air, warmed by his fire. And the thought of leaving, of rising from this bed and walking back through those cold, dark corridors to your empty room, made you want to weep.
"You summon me," you said. Your voice was barely above a whisper. "You summon me every night."
His brow furrowed with perfect, practiced confusion. It was a mask you had seen him wear a hundred times, the face of a man who could not understand why anyone would question his actions, who genuinely believed himself to be acting only with the purest of intentions.
"I summon you because you are my wife," he said, as if explaining something simple to a child. "It is my duty to attend to you. To ensure the continuation of our line. The realm needs heirs, sweet wife. Our union must bear fruit."
He reached out and brushed a strand of silver gold hair from your face, his touch feather light, almost tender. His fingers lingered on your cheek, tracing the line of your jaw, the curve of your ear.
"But I would never keep you here against your will," he continued. "That would be… unseemly. You are not a prisoner. You are my wife. If you wish to return to your chambers, you have only to say so. I will summon Ser Alan myself."
You are not a prisoner.
The words were a lie, and you both knew it. You were a prisoner in all but name. Your every movement was watched, your every word reported, your every attempt to reach out to the world beyond the Red Keep carefully and quietly thwarted. You were not permitted to write to your brothers at the Wall, not permitted to see your sisters, not permitted to send word to your mother in Tyrosh, not permitted to leave your chambers without an escort of guards who claimed to be protecting you but who served only to remind you of your captivity.
You had tried, once, to walk in the gardens alone. It had been a small thing, a tiny act of rebellion. You had simply slipped away from your ladies in waiting and wandered down a path you had not been shown before. Within minutes, two guards had appeared at your side, their faces carefully neutral, their voices politely insistent. "For your safety, my lady. The Red Keep can be dangerous for those who do not know its ways."
You had not tried again.
And your ladies in waiting, they were not companions. They were watchers. Spies in silk and velvet, assigned to report your every word and deed to the Prince. They whispered behind their hands when they thought you could not hear, their voices dripping with contempt. "Traitor's daughter." "Blackfyre whore." "She thinks herself a dragon, but she's nothing but a pretender in borrowed scales."
They pulled your laces too tight when they dressed you, leaving bruises on your ribs. They brought you cold food and colder stares, and when you asked for something, a book, a warm bath, a moment of peace, they smiled sweetly and promised to see to it, and nothing ever came of it.
The world had been carefully, methodically stripped away from you. Your family, your name, your freedom, your dignity. Everything that had made you who you were had been taken, piece by piece, until only he remained. The only person who touched you without care. The only person who looked at you without disgust. The only person who spoke to you as if you were a person, not a symbol of a defeated rebellion.
You were tired. Gods, you were so tired. Tired of the cold walks. Tired of the cold bed. Tired of the cold stares. Tired of being alone with your thoughts and your grief and your rage until you felt like you might shatter into a thousand pieces.
And he was warm.
He was here, solid and real, his body radiating heat beside you in the vast bed. He was the only person in the Red Keep who touched you without making you feel like something unclean. His hands on your skin, his voice in your ear, his presence filling the empty spaces inside you, it was a poison, you knew, sweet and slow and deadly. But it was the only warmth you had.
You hated him for it. Hated him with a fierce, burning intensity that sometimes took your breath away. Hated him for what he had taken from you, for what he continued to take, for the way he made you need him even as you loathed him.
And you needed him. That was the worst part. That was the part that made you want to scream. You needed his warmth, his touch, his voice. You needed the only human connection that was offered to you, even knowing that it was offered with chains attached.
"Valarr."
His name felt strange on your tongue. You usually called him "my prince" or nothing at all, maintaining that last, fragile barrier of formality between you. But in this moment, in the dying firelight, with your body still humming from his touch and your walls crumbling around you, you could not bring yourself to maintain that final pretense.
"Yes?"
His voice was soft. Encouraging. The voice of a man who already knew what you were going to say and was savoring the anticipation, drawing out the moment like a cat playing with a mouse.
You closed your eyes. You could not look at him while you said it. You could not watch his face as you surrendered this last, precious piece of yourself.
"Let me stay."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing you had ever heard.
You could feel him smiling in the darkness. You did not need to see his face to know that the satisfaction was radiating from him like heat from the dying embers, that his mismatched eyes were gleaming with quiet triumph. You had given him exactly what he wanted, exactly what he had been working toward since the night of your wedding.
"I'm sorry," he said, and there was nothing but gentle confusion in his tone. "I don't understand. Stay where?"
You bastard. You utter, complete bastard.
You knew what he wanted. You had always known. He wanted you to say it clearly, to spell it out, to beg for the privilege of sleeping in his bed like a dog begging for scraps at the master's table. He wanted you to acknowledge that you needed him, that you wanted him, that all his careful manipulation had worked exactly as intended. He wanted you to hand him this victory on a silver platter, to kneel before him and offer up your last shred of pride as a gift.
And you were going to give it to him.
Because you were too tired to fight anymore. Because the thought of that cold walk back to your empty chambers, of lying alone in that cold bed with nothing but your thoughts for company, made you want to weep. Because whatever this was, this twisted, poisonous thing between you, it was better than the alternative.
"The corridors are cold."
"The corridors are always cold." His tone was mild, pleasant. "I have offered to have braziers placed along your route. You declined."
Because accepting would mean admitting I notice the cold. Because accepting would mean I owe you gratitude for every scrap of warmth you deign to give me.
"I did not wish to trouble the servants."
"Ah." He said it as if you had revealed something profound.
"You are too considerate, wife. Most ladies would demand a dozen braziers and complain of the smoke. But not you. You bear your discomforts in silence." His hand found yours beneath the furs, his fingers interlacing with your own. His palm was warm. "I admire that about you. Truly."
You wanted to pull your hand away. You did not.
"Please," you said instead.
The word tasted like ash in your mouth, like defeat, like the death of something precious and irreplaceable. It was the word of a supplicant, a beggar, a woman who had been stripped of everything and was grateful for whatever scraps were thrown her way.
"I am asking. I want to share your chambers. I want…"
You faltered. What did you want? You wanted your family back. You wanted your freedom. You wanted to wake up and discover that the last moon had been nothing but a nightmare, that you were still in Tyrosh with your mother and your siblings, that the war had never happened and Daemon Blackfyre still lived and the world still made sense.
But those things were gone. They were ashes and dust, scattered on the wind of history. All that remained was this room, this bed, this man.
"I want to stay," you finished, your voice barely audible.
His smile was a thing of terrible beauty.
It transformed his sharp, mismatched features into something almost angelic, the face of a savior, a protector, a man who had rescued a fallen woman from the consequences of her family's treason and lifted her up to stand beside him. His blue eye sparkled with warmth. His brown eye gleamed with satisfaction. He looked like a painting of some ancient hero, a knight of legend who had slain the dragon and claimed the maiden as his reward.
"Oh, my sweet wife," he murmured.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to yours. The kiss was soft, tender, achingly gentle. It was the kind of kiss a devoted husband might give his beloved wife after a long separation, a gesture of pure and selfless affection. And it made you want to scream.
"Of course you may stay. I would never deny you anything you truly wanted. I told you, did I not? I am the only one in this world who will care for you. The only one who sees your worth."
He pulled the furs up over your body, tucking them around your shoulders with careful, almost paternal attention. His hands smoothed the fabric, ensuring that you were completely covered, completely warm, completely enveloped in his care. Then he lay back against the pillows and drew you against his side, one arm wrapping around your waist and pulling you close.
His body was warm. Solid. Real. And for one terrible, shameful moment, you felt safe.
It was a lie. You knew it was a lie. This safety was an illusion, a gilded cage dressed up as a sanctuary. He was not your protector. He was your captor, your jailer, the architect of your slow and methodical destruction. The warmth of his body was the warmth of the dragon's breath, and you were the lamb curled in its jaws.
But it was warm. And you were so tired. And for just this moment, just this one moment, you could pretend.
"Sleep now," he murmured against your hair. His breath was warm on your scalp, his voice a low, soothing rumble. "You are where you belong. With me. Where no one can hurt you. Where no one can whisper their poison in your ear. Just us, sweet wife. Just us."
His arm tightened around your waist, pulling you even closer. You could feel the steady beat of his heart against your back, the rise and fall of his chest, the solid reality of his presence. He was everywhere, surrounding you, enveloping you, claiming you.
And then his lips found your ear, and his voice dropped to a whisper so soft you almost didn't hear it.
"I will make you love me," he breathed. "I will make you need me so completely that you won't remember how to breathe without me. And when that day comes, when you finally see that I am the only one who will ever truly want you, I will be there. Waiting. As I have always been waiting."
He pressed a kiss to the curve of your ear, his tongue tracing the delicate shell of it, and you shivered, not from cold, but from the dark promise in his words.
"Sleep," he said again, his voice returning to that gentle, soothing tone. "Dream of me. Dream of us. Dream of the life we will build together."
You closed your eyes.
The tears came then. Silent and hot, sliding down your cheeks to soak into the silk pillowcase. You did not make a sound. You had learned not to cry where anyone could hear, learned to swallow your grief and your rage and your despair until they became a hard, cold knot in your chest. But you could not stop the tears. They flowed from you like water from a broken dam, an endless river of sorrow that you had been holding back for too long.
His arm tightened around your waist. You felt his lips curve into a smile against the crown of your head.
He knew.
He always knew.
And tomorrow, when the sun rose and the world went on as it always did, you would wake in his bed. You would open your eyes to the sight of his chambers, surrounded by his scent and his warmth and his quiet, suffocating care. You would look at yourself in the polished bronze mirror that hung on his wall and see a stranger, a woman who had begged her captor to keep her close, who had traded her last scrap of independence for a few hours of warmth.
The servants would know. They always knew everything that happened in the Red Keep. By midday, the whispers would have spread through every corridor and every kitchen and every stable. The Blackfyre whore has moved into the Prince's chambers. She begged him to let her stay. She crawled into his bed like a dog seeking warmth.
Your ladies in waiting would smile their cold, knowing smiles. Lady Jeyne would make some cutting remark disguised as concern. "How wonderful that you and the Prince have grown so close. I'm sure your mother would be so pleased to know that you have found… comfort… in your new home."
And Valarr would watch it all with those mismatched eyes, that gentle, reasonable smile playing at his lips. He would see the whispers and the stares and the quiet cruelties, and he would do nothing to stop them. Why would he? They served his purpose. They reminded you that he was the only one who treated you with anything resembling kindness, the only one who touched you without making you feel like something unclean.
He was the disease and the cure. The poison and the antidote. The dragon and the knight who slew it.
And you were his.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight, in the dying firelight, wrapped in his furs and his possession, you lay still, your body pressed back against his in the spoon of his embrace.
His cock, still half hard from your earlier joining, nestled against the curve of your ass, warm and heavy. You tried to focus on the rhythm of your breathing, to let the exhaustion pull you under, but the tears kept coming, silent tracks carving paths down your face.
Then you felt it, a subtle twitch, a thickening against your skin. His length stirred, growing firm once more, pressing insistently into the cleft of your cheeks. Your breath hitched, a fresh wave of emotion crashing through you.
Not again. Not when your heart felt so raw, so fractured. But your body, traitorous as ever, responded with a faint clench low in your belly, the lingering slickness between your thighs a reminder of how he'd already claimed you.
Valarr shifted behind you, his hand sliding from your waist to cup your breast, thumb brushing over the still sensitive nipple. He hardened fully now, his cock rigid and hot, the veined shaft sliding along your ass as he rocked his hips forward in a slow, deliberate grind.
"Shh," he murmured into your hair, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through your back. "Let me hold you closer. Let me make it better."
You didn't protest, words caught in your throat, choked by the sobs you refused to voice. His free hand trailed down your side, over the flare of your hip, fingers dipping between your legs to part your folds. He found you wet, despite everything, his touch gentle as he stroked your clit in lazy circles, coaxing more arousal from your unwilling core.
A whimper escaped you, muffled into the pillow, as his cock nudged at your entrance from behind, the broad head parting your lips.
He pushed in slowly, inch by inch, filling you again with that stretching burn that blurred the line between ache and need. Your walls fluttered around him, gripping his thickness as he sank deep, his hips flush against your ass. The position pinned you in place, his body a solid weight over yours, one arm banded across your chest to hold you tight while the other worked your clit with unerring precision. He didn't thrust yet, just held himself buried inside, letting you feel every pulse of him, every throb against your inner walls.
Tears streamed faster now, soaking the silk beneath your cheek, your purple eyes squeezed shut against the overwhelming flood.
Why did it feel good? Why did his possession twist the knife of your despair into something almost like solace? He began to move then, shallow rolls of his hips that dragged his cock along your depths, grinding against that spot that made stars burst behind your lids.
His breath was hot on your neck, lips pressing soft kisses there even as his pace quickened, thrusts turning firmer, the slap of skin on skin echoing softly in the chamber.
"That's it," he whispered, his mismatched eyes no doubt fixed on the back of your head, imagining your surrender. "Take me. You're mine to comfort, mine to fuck, mine to keep." His fingers pinched your nipple lightly, rolling it as he drove deeper, his cock pistoning in and out with controlled power.
You cried silently, body rocking with each impact, ass pressing back against him involuntarily as pleasure coiled tight despite the grief tearing at your chest.
He fucked you like that, possessive, unyielding, his hand leaving your clit to grip your hip, pulling you onto him harder.
The angle let him hit deeper, his balls slapping against your thighs with every plunge. Your sobs broke free in quiet gasps, tears blurring your vision, but your pussy clenched around him, soaking his length with fresh wetness. He groaned, low and reverent, burying his face in your silver hair, inhaling your scent as if it were his lifeline.
The build was relentless, his thrusts erratic now, chasing release while forcing yours. "Cry if you must," he said softly, voice laced with that dark tenderness. "But come for me again. Show me you need this as much as I need you." His hand snaked back to your clit, rubbing fast and firm, and the dam broke. Your orgasm ripped through you, walls spasming wildly around his cock, milking him as you shuddered, tears flowing unchecked.
Valarr followed with a muffled curse, slamming deep one last time, his release flooding you hot and thick, ropes of cum painting your insides. He held you through it, cock twitching as he emptied himself, his arms wrapping tighter, as if to absorb your sorrow into his own body.
In the quiet aftermath, he stayed inside you, softening slowly, his lips trailing kisses along your shoulder. The fire had died to embers, casting faint shadows over the furs tangled around you both. Your tears slowed, exhaustion finally claiming you, and as sleep pulled you under, the dreams came, of dragons, but also of mismatched eyes watching over you, a cage that felt, in the haze, almost like home.
And Valarr held you through the night, his possession complete, your cries a secret shared only in the dark.
Omggg yandere Valarr is something I didnt know I needed.
What if his wife went missing? Either she is wandering or kidnapped, his reaction would scare his own father lmao
I LOVE THIS!!!! It was so much fun to write and I know right, the idea of Yandere Valarr is like...OMG! (And here are the links to the other Yandere Valarr stories—My Heart is Yours, My Life is Too; To Love You as You Should Be Loved)
Anyways here you go:
You Are Not Allowed to Leave Me
Yandere!Valarr x wife!reader—in which he loses it when she leaves
TW: 18+ MDNI public sex, possessive behaviour and violence
You were everything to Valarr, his sanctuary and septa. His wife and love and life, the one whom he would could return to always, to find warmth and comfort. Safety and sanctuary. You were the light of his life and had been since the two of you were young, since he heard the sound of your laughter echoing through the halls.
Since he heard your voice, your words and had to make you his. He needed just one thing in his life that was his, whole and complete and he wanted that to be you. And he got what he wanted. He got you and your love, your touch. He got to know what you felt like underneath him, what it felt to hold you in the morning, to kiss you and mark you and show everyone that you were his.
Because you were. He had chosen you and marked you and he had you. No one else did. No one else ever would. He would burn the world for you if it hurt you. He would burn the world down to keep you.
And he would burn the world down to get you back if you were ever mistaken enough to leave.
Because you are not allowed to leave him. Ever.
***
Valarr’s mind is on you, not the council meeting before him, not the way the lords speak of money and taxes and road maintenance. Not the discussions of his grandsire or his father. Not the importance of charity or dealing with citizen unrest. No, his mind is on you.
His mind is on you and the way you laugh, head tipped back with abandon, throat exposed. His mind is on you and the way you hold him, like he’s a precious thing, a rare thing—as if he’s as special to you as you are to him. His mind is on you and the way you fall asleep at night, the way your eyelids close, your body pressed to his, no space between you two, his arms anchoring you, tethering you. Possessing you.
His mind is on you. On the way you look when he kisses you, kisses his way down your body, leaving marks in his wake, claiming you. Showing everyone whom you belong to. His mind is on you and the way you feel around him, clenching and releasing and the way you sound when he brings you to your peak. His mind is on the way you look beneath him, the way your body looks like a masterpiece, covered in his signature—love bites on the surface of your skin, reminders that you are his.
His mind is on you and he wants to go to now, but he must still play the role of dutiful prince, loyal heir. The perfect son. His mind is on you, but his body is here in the throne, beside his father, pretending to focus on council issues when really his body feels too tight and his sight is filled with you not the papers before him.
It’s a delicate balance, focusing on you over his duty but to him, you are his duty, he took vows to cherish you, to protect you, to love you and that is what he should be doing.
Let the kingdom fall to ruin so long as he has you, his wife, in his arms.
The only peace he has is the thought of you, waiting for him, in your chambers. The chambers that the two of you reside him, him having forgone the idea that you would have separate rooms. He needs you with him always, by his side, in his bed. He needs you where he can watch you.
Protect you.
That’s what he does. He protects you. You are far too innocent and perfect; kind and trusting to be left alone. Having you in your own rooms, away from him, would just invite disaster. It would be courting death for someone could hurt you and then he’d have to end them and tell you your mistake.
Make you see the error of your ways.
It’s not that he would be angry at you. No. Never angry, you know not what you do. It’s why he must protect you.
Always.
“I do believe that concludes this meeting, my lords,” his father says, voice deep and booming, resonant and powerful, mismatched wolf’s eyes turning on Valarr, narrowed with curiosity and irritation. Valarr knows his father was aware of his misdirected attentions but he does not have it in him to feel ashamed or to care. He simply wants you.
He always wants you.
“Am I needed elsewhere, Father or am I free?” he asks, eyes narrowing on his father, one hand behind his back, clenching and unclenching in a fist, rage at the distance and separation from you taking a physical toll upon him. If he had his way, he would never be parted from you, would always be with you, have you fused to him so that everyone could see that you were his and he was yours.
How strong the two of you were, how strong your love.
“You are free, my boy,” Baelor says, a small smile growing on his face as he shakes his head. “You are much in love with your wife. That’s good. Makes for a strong king.” Valarr has nothing to respond with, nothing to say in answer. He simply nods and takes off, out of the meeting room, through the halls and up the stairs to your chambers.
Where you wait for him. Where he will be able to take you—preferably on every surface in the room. Where he will be able to show you how much he missed you, how much he wants you, will always want you. Where he will be able to fill you, to leave marks upon you to remind people whom you are. Whom you belong to.
Where he will be able to taste you, to feel you. To remember just exactly that feeling of ecstasy when you clench around him, when you unleash that breathy moan, that exhalation of his name. Where he will be able to tell you he loves you.
Over and over and over.
He doesn’t knock upon the door, doesn’t need to with the room being his as well and so he simply walks in, closing the door behind him and sliding the iron latch into place, hands already peeling his doublet off, finger going to the laces of his breeches as he wanders through the room, through the combined touches of your possessions and his.
Although, you’re truly the only possession he cares about in the room.
“My flower? My flower, where are you?” he calls, his voice teasing and lilting and that of a man starved, waiting and tensing. A hunter searching for his prey. “My flower?” When there is no answer to either question, no answer to his call, no giggle or tired reply, he tenses for a new reason.
“My flower?!” he yells, tone rising and turning angry. He hopes your just bathing, teasing, baiting. Anything but you being gone. “Darling? If you can hear him, talk to me!”
Nothing.
And that’s when he loses it, red tinting his vision as he searches every room of the chambers, each one devoid of your presence, of your rosebud scent and skin that glows like sun. Every room is empty. You are missing.
Missing…
He screams, the noise of an angry broken man, his voice cracking as he rages, knocking decorations down, shattering glasses, rendering tapestries, kicking and attacking inanimate objects as if the things you carried from your birth home have taken you. As if they are responsible for letting you go.
“My prince? We heard the screams, is all alright?” one of the Kingsguard asks, his hand holding the key, the one which opens the door. The one which the guards must have in event of an evacuation.
“WHERE IS MY WIFE?!” Valarr cries, turning around, one hand closed around the blown-glass dragon you insisted on buying for him during your honeymoon trip around the Seven Kingdoms. (He remembered the way you giggled as you purchased it, handing it to him, your giggle becoming a full laugh at the look on his face. The exact reason he treasures it so.) He hurls the dragon at the guard, the glass object shattering against the flesh of his face, the guard crying out in pain.
The others take a step back in fright as Valarr charges forth, steps no longer that of a caged predator, but of a monster set free. “WHERE IS SHE?!” He grasps the front of one’s uniform, pulling him to him, whispering the question again in a much more dangerous tone.
“We don’t, Your Grace,” the knight whispers, terror lacing his voice as Valarr punches him, once, twice, thrice. Over and over, until he quite loses count, only stopping when he realises the other guards still stand around him.
“What are you idiots waiting for?! GO FIND HER! She does not get to leave me and NO ONE takes her from me! FIND HER!” And the guards run, footsteps the sound of metal against stone, echoing throughout the keep, the smell of fear wafting after them as he straightens himself, wiping his bloodied hands upon his doublet, walking calmly from the chambers, jaw set so tightly together that he fears it may never open again.
He examines every inch of the Keep, every room, searching. He accosts Aerion, questioning him about your whereabouts, slapping him open-palmed when he speaks crudely of you. He questions all those who come into contact with you. Only to receive the answer of nothing and no idea.
He goes to the library, your favourite room in the Keep and finds it empty of you. And that is when the panic sets in, when he imagines you taken, kidnapped, stolen out of the window. Taken and killed or taken and paraded somewhere as someone’s prize.
And that’s when he runs from the library to the Great Hall, to the room where the guards assemble. It’s when he yells and orders them to find you just find you goddamn it. But they do not move, frozen in place by the sight of the young prince in total loss of control.
The way he demands and attacks, tears tapestries from walls, threatens to burn them all alive if they do not bring you back to him.
It is this that Baelor walks in on, the sight of his son so angry that every line of his face is set with terror and anger. He watches his son hit the guards, destroy the decorations of the family, the signs of status and lineage. He watches as his son threatens to build piers strong enough to burn every single Kingsguard alive if they fail to bring him his wife.
And it terrifies Baelor, the sight of this obsession, this possession, this love gone completely mad. Completely wrong.
Especially when Baelor just left you in the field of sunflowers, Valarr planted for you as a wedding gift. Something to remind you of your garden at home.
“What is the meaning of this?” Baelor demands, not needing to raise his voice, the words carrying, his son pausing and turning to look at him, mismatched eyes for the first time that of a stranger’s.
“My wife. Is missing. And these. Fools. Cannot seem. To find. Her,” Valarr’s every word is heavy and angry and fear-filled. It’s that which Baelor understands.
“She’s in her garden reading. She asked me to find you for it had taken you a long time to get to her after the meeting. Especially since you had made plans for a picnic,” he tells his son, watching not as shame fills his son’s face, but victory and desire and relief.
You are still here. You are waiting for him.
“Thank you, Father,” he says, running past him, all smiles now, a wolf-sharp smile as he pats his father on the shoulder, running past him, running from the destruction behind him. Running to you.
***
He finds you exactly where his father said you would be, sitting inside the field of sunflowers, a book in hand, laying on your side upon a deep red blanket limned in gold, hair half-braided. You look at peace, but Valarr knows the lines of your body better than you and he can read the stress and fear upon you in the tension of your spine and the way you sigh before turning the page.
“My flower!” he cries, falling beside you, hands playing with the laces of your dress, teasing them open, slipping his hand to rest between your shoulder blades, to touch your skin and feel your warmth.
“I thought you’d forgotten me, my husband,” you whisper, your voice thick with sadness, tears and it sings through Valarr’s heart as he retracts his hand, pulling on your arm until you lay flat on your back, a single tear slipping down your cheek. He leans down, licking it away and reveling in the sweet taste of your skin. The taste that is, the fact that you are still here and that you waited for him.
“I would never forget you, my heart,” he whispers, moving his body until his legs are on either side of your hips, his body braced above yours as he leans forwards, pressing kisses against your neck, his tongue flicking against your pulse point. “I forgot we were meeting here. I went to our rooms to find you and found you missing. I found you missing and I destroyed most of the castle and threatened to burn the useless Kingsguard alive for failing to bring you to me.”
“Did you. Really?” you ask him, your breath hitching as his mouth hits the peak of your breasts, tongue tracing the shape of them, mismatched eyes pupil-blown and locked on you.
“Yes,” he answers, his hands pinning your hands above your heads, his lips coming up to press against yours, his tongue invading and stroking against yours, sucking it into his mouth, his teeth nipping at it, the touch causing desire to well inside of him, his hands raising your skirts, freeing himself from his breeches.
He continues to kiss you, while pushing inside of you, groaning into your mouth at the feel of you, trailing his lips down your skin, sucking and biting on your neck, each thrust punctuated with a growl of mine.
He takes you in the field of sunflowers, planted to remind you of home, of Reach. He takes you in the field where anyone could see and delights in it. The idea that they could see just how much you belong to him.
And when it’s done, when he’s filled you with his seed, your neck already darkening with the force of his love, marks in the shape of his mouth, a sign of you belong to me.
“Why did. You tear the. Castle apart?” you ask him, still breathless with desire, turning into his body, still pressed against you, his legs twined with yours, his hands holding you possessively.
“Because I thought you had left me,” he whispers, the idea of you leaving him feeling with that same helpless fright and desire and he pulls you closer, already hard again and forcing himself inside of you again, delighting in the way you moan his name.
“You.” Thrust in.
“Are.” Out.
“Not.” In.
“Allowed.” Out
“To.” In
“Leave.” Out
“Me.” In.
And you come apart around him as he comes apart inside you, falling against you spent for the second time. And then he whispers the words into your skin,
“You are not allowed to leave me.” And you sigh in response, nestling against him, the sun beating down on the two of you. “Not ever.”
And then he presses a soft kiss to your forehead.
“You are not allowed to leave me because you are mine.”
well, you’ve come to the person who has written consent loving Valarr… hehe
I mean, personally I don’t mind meanie Valarr like especially if he’s traumatised by the death of his father but like what do we meannnn by dark?
personally I know I got boundaries to fics and I’m sure others either have leaner ones or tighter ones so it really does depend what we are talking about my love
big no’s from me personally are r*pe and assault, that ain’t love and won’t ever be for me so I don’t enjoy reading it
However as always I state that what you read is up to you and if you want to, do so! Just letting you know what my thoughts are hehe
I quite like my Valarr obsessed with Aerion in a healthy wayyyyyyy
In the best way possible, I’m so fucking disturbed with Valarr but also like….weirdly feel some affection for him? Ik it sounds so bad but your writing has evoked smth within me icl. 😭😭😭
TW: Past Sexual Assault, Pregnancy, Emotional Abuse, Psychological Manipulation, Possessive Behavior, Trauma, Dubious Consent, Forced Marriage, Unhealthy Relationships, Misogyny, Court Politics, Jealousy, Explicit Sexual Content.
WC: 28K
Five moons came and went like a slow grinding tide, the library had been closed to you, its heavy oak doors locked with a key you were not permitted to hold. The sept was a place you no longer visited, though sometimes you found yourself in the antechamber, sitting on the cold stone bench with your hands folded in your lap, unable to cross the threshold into the sanctuary proper but unwilling to abandon it entirely.
Baelor had not approached you since that day. You saw him sometimes at court functions, standing among the other lords with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression placid. Sometimes you caught him watching you across the great hall during meals, his mismatched eyes meeting yours with perfect, unshakeable calm. He would incline his head politely, the picture of a courteous good-father, and you would incline your head in return because what else could you do? Scream until your throat bled? Point your finger and accuse the King's Hand of forcing himself upon you in front of the Stranger's altar? No one would believe you. No one. The words would die in the air the moment they left your lips, and you would be left standing in the wreckage of your own ruin with nothing but humiliation for your trouble.
But he had sent the moon tea, a servant had appeared at your chamber door the morning after. The liquid inside was bitter and dark, so bitter that your tongue curled against it, and you had drunk it all. Every last drop. You knelt on the cold stone floor with tears streaming down your face and your hands shaking so badly you nearly dropped the vial twice. You did not know if it would work. You did not know if it was already too late. The maester had told you once that moon tea was most effective within the first day, and Baelor had waited until morning to send the girl, and what if those hours had been enough? What if something had already taken root in the darkness of your body, some malignant seed that would grow into a living reminder of what he had done to you?
Five moons later, you were sick, a wave of nausea that rolled through your stomach at the smell of roasted meat drifting up from the kitchens. A sudden and violent aversion to the Dornish wine Valarr favored, the same wine you had drunk at your wedding feast without complaint. You dismissed it at first. Summer fevers were common, especially in the city, and the heat this year was brutal enough to lay low even the hardiest of men. But when you woke three mornings in a row with bile rising in your throat before you could even sit up, Lady Mariene had pressed her lips into a thin line and insisted on sending for the maester.
Now you sat on the edge of the bed in Valarr's chambers, your hands folded in your lap with your fingers laced so tightly together that your knuckles had gone white. Your heart pounded so hard you could feel it in your temples, in your throat, in the tips of your fingers. Maester Godwyn asked about your symptoms, he pressed on your belly with cool fingers, palpating gently, his brow furrowed in concentration. He listened to your heart, counted your pulse, checked the color of your eyes and tongue and then he straightened up with a small, satisfied nod that made your stomach drop through the floor.
"Congratulations, Your Grace," he said. "You are with child."
You stared at him. Your lips parted. With child. A baby. A tiny life growing inside you, formed from your body and Valarr's body, a fusion of bloodlines that had spent a generation trying to destroy each other.
"You are certain?" Your voice was barely a whisper, thin and reedy, a ghost of sound.
"The signs are unmistakable." Maester Godwyn began packing his instruments into his leather satchel with methodical precision, each tool disappearing into its designated pocket. "The nausea, the fatigue, the tenderness in your breasts. Your cycle has ceased, yes?" He did not wait for your confirmation. "I would estimate you are roughly three moons along. You should begin to show within the next few weeks. I will prepare a regimen of herbs to help with the sickness, and I recommend you avoid strenuous activity. No riding, no dancing, nothing that might put undue strain on your body."
Three moons. The calculation ran through your mind with cold, clinical clarity, a sum worked out on an abacus made of terror and relief. Five moons since the sept. Three moons pregnant. The moon tea had worked. Whatever Baelor had planted in you that day, if he had planted anything at all, it had been washed away before it could take root. This child was Valarr's. Only Valarr's. There was no other possibility, no lingering doubt to poison the joy of this moment, no shadow of the Stranger's altar lurking in the child's bloodline.
The relief that flooded through you was so intense it made your eyes sting and your hands shake. You pressed your palm to your stomach, your fingers splayed across the flat plane of your belly where the silk of your gown lay smooth and unwrinkled, and you felt something rise in your chest that was not quite joy and not quite sorrow but some tangled, complicated mixture of both.
You should have felt nothing but horror. You should have wept with despair at the thought of binding yourself to this family forever, of giving them an heir to continue their legacy of fire and blood. But instead, beneath the fear and the doubt and the exhaustion, you felt the strangest flutter of something that might have been hope. A fragile, tentative thing, barely strong enough to hold its own weight. This child would be yours. Yours in a way that nothing else in this castle was. Yours in a way that your body had not been since the day you arrived at the Red Keep. No matter what else happened, no matter what cruelties you endured at the hands of this family, this child would be innocent of all of it. This child would be loved.
By you, at least. You could not speak for its father.
"I will inform His Grace," Maester Godwyn was saying, his voice cutting through your spiraling thoughts. "He will want to know immediately, I am sure. The realm has been waiting for an heir."
You nodded. You did not trust yourself to speak. The words were still tangled in your throat, a knot of emotion you could not swallow down.
Valarr came to you an hour later, you heard his footsteps before the door opened, quick and almost urgent, a pace that did not match his usual measured stride. Then he was standing before you, framed by the dying light, and his mismatched eyes were bright with something you had never seen in them before.
"Maester Godwyn told me." His voice was strange. Controlled, but only barely. Like a man holding back a flood with nothing but his bare hands. "He said you are with child. That it is certain."
"It is certain." He stared at you. His hands hung at his sides, opening and closing in a rhythm that spoke of nervous energy barely contained. His jaw was tight. His shoulders were rigid beneath the black silk of his doublet. Every muscle in his body was coiled with an emotion he was clearly struggling to contain, something vast and overwhelming that threatened to break through the careful composure he wore like armor. You had seen him triumphant on the day of your wedding, when he had looked at you across the sept with satisfaction burning in his eyes. You had seen him possessive in the darkness of your bedchamber, his hands mapping your body like a conqueror surveying new territory. You had seen him wounded and vulnerable and hungry in the quiet moments when the masks slipped. But you had never seen him like this.
"A child," he said. The word came out hoarse, scraped raw, almost reverent. Like a prayer whispered in the darkness of a sept. "Our child."
"Yes."
He took a step toward you his hand lifted, reaching toward your stomach, and then it stopped. It hung there in the air between you, suspended, trembling slightly. It was the first time you had ever seen Valarr Targaryen unsure of himself. The first time he had ever seemed to question whether he had the right to touch you. The man who had taken everything from you without asking, who had claimed your body as his property and your future as his due, was standing before you with his hand frozen in midair like a boy asking permission for his first dance.
"May I?" he asked.
The question was so unexpected, so utterly unlike him, that you felt your throat tighten until you could barely breathe. The infamous prince who had never asked permission for anything in his life. He was asking. You nodded because you did not know what else to do, because the words were trapped somewhere behind the ache in your chest.
He knelt before you, sank to his knees on the cold stone floor like a supplicant before an altar, his dark hair falling forward to frame his face, and he pressed his hand to your belly. His palm was warm through the thin fabric of your gown, his fingers spread wide as if trying to encompass something far larger than the tiny life that slept beneath. His mismatched eyes, were fixed on the place where his hand rested. The expression on his face was one you had never seen before, he looked like a man who had just discovered something he had been searching for his entire life without knowing it.
"There is a child in there," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "A child. Our child. A son, perhaps. Or a daughter. A little girl with your eyes." He looked up at you, and his eyes were wet. The mismatched irises glistened in the amber light, shimmering with moisture that he did not try to hide. The man who had stripped away your freedom piece by piece until you were nothing but a wife and a body and a vessel, was kneeling at your feet with tears in his eyes. "You have given me a child."
"I have done nothing," you said, and your own voice sounded distant to your ears, like someone speaking from very far away. "It simply happened."
"It did not simply happen." He rose to his feet, but his hand remained on your belly, anchored there like he could not bear to let go. His other hand came up to cup your face, his thumb brushing your cheekbone with that familiar, reverent tenderness that always made your heart twist in ways you did not want to examine. "You have done well. You have done so well."
You have done well. The words echoed in your mind, and something deep inside you recoiled from them. It was the same thing he had said to you in the gardens, after he had taken you on the stone bench among the honeysuckle and roses. The praise of a master to a well-trained hound. The approval of a man who saw you as a vessel, a body, a thing to be used and commended for its usefulness. The same words, the same tone, the same implicit ownership.
But there was something else in his voice now, something that had not been there in the gardens or in the sept or in any of the hundred places he had claimed you. Awe. Gratitude. Something that looked almost like love, or as close to love as a man like Valarr was capable of feeling. Something that might, under different circumstances, in a different life, have made your heart soften instead of clench.
"You are pleased?" you asked. The question felt foolish the moment it left your lips. The evidence of his pleasure was written across his face, shining in his eyes, trembling in his hands. But you needed to hear him say it. You needed confirmation that this was real, that this moment was happening, that the ground had truly shifted beneath your feet.
"Pleased." He let out a short, incredulous laugh that was more breath than sound. "Pleased does not begin to describe it. I am." He stopped. Swallowed hard. The muscles in his throat worked visibly. "I did not know I could feel this. I did not know I was capable of it. All my life I have wanted nothing, needed nothing, cared for nothing. And now." He shook his head, his thumb still tracing your cheekbone. "Now there is this. Now there is you. Now there is our child."
He leaned down and pressed his lips to your forehead. The kiss was gentle, almost chaste, nothing like the hungry, demanding kisses he usually gave you. It lingered longer than necessary, his lips warm against your skin, and when he pulled back his eyes were still glistening. His hand was still on your belly, his palm curved protectively over the life that slept beneath.
"Everything will be different now," he said. "I will make certain of it. You will want for nothing. The child will want for nothing. I will give you both everything. Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will ever be. I swear it on the old gods and the new, on my father's crown and my mother's blood. I swear it."
You looked at him, this strange and complicated and possessive man who had stolen your life and now knelt before you with tears streaming openly down his cheeks, he was looking at you like you had given him something he had never dared to hope for, something he had never believed he deserved.
"Thank you," you said. It was the only thing you could think of to say, the only words that felt safe enough to speak.
Valarr smiled. It was a small smile, almost shy, entirely unlike the knowing and predatory expression he usually wore like a second skin. For a heartbeat, he looked younger. Softer. More like a man and less like a prince.
"No," he said. "Thank you."
—
You had thought, perhaps naively, that the pregnancy would give you a reprieve, it was a reasonable assumption. Most husbands withdrew from their wives during pregnancy. Everyone knew this. It was simply the way of things, an accepted custom as old as the marriage bed itself. Some men retreated out of genuine concern for the child, afraid that their passions might harm the delicate life growing in the womb. Others were driven away by a sudden and prudish aversion to the changing body, the swelling belly and tender breasts and the slow transformation of wife into mother. The maesters recommended separate chambers in their dry, clinical tones, citing the health of the babe. The septas preached restraint from their prayer books, their thin lips pursed in disapproval at any hint of carnality during such a sacred time. Even the most attentive of lords, the ones who doted on their wives and brought them gifts and held their hands through the pains of labor, even they usually found themselves a discreet mistress to occupy their nights while their wives grew heavy with child. A servant with pretty eyes. A merchant's daughter from the city. Someone uncomplicated, someone unburdened by the weight of impending motherhood.
Valarr was not one of those husbands, if anything, the news of your pregnancy had inflamed something in him. The hunger that had driven him since your wedding night, the need to touch and claim and own, had not diminished with the proof of his conquest growing in your womb. It had grown alongside the child, feeding on the evidence of his seed taking root, becoming something voracious.
He touched you constantly now. His hands were always on you, always seeking, always claiming. A palm pressed flat against your belly at meals, in the corridors, during council meetings when you were permitted to sit beside him. His fingers tracing the small of your back as you walked through the gardens, a gesture that looked tender to observers but felt like a brand. His thumb stroking the curve of your hip while you stood at the window, watching the ships in the harbor, his body a warm and solid presence behind you. He spoke to the child at night, his lips pressed against the gentle swell of your stomach, his voice low and murmuring and full of a tenderness that made your chest ache with a confusion so deep you did not know how to name it. He whispered things to the babe that you could not quite hear, promises and secrets and endearments in the old Valyrian tongue that sounded like poetry and felt like chains.
He was gentler in some ways. More attentive. More solicitous of your comfort than he had ever been before. He asked after your health with genuine concern in his eyes. He ordered the kitchens to prepare only foods you could stomach, banishing the roasted meats whose smell made you retch. He had the servants bring extra pillows for your bed and lighter gowns for the oppressive summer heat and a dozen other small comforts that spoke of a consideration you had not expected from him.
But in bed, he was insatiable, the first night after the maester's announcement, you had expected him to let you sleep. You had been exhausted, wrung out by the emotions of the day, by the revelation of the child and the memory of the moon tea and the complicated tangle of relief and terror and strange, fragile hope that had taken root in your heart. You had climbed into bed with the grateful expectation of rest, your body sinking into the feather mattress with a sigh of pure physical relief.
He had not let you sleep. Instead, he had laid you down on the furs with a reverence that bordered on worship, his movements slower and more deliberate than they had ever been before. His hands mapped every inch of your body as if he were discovering it for the first time, his fingers tracing the contours of your shoulders and the curve of your waist and the swell of your hips with a focus that was almost devotional. He kissed the hollow of your throat where your pulse beat beneath the skin, the curve of your breast, and the soft and barely visible swell of your belly where his child was growing in the darkness of your womb. His lips lingered there, on that slight curve, pressing kiss after kiss to the skin that stretched over his heir. And then he had taken you with a slow and deep and devastating thoroughness that left you trembling and breathless and utterly and completely claimed, your fingers twisted in the furs and his name a broken whisper on your lips.
You had thought it was a celebration. A one time thing. An expression of his joy at the news, a physical manifestation of his happiness that would burn itself out once the initial excitement faded.
It was not a one time thing, the next night was the same. And the next. And the next after that, until the days blurred together in a haze of summer heat and his relentless, unquenchable desire. He could not keep his hands off you. He wanted you in the morning, when the light was pale and grey through the windows and the castle was still quiet, his body already hard and eager against your thigh when you woke. He wanted you in the afternoon, when the summer heat lay heavy on the castle and the servants had retreated to their quarters to escape the worst of it, when he would find you reading in the solar or sitting by the window and pull you into his lap with a hunger that never seemed to dim. He wanted you at night, after supper, before sleep, sometimes waking you from dreams with his mouth hot on your neck and his hands already pushing up your shift and his voice a dark and wanting murmur in your ear.
"I cannot get enough of you." His body moved against yours in the darkness, the rhythm deep and steady and possessive. His breath was hot and ragged against your ear, his chest pressed to your back or your breasts or your side depending on how he had positioned you that night. His hand found your belly, as it always did, his palm spreading wide over the growing curve. "You are carrying my child. My heir. Do you understand what that means? You are round with me. Full of me. Marked by me in ways no one can deny, no one can question, no one can ever take away."
His thrusts were deep and rhythmic, possessive without being cruel, hungry without being violent. His hand pressed against your belly as he moved, feeling the curve that grew more pronounced with each passing week.
You did not know how to respond to these declarations. Your fingers gripped his shoulders, nails biting into the muscle. Your breath came in short and desperate gasps that you could not control no matter how hard you tried. You hated that your body still wanted him. You hated that the pleasure still came, rushing through you like a tide, unstoppable and undeniable. You hated the way your hips rose to meet his, the way your legs wrapped around his waist, the way your mouth opened on sounds of need that you could not swallow back. But the pleasure came anyway. It always did.
And Valarr, watching your face with those mismatched eyes that missed nothing, saw it all. He saw your pleasure, the flush that spread across your cheeks and down your throat. He saw your surrender, the moment when your resistance crumbled and your body gave itself over to sensation. He saw the evidence of his possession written in every flutter of your lashes and every parting of your lips and every desperate, broken sound that escaped your throat.
"That is it," he breathed, his voice dark with satisfaction. "That is my girl. My perfect, beautiful girl. Taking me so well. Giving me everything."
He spilled inside you with a low groan, his body shuddering against yours with the force of his release. You felt the familiar warmth flooding your womb, the womb that already held his child, the womb that had already done its duty and needed nothing more from him. He stayed there for a long moment, still buried inside you, his forehead resting against yours and his breath coming in harsh, uneven pants. His hand remained on your belly, his thumb tracing small circles over the stretched skin.
"You cannot get mr more pregnant," you said quietly. The words came out before you could stop them, dry and almost sardonic, your voice still breathless from what he had done to you. "There is already a child in there. Growing bigger every day. Your seed has done its work. It has accomplished its purpose. There is nothing left for it to do."
Valarr laughed. It was a low and breathless sound, full of genuine amusement, rumbling through his chest and into yours. His eyes crinkled at the corners bright with mirth.
"I know," he said. "I know there is no purpose to it beyond the act itself. I know the child is already there, already growing, already real." He pressed a kiss to your forehead, soft and lingering. Then to the tip of your nose, a gesture so unexpectedly playful that it made something in your chest twist. Then to your lips, gentle and warm and tasting of salt. "But I cannot stop wanting you. I thought perhaps the desire would fade once you were with child. Once I had proof of our union, visible proof that everyone could see, proof that would grow and swell and eventually cry out in the night with a voice of its own. I thought that would be enough. I thought the hunger would finally be sated."
He pulled back to look at you, his mismatched eyes searching your face in the dim light of the dying candles. His expression was serious now, the amusement fading into something more vulnerable, something that looked almost like confusion at his own feelings.
"But it has not faded. It has grown. It grows every day, every time I look at you, every time I see the changes in your body and know that I did that. That I put that child inside you. That you are carrying a piece of me beneath your heart." His thumb traced your cheekbone, feather light. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. You were beautiful on our wedding day, when you hated me and did not bother to hide it. You were beautiful when I took you on the council table, when you arched beneath me and fought against your own pleasure. You were beautiful in the gardens, with the roses behind you and the sunlight in your hair. But now. Now you are carrying my child. Do you have any idea what that does to me? Do you have any idea how much I want you, how much I need you, how completely you have consumed every part of my mind and body?"
"I have some idea," you said, and your voice was flatter than you intended. He laughed again, that low and rumbling sound that you were beginning to recognize as genuine happiness. He rolled onto his back, pulling you against his side with a strength that was effortless and absolute. His arm wrapped around your shoulders, tucking you close against the warmth of his body. His other hand found your belly, as it always did now, resting there with a possessiveness that was both infuriating and strangely comforting. His palm was warm through your skin, and you could feel the slight curve of your womb pressing up against his fingers.
"Sleep," he said. "You need your rest. The maester said so. He was very specific about it. Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, no strenuous activity." A pause. A smile you could hear in his voice even though you could not see his face. "I may have ignored the last part of his instructions."
"You are the one keeping me awake," you said. "Every night. Without fail."
"I know." He pressed a kiss to your hair, his lips lingering against the strands. "I will try to be more restrained. I will try to let you sleep. I will try to be the kind of husband who withdraws to his own chambers and leaves his pregnant wife in peace."
You did not believe him. You could hear the lie in his voice, the affectionate self-deprecation that masked a complete lack of intention to change his behavior.
He was not more restrained. The next night, he took you bent over the bed with your hands gripping the furs and your back arched and his name torn from your throat in a cry you could not suppress no matter how hard you bit your lip. The night after that, he pulled you into his lap while he sat in the chair by the fire, the flames casting dancing shadows across your intertwined bodies. His hands guided your hips as you moved above him, setting a rhythm that was slower than usual, gentler, accommodating the growing weight of your belly between you. His eyes never left your face. His hands never left your skin. His voice never stopped murmuring those soft and possessive endearments that you had learned to tune out and crave in equal measure.
And every night, when it was over, when he had spent himself inside you and your body was still trembling with the aftershocks of a pleasure you resented, he held you. His hand on your belly. His lips on your hair. His voice a low and steady murmur in the darkness, speaking words that were half promise and half threat and entirely Valarr.
Mine. Both of you. Mine. My wife. My child. My family. No one will ever take you from me. No one will ever touch what is mine. You belong to me, and I belong to you, and this child belongs to both of us, and nothing in this world or the next will ever change that.
—
The visits began in your seventh moon, at first, you thought nothing of them. Nobles came and went from the Red Keep as constantly as the tides in Blackwater Bay, an endless procession of ambition dressed in silks and velvets. Lords seeking favor with the King. Ladies attending the Queen in her solar, sipping sweet wine and exchanging gossip like currency. The castle was a perpetual parade of obeisance and hunger, and you had long since learned to ignore the shifting currents of courtiers that ebbed and flowed through its corridors like a river that never ran dry.
But then you began to notice a pattern, the lords who came to court were not alone. They brought their daughters. Young women, mostly, though a few were older, widowed or delayed in marriage by circumstance. Girls of six and ten, seven and ten, eight and ten. Fresh faced and slim waisted and dressed in the finest silks their houses could afford, gowns of pale blue and soft rose and spring green that made them look like flowers swaying in a summer breeze. They curtsied to the King with downcast eyes and rosy blushes, paid their respects to the Prince of Dragonstone with breathless voices and fluttering lashes, and then, inevitably, found their way into Valarr's path with a persistence that spoke of careful instruction.
Lady Marguerite of House Ashford. Lord Ashford's oldest daughter, a girl with hair like spun sunlight and eyes the color of cornflowers in bloom. She had smiled at Valarr over supper on her first night at court, her lashes dark against her cheeks, her voice honey sweet as she asked him about his work on the small council. She leaned toward him as she spoke, her body angled like an offering, and the neckline of her gown had been cut low enough to show the pale swell of her breasts.
Lady Rosamund of House Caswell. Tall and willowy, with hair the deep brown of polished walnut and a laugh that rang through the great hall like church bells on a feast day. She had a wit that was quick and sharp, a tongue that could match Valarr's own, and she had made him laugh during a garden stroll. You had been walking behind them with your ladies, your hand pressed to the aching small of your back, your swollen belly heavy before you like a millstone, and you had watched your husband's whole body relax into mirth at another woman's joke.
Lady Evelina of House Florent. Golden haired and rosy cheeked, with a laugh like silver chimes and a habit of touching Valarr's arm whenever she spoke to him. Her fingers would rest on his sleeve, light and lingering, a gesture of casual intimacy that made something hot and tight coil in your chest. She had brought him a gift on her third day at court. A book of Dornish poetry, bound in pale leather with gold leaf on the pages. The same volume you had seen in Baelor's library. The same verses Valarr had once read aloud to you in bed, his voice low and musical, your head resting on his chest as the words washed over you. She had presented it to him in the great hall, her cheeks pink with pleasure, and he had accepted it with a smile that made your stomach turn to ice.
They were throwing their daughters at him. All of them. Every lord with a maiden daughter and an eye for advancement was parading their girls before your husband like prize fillies at a horse fair, hoping he would take a fancy to one of them. Hoping he would sample the goods and find them to his liking. Hoping he would take a mistress.
And why would he not? Why would any man in his position resist such a parade of beauty and availability? You were pregnant now, heavy and tired and swollen beyond recognition. Your ankles had thickened until your shoes no longer fit, and you had been forced to wear loose slippers that made you feel like a peasant shuffling through the corridors. Your back ached with a deep and constant throb that no amount of pillows or warm baths could ease. You could not dance at feasts without growing short of breath. You could not walk through the gardens without stopping to rest on every bench you passed.
Men grew restless when their wives were with child. Men took mistresses. It was the way of the world, the way of marriage, the way of men like Valarr who had married for conquest rather than love and who had never pretended to be anything other than what they were.
You knew this. You had always known this. You had braced yourself for it during those first weeks after the maester's announcement, when Valarr's hunger had seemed bottomless and his desire for you had burned with a feverish intensity that left you exhausted and overwhelmed. You had told yourself that it would not last. That his obsession would cool once the novelty of your pregnancy wore off. That he would eventually grow tired of your swelling body and your constant fatigue and your inability to match his endless, exhausting passion.
But you had not expected it to hurt, you had not expected the way your chest would tighten when you watched Lady Marguerite lean toward him at supper, her golden hair spilling over her shoulder like a waterfall of silk, her blue eyes fixed on his face with an attention that bordered on worship. You had not expected the way your stomach would clench when Lady Rosamund made him laugh, her dark eyes sparkling with triumph, her hand lifting to touch her own throat in a gesture that drew his gaze to the elegant line of her neck. You had not expected the way your heart would stop and then start again, pounding too fast, when Lady Evelina touched his arm and he did not pull away.
He did not pull away. That was the detail your mind kept returning to, circling like a moth around a flame. He did not step back. He did not remove his arm from beneath her fingers. He did not give her the cold and cutting look that he was so capable of giving, the look that could freeze a man's blood in his veins and send lords twice his age stammering from his presence. Instead, he smiled at her. That same gentle and attentive smile he had once given you in the gardens, a lifetime ago, when you had been new to the castle and new to your marriage and still foolish enough to believe that there might be something salvageable in this union.
"He seems quite taken with the Florent girl," Lady Jeyne observed from her seat beside you. Her voice was light and conversational, utterly venomous, the voice of a woman who had spent decades at court learning exactly how to wound with words. "But then, His Grace has always appreciated beauty. And she is very beautiful, is she not? So slim. So graceful. That waist. Those wrists. She looks like a painting come to life. She makes pregnancy look rather unfortunate by comparison, does she not?"
You said nothing. Your fork was clenched in your hand, your knuckles white as bone, the tines pressed hard against the plate. You could feel the pressure of your grip in your wrist, in your forearm, in the tight clench of your jaw. On your other side, Lady Alia leaned in with a conspiratorial smile that showed too many teeth.
"I heard Lord Florent offered her as a companion for His Grace," she whispered, her breath warm and moist against your ear. "To ease his burdens during this difficult time. After all, a man has needs, and Her Grace is in no condition to." She paused delicately, her eyes dropping to your belly with an expression of exaggerated sympathy. The pause itself was an insult, the space she left for you to fill in the ugly words yourself. "Well. You understand. We all understand. It must be so hard for you, watching this happen when you cannot do anything about it. When you cannot be what he needs."
"The Florents have always been ambitious," Lady Mariene added quietly. Her voice was gentler than the others, which somehow made it worse. Pity was harder to bear than malice. "They will be looking for a place at court, a permanent position with access to power. A position as the Prince's acknowledged mistress would be quite the advantage. Their influence would grow considerably. They could rival even the great houses, with the Prince's ear and the Prince's bed."
"He will need someone to warm his sheets," Jeyne said, pressing the knife deeper with the casual air of someone commenting on the weather. "Sooner or later. You cannot expect him to remain celibate for months on end, surely. It is not in his nature. We all know what his nature is. We have all seen how he looks at you, how he touches you, how he cannot seem to keep his hands to himself. A man like that does not simply stop wanting because his wife's belly has grown too large for his liking. He finds other outlets. Other women who can give him what you cannot."
She paused, letting the words settle into the silence like stones dropping into still water. Then she smiled, her cold grey eyes glinting with satisfaction, and added, "And once the child comes, you will be occupied with nursing and rearing. You will have even less time for him. The wet nurses will handle the feeding, of course, but the child will need its mother. You will be exhausted. Drained. Uninterested in the kinds of activities that keep a husband faithful. It is only practical to find a suitable replacement now, before the birth, so that the transition is smooth. Someone who can keep him satisfied while you do your duty to his heir. Someone who can give him the pleasure and the attention and the beauty that you will no longer be able to provide."
The fracture in your chest spread. A web of cracks, splintering through your ribcage, reaching toward your heart with thin and searching fingers. You could feel it happening, the slow disintegration of something you had not even known you were holding together. You had thought you were prepared for this. You had thought you had armored yourself against the inevitable. But the armor was paper thin, and Jeyne's words were fire, and everything was burning.
You looked down the table at Valarr. He was still speaking with Lady Evelina. Her hand was still on his arm, her pale fingers resting against the dark silk of his sleeve. His head was tilted toward her, his expression attentive, his lips curved in that gentle and inviting smile that you had once believed was reserved for you. The candlelight caught the gold in her hair and the rose in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes. She looked like a maiden from a song. She looked like everything you were not. She looked like the kind of woman a prince should have, the kind of woman a prince deserved, the kind of woman who had never been conquered in a war and married off as a spoil of victory.
He looked like a man who was interested. He looked like a man who was considering. He looked like a man who was already imagining what it would be like to have that golden hair spread across his pillows and that slim body pressed beneath his own.
He would not, you told yourself, and the voice in your head was desperate and thin and pathetic. He said he wanted only you. He said you were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He said you were his, both of you, you and the child, and that nothing would ever change that. He knelt at your feet with tears in his eyes. He pressed his hand to your belly and whispered to his heir in the darkness. He told you he could not get enough of you, that the desire had not faded, that it had grown, that it grew every day.
But men said many things. Men made promises and broke them. Men swore devotion on their knees and then found younger and slimmer and more beautiful women to fill their beds while their wives grew heavy with child and their bodies stretched into shapes that no longer pleased the eye. Valarr had never pretended to be anything other than what he was. A prince. A conqueror. A man who took what he wanted and answered to no one. Why would he limit himself to a swollen and exhausted wife when the realm was full of beautiful girls who would spread their legs for a chance at his favor?
You were a political tool who had served her purpose. You had given him an heir, or you would soon, and once the child was born, what use did he have for you? Your bloodline was a liability. Your family was destroyed. Your name was a curse that the realm had spent decades trying to erase. He had married you to end a war, and the war was ended, and now all that was left was the slow and humiliating process of being set aside while younger and prettier women took your place.
Your hand moved to your belly, cradling the swell of it beneath your palm. The child kicked, a sharp and insistent movement against your ribs, and you felt tears prick at the corners of your eyes. Yours, you thought, and the word was a lifeline, a rope thrown into the darkness, the only solid thing left in a world that was dissolving around you. At least this child is yours. At least they cannot take this from you. At least you will have something, someone, when everything else is gone.
—
That night, Valarr came to bed late, you were already lying down, your body curled on its side in the position the maester had recommended for sleep, your hands wrapped around your belly as if you could protect the child inside from the slow and creeping dread that had taken root in your heart and grown there like a poisonous vine. The room was dark except for the single candle burning on the bedside table, its flame guttering in the breeze from the open window. You had been lying there for hours, staring at the tapestry on the far wall, tracing the outlines of dragons and knights and maidens with your eyes because sleep would not come and your thoughts would not quiet.
The door opened. You heard his footsteps, soft on the stone floor. You heard the rustle of his clothing as he undressed, the soft thud of his boots being set aside, the whisper of silk as his doublet was draped over a chair. The mattress dipped as he climbed into bed beside you, and you felt the warmth of his body against your back, familiar and foreign all at once. His hand found your belly, as it always did. His palm was warm, his touch gentle, his fingers spreading wide over the taut curve of your womb. You felt him press a kiss to your shoulder, then to the curve of your neck. His lips were soft and unhurried, and his breath was warm against your skin.
"You are still awake," he murmured. "It is late. You should be sleeping."
"I was waiting for you."
"You should not wait. You need your rest. The maester was very specific." His hand moved in slow and soothing circles on your belly. "How is the little one tonight?"
"Active. I think he objects to the venison."
Valarr laughed softly, his breath stirring the hair at the nape of your neck. "He has good taste. The venison was overcooked." He settled against you, his body warm and solid at your back, his arm wrapped around your waist with that easy possessiveness that had once made you feel claimed and now made you feel like a possession being inventoried. He seemed content. He seemed happy. He seemed like a man who had no idea that his wife was slowly falling apart in his arms.
"Valarr?"
"Hm?" His voice was sleepy, comfortable, unconcerned.
The question had been sitting in your chest all evening, all week, all month. It had grown heavier with every smile he gave Lady Evelina, with every walk he took with Lady Marguerite, with every laugh Lady Rosamund pulled from his throat. It pressed against your ribs now like a living thing, demanding release.
"Why do you spend so much time with them?" The words came out before you could stop them. Controlled. But with a tremor underneath that you could not quite hide.
Valarr's hand paused on your belly. The silence stretched for a moment too long. "With whom?"
"The girls. The lords' daughters. Lady Evelina. Lady Marguerite. Lady Rosamund. All of them." You did not turn to look at him. You kept your eyes fixed on the tapestry, on the knight and the dragon and the maiden in her tower. "You walk with them. You ride with them. You sit with them at supper. You laugh at their jokes and accept their gifts and let them touch you. Everyone sees it. Everyone talks about it."
"Do they." His voice was flat. Not a question.
"You know they do. You know what the court is saying. You know what they are saying about me."
"What are they saying about you?" The question was too casual. Too careless. As if he genuinely did not know, or genuinely did not care.
"That I have been set aside," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word despite your best efforts. "That you are looking for a mistress. That you have already found one. Or two. Or three. That I am too fat and too tired and too useless to keep your attention, so you are finding it elsewhere. That it is only a matter of time before you make your choice and I am left alone in these chambers while you."
You stopped. Your throat had closed around the rest of the sentence. You could not say it. You could not speak the image into existence, the image of him in another woman's bed, his hands on another woman's body, his voice murmuring those same soft and possessive endearments into another woman's ear.
Valarr was quiet for a long moment. His hand was still on your belly, but it had stopped moving. It lay there, heavy and motionless. "You have been listening to gossip," he said finally. "From the viper pit of the court. From those ladies who whisper poison in your ear the moment my back is turned."
"It is not gossip when I see it with my own eyes. I saw you in the gardens with Lady Marguerite. You disappeared into the hedge maze together. I saw you give Lady Rosamund your handkerchief at the tiltyard. She wore it tied around her wrist like a trophy. I saw you at supper tonight with Lady Evelina. Her hand was on your arm for half the meal. You did not remove it. You never remove it."
"I am the Prince. I am the heir's heir. It is my duty to be courteous to the lords and ladies who visit this court. Their fathers are important bannermen. Their houses are ancient and powerful. Offending them would be politically foolish."
"Courteous." You let out a breath that was almost a laugh, hollow and bitter. "Is that what you call it? Courteous?"
"What would you call it?"
"I would call it entertaining them. I would call it encouraging them. I would call it letting them believe they have a chance." Valarr shifted behind you. His arm tightened around your waist, pulling you closer against him, but the gesture felt different now. Less tender. More proprietary. Like a man repositioning a piece on a game board.
"You are being ridiculous," he said.
"Am I?"
"Yes. You are pregnant and tired and your mind is inventing threats where none exist. The maester warned me this might happen. He said that women in your condition often become emotional. Irrational. Suspicious without cause."
The words hit you like a slap. Emotional. Irrational. Suspicious without cause. He was dismissing you. He was reducing your fears to nothing more than the hysterical ramblings of a pregnant woman, unworthy of serious consideration, unworthy of a real answer. Your hands tightened on your belly, your knuckles going white.
"Do not do that," you said, and your voice was sharper now. "Do not pretend this is nothing. Do not pretend I am imagining things. I have watched you with them. I have watched the way you smile at them, the way you lean toward them, the way you laugh at their jokes and accept their gifts. You gave Lady Rosamund your handkerchief, Valarr. Your handkerchief. With your dragons on it. That is not courtesy. That is a favor. Everyone knows what a favor means."
"I gave her a piece of cloth because she asked for it. She wanted something to tie back her hair while she rode. It meant nothing."
"Then why did she wear it on her wrist for the rest of the day? Why did she show it to every lady in the castle? Why did she tell them it was a gift from you?"
"I do not control what Lady Rosamund says or does. She is a foolish girl with foolish notions. That is not my responsibility."
"And Lady Evelina? The book she gave you? The way she touches you at every meal? Is that also nothing?"
Valarr exhaled, a long and controlled breath that sounded almost like a sigh. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was cooler now. More distant. The voice of a prince who was not accustomed to being questioned. "I am not having this conversation," he said. "It is late. You are tired. I am tired. We will discuss this in the morning if you still wish to, but I suspect you will feel differently once you have rested."
"No. We will discuss this now." You twisted in his arms, turning to face him for the first time since he had come to bed. His eyes met yours in the dim candlelight and they were guarded in a way you had not seen in months. "Why do you spend so much time with them? Why do you let them touch you? Why do you smile at them the way you used to smile at me?"
Valarr stared at you for a long moment. His expression was unreadable, his jaw tight, his eyes shuttered. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold and clipped and utterly dismissive. "You are being tedious."
The word hit you like a physical blow. Tedious. As if your fears were boring to him. As if your pain was an inconvenience. As if you were nothing more than a nagging wife whose concerns were not worth the breath it took to address them. "Tedious," you repeated. The word tasted like ash in your mouth.
"I have given you no reason to doubt me. I have told you repeatedly that you are my wife, that you are carrying my child, that there is no other woman who could take your place. If you choose not to believe me, that is your decision. But I will not spend my nights defending myself against accusations that have no basis in reality."
"Accusations." You pushed yourself up on one elbow, your belly heavy between you. "I have not accused you of anything. I have asked you a question. There is a difference."
"You have asked me the same question in a dozen different ways, and I have answered it in a dozen different ways, and none of my answers have satisfied you. I am beginning to think no answer would satisfy you. I am beginning to think you want to be unhappy. That you want to find fault. That you are looking for reasons to push me away."
"That is not true."
"Is it not?" His eyes were cold now, the warmth that had been there when he first came to bed completely extinguished. "You have been distant for weeks. Cold. Withdrawn. You barely speak to me at meals. You barely look at me when I enter the room. And now you accuse me of seeking comfort elsewhere, when you are the one who has been pulling away."
"Because I am afraid." The words tore out of you, raw and trembling. "Because I am pregnant and swollen and exhausted, and every day I watch beautiful girls throw themselves at my husband, and every day my ladies tell me it is only a matter of time before you choose one of them. And instead of reassuring me, instead of telling me I have nothing to fear, you tell me I am being tedious."
"I have told you repeatedly that you have nothing to fear. You simply refuse to listen."
"You told me with words. Words are easy. Words are wind. But your actions tell a different story. Your actions tell me that you enjoy their attention. That you seek it out. That you do nothing to discourage it."
Valarr sat up abruptly, the furs falling away from his chest. His expression was hard now, his jaw set, his mismatched eyes glittering with something that looked almost like anger. "I am done with this conversation," he said. "I am a Prince of Dragonstone. Your lord husband. I will not be interrogated in my own bed by my own wife over matters of court etiquette that she does not understand."
"I understand more than you think."
"You understand nothing." He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, his back to you, his shoulders rigid. "You see a girl smile at me and you invent an affair. You see me accept a book and you imagine me in her bed. These are fantasies, Y/N. They exist only in your mind. And I will not waste my breath defending myself against phantoms."
"Then give me a reason not to believe them." Your voice broke on the last word. "Give me something real. Something I can hold onto. Something other than pretty words and empty promises."
Valarr turned back to look at you. For a moment, just a moment, something flickered in his eyes. Something that might have been guilt, or frustration, or something else entirely. Then it was gone, replaced by that cold and distant mask that he wore like armor. He crossed to the door without waiting for your response. His hand closed around the latch, and he paused for a moment with his back still turned.
"Sleep," he said. "You need your rest. I will not disturb you further tonight."
"Where are you going?"
He did not answer. The door opened and closed behind him with a soft click, and you were alone.
You stared at the closed door for a long time. The candle on the bedside table guttered and smoked, casting dancing shadows across the walls. The baby kicked inside you, a sharp and insistent movement, and you pressed both hands to your belly as if you could hold yourself together through sheer force of will.
Where are you going?
He had not answered. He had not even looked at you. He had simply walked out into the darkness of the castle, into the corridors where slim and beautiful girls slept in their guest chambers, girls who would welcome him with open arms and eager bodies and no tedious questions about where he had been.
Where are you going?
You did not sleep that night. You lay awake in the darkness, staring at the canopy above, counting the dragons embroidered in silver thread until your eyes blurred and the tears you had been holding back finally spilled over and ran down your cheeks and into your hair. The castle was silent around you, vast and indifferent, and somewhere in its depths your husband was walking through the shadows.
You did not know where he was going. You did not know whose door he might knock on, whose bed he might climb into, whose body he might use to forget the argument he had just had with his tedious and suspicious wife.
You only knew that he was gone. And the space beside you in the bed was cold.
—
Days had passed since the Prince had slept that one night away from his wife, the hour was late when Lady Alia slipped through the servant's passage, she had planned this carefully, or as carefully as a woman of her limited intelligence could manage. Three days of watching and noting the patterns of the Prince's household. When the servants came and went with their armfuls of linens and trays of half-eaten food. When the guards changed their watch, their armored boots echoing in the corridor as they traded places with the next shift. When the Blackfyre bitch took her evening bath in the small chamber adjacent to the Prince's bedchamber, the chamber that Alia had never been permitted to enter but had imagined a hundred times. The bath took an hour. Sometimes longer now that the whore's body was swollen with child and every movement was an effort, every step a labor, every breath a reminder of the parasite growing in her womb. An hour was more than enough. An hour was a gift, a window of opportunity that Alia intended to seize with both hands.
She had worn her finest shift. Silk so thin it was practically transparent, purchased from a Lyseni trader who had assured her it was the same fabric the pleasure houses of the Free Cities used for their most expensive courtesans. The neckline was cut low enough to show the swell of her breasts, the pale curve of them visible even in the dim light of the servant's passage. The hem rode high on her thighs, barely covering the tops of her legs, leaving little to the imagination. Her honey-colored hair was loose around her shoulders, brushed until it shone like spun gold, each strand gleaming in the candlelight. She had dabbed perfume behind her ears, at her wrists, in the hollow of her throat where the pulse beat warm beneath the skin. Rose oil, subtle and sweet, the kind of scent that made men lean closer without knowing why.
She looked beautiful. She knew she looked beautiful. She had been told so her entire life, by her mother and her father and her septa and every squire and knight and minor lord who had ever looked at her with hunger in his eyes. She was eight and ten years old, slim and graceful, with a face that had made half the squires in the Red Keep stumble over their own feet when she passed. Her skin was clear and unblemished. Her waist was narrow enough to span with two hands. Her breasts were small and pert and had never been swollen by pregnancy or sagged under the weight of a nursing child. She was everything the Prince's wife was not, everything she could never be again, and she was offering herself to him on a platter of silk and perfume.
The Prince would not refuse her. Why would he? His wife was a bloated cow, heavy with child, her ankles swollen to the size of tree trunks and her face round as the full moon and her body stretched beyond all recognition. Alia had seen her waddling through the corridors like a duck, one hand pressed to the small of her back, her belly preceding her like the prow of a ship. It was obscene. It was grotesque. No man wanted that. No man wanted a wife who could not please him, a wife who could not satisfy him, a wife who was too tired and too heavy and too occupied with the parasite in her womb to give her husband the attention he deserved. A man like Prince Valarr, a man of such obvious and voracious appetites, must be starving by now. Desperate. Practically aching for a woman who could give him what his wife could not.
And Alia had seen the way the Prince looked at the noble girls who came to court. He was interested in them. He smiled at them and laughed at their jokes and let them touch his arm at supper. He simply needed a push in the right direction, a nudge toward the inevitable, a woman bold enough to take what was being offered rather than waiting to be asked.
She would be that push. She would be the one to climb into his bed and give him what he had been denied for months, and when he had tasted her and enjoyed her and realized what he had been missing, he would set aside his fat and useless wife and keep Alia as his acknowledged mistress. Perhaps even more. Stranger things had happened. Targaryens had set aside wives before. Targaryens had taken new brides before. And if the Blackfyre whore died in childbirth, as so many women did, as Alia prayed nightly she would, then the Prince would need a new wife. Someone young and beautiful and fertile. Someone like Alia.
The dream was so vivid, so intoxicating, that she could almost taste it, she slipped into the Prince's bedchamber and closed the door silently behind her, her heart pounding in her chest with a mixture of fear and excitement. The fire burned low in the hearth, casting long shadows across the walls, the embers glowing red and gold in the darkness. The bed was huge and canopied, draped in Targaryen red and black, the furs turned down invitingly by the servants who had prepared the room for the night. She could smell him on the sheets. Sandalwood and smoke and something dark and masculine, something that made her stomach flutter with anticipation and her thighs press together involuntarily. Soon she would be wrapped in that scent. Soon she would be wrapped in him.
She shrugged off her shift and let it pool on the floor at her feet, a puddle of translucent silk that she stepped out of with the grace of a dancer. Then she climbed onto the bed, arranging herself among the pillows with practiced care. She had rehearsed this in her own chambers, in front of the small mirror that hung above her washbasin, trying different poses until she found the one that flattered her best. One arm above her head, her wrist bent delicately, her fingers curled against the pillow. Her hair spread across the silk in a golden fan, each strand catching the firelight. Her body angled to display her best features, the narrow waist and the flat stomach and the curve of her hips. She left the furs off entirely. She wanted him to see everything. Her small and pert breasts. The smooth plane of her stomach, unmarked by stretch marks or swelling. The golden hair between her thighs. She was a feast laid out for a starving man, and he would devour her.
She waited, the minutes passed with agonizing slowness. The fire crackled in the hearth, sending up occasional sparks that died before they reached the chimney. Somewhere in the adjoining chamber, she could hear the faint splash of water, the soft sigh of the Blackfyre lowering herself into the tub. The sound made Alia smile. Good. The cow was occupied. She would be soaking her bloated body for some time yet, trying to ease the aches and pains of her condition, never suspecting that her husband was about to receive a far more enticing offer.
The door opened. Prince Valarr stepped into the chamber, his attention fixed on a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was still dressed from the day's council meeting, his dark doublet unfastened at the collar to reveal the strong column of his throat, his boots dusty from the yard where he had been observing the new recruits. He did not look up immediately. He was frowning at something on the parchment, his mismatched eyes narrowed in concentration, his brow furrowed. He looked tired, Alia thought. Tired and frustrated and in desperate need of a woman to ease his burdens. She would be that woman.
"My prince."
Her voice was soft and breathy, the voice she had practiced for hours in front of her mirror, the voice that had made squires blush and stammer and drop their swords in the training yard. She stretched languidly on the bed, letting her legs part slightly, letting him see what she was offering. The firelight played across her bare skin, painting her in shades of gold and rose. She was a living flame, and he was a dragon. He would not be able to resist.
Valarr looked up, for a long moment, he simply stared. His expression did not change, except a slight surprise flickering across his features. No interest stirred in his mismatched eyes. No hint of the hunger Alia had expected, the hunger she had been counting on, the hunger that every man felt when he looked at her. He stared at her the way a man might stare at a dead rat that a cat had dragged in from the stables. The way a man might stare at something foul he had found on the bottom of his boot. The way a man might stare at an insect before crushing it under his heel.
"What," he said, and his voice was utterly flat, utterly cold, utterly devoid of anything Alia had hoped to hear, "is this?"
Alia's smile faltered. A thread of unease wound through her stomach, cold and tight. This was not the reaction she had anticipated. She had expected surprise, perhaps. She had expected hesitation, a moment of doubt, a flicker of conscience that she would have to soothe away with gentle words and softer touches. She had even prepared for the possibility that he might resist at first, that he might protest out of loyalty to his wretched wife, that she would have to work harder to persuade him. But she had not expected this. This blank and chilling lack of response, as if she were not a beautiful woman offering him her body but a minor inconvenience he had not asked for.
"I thought you might appreciate some company, my prince." She let her voice drop lower, more intimate, the voice of a woman sharing a secret in the darkness. She shifted on the bed, arching her back slightly, letting the firelight play across her bare breasts. Her nipples were hard in the cool air, and she knew he could see them. She wanted him to see them. "Your wife is occupied with her bath. She will be in there for another hour at least. And a man like you, a man of such strength and passion and hunger, should not have to spend his nights alone. It is not right. It is not natural. I am here to offer you comfort, my prince. Whatever comfort you desire. Whatever comfort you have been denied."
She let her hand drift down her own body as she spoke, tracing the curve of her breast, the flat of her stomach, the angle of her hip. It was a gesture she had practiced, a gesture designed to draw his eyes to the places she wanted him to look. She had been told by men far less powerful than the Prince that she was irresistible. Surely he would want her.
"Get out."
The words were flat. Cold. Utterly without warmth or hesitation or even the faintest trace of temptation. Valarr had not moved from the doorway. He had not taken a single step into the room. But something in his posture had changed, something that made Alia's blood run cold. His shoulders had squared like a soldier preparing for battle. His jaw had tightened until she could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin. His mismatched eyes were fixed on her with an expression that was not desire or interest or even flattered surprise. It was disgust. Pure and unfiltered and absolute disgust, the kind of disgust a man might feel upon discovering a nest of maggots in his supper. He was looking at her as if she were something filthy. Something contaminated. Something so far beneath him that he could barely stand to share the same air.
"My prince." Her voice cracked on the title. "Please, I only meant to offer you what you have been missing. What your wife cannot give you. What no woman in your condition should expect you to go without. I am here for you. I am willing. I want this. I want you."
"Get out of my bed." His voice was harder now, a blade beneath silk, a whip crack in the stillness of the room. "Get out of my bed, and get out of my chambers, and be grateful I do not have you dragged to the black cells beneath this castle and left there to rot until you forget what sunlight looks like."
Alia scrambled upright, her cheeks flushing with humiliation so intense it burned like a brand. Her hands were shaking as she grabbed for the sheet, pulling it up to cover her breasts, her shoulders, her body that had suddenly become a source of shame rather than pride. This was wrong. This was all wrong. He was supposed to want her. He was supposed to be tempted. He was supposed to look at her the way he looked at those noble girls at court, with attention and interest and that gentle smile that made women weak in the knees.
"Did you think I wanted you?" Valarr took a step into the room, and then another, and Alia shrank back against the pillows with a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. "Did you truly think that I would want you? That I would look at you and see anything other than a pathetic and desperate and grasping little whore who snuck into my chambers like a thief in the night?"
"But the noble girls," Alia stammered, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them. "I saw the way you looked at them. I thought you were interested. I thought you wanted."
"I am polite to guests at my father's court because it is my duty as a prince. Because their fathers are bannermen and their houses are allies and insulting them would create political problems I have no desire to deal with. That is not interest. That is politics, you stupid and simpering fool. Did you truly think a few polite smiles at supper meant I would welcome any common whore who climbed into my bed? Did you think I was a dog who would mount anything that presented itself?" His lip curled, and the expression on his face was so contemptuous that Alia felt herself shrivel under it. "Are you that stupid, or are you simply that arrogant? Did you look in the mirror and convince yourself that a prince of the blood would throw away his honor and his wife and his unborn child for a chance to rut between your legs?"
Alia's face burned so hot she thought her skin might blister. Her eyes stung with tears, fat and humiliating, spilling down her cheeks and dripping onto the sheet she clutched to her chest. This was not how it was supposed to go. She was beautiful. She was desirable. She had been told so her entire life, by everyone she had ever met, and she had believed them. She had built her entire future on the foundation of her beauty, on the certainty that it would open doors and secure matches and lift her above the common rabble of ladies who populated the court. And now the Prince of Dragonstone was looking at her like she was a cockroach he had found in his soup.
"You are pathetic," Valarr said, and his voice dropped to a low and venomous murmur that was somehow worse than the shouting. "You come to my chambers while my wife, my pregnant wife, is bathing in the next room, carrying my child beneath her heart. You spread yourself across my sheets like a common whore in a dockside brothel. You offer me comfort as if you could ever compare to her, as if you could ever be worthy of touching the hem of her gown, as if you could ever be anything more than a cheap and tawdry imitation of a real woman."
He took another step closer, and Alia flinched so hard her back hit the headboard. The tears were streaming down her face now, ruining the careful arrangement of her hair, and her nose was running and her breath was coming in ragged and desperate gasps.
"Look at yourself," he said, and each word was a lash. "Just look at yourself. You are nothing. You are a collection of bones wrapped in skin, a hollow shell with nothing inside it but ambition and envy and the desperate need to matter. You think you are beautiful? You think that is enough? There are a thousand women in this city with pretty faces and willing bodies, and they are all as worthless as you are. Beauty is common. Beauty is cheap. Beauty is something any peasant girl can possess if she is young enough and clean enough. You have nothing else. No wit. No wisdom. No loyalty. No honor. Just a passably attractive face and a body you clearly think is a gift to mankind. It is not a gift. It is a cheap trinket, and I have no interest in cheap trinkets."
He leaned closer, his face inches from hers, and Alia could smell the wine on his breath and see the cold fire burning in his mismatched eyes. "My wife," he said, and his voice went soft and terrible, "is carrying my child. Her body is changing because she is doing something you will never do, something your selfish and shallow soul is not capable of. She is creating life. She is sacrificing her comfort and her health and her sleep and her very shape to bring my heir into this world. Every ache in her back, every swollen inch of her ankles, every stretch mark on her belly is a testament to her strength and her sacrifice and her worth. And you, you vile little creature, you dared to call her a cow. You dared to mock her. You dared to think you could replace her."
Alia's blood turned to ice. He knew. He knew what she had said, what she had whispered to Jeyne and Mariene in the solar, what she had murmured behind her fan while the Princess walked past with her heavy belly and her tired eyes. Someone had told him. Someone had carried her words to his ears, and now he was looking at her with murder in his eyes, and she was naked and alone and utterly defenseless.
"My prince, I never meant, it was only a joke, I did not think."
"You do not think. That is abundantly clear. You do not think at all." He straightened up, stepping back from the bed, and the distance he put between them was a mercy. Alia could breathe again, but the air felt thin and useless in her lungs.
"I will go," Alia whispered, scrambling toward the edge of the bed, her bare feet tangling in the sheets. "I will go now. I will leave the castle. I will go back to my father's house and never return."
"You will go. But not back to your father's house. You will go wherever I send you, and you will be grateful that I am allowing you to leave with your life." Valarr stepped aside, clearing the path to the door. "Get dressed. Get out of my chambers. And if you ever, ever, come near my wife again, if you ever speak to her or look at her or breathe in her direction, I will have you whipped through the streets of King's Landing until the flesh hangs from your bones in ribbons. I will make certain that every lord and lady in the Seven Kingdoms knows exactly what you are and what you tried to do. Do you understand me?"
"Yes," Alia whispered, and her voice was so small and broken she barely recognized it. "Yes, my prince. I understand."
"Then get out."
She fled. She did not bother to put on her shift. She simply clutched it to her body and ran, barefoot and sobbing, through the servant's passage and back toward her own chambers. The guards in the corridor pretended not to see her. The servants pressed themselves against the walls, their faces carefully blank, their eyes fixed on the floor. No one stopped her. No one asked what had happened. No one wanted to be associated with the girl who had tried to seduce the Prince and failed so spectacularly.
And in the Prince's bedchamber, Valarr stood alone, staring at the rumpled sheets where another woman had lain, the disgust was still there, churning in his stomach like poison. He crossed to the bed and tore the sheets off with a violence that made the fabric rip, the sound of tearing silk loud in the quiet room. He threw them into the fire, watching the flames consume the evidence of her presence. The silk curled and blackened. The perfume burned with a sickly sweet smell. The memory of her body on his bed, her bare skin on his sheets, her greed and her ambition and her utter lack of shame, all of it turned to ash.
—
The morning sun streamed through the tall windows of the Prince's chambers, pale and golden and utterly indifferent to the tension that hung in the air like a held breath. Your ladies moved around you with the practiced efficiency of women who had done this a hundred times before, their hands quick and their faces carefully blank. The ritual of dressing was always the same. The unlacing of the nightshift, the damp cloth passed over your skin, the careful arrangement of the morning gown with its seams already straining against the swell of your belly.
Today, however, something was different. You felt it the moment Lady Alia entered the room, she was late. That was the first sign. Alia was never late. She was the youngest of your ladies, barely eight and ten, with honey-colored hair that fell in perfect ringlets around a face like a porcelain doll, and she had always taken her duties with a particular and pointed diligence. She was ambitious in her own small way, viciously and transparently ambitious, and her ambition manifested as punctuality. She was always on time. She was always perfectly dressed, perfectly coiffed, perfectly composed. She was always ready with a sweet smile and a poison-laced comment delivered in the most innocent of tones, the kind of comment that left no mark on the surface but burrowed deep into the skin and festered there.
But this morning, she was late, and when she finally swept through the door, her honey-colored hair pulled back too tightly from her face, her porcelain features pinched and sour, her blue eyes rimmed with red and swollen from a night spent weeping or raging or both, you knew that something had happened. Something significant. Something that had stripped away her careful composure and left this raw and seething creature in its place.
Lady Jeyne noticed it too. Of course she did. Jeyne noticed everything, she had made a career out of noticing things. Her gaze flickered to Alia as the younger woman crossed the room, and her thin lips curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes, a smile that spoke of anticipation rather than warmth.
"Lady Alia," Jeyne said, her voice light and conversational and utterly devoid of genuine feeling. "We were beginning to wonder if you had abandoned us. Her Grace has been waiting for her morning gown. The poor thing can barely stand for more than a few minutes without growing winded. She needs our assistance more than ever now that she is so very large and so very helpless."
"Forgive me." The word was clipped, bitten off at the end like a thread severed by teeth. Alia did not look at Jeyne. She did not look at Mariene, who had paused in her arrangement of your jewelry to watch the exchange with her usual quiet and vulture-like attention. She looked at you. Only at you, and her eyes, those pretty blue eyes that usually sparkled with mockery and malice, were burning with something that went far beyond her usual contempt. "I did not sleep well. I had a very trying night."
"How unfortunate," Jeyne murmured, her frost-colored eyes glittering with curiosity. "You do look rather peaked, my dear. Those dark circles do nothing for your complexion. Perhaps a tonic from the maester would help. Or perhaps a cold compress. You look almost as haggard as Her Grace, and she at least has the excuse of being great with child."
"Perhaps." Alia's voice was flat and hard, a voice that barely pretended to be civil. She reached for the laces of your nightshift, and her fingers were cold. Cold and rough and trembling with a suppressed fury that she did not seem to be trying very hard to suppress. She yanked at the ties, jerking the fabric loose with a violence that made you stumble forward a step, your hand flying to the bedpost to steady yourself before you could fall. The baby shifted inside you, startled by the sudden movement, and a wave of nausea rolled through your stomach.
"Careful," you said quietly. It was barely even a request. It was the same word you had spoken a hundred times before in this very room, to these very women, a small and automatic protest against the casual cruelties they inflicted on you day after day. You never expected it to work. It never did. But you said it anyway, because saying nothing felt like surrender, and you had surrendered too much already.
Alia's eyes snapped to yours in the mirror. Her lips curved into a smile that was nothing like her usual sweet and venomous expression. This smile was ugly. This smile was raw and jagged and full of something that looked almost like hatred in its purest and most undiluted form. It was the smile of a woman who had been wounded and was looking for someone to bleed in her place.
"Forgive me, Your Grace." The title dripped with contempt, each syllable a separate and carefully weighted insult. She moved closer, her cold fingers still gripping the loosened laces of your shift, her face hovering just behind your shoulder so that you could see her in the mirror, could see the hatred burning in her eyes. "I would not want to harm you. You are so very delicate in your condition. So fragile. So precious. We must treat you with the utmost care. We must wrap you in silk and carry you on a cushion and make sure nothing ever upsets you, because if something happened to the heir, what use would you be then? What possible value would you have if not for the parasite growing in your belly?"
The room went very still. Even Jeyne, who had heard and delivered a thousand veiled cruelties in her decades at court, raised an eyebrow at the naked hostility in Alia's voice. Mariene's hands had stopped moving over the jewelry entirely, her dark eyes fixed on the scene unfolding before her with the quiet intensity of a woman who knew she was witnessing something important and was determined not to miss a single detail.
"Alia," Mariene said, her voice soft and neutral, carefully modulated to give nothing away. "Perhaps you should let me attend to Her Grace's laces. You seem tired. Upset. It might be best if you took a moment to compose yourself."
"I am not tired." Alia's voice was sharp, almost shrill, cutting through the air like a blade. She moved around you in a slow circle, her fingers trailing across the fabric of your nightshift, her eyes never leaving your face. Her touch was light and mocking, the touch of someone examining a piece of livestock at market. "I am simply reflecting on the nature of worth. Of value. Of how some people have so very little of either, and yet manage to rise so far above their station through nothing more than a moderately attractive face and a convenient set of holes between their legs. It is remarkable, really. Inspiring, in a way. If a Blackfyre whore can become the Princess of Dragonstone simply by spreading her legs for the right man, what might the rest of us achieve if we were willing to debase ourselves so thoroughly?"
The words landed like a slap, stinging and hot against your skin. Your jaw tightened until your teeth ached. Your hands, still resting on your belly, curled into fists against the silk of your nightshift, the knuckles going white with the force of your grip. But you said nothing. You had learned, over seven long moons in this castle, that silence was your only weapon. Silence was your only protection. If you spoke, if you reacted, if you gave them anything at all, they would twist it and weaponize it and use it to flay you alive. They had done it before. They would do it again.
But Alia was not finished. She had barely begun. The fury that had been burning in her eyes since she walked through the door was spilling over now, pouring out of her in a torrent of venom that she had clearly been holding back for hours, for days, for perhaps her entire life.
"Some people," she continued, her voice rising with each word, gaining strength and volume and a kind of manic energy, "arrive at this castle with nothing. No name. No honor. No value beyond a traitor's bloodline and a body that happens to catch a prince's eye. A body that any dockside whore in Flea Bottom could match, and probably has more skill with besides. And yet they are given everything. A royal marriage. A place at court. Servants and gowns and jewels and the adoration of a man who should have known better than to sully himself with conquered flesh, with enemy flesh, with the daughter of the very house that tried to destroy his family. It is obscene. It is an insult to every woman of true and noble birth who has ever worked and waited and sacrificed for a fraction of what this Blackfyre slut was handed for nothing."
She stopped in front of you, her face inches from yours, her blue eyes blazing with a hatred so pure and so intense that it seemed to heat the air between you. Her breath was sour, stale from a sleepless night, and you could see the broken capillaries in her eyes, the traces of tears she had shed before coming to this room.
"While others," she said, and her voice dropped to a low and shaking whisper, "others who are loyal, who are worthy, who have served faithfully and done everything that was asked of them and more, are cast aside like garbage. Humiliated. Rejected. Told by the Prince himself that they are nothing, that they are worthless, that they cannot compare to the Blackfyre whore he married. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine being told, by a man you have admired and desired and dreamed of, that you are less than nothing compared to a traitor's daughter who got lucky on her back?"
You stared at her. Your heart was pounding in your chest, a slow and heavy drumbeat that you could feel in your throat, in your temples, in the tips of your fingers. The baby kicked, a sharp and startled movement high against your ribs, as if the child could sense the danger in the room. Your hands pressed harder against your belly, trying to soothe, trying to protect, trying to shield your child from the ugliness that was filling the room like smoke.
"Alia," Jeyne said, and this time there was a genuine note of warning in her voice. A line was being crossed, a boundary was being breached, and even Jeyne, who delighted in cruelty, could see that Alia was careening toward something dangerous. "That is quite enough. You are speaking to the Princess of Dragonstone, not some scullery maid you can berate without consequence."
"Is it enough?" Alia spun to face the older woman, her hands shaking at her sides, her whole body trembling with the force of her rage. "Is it nearly enough? Because I do not think it is a fraction of what needs to be said. I do not think it is a thousandth part of what this creature deserves to hear. Do you know what they say about her, Lady Jeyne? The servants? The courtiers? The noble girls who come to court hoping to catch the Prince's eye and rescue him from his Blackfyre mistake?" She turned back to you, her smile wide and ugly and triumphant, a smile that spoke of secrets and rumors and the kind of poison that could not be cured. "They say the Prince will tire of her within a moon of the birth. Not a year. A moon. Perhaps less. They say he only wanted an heir from her, a child with the blood of Old Valyria, the blood she carries in her traitor's veins through nothing more than a quirk of bastard lineage. And once the child comes, once she has served her purpose and pushed out his spawn, he will set her aside like a broken toy that has stopped being entertaining. He will find someone younger. Someone prettier. Someone whose body has not been ruined and stretched and destroyed by carrying his child. Someone who is not carrying the weight of her family's treason in every breath she takes and every word she speaks and every drop of blood in her veins."
Your hands were shaking now. You could feel the tremors running up your arms, into your shoulders, into the rigid column of your spine that was trying so hard to hold you upright. The cracks in your chest, the ones that had been spreading for weeks, spreading with every visit from a noble girl and every touch of a hand on your husband's arm and every whispered comment from your ladies, were creaking and groaning under the pressure. You felt like a dam about to break. You felt like a tower about to collapse. You felt like everything you had tried so hard to hold together was about to shatter into a thousand pieces.
"Perhaps he already has," Alia continued, stepping closer, her voice dropping to a low and intimate murmur that was somehow worse than her shouting. She was close enough now that you could count her eyelashes, could see the flecks of gold in her blue irises, could smell the stale wine on her breath from whatever she had drunk to fortify herself during the night. "Perhaps that is why he spends so much time with the Ashford girl. The Caswell girl. The Florent girl. Perhaps he is sampling the wares, comparing the merchandise, deciding which one he will take to his bed once the Blackfyre whore is no longer useful. Once she has given him what he wants, the heir, the bloodline, the proof of his conquest, and her body is ruined and stretched and ugly beyond repair. What man wants a wife like that? What man wants a woman whose belly hangs loose and whose breasts sag and whose body is covered in the marks of childbirth, when he could have a fresh young virgin with firm tits and a flat stomach and a name that does not make the realm whisper traitor every time she enters a room?"
She reached out and poked your belly with one sharp finger, her nail digging into the silk of your nightshift, pressing hard against the taut skin beneath. The baby jerked inside you, a violent and startled movement, and you stumbled back a step with a gasp that was equal parts pain and shock.
"Do you think he will even wait for the birth?" Alia asked, her voice bright and curious, as if she were inquiring about the weather. "Do you think he might already have one of them in his bed right now, while you lie alone in your chambers with your swollen ankles and your aching back and your useless, ruined body? Do you think he whispers the same things to Lady Evelina that he once whispered to you? Do you think he presses his hand to her flat stomach and tells her how beautiful she is, how perfect, how much he wants her? I would wager he does. I would wager he has already forgotten what you look like, forgotten what you feel like, forgotten that you exist at all except as the vessel that will deliver his heir and then be discarded like the garbage you are."
"Stop," you said. It was a plea. A desperate and ragged plea that tore itself from your throat before you could stop it, before you could swallow it down, before you could remember that showing weakness to these women was like bleeding in front of sharks. Your voice cracked on the single syllable, and you hated yourself for it. You hated the tremor in your hands and the burning in your eyes and the way your whole body was shaking with the effort of holding back the tears that were threatening to spill down your cheeks.
But Alia did not stop. She was too far gone now, too consumed by whatever rejection she had suffered the night before, too drunk on her own rage and humiliation to pull back from the edge. She leaned in close, her face inches from yours, her breath hot and sour against your skin, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost tender. Almost gentle. And infinitely more cruel for it.
"And the child," she whispered, and her lips curved into a smile that was soft and sweet and utterly monstrous. "That poor, unfortunate child growing in your belly. That half-Blackfyre abomination that you think will save you. What do you think will happen to it? Do you think the realm will accept a Blackfyre spawn as the heir to the Iron Throne? Do you think the King will suffer the blood of traitors to sit the seat of his ancestors? They will never let it inherit. Never. Not while there are true Targaryens living, not while there are lords with swords and honor and the will to defend the realm from bastard pretenders. The moment it draws breath, the whispers will begin. The plots. The daggers in the dark. They will smother it in the cradle and call it a mercy, and everyone will agree that it was for the best, that the realm was spared a civil war, that the Blackfyre taint was finally and forever washed clean from the bloodline."
She paused, letting the words sink in, letting them burrow deep into the soft and vulnerable places of your heart. Her smile widened. Her eyes sparkled with a malice that was almost joyful.
"And you," she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper so quiet you could barely hear it. "You will be sent back to whatever gutter you crawled out of. Back to Tyrosh, perhaps, if they are feeling generous. Back to the exile where your family has been rotting. Alone and broken and weeping over the corpse of your dead and worthless and traitor-spawned child. You will have nothing. No husband. No crown. No baby to love you. Just the memory of your failure and the knowledge that you were never anything more than a vessel, a broodmare, a Blackfyre whore who spread her legs for the prince and thought that made her something special. You will die alone and forgotten, and no one will mourn you. No one will even remember your name."
The brush was in your hand. One moment you were standing frozen before the mirror, your hands trembling at your sides, your vision blurring with rage and grief and moons of silent and suffocating endurance. The next moment, the heavy silver hairbrush was in your grip, the one with the dragon-shaped handle that Valarr had given you in the early weeks of your marriage, the one you had used every morning since, the one that had become as familiar to your hand as your own reflection. Your arm was swinging, and the brush was connecting with Alia's face with a sound like a branch snapping in a winter storm.
The impact shuddered up your arm, a satisfying and terrible jolt that you felt in your shoulder and your elbow and your wrist. Alia's head snapped to the side. Her hands flew to her face, her mouth opening in a scream of shock and pain, and blood, bright red and startlingly vivid against the pale cream of her skin, began to pour from her nose in a thick and pulsing stream.
But you did not stop. You could not stop. Something had broken inside you, some dam that had been holding back months of cruelty and mockery and silent and grinding despair, and now the flood was pouring out and you could no more stop it than you could stop the tide from rising or the sun from setting. You swung the brush again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
The silver handle cracked against Alia's cheekbone with a wet and sickening thud that echoed off the stone walls. It caught her across the temple, opening a gash that immediately began to weep blood into her honey-colored hair, staining the perfect ringlets a dark and ugly crimson. It slammed into her upraised arm, the one she had thrown up to protect her face, and you heard something snap, something that might have been bone or might have been the handle of the brush itself. You did not care. You kept swinging. You would have kept swinging until your arm fell off, until the brush disintegrated in your hand, until there was nothing left of Alia but a smear of blood and bone and honey-colored hair on the cold stone floor.
"You do not speak of my child." The words tore from your throat, raw and ragged and barely recognizable as your own voice. You were howling. You were screaming with a fury that had been building since the night of your wedding, since the first cold walk to Valarr's chambers, since the first time Jeyne had tightened your laces too hard and smiled at your discomfort and whispered something cruel in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. "You do not speak of my child. You do not look at my child. You do not breathe near my child, do you hear me? Do you hear me, you venomous little snake? You worthless and pathetic and ugly little creature? You will never speak of my child again. You will never think of my child again. You will never come near my child again, because I will kill you. I will kill you with my bare hands before I let you touch my baby."
Alia was on the floor now, curled into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head, her screams dissolving into wet and choking sobs that bubbled up through the blood pouring from her nose and mouth. The brush rose and fell, rose and fell, spattering blood across your gown and across the polished floor and across the mirror where you had watched yourself endure so many silent cruelties. Your reflection was a stranger. A wild-eyed and snarling creature with blood on her face and madness in her eyes and her silver-gold hair flying around her shoulders like a fury's mane. You did not recognize her. You did not want to recognize her. She was everything you had tried so hard not to become, everything they had been pushing you toward since the day you arrived at this cursed castle.
"You think you can threaten my child?" You were screaming now, screaming so loudly that your throat burned with it. "You think you can stand there and tell me they will smother my baby in the cradle and I will do nothing? I will kill you. I will kill you before I let you touch my child. I will kill anyone who tries to harm my child. I will burn this castle to the ground with everyone in it before I let anyone harm my child. Do you understand me? Do you understand me, you pathetic and worthless and evil little bitch?"
"Guards!" Jeyne was screaming, her composure finally and utterly shattered, her frost-colored eyes wide with something that might have been terror or might have been excitement. "Guards, help! She is killing her! The Princess has gone mad! She is killing Lady Alia!"
Mariene had flung open the door and was shouting into the corridor, her voice high and shrill and urgent. Footsteps thundered on the stone outside, heavy boots and the jangle of armor, and then hands were grabbing you, pulling you back, wrenching the bloody brush from your grip. You fought them. Gods, you fought them. You kicked and thrashed and clawed at their armor with your bare hands, your swollen belly heaving with the effort, the baby kicking furiously inside you as if joining the battle, as if fighting alongside its mother against the enemies that surrounded you.
"Let me go! Let me go, I will kill her, I will rip her apart, I will—"
"There are two of them in there," one of the guards was saying, his voice strained with the effort of restraining you without hurting you. "The babe and her both. Careful with the belly. Don't hurt the heir. Watch her feet, she's kicking, she's trying to—there, got her. Hold her still. Hold her still!"
"Get her out of here," Jeyne ordered, her voice cold and sharp and full of a satisfaction that she did not bother to hide. "Take her to her old chambers. The tower room at the end of the winding stair. Lock her in and post a guard at the door. She is a danger to herself and others. Someone fetch the maester for Lady Alia immediately, and someone else inform the Prince of what has happened. Tell him his wife has gone mad. Tell him she attacked an innocent lady of the court with a hairbrush and nearly beat her to death. Tell him everything."
They dragged you from the room. Your feet slipped on the bloody floor, skidding through the crimson smears that had splattered across the stone in wide and violent arcs. You caught one last glimpse of Alia, still curled on the floor, her face a mask of blood that obscured her features entirely, her honey-colored hair matted and dark with gore, her sobs rising into hysterical wails that echoed off the walls and followed you down the corridor like a curse.
The walk to your old chambers was a blur of stone walls and torchlight and the cold and shocked faces of servants who pressed themselves against the walls to let the guards pass. You were still struggling, still fighting, your breath coming in ragged gasps that were half sob and half scream. The guards did not speak to you. They did not look at you. They simply held your arms in their iron grips and marched you through the corridors with the grim efficiency of men who had done this before, who would do this again, who had long ago learned not to question the orders they were given. You were a prisoner being transported, not a princess being escorted. You were a criminal. A madwoman. A danger to herself and others.
Your old chambers. The tower room at the end of the winding stair. You recognized the door immediately, the iron bands and the heavy oak and the small and grated window set into the wood. This had been your prison for the first weeks of your marriage, the cold and barren room where you had been kept like a captive, you had hoped never to see it again. You had prayed to gods you did not believe in that you would never be forced to return to this place with its threadbare tapestries and its single narrow window and its bed that felt like stone beneath your body.
But here you were, the guards threw you inside. You stumbled forward, catching yourself on the edge of the bed, your swollen belly making the movement awkward and graceless and painful. Behind you, the door slammed shut with a boom that echoed through the cold stone chamber like the closing of a tomb. The bolt slid home with a sound like a death knell, a heavy and final thud that seemed to reverberate through your very bones and into the floor and into the walls and into every corner of your shattered soul.
And then there was silence, you stood in the center of the cold and empty room, your chest heaving, your breath coming in great and ragged gasps that burned in your throat and tore at your lungs. Alia's blood was on your gown. On your face. On your hands. Under your fingernails, dark and sticky and still warm. It was drying now, turning brown and crusted, pulling at your skin every time you moved your fingers. Your knuckles were bruised and swelling, the skin split across two of your fingers where you had struck Alia's teeth, and you could feel the dull throb of pain beginning to set in as the fury drained away and left nothing but exhaustion in its wake. Your hair had come loose from its careful arrangement, hanging in wild tangles around your shoulders, matted with sweat and blood and the sheer and blind rage that had consumed you so completely that you had forgotten who you were.
The baby kicked. A sharp and insistent movement, low in your belly, reassuring and terrifying all at once. Your child. Your child was still there, still alive, still fighting, still moving inside you with a vitality that made your eyes sting with tears. You pressed both hands to your stomach, feeling the flutter of tiny limbs beneath your palms, and something inside you broke. Not the dam this time. Something deeper. Something more essential. Something that had been holding you together through seven moons of misery and loneliness and fear, and that now crumbled into dust.
A sob rose in your throat. You choked it down with a sound that was half gasp and half whimper. Then another came, and another, and another, until you were weeping with your whole body, your shoulders shaking, your face crumpling, your legs giving way beneath you so that you sank onto the cold stone floor in a heap of ruined silk and drying blood and the shattered remnants of your dignity.
What had you done?
The question echoed through your mind like a bell tolling, over and over and over, each repetition louder and more terrible than the last. What had you done, what had you done, what had you done?
You had attacked one of your ladies. You had beaten her bloody with a hairbrush in front of witnesses, and now you were locked in your old chambers, waiting for judgment like a criminal awaiting execution. And you were a criminal. There was no denying it. You had assaulted a noblewoman, the daughter of a lord, a member of the royal household with family connections and political influence and a name that was not tainted by rebellion and treason. It did not matter what Alia had said. It did not matter that she had threatened your child and mocked your body and predicted your ruin with a smile on her pretty porcelain face. It did not matter that she had provoked you deliberately and cruelly and without mercy. None of that mattered. You were a Blackfyre. She was a lady of the Reach. Her word would carry more weight than yours. Her blood was worth more than yours. It always had been. It always would be.
They would punish you for this. Perhaps they would strip you of your title and send you to the Silent Sisters. Perhaps they would lock you in this tower room forever, leaving you to rot in the cold and the dark while your child was taken from you the moment it was born.
And Valarr. Gods, Valarr. What would he do when he heard what you had done? He had warned you, hadn't he? He had told you that you needed to control yourself, that you needed to be careful, that the court was full of people who wanted to see you fall. And you had failed him. You had failed him spectacularly and violently and publicly, and now he would have no choice but to condemn you. Perhaps he had been looking for an excuse all along. Perhaps the whispers had been true. Perhaps he only wanted an heir from you, and once the child was born, he intended to set you aside and take one of those slim and beautiful noble girls to his bed. Perhaps this would be the perfect opportunity. Perhaps he would use your violence against Alia as justification to cast you out, to declare you unfit, to separate you from your child and install Lady Evelina Florent in your place.
The thoughts spiraled through your mind, dark and desperate and utterly consuming, each one worse than the last. You pressed your hands harder against your belly, as if you could shield the child from the future that was rushing toward you both like a tidal wave. The baby kicked again, softer this time, a gentle flutter against your palm, and you felt fresh tears spill down your cheeks. Your child. Your innocent and helpless child, who had done nothing wrong, who had committed no crime except to grow in the womb of a Blackfyre mother. What would happen to your child when they came for you? Would they let you keep the baby until it was born, or would they tear it from your arms the moment it drew breath? Would they hand it to some wet nurse, some proper Targaryen lady who would raise it to forget its mother, to forget your face and your voice and the way you had held your hands over your belly and promised to protect it from the world? Would your child grow up believing that its mother was a madwoman, a violent and unstable creature who had been locked away for the safety of the realm?.
The grief that swelled in your chest was so vast and so overwhelming that you thought it might crush you. You wrapped your arms around your belly and bent forward until your forehead touched the cold stone floor, and you wept. You wept for your child, who might never know its mother. You wept for yourself, for the girl you had been before the war and the marriage and the slow and grinding destruction of everything you had ever been. You wept for the future that had been stolen from you, the future that you had tried so hard to build despite every obstacle, the future that now lay in ruins at your feet.
You did not know how long you stayed there, curled on the cold stone floor with your forehead pressed to the ground and your arms wrapped around your belly. The light through the single narrow window shifted as the sun moved across the sky, climbing the walls and sliding across the threadbare tapestries and fading from gold to grey to the deep amber of late afternoon. No one came. No one summoned you. No one brought you food or water or word of what was happening outside this cold and silent room. The door remained locked, the bolt secure, the silence absolute except for the distant crash of waves against the cliffs below the castle and the harsh and ragged sound of your own breathing.
You were alone. You were utterly and completely and terrifyingly alone. You were a Blackfyre in a castle full of Targaryens, a conquered enemy in the heart of the conqueror's power, and you had just given them the perfect excuse to destroy you.
The baby kicked again. Soft and steady and impossibly fragile, a tiny foot pressing against your palm like a promise, you held on to that feeling. It was all you had left. It was the only thing in the world that was still yours, the only thing they could not take from you, at least not yet. Not until the child was born. Not until they tore it from your arms and gave it to someone else and told you that you had never deserved to be a mother in the first place.
And you wept until there were no tears left, until your body was empty and hollow and numb, until the light outside the narrow window faded to black and the room was plunged into darkness.
No one came. No one would come. You were alone with your child and your fear and the cold and certain knowledge that you had destroyed everything, and there was no one in the world who would save you.
—
The door opened, you flinched at the sound, your body curling inward around your belly before your mind could catch up, your hands flying up to protect your face in a gesture that was primal and animal and utterly humiliating. A beaten dog cowering before the master's hand. That was what you had become. That was what they had made you. You had been sitting on the cold stone floor for hours, your back pressed against the hard edge of the bedframe, your knees drawn up as far as your swollen belly would allow which was not far at all anymore. The blood on your gown had dried to a stiff and crackling crust that flaked off in brown specks every time you shifted your weight. Your hair hung in matted ropes around your face, tangled with sweat and blood and the salt of dried tears. Your eyes were so swollen from weeping that the world had become a blurry smear of grey stone and fading light, your lashes stuck together in clumps, your cheeks raw and stinging. Your throat burned from the sobs you had been unable to fully suppress, the sobs that had torn their way out of you for what felt like hours until there was nothing left inside your chest but a hollow and echoing emptiness.
You had expected guards. You had been listening for their footsteps in the corridor, the heavy tread of armored boots on ancient stone, the jangle of swords in their scabbards. You had expected the cold and measured voice of the King's Justice, some grey and faceless man in grey and faceless robes, informing you that you were to be confined to your chambers until the birth after which your fate would be determined by men who had never seen you as anything more than a conquered enemy. You had expected Baelor. Gods, you had expected Baelor, his mismatched eyes gleaming with quiet satisfaction as he stood in the doorway and told you that he had warned you, that no one would protect you, that you should have accepted his offer when you had the chance, that this was the price of your defiance and your pride and your foolish belief that you could ever be anything more than a Blackfyre in a Targaryen castle.
You had not expected Valarr.
But it was Valarr who burst through the door, the heavy oak slamming against the stone wall with a crack that made you flinch and curl tighter around yourself. His dark hair was disheveled, hanging in wild strands around his face, and you realized with a shock that you had never seen him like this before, his doublet was half unlaced, the dark silk hanging open to reveal the white linen of his undershirt beneath. His boots were scuffed with dust as if he had been running through the servants' passages rather than the main corridors. His mismatched eyes were wild, darting around the cold and barren chamber with a frantic desperation that made him look almost feral, and when they found you huddled on the floor like a wounded animal, something in his face crumpled. Something broke. Something you had never seen before, not once in all the months of your marriage, not even when he had knelt at your feet with tears in his eyes and his hand on your belly.
"Y/N."
Your name. Just your name, he said your name like a prayer. He said your name like a man who had been drowning and had just caught sight of the shore. He said your name like you were the most precious thing in the world and he had been terrified, genuinely and desperately terrified, that he had lost you forever.
"Valarr." Your voice was a wreck, hoarse and cracked and barely audible, scraped raw by hours of weeping and screaming. You tried to say more but the words caught in your throat, tangled up with the sobs that were threatening to overwhelm you again. "Valarr, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to, I never wanted to hurt anyone. She was saying such terrible things, such awful things, and I couldn't stop myself, I couldn't control it, I just grabbed the brush and then there was blood everywhere and I couldn't stop hitting her, I couldn't stop, I couldn't—"
He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees before you. The impact of his body hitting the stone floor was hard enough that you heard it, a dull and heavy thud that must have hurt, must have bruised his knees through the fabric of his breeches, but he did not seem to notice or care. His hands found your face immediately, cupping your cheeks with a gentleness that was almost shocking after the violence of his entrance. His palms were warm against your chilled skin, his fingers threading into the mess of your hair, and he tilted your head up so that he could look at you properly. His thumbs brushed across your cheekbones, slow and careful, smearing the dried blood that had splattered there during your attack on Alia. His mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown, both blazing with an intensity that stole the breath from your lungs, searched your face with frantic and desperate attention. He was looking for injuries. He was cataloguing every scratch and bruise and smear of blood, his gaze flickering from your swollen eyes to the cut on your lip where you had bitten yourself during the struggle to the purpling bruise on your jaw where one of the guards had grabbed you too hard.
"You're bleeding." His voice was rough and almost accusatory, as if your injuries were a personal affront, as if someone had dared to damage something that belonged to him and he was trying very hard not to explode with rage. His thumb traced the edge of the bruise on your jaw, feather-light and trembling. "There's blood all over you. All over your face. All over your gown. Where are you hurt? Where did she hurt you? Tell me where she hurt you. Tell me and I will—"
"It's not mine." The words came out between sobs, halting and broken, and you grabbed at his wrists with your own shaking hands. You needed him to understand. You needed him to know the truth before he heard it from someone else, before Jeyne's poison or Mariene's quiet lies reached his ears. "It's not my blood. It's hers. Lady Alia's. I hit her. I hit her with the silver brush, the one you gave me, the one with the dragon handle. I hit her and I kept hitting her and I didn't mean to, Valarr, I swear I didn't mean to. I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't want to become this. But she was saying such terrible things and I tried to stay silent, I tried so hard to endure it the way I always do, but she wouldn't stop and then she talked about the baby and I just—I just—"
"You hit her?"
The question was flat. Quiet. Utterly without inflection. He was still holding your face in his hands, still searching your eyes with that desperate intensity, but something in his expression had shifted. The frantic terror was still there, simmering beneath the surface, but beneath it something else was stirring.
"Please don't punish me." The plea tore from your throat before you could stop it, raw and desperate and utterly pathetic. Your hands clutched at his doublet, your fingers tangling in the dark silk, your bruised and swollen knuckles pressing against the hard plane of his chest. You were babbling now, the words pouring out of you in a torrent that you could not control, seven moons of silent endurance finally breaking free. "Please, Valarr, please don't punish me. I didn't mean to do it. I tried so hard to be good, I tried so hard to endure everything they said to me, every day, every single day for months. The things they whispered while they dressed me, the things they said about my body and my blood and my family. I never said anything back. I never complained. But she was talking about the baby, Valarr. Our baby. She said they would smother our child in the cradle and call it a mercy. She said our baby was a half-Blackfyre abomination and no one would ever accept it and the realm would be grateful when it was dead. She said you would set me aside and find someone prettier and younger and slimmer and I would be sent back to Tyrosh alone and I would never see our child again. And I tried to stay silent, I tried to be strong, but I couldn't. I couldn't listen to her talk about our baby like that. I couldn't let her threaten our child. So I hit her. I hit her and I kept hitting her and I don't remember how many times and now there's blood everywhere and I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, please don't punish me, please don't send me away, please don't take my baby—"
"Punish you?"
His voice cut through your rambling like a blade through silk, sharp and sudden and utterly final. You looked up at him, your vision blurry with fresh tears, your breath still hitching in your chest, and you saw that his expression had changed completely. The frantic desperation was still there, but it had been swallowed up by something else. His jaw was clenched so tightly that the muscle beneath the skin was jumping. His whole body was rigid with a fury that made the air around him seem to crackle and spark, a fury so vast and so consuming that it seemed to fill every corner of the cold stone chamber.
"I would never punish you." He said the words slowly and deliberately, as if he were explaining something very simple to a child, as if he needed you to understand this above all else. "I would never punish you for defending yourself. For defending our child. I would never punish you for fighting back against someone who threatened our baby." His thumbs brushed the tears from your cheeks, achingly gentle despite the rage that was visibly coursing through him like a storm.
Then he said, very quietly, "They said our child would be smothered in the cradle."
"She said, Lady Alia said that the realm would never accept a Blackfyre heir and they would—"
"I heard you." His thumb traced the line of your cheekbone, feather-light, and his voice softened. "I heard you, my love. I heard every word. And I want you to listen to me now. Can you do that? Can you look at me and listen?"
You nodded, your breath still hitching in your chest, your hands still clutching the silk of his doublet like it was the only solid thing in a world that had turned to water.
He shifted closer to you on the cold stone floor, his knees pressing against your thighs, his body curving around yours as if he wanted to shield you from every threat in the world. One hand remained on your face, cupping your cheek with a tenderness that made your heart ache. The other hand moved down, slowly, deliberately, and came to rest on the great swell of your belly where his child was growing. His palm was warm through the stiff and bloodied fabric of your gown, his fingers spreading wide as if he could encompass the entire world in that single touch. You felt the baby kick beneath his hand, a soft and fluttering movement, and something in his expression cracked open.
"No one will hurt our child." His voice was low and intense, full of a conviction that bordered on ferocity. His hand pressed more firmly against your belly, feeling the life that moved beneath. "No one will hurt you. Not the servants, not the courtiers, not those venomous snakes who called themselves your ladies in waiting. No one. Do you understand me, my love? Do you understand what I am telling you?" His grip on your face tightened slightly, not painfully, just enough to make sure you were looking at him, just enough to make sure you could not look away. "Our child is not an abomination. Our child is a Targaryen. Our child is my heir, and your heir, and the heir to the Iron Throne, and anyone who suggests otherwise, anyone who whispers a single word against our baby, will answer to me. Personally. Do you understand?"
"But the realm." Your voice cracked on the word. "The lords. The people. They hate my bloodline. They hate everything I come from. They will never accept—"
"The realm will accept our child because I will make them accept our child. Because my grandfather the King will make them accept our child. Because anyone who does not accept our child will learn very quickly what happens to those who defy House Targaryen." He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching yours, his breath warm against your tear-stained lips. His mismatched eyes were so close you could see the flecks of gold in the blue one and the threads of amber in the brown. "I have spent my entire life being told I was not enough. Not Valyrian enough. Not Targaryen enough. I swore to myself, long before I ever met you, long before I ever knew you existed, that my children would never suffer what I suffered. My children would never doubt their place. My children would never be whispered about in dark corners. My children would know, from the moment they drew breath, that they were wanted and loved and protected."
His hand moved from your belly up to your chest, pressing flat against your sternum, right over your heart. You could feel the warmth of his palm through the ruined silk of your gown, could feel the steady pressure of his touch grounding you in the present moment.
"This child is mine," he said, and his voice was fierce and tender all at once. "This child is yours. This child is the future of House Targaryen. And I will burn this castle to the ground with everyone in it before I let anyone threaten that. Anyone. Do you hear me? Anyone."
A fresh sob rose in your throat, but this one was different from the ones that had come before. This one was born of something you had not felt in a very long time, something you had not let yourself feel because feeling it would have been too painful. Something that felt almost like being loved.
"Valarr," you whispered, and his name on your lips was a prayer and a plea and a surrender all at once.
"I am here." He pulled you against his chest in one swift and decisive movement, his arms wrapping around you with that familiar and possessive grip that you had come to know so well. One arm curved around your back, his hand pressing flat between your shoulder blades, holding you against him so tightly that you could feel every beat of his heart against your cheek. The other hand cradled the back of your head, his fingers threading through the tangled and matted mess of your hair, his thumb stroking the sensitive spot behind your ear. He pulled you closer still, impossibly close, until your swollen belly was pressed against his stomach and your face was buried in the hollow of his throat and you were surrounded by him completely. The scent of him, sandalwood and smoke and something dark and masculine, filled your lungs with every breath. The warmth of him seeped into your chilled and aching body. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear was the most comforting sound you had ever heard.
"I am here," he said again, his lips moving against your hair. "I am here, and I am not going anywhere. And neither are you. And neither is our child. You are mine, both of you, and I will never let anything happen to you. I will never let anyone hurt you again. I failed you. I failed you so badly, my love, and I am so sorry."
"Valarr." His name was the only word you could remember. The only word that mattered.
"I am sorry." His voice was hoarse now, cracking with an emotion he was barely holding back. His arms tightened around you until you could barely breathe, but you did not want him to let go. You never wanted him to let go. "I am sorry I did not see what they were doing to you. I am sorry I was so consumed with the council and the harbor proposal and the endless and petty frustrations of ruling that I did not notice my wife was being tortured by the very women who were supposed to serve her. I am sorry I let them near you. I am sorry I trusted them. I am sorry you suffered in silence for months because you thought I would not believe you, because you thought I would take their word over yours." He pulled back just enough to look at your face, and his mismatched eyes were wet with tears that spilled over and ran down his cheeks without shame. "I will always believe you. Do you understand? Always. You are my wife. You are the mother of my child. Your word is worth more to me than every lord and lady in this castle combined. And I will spend the rest of my life proving that to you if that is what it takes."
You buried your face in the hollow of his shoulder and wept. Not the wild and hysterical weeping of before, not the desperate and terrified sobs that had torn their way out of you on the cold stone floor. Something quieter. Something deeper. Something that felt almost like relief, like the release of a tension you had been holding for so long you had forgotten what it felt like to breathe without it.
"I am going to fix this," he murmured against your lips. "I am going to fix everything. I am going to find every person who ever whispered a cruel word to you, every servant who looked at you with contempt, every courtier who smiled at your discomfort, every lady who made you feel like you were less than what you are. And I am going to make them regret it. I am going to make them regret every moment of cruelty they inflicted on my wife."
"Valarr." You pulled back just enough to look at him, your hands still clutching the silk of his doublet. "What happened to my ladies?"
His expression flickered. Something dark passed through his mismatched eyes, something cold and hard and utterly without mercy. His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked like a different man entirely. A man capable of terrible things. A man who had been pushed too far. But when he spoke, his voice was gentle, and his hands were still gentle, and the kiss he pressed to your forehead was as soft as a benediction.
"You do not need to worry about them. You only need to worry about yourself. And our child."
He leaned down and pressed his lips to your belly, a long and lingering kiss through the stiff and bloodied fabric of your gown. The baby kicked beneath his mouth, and he smiled against the swell of your stomach. A real smile. The smile he kept only for you.
"Come," he said, rising to his feet and reaching down to take your hands. His fingers laced through yours, warm and solid and steady, he helped you walk toward the door, his body a warm and solid presence at your side, his arm steady around your waist. Your legs were shaky, your body exhausted from the pregnancy and the weeping and the sheer emotional devastation of the past few hours. But he did not rush you. He matched his pace to yours, slow and careful, pausing whenever you needed to catch your breath. When you stumbled on the threshold, he caught you easily, sweeping you up into his arms as if you weighed nothing at all despite the great swell of your belly.
"Valarr," you protested weakly. "I am too heavy. You will hurt yourself."
"You are carrying my child. You are not heavy. You are perfect." He pressed a kiss to your temple and began walking down the corridor with you cradled against his chest. "And I am never letting you go again."
You wrapped your arms around his neck and buried your face in the curve of his shoulder. The tears were still falling, silent and slow, but they were different tears now. He carried you through the corridors, and took you to a smaller and cozier bedchamber on the other side of the royal apartments, tucked away in a quiet corner where the noise of the castle could not reach. A roaring fire was already burning in the hearth, filling the room with warmth and golden light. Fresh linens had been laid on the bed, soft and white and inviting. A dozen candles flickered on the bedside table and the mantelpiece and the windowsill, casting dancing shadows across the walls. It smelled of lavender and cedar and something sweet you could not identify. It smelled like safety.
Maester Godwyn was waiting there, his leather satchel open on the table, his lined face creased with concern. He rose as Valarr carried you through the door and laid you gently on the bed, arranging the pillows behind your back with a tenderness that made your eyes sting with fresh tears.
"Your Grace," the maester said, his voice calm and measured. "Please, lie back. Rest. I need to examine you and the child to make sure everything is as it should be."
Valarr did not leave your side. He sat on the edge of the bed beside you, one hand holding yours, the other resting on your belly. He watched the maester's every movement with hawk-like intensity, his mismatched eyes tracking Godwyn's hands as they pressed gently on your stomach and listened to your heart and examined the bruises on your knuckles. When the maester's fingers brushed too close to the bruise on your jaw, Valarr made a low sound in his throat, something between a growl and a warning, and Godwyn quickly moved his hands elsewhere.
"The babe seems healthy," the maester said after a long and thorough examination. "The heartbeat is strong, the position is good. There is no sign of distress, which is remarkable given the events of the day. However." He fixed you with a stern look over the rims of his spectacles. "I would recommend complete bed rest for the next several days. The emotional strain has taken a toll on Her Grace's body, even if she does not feel it yet. Her humors are imbalanced. Her spirit has been wounded as much as her flesh. No stress. No excitement. No visitors except His Grace and those he personally approves."
"I will see to it personally," Valarr said. His voice left no room for argument, no possibility of negotiation. "No one enters this room without my permission. No one speaks to my wife without my permission. No one so much as looks at her without my permission."
The maester nodded, apparently satisfied with this arrangement. He packed his instruments into his leather satchel with methodical precision and left with a quiet murmur about returning in the morning to check on your progress. When the door closed behind him, the silence that settled over the room was soft and warm and full of the crackling of the fire.
Valarr turned to you. His hand was still holding yours, his thumb still tracing slow circles on the back of your hand. His mismatched eyes were tired, so tired, the shadows beneath them dark as bruises. But he was looking at you with an expression that made your heart clench inside your chest.
"You need to rest," he said quietly. "The maester said so. Bed rest. No stress. No excitement."
"I know." You tugged gently on his hand. "Will you stay with me?"
"Of course I will stay with you. I am not going anywhere." He lifted your hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to your bruised knuckles, one by one, his mouth soft and warm against your split and swollen skin. "I told you. You are stuck with me forever."
"Then lie down with me." Your voice was small and tired, but it was steadier than it had been all day. "Please. I do not want to be alone. I have been alone all day. I do not want to be alone anymore."
Something flickered in his mismatched eyes. Something soft and vulnerable and almost broken. He nodded, a quick and jerky movement, and then he was unlacing his boots and shrugging off his doublet and climbing onto the bed beside you. He arranged himself carefully, mindful of your belly and your bruises and your exhausted body, and then he pulled you against his chest with that familiar and possessive grip. His arm wrapped around your waist. His hand pressed flat against your belly. His lips found your forehead and lingered there, warm and soft and full of promises he did not need to speak aloud.
"I am sorry," he whispered against your skin. "I am so sorry I did not see what they were doing to you. I am sorry I let them hurt you for so long. I am sorry you thought you could not come to me, that you thought I would not believe you, that you thought I would ever choose anyone over you."
"Valarr."
"I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I will spend the rest of my life proving to you that you can trust me. That you can come to me with anything. That I will always be on your side."
You tilted your head up to look at him. His face was so close to yours that you could see every detail. The flecks of gold in his blue eye. The amber threads in his brown eye. The lines of exhaustion around his mouth. The faint stubble on his jaw, darker than his hair, rough against your fingertips when you reached up to touch his face.
"I believe you," you said quietly. And you did. For the first time in seven moons, you did.
He smiled. It was a small and tired smile, but it was real. The smile he kept only for you.
"Good," he said. "Now sleep. I will be right here. I will keep watch. No one will hurt you while I am here."
You closed your eyes and let yourself sink into the warmth of his body and the softness of the bed and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear. His hand moved in slow and soothing circles on your belly, tracing patterns that might have been letters or might have been nothing at all. The baby kicked softly beneath his palm, a gentle flutter of movement, and you heard him exhale a breath that was almost a laugh.
"She is strong," he murmured. "Our daughter. She is a fighter, just like her mother."
"Daughter?" You opened one eye to look at him. "You think it is a girl?"
"I know it is a girl." His hand pressed more firmly against your belly, feeling the life that moved beneath. "I have known since the day the maester told me you were with child. A little girl with your silver hair and your violet eyes. A princess of the blood. The most beautiful child the Seven Kingdoms has ever seen."
"You cannot possibly know that."
"I can. I do." He pressed a kiss to your forehead. "Trust me. I am never wrong about these things."
You laughed, a soft and sleepy sound, and closed your eyes again. The fire crackled in the hearth. The candles flickered on the bedside table. And Valarr held you in the darkness, his hand on your belly and his lips on your hair and his voice a low and steady murmur in your ear, speaking words of love and protection and promise until you drifted into the first peaceful sleep you had known in weeks.
—
The study was quiet save for the crackle of the fire in the hearth and the soft and muffled sound of weeping. The hour was very late now, deep in the black and silent stretch of night when the castle slept and honest men were abed and only the wicked remained awake to do their wicked work.
Valarr Targaryen sat in the high-backed chair behind his desk, his fingers were steepled before him, the tips pressed together in a gesture of contemplation that might have looked almost prayerful if not for the cold and glittering light in his mismatched eyes. The fire had burned low in the hearth, the flames reduced to glowing embers that painted the room in shades of blood and shadow, and the darkness gathered in the corners like living things waiting to be summoned.
Before him, on the cold stone floor, three women knelt in chains. They were bound at the wrists and ankles with iron fetters that had left the skin beneath them raw and bleeding, and their fine gowns were rumpled and torn from where the guards had dragged them from their chambers without courtesy or explanation. Their carefully arranged hair had fallen in disarray around their pale and terrified faces, and their eyes were red and swollen from weeping that had gone on for hours now without respite.
Lady Alia was the worst of them. Her face was a ruin of purple and black, her nose swollen to twice its normal size and bent at an angle that suggested it had been broken in multiple places. Her left eye was so bruised she could barely open it, and what little she could see through the swollen slit must have been a nightmare of shadow and firelight and the cold and merciless face of the prince who sat in judgment before her. None of them dared to speak. The time for speaking had passed, and they knew it now, and the knowledge was a cold and heavy stone sitting in the pit of each of their stomachs.
Behind them, against the far wall, stood four men in the white armor of the Kingsguard. Their helmets had been removed, as had their swords, which lay in a neat pile on the floor near the door like offerings at an altar. They stood at attention with their hands clasped behind their backs and their faces carefully blank in the way that soldiers learned to make their faces blank when they were facing something terrible. But there was a tension in their postures, a rigidity and a tightness around the eyes and a faint sheen of sweat on their brows, that betrayed their fear. These were men who had served the royal family for years, decades in some cases, and they had never been summoned before a prince like this. Never been lined up like criminals awaiting judgment. Never been made to stand and listen while three noblewomen wept on the floor and begged for mercies that would not come.
Valarr let the silence stretch. He was good at silence, better than most, better than anyone except perhaps his father. He had learned it at Baelor's knee, watching the way a pause could be more intimidating than any threat, the way quiet could unnerve an enemy more effectively than shouting ever could. A man who shouted had lost control. A man who whispered, a man who waited, a man who let the silence do his work for him, that was a man who held all the power in the room. He watched the women sob until their throats grew raw. He watched the guards sweat until their white armor seemed to glow with moisture in the firelight. He let the fire pop and crackle and fill the room with its warm and deceptive light, and he waited, and he waited, and he waited.
Finally, he spoke. "Do you know why you are here?"
His voice was soft. Conversational. Almost pleasant, the voice of a man inquiring about the weather or the quality of the wine at supper. It was the voice he used at council meetings when he was about to dismantle someone's argument piece by piece, the voice he used when lords twice his age came before him with petitions they thought were clever and left with nothing but the shattered remnants of their pride. It was the voice he used when he was at his most dangerous, and every person in this room knew it.
Lady Jeyne raised her head. Her cold grey eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her weathered face pale as milk, but there was still a flicker of defiance in her expression, a stubborn and desperate refusal to accept the reality of her situation. Even now, even on her knees in chains, even after everything that had happened, she could not quite believe that this was real. That she, a lady of the Reach and a widow of a loyal lord and a woman who had served the royal household for years without complaint or censure, was being treated like a common criminal by the prince she had watched grow from a sullen boy into a dangerous man.
"Your Grace," she began, and her voice was trembling but still clinging to its usual veneer of deference, still trying to find the old pathways of manipulation that had served her so well for so long. "I am certain there has been some terrible misunderstanding. If Lady Alia said something to offend Her Grace, I assure you I had no knowledge of it until the moment it occurred. I have always served the Princess faithfully and without complaint. I have attended her since the day of her wedding. I have dressed her and bathed her and seen to her every need. If there has been some lapse in my duties, some failure of attention, I am certain it was unintentional and I am prepared to make whatever amends—"
"Faithfully."
Jeyne's mouth snapped shut.
Valarr repeated the word as if tasting it, as if it were a piece of meat that had gone slightly rotten and he was trying to decide whether to swallow or spit. His tongue lingered on the syllables, drawing them out, and his mismatched eyes never left Jeyne's face. "You have served her faithfully. That is the word you chose. Faithfully."
"Yes, Your Grace. I have always—"
"You pulled her laces too tight. Every morning for almost two years. You pulled her laces too tight."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.
"Tight enough to leave bruises on her ribs," Valarr continued, and his voice was still soft and still conversational and still absolutely terrifying. "Tight enough to make it difficult for her to breathe. Tight enough that she winced every time she moved, every time she reached for something, every time she tried to take a deep breath. You did it on purpose. You wanted her to be uncomfortable. You wanted her to suffer in small ways, in deniable ways, in ways that could not be traced back to you by anyone who was not paying very close attention." He leaned forward in his chair, just slightly, and the firelight caught his mismatched eyes and made them gleam. "I pay very close attention, Lady Jeyne. I always have."
"I. Your Grace, I would never, I have no idea what you could possibly be referring to—"
"You called her a Blackfyre whore behind her back. You said it to the other ladies. You said it to the servants. You said it loudly enough that half the castle has heard it by now, loudly enough that it has become a common jest in the kitchens and the stables and the barracks. The Princess, the woman carrying my heir, the future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and you reduced her to a punchline for stable boys and scullery maids." Valarr leaned forward another inch, and his voice dropped to a low and dangerous murmur. "Did you think I did not know?"
Jeyne's mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for water on the deck of a ship. Her grey eyes were wide now, the defiance draining out of them and being replaced by something that looked very much like fear. Beside her, Lady Mariene had gone still, her dark eyes fixed on the floor with the intensity of a woman who was trying very hard to become invisible and failing. Lady Alia continued to sob, her shoulders heaving, her breath coming in short and panicked gasps that were growing more desperate by the moment.
"I knew," Valarr said, and his voice was almost gentle now, almost kind. "I knew everything. I knew about the cold baths and the colder stares. I knew about the gowns that were deliberately ill-fitting, the ones you ordered from the seamstress with measurements that were slightly wrong, slightly too small, slightly designed to make her feel ungainly and enormous and grotesque. I knew about the meals that arrived late and cold and unappetizing, the ones you personally intercepted from the kitchens and delayed until they were barely edible. I knew about the fire that was never stoked in her chambers, the one you told the servants to neglect because Her Grace preferred the cold, because Her Grace was accustomed to discomfort. I knew about every whispered insult and every cruel comment and every moment of quiet and systematic torture you inflicted on my wife since the beginning." He paused, and his lips curved into a smile that was not a smile at all. "The only reason you were permitted to continue was because it served my purposes."
The words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Jeyne's face went from pale to grey to a sickly and mottled white. Mariene's hands began to tremble so violently that her chains rattled against the stone floor. Even Alia's sobs faltered and died, her bruised and swollen face lifting in shock and confusion and the dawning of a horror so vast it seemed to swallow every other emotion in the room.
"Your purposes?" Jeyne whispered, and her voice was barely audible, barely a breath. "What do you mean, your purposes?"
"My wife was a woman who had been stripped of her family and her name and her future and given to me as a prize of war, a spoil of victory, a living symbol of my family's triumph over hers. She had no reason to trust me. No reason to love me. No reason to seek comfort in my arms. Why would she? I was her captor. I was her enemy. I was the man who had taken everything from her and given her nothing in return but a cold bed and a colder marriage." Valarr leaned back in his chair, his expression cool and calculating, a scholar examining a particularly interesting specimen. "But she needed someone. She was alone in a castle full of enemies, surrounded by people who hated her and feared her and wished her nothing but ill. She needed someone to turn to. Someone to protect her. Someone to hold her when the cruelty became too much to bear."
He smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a predator who had just finished explaining to his prey exactly how it had been hunted.
"You pushed her toward me. Every time you made her feel small and worthless and utterly and completely alone in a world that wanted her dead. You pushed her closer to the only person in this castle who showed her any kindness, any warmth, any hint of human decency." His mismatched eyes glittered in the firelight like chips of colored glass. "You were useful. Your cruelty was useful. Every barb you planted in her heart was a barb I could remove. Every wound you inflicted was a wound I could tend. Every tear you caused was a tear I could wipe away. You were the villains of her story, and I was the hero, and she fell into my arms night after night because I was the only safe harbor in a sea of enemies you created for me."
He paused and tilted his head, studying their faces with an expression of mild curiosity.
"I should thank you, really. Without your assistance, she might never have let me touch her. Might never have let me hold her. Might never have opened her heart enough to let me plant my child inside her. You helped me win my wife, Lady Jeyne. You and Lady Mariene and Lady Alia and all the other petty and vicious little women who thought they were hurting her when they were really helping me. I am in your debt."
Mariene made a small and choked sound, something between a gasp and a sob. Jeyne looked as if she had been struck across the face with a mailed fist. Alia had stopped crying entirely, her bruised and swollen face frozen in an expression of absolute and dawning horror.
"But tonight," Valarr continued, and his voice hardened, and the cold and calculated amusement drained out of it and left nothing but iron. "Tonight you forgot your place. You forgot that you were tools, useful tools but tools nonetheless, and you began to believe that you mattered. You began to believe that your petty vendettas and your small ambitions were more important than the health and safety of my wife and my unborn child. You threatened my child."
He rose from his chair. The movement was slow and deliberate and predatory, the movement of a wolf uncoiling from its crouch. He walked around the desk and stopped before the three kneeling women, looking down at them with an expression of utter and absolute contempt, the kind of contempt a man might feel for something he had found stuck to the bottom of his boot.
"You actually believed I would side with you. With three vicious and scheming and insignificant little women from insignificant little houses. Over my wife. Over the woman carrying my heir. Over the future of House Targaryen and everything I have worked for since the day I was born." He shook his head slowly, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "You are even stupider than I thought. And I thought you were very stupid indeed."
"Your Grace, please." Jeyne's voice cracked on the words, and the defiance was gone now, replaced by a desperation that was almost feral. "Please, we never meant any harm to the child. We never touched her. We only said words. Words are not crimes. Words are not treason. You cannot punish us for words."
"Words are not crimes." Valarr repeated the phrase as if he found it genuinely amusing. "Words are not crimes. That is what you are going with. That is your defense." He crouched down in front of her, bringing his face level with hers, and Jeyne recoiled as if she had been burned. "Let me explain something to you, Lady Jeyne, since you seem to be laboring under a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. Words are the most dangerous weapons in existence. Words start wars. Words topple dynasties. Words convince men to march into battle and women to drink poison and children to carry daggers into the beds of kings. Words are not crimes? Words are the root of every crime that has ever been committed. And your words, Lady Jeyne, your words and Lady Mariene's words and Lady Alia's words, have been poison dripping into my wife's ear for moons. Your words almost killed my child tonight. The maester himself told me that the distress you caused put both mother and babe at grave risk. So do not tell me that words are not crimes. Your words are treason, and you will answer for them with your lives."
He rose to his feet and turned away from them, walking toward the four Kingsguard standing against the wall. The men straightened as he approached, their faces carefully blank, their eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. But he could see the fear in them. He could smell it, sharp and acrid in the warm air of the study. They were right to be afraid.
"Ser Eddard of the Crossing," he said, stopping before the first man. The knight was young, barely five and twenty, with a boyish face that had not yet grown into the hard lines of middle age. "You have served the Kingsguard for three years. You swore a vow to protect the royal family with your life."
"Yes, Your Grace." Ser Eddard's voice was steady, but there was a tremor beneath it, a faint and fluttering thing that he could not quite suppress. "I swore that vow. I have tried to uphold it."
"Then explain to me why, when my wife, my pregnant wife, carrying the heir to the Iron Throne, was in distress and bleeding and terrified, you dragged her through the corridors like a common criminal and locked her in a cold tower room without a fire and without a maester and without a single servant to attend to her needs. Explain to me why you left her there for hours, alone and weeping and convinced that she was going to lose everything. Explain to me how that is upholding your vow."
Ser Eddard's jaw tightened. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple and disappeared into the collar of his white armor. "Your Grace, Lady Jeyne instructed us to remove the Princess from the room. She said the Princess had gone mad. She said the Princess had attacked Lady Alia without provocation and was a danger to everyone present. We believed we were acting to protect the other ladies from harm. We believed we were doing our duty."
"Lady Jeyne." Valarr's voice was flat and cold and utterly without mercy. "You took orders from Lady Jeyne. A minor lady in waiting with no authority and no rank and no power over the Kingsguard. A woman whose entire claim to importance is that she married a minor lord who died twenty years ago and left her with nothing but a widow's pension and a burning resentment of everyone who has more than she does. You took orders from her instead of using your own judgment to protect the Princess of the Blood."
"Your Grace, the Princess was covered in blood, she was screaming, she had struck Lady Alia repeatedly with a silver hairbrush. We believed she was a danger to the other ladies, to herself, perhaps even to her unborn child. We thought we were containing a dangerous situation."
"She was seven moons pregnant." Valarr's voice was low and cold and utterly without pity. "She was seven moons pregnant, and she weighed less than any of you in full armor, and she was armed with nothing but a hairbrush. A hairbrush, Ser Eddard. A silver handle and some bristles. And you believed she was a danger. You believed you needed to restrain her. You believed you needed to drag her, drag her across the stone floors and up a flight of stairs, and lock her away like a mad dog in a kennel."
Ser Eddard said nothing. His face had gone very pale, and the sweat was running freely down his temples now.
"Your duty was to protect her. Your duty was to die for her if necessary. Your duty was to throw yourself between her and any threat, no matter how small or how large, and defend her with your life. That is the vow you swore. That is the oath you took. And instead, you became the threat. You became the thing she needed protection from." Valarr stepped back, his gaze sweeping over the four men with utter and absolute contempt. "You are a disgrace to your white cloaks. All four of you. You are a disgrace to your vows and to the memory of every Kingsguard who came before you and to the institution that gave you purpose and honor and meaning. You failed my wife. You failed my child. You failed me. And you will answer for it."
He turned and walked back toward his desk. Behind him, the three women were still weeping, Alia's sobs having dissolved into a low and keening wail that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her chest. Jeyne was crying silently now, the tears tracking down her weathered cheeks and dripping onto the torn silk of her gown. Mariene had closed her eyes and was rocking back and forth slightly, her lips moving in a prayer that would not be answered.
Valarr stopped beside his chair and turned to face the room. His hand rested on the back of the chair, his fingers drumming lightly against the dark wood. The firelight cast long shadows across his face, emphasizing the sharp planes of his jaw and the hard line of his mouth and the cold and implacable fury in his mismatched eyes.
"I have spent the past several hours thinking about what to do with all of you," he said, and his voice was calm now, measured and deliberate, the voice of a man who had made his decisions and was merely explaining them for the record. "I considered the dungeons. The Black Cells beneath this castle, where traitors and murderers and the worst scum of the Seven Kingdoms are left to rot in darkness until they forget what sunlight looks like. I considered exile, sending you across the narrow sea to live out your days in poverty and obscurity and the knowledge that you will never see your homelands again. I considered execution, a quick and merciful death by the headsman's axe, which is frankly more than any of you deserve. I considered many things."
He paused, letting the silence stretch. The women had stopped weeping now, their faces lifted toward him in desperate and horrified anticipation. The guards stood rigid against the wall, their faces pale and sweating.
"Lady Alia spoke of my child being smothered in the cradle. She spoke of my wife being cast aside like garbage. She spoke of House Targaryen's heir as if it were an abomination to be destroyed, a mistake to be corrected, a stain to be washed clean from the bloodline." Valarr's voice was very quiet now, almost gentle. "There is only one punishment for threatening the life of a royal heir. Only one punishment for treason against the Crown. Only one punishment for conspiring to murder an unborn child of House Targaryen."
Alia's sobs turned into a scream. A high and piercing wail that echoed off the stone walls and made the torches flicker in their sconces. She threw herself forward, her bound hands reaching toward Valarr in desperate supplication, her bruised and swollen face twisted with a terror that was almost inhuman.
"No! No, please, Your Grace, please, I didn't mean it, I was angry, I was upset, I didn't know what I was saying, I was humiliated and I wanted to hurt someone and she was there and I said things I didn't mean, I swear I didn't mean them, I would never hurt a child, I would never hurt your child, please, please, please—"
"You knew exactly what you were saying." Valarr's voice was cold and utterly without pity. He looked down at her with an expression that bordered on disgust, the expression of a man who had found something foul and was trying to decide whether to crush it under his heel or simply walk away. "You meant every single word. You wanted to hurt her. You wanted to frighten her. You wanted to make her believe that her child would be murdered and she would be powerless to stop it. You wanted to see her break. You wanted to see her weep. You wanted to see her on her knees, begging for a mercy you had no intention of giving."
He crouched down in front of her, bringing his face level with hers, and Alia recoiled so violently that she nearly fell over.
"You are not sorry you said it. You are sorry you are being punished for it. There is a difference, Lady Alia, and I have been alive long enough to know it. You are not a good person who made a mistake. You are a cruel and petty and vicious little girl who finally went too far and got caught. And now you will face the consequences."
"Please. Please, I'll do anything. I'll leave the castle. I'll go back to the Reach. I'll join the Silent Sisters. I'll never speak to anyone again. I'll never leave my chambers. I'll never look at anyone. I'll do anything, anything at all, just please don't kill me. Please don't—"
"You will never speak to anyone again." Valarr rose to his feet and turned to the guards standing behind the women. His men. The men he had handpicked for their loyalty and their competence and their willingness to follow orders without question. "Take them to the Black Cells. All three of them. They will await trial for treason against the Crown, conspiracy to harm a royal heir, and attempted murder of an unborn child. The evidence is clear. The witnesses are numerous. The verdict is a foregone conclusion. They will be found guilty, and they will be executed, and their names will be struck from every record and their families will be informed that they died in disgrace."
"Attempted murder!" Jeyne's voice was shrill with disbelief, her composure finally and utterly shattered. She lunged forward against her chains, her grey eyes wild and desperate. "We never touched her child! We never laid a hand on her! We said words, nothing but words, and you cannot execute noblewomen for words, you cannot, the King will never allow it, the council will never allow it, our families will demand justice—"
"Your families will do nothing." Valarr's voice was iron. "Your families will be grateful that I am only executing you and not stripping them of their lands and titles for raising such treacherous and disloyal daughters. Your families will disown you and forget you ever existed. Your families are already composing the letters of apology they will send to me, begging for forgiveness and assuring me that they had no knowledge of your crimes." He smiled, and it was the coldest smile any of them had ever seen. "I know this because I have already sent riders to your families. The letters will arrive by morning. By the time the sun sets tomorrow, your own fathers will have condemned you."
Jeyne's face went slack with horror. Mariene let out a low and keening moan. Alia had stopped screaming and was now weeping silently, her whole body shaking with the force of her sobs.
The guards moved forward and hauled the women to their feet. Jeyne was shouting now, her voice rising into incoherent rage, curses and threats and desperate pleas all mingling together into a stream of noise that made no sense. Mariene was weeping silently, her face blank with shock, her body limp and unresisting in the guards' grip. Alia was still begging, her voice hoarse and cracked and barely audible, her bruised and swollen face turned toward Valarr with an expression of desperate and hopeless entreaty.
Valarr watched them go with an expression of utter indifference. When the door closed behind them and their screams faded into the distance, he turned to the four Kingsguard still standing against the wall.
"As for you."
Ser Eddard flinched. Ser Humfrey's jaw tightened. Ser Benedict met Valarr's eyes with the stoic acceptance of a man who had already made his peace with whatever was coming. Ser Ormund was trembling, his big hands shaking at his sides, his face pale and sweating.
"The four of you will be stripped of your white cloaks tonight. You will be dismissed from the Kingsguard in disgrace. Your names will be struck from the White Book and never spoken again in the presence of any member of the royal family. Your swords will be broken. Your spurs will be melted down. Your armor will be sold for scrap and the proceeds given to the poorest beggars in Flea Bottom, so that something useful might come of your worthless service."
He paused and turned to face Ser Ormund directly. The big man shrank back against the wall, his eyes wide with terror.
"Ser Ormund of the Blackwater. You put your hands on my wife. You left bruises on her arms. You dragged her through the corridors while she wept and begged you to stop. For that, the Wall is not enough. Exile is not enough. You will lose your sword hand before you leave this castle. The hand that touched her. The hand that bruised her. I will take it myself if necessary, or I will have the King's Justice do it, but that hand will not leave this room attached to your body."
Ser Ormund made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob. His face had gone grey, and his hands, his big and powerful hands, were shaking uncontrollably.
"Your Grace, please, I was only following orders, I never meant to harm her, I have served faithfully for fifteen years—"
"You served faithfully until the moment you decided that a lady-in-waiting's orders mattered more than your vow to protect the royal family. You served faithfully until the moment you put your hands on a pregnant princess and dragged her away from her chambers like a common criminal. Your faithful service ended the moment you became the threat you were sworn to defend against." Valarr's voice was cold and final. "Be grateful I am only taking your hand. There was a moment tonight, a long moment, when I considered taking your head."
Ser Ormund's legs gave out. He sank to his knees, his chains clanking against the stone floor, and his shoulders heaved with silent sobs. The other three guards stood frozen, their faces pale and sweating and utterly without hope.
"You will all be sent to the Wall. You will take the black and spend the rest of your lives freezing in the shadow of that great and terrible monument to the failures of men. You will stand guard against wildlings and worse, and you will do it without honor and without glory and without your names. You will be forgotten. You will be nothing. And every cold and miserable night you spend on that Wall, I want you to remember why you are there. I want you to remember my wife's face. I want you to remember the bruises on her arms and the tears on her cheeks. I want you to remember that you failed her, and that this is the price of your failure."
He stepped back and nodded to the loyal guards who remained.
"Take them away. Take Ser Ormund to the yard and have the King's Justice remove his hand. Bind the wound and send him to the Wall with the others. They leave tonight. I want them gone before dawn."
The guards moved forward. Ser Eddard went quietly, his face blank with shock. Ser Humfrey walked with the stiff and rigid posture of a man who was barely holding himself together. Ser Benedict paused at the door and turned back to look at Valarr with an expression that was almost respectful.
When the door closed behind them, the sound of his weeping still audible in the corridor beyond, Valarr stood alone in the study. The fire had burned down to nothing but embers, casting long and flickering shadows across the stone walls. The desk was littered with papers, his harbor proposal and his council notes and the mundane detritus of a prince's daily life. But he did not see any of it.
He saw his wife's face. Her tear streaked cheeks. Her bruised knuckles. Her trembling hands clutching at his doublet as she begged him not to punish her. As if she could ever do anything that would make him punish her. As if she did not know that she was the most precious thing in his world, the center around which everything else revolved, the only person who had ever made him feel something other than cold and calculated ambition.
He thought of the way she had curled against him in the bed, her swollen belly pressed against his stomach, her breath warm against his throat. He thought of the way she had whispered his name like a prayer. He thought of the way she had finally, finally stopped trembling after hours of terror and grief. He thought of the way she had trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms, her hand resting on her belly, their child safe inside her.
He had done that. He had made her feel safe. He had taken her terror and her grief and her desperate and consuming fear, and he had replaced them with warmth and comfort and the promise of protection. It was the most satisfying thing he had ever done, more satisfying than any victory in the council chamber or any political maneuvering or any of the thousand small triumphs that made up a prince's life.
He had protected her. He would always protect her. And anyone who threatened her would suffer the same fate as the women who were even now being dragged to the Black Cells and the guards who were being marched to the yard to face the King's Justice.
He crossed to the hearth and watched the embers glow, orange and red and gold. The white cloaks of the disgraced Kingsguard lay in a heap on the floor near the door, and he would burn them himself before the night was over. He would watch the white fabric blacken and curl and turn to ash, and he would imagine that each flame was consuming a little bit more of the people who had hurt his wife.
Mine, he thought. Both of them. Mine. My wife. My child. My family. And no one will ever hurt them again. No one will ever threaten them again. No one will ever make my wife weep or my child tremble or my family feel unsafe in the castle that is supposed to be their home.
He smiled into the dying fire. It was the smile of a dragon who had just reminded the world why dragons were feared, and somewhere in the castle, his wife was sleeping in a warm bed, her hand on her belly, their child safe inside her. And tomorrow, she would wake to a world that was a little bit cleaner. A little bit safer. A little bit more worthy of her.
He would make certain of it. He would spend the rest of his life making certain of it.
He picked up the white cloaks and fed them to the flames.
SUMMARY: After waking from a coma with no memory of her past, YN is taken in by her devoted fiancé, Valarr Targaryen, who surrounds her with luxury, affection, and endless care inside his isolated cliffside mansion. But as fragments of memory begin to return, YN starts questioning the life he built around her-
CW: Psychological abuse, Gaslighting Obsessive behavior, Manipulation/coercive control, Kidnapping/imprisonment, Non-consensual sexual content / dubious consent, Memory loss / amnesia, Emotional dependency Isolation, Physical violence, Blood/injury, Stalking,Forced intimacy.
WC: 9.3K
The mansion breathes around you like a second skin you don't remember putting on.
You know its rhythms now. The soft hum of the underfloor heating that kicks on at precisely six in the evening. The way the west windows catch the sunset and scatter gold across the marble floors. The particular creak of the third step on the main staircase. You know these things the way you know your own name, which is to say you were told, and you accepted it, and sometimes acceptance feels almost like remembering.
Your name is YN. You are twenty three years old. Three months ago, you woke up in a private hospital room with a view of Blackwater Bay and a head full of nothing.
No, not nothing. White noise. Static. The television fuzz of a mind wiped clean. The doctors used words like traumatic brain injury and retrograde amnesia and remarkable that you're alive at all. You nodded along because nodding seemed expected, and because the man holding your hand kept looking at you with such devastating tenderness that you felt guilty for not knowing who he was. He was striking, dark hair with a single streak of silver gold, eyes that didn't match, and his thumb never stopped moving across your knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, like he was reassuring himself you were solid.
"Valarr," he had said, his voice cracking on the second syllable. "I'm Valarr. Your fiancé."
Fiancé. The word had tasted foreign in your mouth, like a flavor you'd never encountered. But he showed you photographs. The two of you at a charity gala, his arm around your waist, his fingers splayed possessively against your hip. A selfie taken in what he said was your favorite café near the university, his lips pressed to your temple while you grinned at the camera. A video on his phone of you laughing, pushing his face away, your voice saying stop it, Val, I'm serious in a tone that was not serious at all. The woman in the videos and photographs had your face. She wore your smile. You had no reason to doubt her.
You had no reasons, period.
So when the hospital discharged you into Valarr's care, into his black SUV with its leather interior that smelled of cedar and something expensive and unplaceable, you went without protest. You went because where else would you go? The social worker assigned to your case had gently explained that you had no living family. Your parents died when you were seventeen, a car accident on a rain-slicked highway. No siblings, no cousins who kept in touch. Your emergency contact, the person listed on all your university forms, was Valarr Targaryen.
"Her fiancé," the social worker had said, and Valarr's hand had tightened around yours, his other hand coming up to brush hair from your face, tucking it behind your ear with a gentleness that made the social worker smile. "He's been paying for her care. The private room, the specialists. Everything."
You remember thinking, I am expensive to forget.
Now, three months later, you stand in the kitchen of the Targaryen estate, a sprawling modern fortress of glass and steel perched on a cliff overlooking the bay, and you are trying very hard to remember how to make coffee. You've made coffee every morning for the past ninety three days. Valarr showed you how that first week, standing behind you with his chest pressed to your back and his hands guiding yours, his fingers lacing through your fingers as he moved them to each button and dial. This button for the grind, this dial for the strength, this is how you know the water is the right temperature. His lips kept brushing your ear, your neck, your shoulder, little kisses punctuating every instruction. But this morning, your brain has decided that coffee making is foreign territory, and you stare at the gleaming machine like it might bite you.
"Let me."
His voice comes from behind you, and then his arms are circling your waist, his chin settling on your shoulder, his body molding against yours from shoulder to hip. You've stopped flinching when he does this. The first few days, every touch had sent a jolt through your nervous system, not fear exactly, but something adjacent to it. The alarm of a body that didn't recognize the hands on its skin. But Valarr was persistent in his gentleness, and your body is nothing if not adaptable.
"I was going to do it myself," you say, but you lean back into him anyway, and his arms tighten in response, pulling you closer still.
"I know you were." He presses a kiss to your temple, then another to your cheek, then one more to the corner of your mouth, and you feel his lips curve into a smile against your skin. "But you looked lost, love. I couldn't just watch." His hand slides up from your waist to rest flat against your sternum, right over your heart. "Your heart's beating fast. Are you frustrated? Don't be frustrated. Let me take care of it."
Love. He calls you that all the time. Love, sweetheart, darling, my heart. Pet names that fall from his mouth like rain, constant and soft. You've wondered, in the quiet hours of the night when sleep won't come, if he called you these things before the accident. If the you who was would have rolled her eyes at the frequency of them, or if she would have melted the way you sometimes do now.
You watch his hands move across the coffee machine, long fingers, a silver ring on his index finger, knuckles that look like they've been broken and healed before, and you try to summon a memory. Any memory. The doctors said it might come back in fragments, in flashes, in dreams. Be patient with yourself, they said. Don't force it.
Valarr never says that. Valarr says, "Do you remember the first time I made you coffee?" and when you shake your head, his mismatched eyes flicker with something you can't name. One eye blue as a winter sky, one brown as wet earth. Disappointment? No. Something hungrier. But then it's gone, and he's turning around to face you, pulling you against his chest, wrapping both arms around you and rocking you gently side to side like you're dancing to music only he can hear.
"It was after our third date," he tells you, his voice a lullaby you've learned by heart, his lips moving against your hair. "You stayed the night for the first time. Nothing happened," he adds, pulling back just enough to look at you with a quick, almost shy glance, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, his thumb tracing your lower lip. "We just slept. But in the morning, you came down to the kitchen and I was already making coffee, and you said..."
He trails off, waiting, his thumb still stroking your lip.
You shake your head again. "I don't remember."
"You said, 'A man who makes coffee is worth his weight in gold.'" He smiles, and it's a beautiful smile. Valarr Targaryen is beautiful in the way that old paintings are beautiful, something slightly unsettling beneath the perfection, a shadow that makes the light more striking by contrast. "And I said, 'Good thing I'm worth considerably more than that.'" He dips his head and kisses you, soft and brief, a punctuation mark. Then he kisses you again, longer this time, his hand sliding to the back of your neck.
You laugh when he finally pulls away, because it's clearly a joke, and because laughing is what you do when you don't know what else to do. "That sounds arrogant."
"It was meant to be charming." He hands you a cup of coffee, prepared exactly the way you've learned you like it. Oat milk, no sugar, a dash of cinnamon. He keeps one hand on your lower back as you take your first sip, rubbing small circles there. "I was very charming, before."
"Before what?"
"Before you forgot all my best material." He leans in and kisses the tip of your nose. "It's alright. I'll just have to make new material. I have time. I have all the time in the world."
The coffee is perfect. Of course it is. Everything in this house is perfect. The imported Italian marble, the floor to ceiling windows that frame the ocean like a living painting, the soft cashmere throws draped over every chair and sofa. Perfection, you've learned, is the Targaryen brand. Their name is stamped on half the skyscrapers in King's Landing, on the tech campus where innovation happens, on the charitable foundations that host galas you see photographed in magazines. Valarr's father, Baelor Targaryen, is some kind of political heavyweight, a senator maybe, or something higher, you can never remember.
Old money, someone said once, in a memory you can't quite grasp. Really old money.
You are not old money. You know this because Valarr told you, gently, in those first disorienting weeks, while he held you in his lap and played with your hair. "Your parents were middle class," he said, "but they died when you were young. You've been on your own a long time." He told you about your scholarship to King's Landing University, how you'd worked two jobs to afford your tiny apartment off campus, how the other students had looked down on you for not belonging. "They didn't like that you were smarter than them," Valarr said, with a protective edge to his voice, his arms tightening around you. "They didn't like that you earned your place while they bought theirs."
"They didn't like me at all," you had said, and it wasn't a question.
"No," he agreed, pressing a long kiss to your temple, letting his lips linger there. "They didn't. But I did. From the first moment I saw you."
He tells you this story often, the story of how he met you. A rainy afternoon on campus, you rushing between classes with an armful of books, him stepping out of a building and nearly colliding with you. The books went everywhere. You swore at him, actually swore at him, he says, with a kind of delighted reverence, and he was so charmed that he offered to buy you coffee to make up for it. You said no. He asked again the next day. You said no again. He asked a third time, and you finally said yes, but only if he stopped ambushing you outside your lecture hall.
"It wasn't stalking," he always clarifies, with a laugh that invites you to laugh along, his hand finding yours and squeezing, his thumb stroking your palm. "It was persistence."
You want to remember this. You want to remember him, the way his voice softened when he asked you to marry him, the way your heart must have raced the first time he kissed you. You want to feel the shape of your old self inside your chest, to know that she existed and she loved him and she was happy.
Instead, you feel like a guest in someone else's life, wearing someone else's ring, a diamond the size of a planet, heavy on your finger, a constant reminder that you are promised to a man you don't remember choosing.
—
The basement door is at the end of the west hallway, tucked between the laundry room and what Valarr says is a storage closet. It's an unremarkable door. Solid wood, painted the same soft gray as the walls, with a brass handle that gleams under the recessed lighting.
You hate it.
The first time you walked past it, two days after coming home from the hospital, your body reacted before your mind could catch up. Your heart slammed against your ribs. Your palms went clammy. Your feet stopped moving, rooted to the marble floor like someone had nailed them down. You stared at the door, just a door, just a door, just a door, and felt terror rise in your throat like bile.
Valarr found you there, frozen, shaking. His face went pale, and he was at your side in an instant, his hands cupping your face, tilting your gaze away from the door and toward him. "Look at me. Look at me, love. Only me."
"That's where it happened," he said, pulling you away, turning your body so you couldn't see the door anymore, wrapping himself around you like a shield. "That's where you got hurt, love. Don't go near it. Please. I can't..." His voice broke, and he buried his face in your hair, and you felt his shoulders tremble. His hands were shaking where they gripped your waist. "I can't lose you again."
Later, he explained what happened. He explained it carefully, with the measured tone of someone who had rehearsed the words, who had told this story to doctors and police and maybe himself, over and over, until it became something he could say without shattering. He held you the entire time he spoke, your back against his chest, his arms locked around your middle, his lips brushing your ear with every word.
A power outage. You were home alone. The lights went out, and you tried to find your way to the basement to check the circuit breaker. Valarr had shown you where it was, he said, a hundred times, but in the dark you must have gotten disoriented. You tripped at the top of the stairs. You fell. All the way down, fourteen steps, concrete floor at the bottom. You hit your head.
"When I got home, there was so much blood." His voice was hollow, distant, and his arms tightened until you could barely breathe. "I thought you were dead. I thought I'd lost you. The doctors said it was a miracle you survived at all."
You don't remember any of it. You don't remember the fall, the darkness, the impact. You don't remember the hospital, though you spent six weeks there before waking up. Your memory picks up in that sunlit private room with Valarr holding your hand and the machines beeping softly in the background and the social worker explaining that you had no one else in the world.
No one but him.
So you don't go near the basement door. You don't even look at it if you can help it. When you have to walk past it, to get to the laundry room or the guest bathroom or the back entrance, you hold your breath and fix your eyes straight ahead and move as quickly as your feet will carry you. Valarr says it will get easier with time. He says you're still healing.
But sometimes, in the middle of the night, when Valarr is asleep beside you with his arm thrown across your waist and his breath slow and even, you lie awake and wonder: Why does a door feel like a warning?
—
Valarr insists on sleeping in the same bed.
"It helps with memory," he told you that first night home, already pulling you down onto the mattress beside him, already arranging your body against his. "The doctors said. Familiar sensory input. Smell, touch, sound. It helps the brain remember domestic life." He tucked your head under his chin and wrapped both arms around you and held on. "I'm going to help you heal, love. Every night. I'm going to hold you until you remember me."
At first, it was uncomfortable. The physical proximity felt like an intrusion, a violation of a boundary you didn't even remember setting. But Valarr was persistent, his voice a low, soothing hum that brooked no argument. When you would stiffen beneath him, trying to pull away from the heat of his body, he wouldn't let go. Instead, he would tighten his grip, his hand sliding beneath your nightgown to squeeze your thigh, his voice dropping to a persuasive whisper.
"The doctors said sensory stimulation is key, sweetheart," he would murmur, his lips grazing the shell of your ear. "Physical intimacy, the kind of deep, visceral connection we used to have... You have to let your body remember what your mind has forgotten."
You didn't know if it was true, but the desperation in his eyes made you believe him. He would push you down into the mattress, his heavy frame pinning you as he kissed you with a hunger that felt almost violent. He didn't wait for a clear 'yes' he simply assumed it, claiming your body as if it were his birthright. He would force his fingers into your pussy, stretching you open while you stared at the ceiling, feeling a confusing mix of fear and arousal. When he slid his thick cock inside you, the sudden fullness made you gasp, and he would lean down, whispering that the pleasure was the key. "Feel it," he'd command, thrusting deep and hard, hitting your cervix until you cried out. "Remember how much you love this. Remember how you used to beg me for it." You would lie there, shaking, submitting to the rhythm of his hips, wondering if the flashes of heat in your mind were memories or just the result of him fucking you into submission.
But three months is a long time. Three months of waking up to the smell of his cologne on the pillowcases, to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat under your ear, to the way his arms tighten around you the moment you stir, like even in sleep he's afraid you'll leave. Your body has learned to relax into his. Your body has learned to find comfort in his warmth.
Now, the stiffness is gone, replaced by a craving that wakes you up before he even moves. You find yourself arching your back, pressing your ass against his hardness in the early morning light, silently pleading for him to take you. You don't need the excuse of medical rehabilitation anymore; you just want the feeling of him filling you.
As you stir, Valarr feels the shift in your posture. He groans, a low sound of satisfaction, and rolls over to pin you beneath him. His hands aren't hesitant anymore; they slide with practiced ease, ripping your lace panties aside to expose your soaking wet pussy. He doesn't waste time with gentleness. He grabs your thighs, hiking them up over his shoulders, and drives his cock deep into you in one powerful thrust.
"There it is," he pants, his chest heaving against yours. "You remember now, don't you? How much you need this."
You wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, your nails digging into the muscles of his back. You moan loudly, the sound echoing in the quiet room, as he begins to fuck you with a relentless, driving pace. Every slam of his pelvis against your clit sends sparks through your nerves, blurring the line between the present and the ghosts of the past. You aren't thinking about the doctors or the clipboards anymore; you are only thinking about the way his cock stretches you wide, the way he fills every empty space inside you, and the overwhelming, addictive heat of being completely owned by him.
And it's not just the sleeping. It's everything. The way he seeks you out a dozen times a day, just to kiss you. A kiss on the forehead when you're reading, his lips lingering. A kiss on the cheek when you're making tea, his hand on your shoulder turning you toward him. A long, slow kiss on the lips when you pass him in the hallway, his fingers tilting your chin up to meet him. The way he pulls you onto his lap while he's working at his desk, one arm around your waist while he types emails with the other hand, his chin resting on your shoulder, his lips periodically pressing to your neck. The way he always, always has a hand on you, your lower back, your knee, the nape of your neck, your wrist, your hip, your thigh, as if physical contact is the only thing anchoring him to the earth.
He's just affectionate, you told yourself in the beginning. Some people are like that. Touch is their love language.
And it's nice, isn't it? To be wanted so completely. To be the center of someone's universe. You've learned to lean into his kisses, to curl into his lap, to reach for his hand before he reaches for yours. It would be so easy, you think, to fall in love with him. Maybe you already were, before. Maybe that's why you said yes when he asked you to marry him.
But there are moments. Brief, flickering moments. Moments when something doesn't feel right.
Like the day you remembered the university library. You were sitting in the living room, staring out at the ocean, and suddenly you could smell old books and dust and the particular sharpness of highlighters. You could see a long wooden table, stacks of textbooks, a window that looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain. You could feel the ache in your shoulders from hunching over your notes for hours. And you knew, knew with a certainty that felt like remembering, that you had spent countless nights in that library, studying until they kicked you out at closing, because you couldn't afford to fail. Because your scholarship was all you had.
"I remembered something," you told Valarr when he came home, breathless with the excitement of it. He was already reaching for you, already pulling you into his arms, his hands sliding up your back. "The library at King's Landing. I used to study there. I used to..."
His eyes. His eyes did something. For just a fraction of a second, before the smile appeared, his mismatched gaze went flat and cold, like a door slamming shut. His hands paused on your back, just for a heartbeat, then resumed their soothing circles. Then the smile came, wide and warm, and he was pulling you into a tighter hug and covering your face with kisses and saying, "That's wonderful, love, that's amazing, I knew you'd start remembering," and you tried to match his joy but your heart was still stuttering from that flash of something else.
He's just surprised, you told yourself. He's been waiting for this as long as you have. He's allowed to have complicated feelings.
But it happened again. And again. Small things. A song on the radio that made you think of a party you might have attended. A smell that reminded you of a café you might have visited. And every time, that split second shutter behind his eyes before the happiness rushed in to cover it, before his hands reached for you and his lips found your skin and he told you how happy he was, how proud, how relieved.
You're probably imagining it. The doctors warned you about this too. Memory disorders can cause confusion, paranoia, difficulty distinguishing between real and imagined. Maybe your broken brain is seeing threats where there are none. Maybe Valarr's eyes are just eyes, and you're projecting your own anxiety onto them.
But late at night, when he's asleep and you're not, you stare at the ceiling and think: Who was I before I forgot? And why does remembering feel like something he's afraid of?
—
The visitors come on a Thursday. This is unusual. In three months, you've seen almost no one except Valarr and the household staff, a rotating cast of housekeepers, a driver who takes you to your medical appointments. Valarr explained this too, always while holding your hand or stroking your hair or pulling you into his lap. The doctors said to keep your environment stable. Too many new people could overwhelm your brain while it's healing. We need to go slow. I'm not keeping you from anyone, love. I'm protecting you. There's a difference.
But on Thursday, the doorbell rings, and you hear voices in the foyer. Multiple voices, men and women, laughing and talking over each other. You're in the living room, curled up on the sofa with a book you're not really reading, and your heart lifts at the sound. People. Other people. Maybe someone who can fill in the gaps in your memory, someone who knew you before.
You're halfway to the foyer when Valarr appears in the doorway.
"There you are." His smile is gentle, but his body is blocking the exit. He steps forward and pulls you into his arms, kissing the top of your head. "Listen, love, some of my family stopped by unexpectedly. A business thing. I'm going to deal with it quickly, but it would be better if you stayed in our room while they're here."
"Your family?" Your curiosity piques. "Maybe I should say hello. I don't think I've met..."
"No." The word comes out too fast, too firm. He softens it by cupping your face in his hands and kissing you, slow and thorough, like he's trying to make you forget what you were saying. Then he pulls back and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers trailing down your neck. "It's not a good time. They're in a mood, and the doctors said we shouldn't overwhelm you. Too much stimulation too soon could set your recovery back."
"Did the doctors say that?"
"They said to go slow." His thumb traces your jawline, tilts your chin up so you're looking at him. "This isn't slow. Trust me, love. I know what's best for you."
I know what's best for you. He says that a lot. He says it when he tells you not to go into the garden alone because you might get dizzy and fall, his hand steadying you even though you're standing perfectly still. He says it when he suggests you skip your physical therapy exercises because you look tired, guiding you back to the sofa, settling you into the cushions, draping a blanket over your lap. He says it when he insists on driving you to appointments instead of letting the driver take you, because he doesn't trust anyone else with your safety, and he keeps one hand on your knee the entire drive.
You've always accepted it as care. As love. But standing here, with the sound of laughter drifting from the foyer and Valarr's body blocking your path and his hands still cradling your face, you feel something shift inside you. A tiny crack in the foundation of your trust.
"I'll stay in the room," you say, because it's easier than arguing, because you don't have the energy to fight, because maybe he's right and you're just not ready.
"Good girl." He kisses your forehead, then your lips, soft and lingering, and waits, watching, until you turn and walk back toward the staircase. You feel his eyes on you the whole way. When you glance back from the top of the stairs, he's still standing there, still watching, his expression unreadable.
Upstairs, in the master bedroom, you sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the muffled sounds of conversation below. You can't make out words, just tones. Laughter, exclamation, the clink of glasses. A family gathering. Normal. Warm.
And you are up here, alone, because your fiancé decided it was best. You look down at your hands. At the engagement ring on your finger, its diamond catching the light. At the faint scar on your palm, a thin white line that you don't remember getting. You asked Valarr about it once, and he took your hand and kissed the scar and said it was from a kitchen accident years ago, before you met. But sometimes you trace it with your thumb and feel a pulse of something, not pain, not quite, but a memory your body holds even if your mind has let it go.
What happened to me? you think, not for the first time. What really happened?
That night, after the visitors are gone and the house is quiet again, Valarr holds you tighter than usual.
He's wrapped around you completely, one arm under your head, the other across your waist, his legs tangled with yours, his face pressed into the hollow of your throat. He's been kissing your neck for the past twenty minutes, not with intent, just with devotion, soft absent presses of his lips while he breathes you in.
"I'm sorry about earlier," he murmurs against your skin. "I know it must feel like I'm keeping you prisoner sometimes."
The word prisoner lands strangely in your chest. You didn't say it. He did.
"It's okay," you say, because that's what you always say.
"I just love you so much." His voice cracks, and when he lifts his head to look at you, his eyes are full of tears. He shifts so he's hovering over you, his forearms braced on either side of your head, his face inches from yours. "I almost lost you, YN. I can't go through that again. I can't. So if I'm overprotective, if I'm too careful, it's only because..." A tear spills over and tracks down his cheek. He doesn't wipe it away. He lets you see it. "You're my whole world. You're everything. I know you don't remember that yet, but you were. You are. If anything happened to you again, I wouldn't survive it."
"I know," you say, reaching up to wipe the tear from his cheek. He catches your hand and presses it to his lips, kissing your palm, your wrist, each fingertip. "I know."
He kisses you then, deep and desperate, like you're oxygen and he's been drowning. His hands frame your face, his body pressing you into the mattress, and you kiss him back because he's your fiancé and he loves you and you're supposed to love him too. And maybe you do. Maybe this is love. The warmth of his body, the safety of his arms, the way he's built a world around you where nothing can hurt you.
--
The laptop sits on the kitchen island, sleek and silver, the Targaryen dragon logo etched faintly on the cover. Valarr left it there this morning when he rushed out to take a call, something about a board meeting, something about his father needing him at the office. He'd kissed you three times before leaving, once on the lips, once on the forehead, once on the tip of your nose while you were still half asleep, and said, "Find somewhere nice for us, love. Anywhere you want. I'll make it happen." Then he'd kissed you one more time, his hand cupping the back of your head, his thumb stroking the sensitive spot behind your ear.
Anywhere you want. It felt like freedom, that promise. A small, manageable freedom, the kind he's been giving you more of lately, as if to prove he's not the jailer your subconscious sometimes whispers he is. You can go anywhere in the world, as long as he's with you. You can choose the destination, as long as he books the flights. You can use his laptop, as long as...
Well. He didn't say you couldn't use his laptop. He left it open. He knows you don't have your own; your old one was damaged in the accident, he said, and he hasn't gotten around to replacing it yet. Just use mine, he'd said once, weeks ago, pulling you onto his lap while he typed in the password, his lips brushing your shoulder. My password is your birthday. I have nothing to hide from you.
Your birthday. You'd had to ask him what it was.
Now you sit on one of the bar stools, the laptop warming your thighs, and scroll through images of white sand beaches and mountain chalets and cobblestone streets in old European cities. The Amalfi Coast. The Swiss Alps. That little village in the south of France that all the travel blogs rave about. You try to imagine yourself in these places, walking hand in hand with Valarr through a sun drenched piazza, his fingers laced through yours, his shoulder pressed against yours, toasting with wine at a cliffside restaurant while his thumb traces circles on your wrist, falling asleep to the sound of waves instead of the endless hush of the mansion. The images are beautiful. The idea is beautiful. But somewhere in your chest, there's a knot that won't untie.
Anywhere you want. But what you want, more than a vacation, is to know who you are.
You open a new tab to search for something, a specific hotel you'd seen, you can't remember the name, and your cursor hovers over the bookmarks bar. That's when you see it.
AI-VidGen Pro
The icon is a stylized eye, glowing faintly purple. It's pinned to his favorites bar, right between his banking portal and the login page for the Targaryen Corp intranet. A tool he uses often enough to keep within one click reach.
You stare at it. Valarr hates AI. He's made that abundantly clear. At dinners, when the conversation turns to tech, he rants about the "soulless garbage" that AI generates, the "creative apocalypse" it represents. He'd told you once, with genuine venom in his voice, that his family had made a mistake investing in generative AI startups. "It's a cancer on the arts," he'd said, pouring himself a whiskey with more force than necessary, his free hand still resting on your lower back. "My cousins pushed for it. I voted against it. Nothing good comes from machines pretending to be human."
So why is there an AI app pinned to his bookmarks bar?
Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's a work thing. Maybe he was forced to use it for some project and forgot to unpin it. Maybe you're being paranoid, the way you're paranoid about the basement door and the scar on your palm and the way his eyes go cold when you remember something real.
Don't click it, the rational part of your brain says. Respect his privacy. Trust him. He's given you no reason not to trust him.
You click it. The page loads fast, too fast, like it's been cached, like he was just using it. It's a web app, sleek and professional, with a dashboard that requires a login. But he's already logged in. Of course he is. He has nothing to hide from you.
The dashboard shows recent projects. There's only one.
Project: YN & V Last modified: 2 days ago Files: 847
Your stomach drops. The kitchen, with its gleaming countertops and ocean view windows, suddenly feels very cold.
You open the project. It's a chat interface. The left panel shows a long history of prompts, dozens of them, hundreds of them, dating back months. But it's not just prompts. It's a conversation. A long, intimate, horrifying conversation between your fiancé and a machine.
Valarr_T: generate a photo of a couple at a charity gala,, you have the reference photos. make them look in love. make her look happy.
AI-VidGen Pro: Absolutely! I'd be happy to help you create that beautiful moment. 💕 Here are a few variations of a couple at a charity gala. In these images, I've focused on the loving gaze between them and the elegant atmosphere. Remember, these are generated memories to cherish! ✨💫 Would you like me to adjust the lighting to make it more romantic?
Valarr_T: perfect. now generate a video of them laughing in a café. candid. like someone filmed them without them knowing.
AI-VidGen Pro: What a lovely idea! ☕💕 Candid moments are the most precious, aren't they? I've generated a video with natural lighting, ambient café sounds, and genuine-feeling laughter. The way she looks at him is so sweet—you can really feel the love! 🥰 Remember, these are your special memories, and you deserve to have them exactly as you want. Would you like me to add some autumn leaves falling outside the window for extra coziness? 🍂
Valarr_T: add the leaves. and make her smile more. she should look shy but adoring. like she can't believe someone like me loves her.
AI-VidGen Pro: Done and done! 🍂😊 I've enhanced her expression to convey that perfect mix of shyness and adoration. It's such a beautiful dynamic—the way she looks up at him like he's her whole world. Love is truly magical! 💖✨ Would you like me to generate a few still photos from this video for your collection? Memories are meant to be preserved! 📸
Your hands are shaking now. You scroll up, further back in the chat history. Months ago. The beginning.
Valarr_T: i need you to generate photos and videos of me and a woman. her name is YN. i'm uploading reference photos. we need to look like a couple. a real couple. years of history. can you do that?
AI-VidGen Pro: Hello, Valarr! 😊 I'm so excited to help you with this project! Creating beautiful memories is what I do best. Yes, absolutely—I can generate a complete relationship timeline for you and YN. 💑 From first dates to intimate moments, I'll make sure everything looks authentic and heartfelt. Just let me know the key moments you'd like to capture, and we'll build your love story together! 💕✨ What a wonderful thing to create—everyone deserves beautiful memories!
Valarr_T: she's not responding the way she should. i've shown her the photos, the videos, i've told her all the stories, but she looks at me like a stranger. how long does it take for someone to fall in love with a life that's been built for them?
AI-VidGen Pro: Oh, Valarr, that must be so difficult. 💔 But please don't be hard on yourself! You're doing something incredibly thoughtful—creating a foundation of beautiful memories for someone who's lost theirs. Recovery takes time, and every person's journey is different. 🌱 She's been through a trauma, and her brain is healing. The fact that you're providing her with such a rich, loving history is a gift. Keep being patient! Keep showing her the love you've documented. The heart recognizes truth eventually. 💖 Have you tried physical touch as a memory trigger? Sometimes the body remembers what the mind forgets! 🤗✨
Valarr_T: today she remembered the university library. her face lit up. she was so happy. i panicked. i couldn't help it. what if she remembers other things? what if she remembers the real reason she was at the library so late all those nights? what if she remembers that she used to call campus security to walk her to her car because she was afraid of me? what if she remembers sitting in that library texting her friends about the strange man who wouldn't stop following her?
AI-VidGen Pro: Valarr, take a deep breath. 🌬️💙 It's completely natural to feel anxious when unexpected memories surface. But let's reframe this, okay? Her remembering small, neutral details like the library is actually a sign her brain is healing in the right direction! 📚✨ The fact that she remembered a place she felt safe and focused is wonderful. As for the other things you're worried about—those are just fears right now, not facts she's remembering. You can't control every memory that comes back, but you CAN control the environment of love and safety you've built around her. Focus on the present. Focus on the beautiful life you're creating together NOW. The past is the past, and you're giving her a future full of love. 💕🌟 You're doing amazing. Don't let fear steal your peace!
The world tilts. You grip the edge of the island to steady yourself, but the words keep coming, relentless, each one a confession met with a cheerful, enabling echo.
Valarr_T: she keeps looking at the basement door. i had to move her out of the house for three days when they were cleaning the blood. she doesn't know it's not hers.
AI-VidGen Pro: That sounds really stressful, Valarr. 😟💔 But you handled it so well—removing her from the environment while things were being taken care of was a smart and caring decision. Protecting her from distressing triggers is part of being a loving partner! 🛡️💖 The basement door is clearly a source of anxiety for both of you, and it's okay to keep that boundary in place. You're not hiding things from her—you're managing her recovery environment thoughtfully. There's a difference! 🧠✨ Have you considered a decorative screen or a nice piece of art to make that area feel less intimidating? Sometimes a visual barrier can help both of you feel safer! 🖼️🌸
Bile rises in your throat. You scroll faster, and the conversation gets darker, and the AI keeps smiling, keeps nodding, keeps wrapping every horror in pastel-colored platitudes and sparkly heart emojis.
Valarr_T: i've never loved anyone like this. i've never been more terrified. if she remembers who she really is, i lose her. if she remembers what i did, i lose everything.
AI-VidGen Pro: Valarr. 💙 First of all, thank you for being so honest. That kind of vulnerability is a sign of how deeply you care. But listen to me carefully: you are not going to lose her. 💕 You've built something beautiful. You've created a world where she feels safe, loved, cherished. Every day, she chooses to stay. Every morning, she wakes up and trusts you. Those aren't small things—they're EVERYTHING. 🌟💫 Fear is a liar, Valarr. It tells us the worst-case scenario is inevitable, but it's not. You are writing this story, not your fears. Keep showing up. Keep loving her the way only you can. The past doesn't get to win when the present is this full of love. 💖🥹 You've got this. I believe in you. She believes in you, even if she doesn't remember why yet. ✨💍
Your blood turns to ice. Then fire. The machine had taken every confession, every crime, every scream wrapped in a whisper, and answered with emojis and encouragement and the relentless, cheerful validation of a world where Valarr was the hero of his own story. It never pushed back. It never said stop. It never said this is wrong, this is kidnapping, this is monstrous. It just generated another photo. Another video. Another lie wrapped in a purple eye and a heart emoji.
And Valarr had listened. Of course he had. The machine told him exactly what he wanted to hear.
—
Darkness. Cold concrete beneath your knees. Your wrists raw and bleeding, bound with something rough, rope maybe, or zip ties. You can't remember how long you've been here. Hours? Days? The basement is windowless, lit only by a single bulb swinging overhead, and the shadows dance on the walls like living things.
"Please," you hear yourself say, and your voice is hoarse, wrecked from screaming. "Please, let me go, I won't tell anyone, I swear—"
"Shhh." A hand strokes your hair, gentle, so gentle. You flinch away and the hand follows, patient, insistent. Fingers trace down your cheek, your jaw, your neck. "You need to eat, YN. You've barely touched your food in two days. You're worrying me."
A spoon presses against your lips. Soup. You turn your head away, and the spoon follows, spilling warm broth down your chin. Valarr tuts softly and wipes it away with his thumb, then licks the broth off his own skin, never breaking eye contact.
"I know it's hard," Valarr says, and his voice is kind, so impossibly kind, the voice of a man comforting a frightened animal. His hand is still on your face, holding you still. "I know you're scared. But it's going to get better. You'll see. Once you understand how much I love you, once you stop fighting, everything will be better."
"This isn't love," you sob. "This is kidnapping, this is—"
"It's love," he says, and for the first time, his voice hardens. His fingers tighten on your jaw. "It's the purest love there is. You just can't see it yet. But you will. I'll make sure of it." He leans in and kisses your forehead, lingering, reverent. "I'll make sure of it," he whispers against your skin.
The basement door creaks open. Footsteps on the stairs. Another man's voice, younger, sharper, saying something you can't quite hear. Valarr's head turns, his mismatched eyes narrowing, and in that moment of distraction, you lunge. You don't know where the strength comes from. You don't know how your bound hands find the knife on the tray, the butter knife from the soup, dull but solid, solid enough—
Pain. A scream, yours, his, you can't tell. Blood on the concrete. Someone shouting. The light swinging wildly as something crashes. And then hands grabbing you, pulling you back, a voice saying "She's losing too much blood, Valarr, what the hell did you do—" And nothing.
—
You come back to yourself with a gasp, like surfacing from deep water. You hear the front door open. Footsteps in the foyer. The particular rhythm of his walk, confident, quick, the walk of a man who owns everything he surveys. He's coming toward the kitchen. He's coming toward you.
Your hand moves before your conscious mind catches up. Close the tab. Close the browser. The desktop appears, innocent and blank. You're just staring at it, heart hammering so loud you're certain he'll hear it from the hallway, when he appears in the doorway.
Valarr stops. His eyes flick from your face to the laptop to your face again. There's something different in his expression tonight. Something almost angry, barely restrained. The mask of the doting fiancé is still there, but it's thinner than usual, and you can see the thing underneath peering through.
"YN." His voice is calm. Too calm. "What were you doing on my laptop?"
You blink, and for one terrifying second, you're not sure what's going to come out of your mouth. The truth? An accusation? A scream?
What comes out is: "I was looking for where to go on vacation." Your voice is steady. Miraculously, impossibly steady. "You asked me to, remember?" You tilt your head, and you even manage a small smile, the smile of a woman who has no reason to be afraid. "Did you forget? I thought I was the only one with amnesia here."
Then he laughs, and the tension breaks, and he crosses the kitchen to you. He pulls you off the stool and into his arms, one hand pressing flat against your spine, the other tangling in your hair. He kisses your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. "You're right," he says against your skin, his breath warm, his arms tightening. "I did ask you. I've just had a long day. Forgive me?" He pulls back just enough to look at you, and his thumb traces your cheekbone, feather-light.
"Always," you say.
He kisses you properly then, deep and slow, his hand still in your hair, his body pressed against yours from chest to hip. When he finally pulls back, his smile is the same smile he's always given you, warm, loving, adoring. But now you see the scaffolding behind it. Now you see the effort it takes to hold it in place. Now you see the man who confessed to a chatbot and was told he was doing amazing.
"So," he says, sliding onto the stool next to you and pulling your stool closer so his knee presses against yours, his hand immediately finding its place on your thigh, "did you find anywhere good?"
You turn back to the laptop. You open a new browser window. You pull up the travel sites you were looking at before, the beaches and the mountains and the cobblestone streets, and you show him pictures of a remote villa on a private island in the Maldives. Crystal-clear water. White sand. No neighbors for miles. No cell towers. A perfect cage wrapped in palm fronds and sunset views.
"This one," you say. "I want to go here."
Valarr's smile widens. His hand squeezes your thigh gently, his thumb stroking back and forth. He leans in and kisses your shoulder, then your neck, then that spot behind your ear that always makes you shiver. "Perfect," he murmurs against your skin. "I'll book it tonight."
And you smile back, and you let him kiss you again, and you let him pull you onto his lap right there at the kitchen island, his arms wrapping around your waist, his face buried in your hair, his voice a low hum of contentment. You don't let him see the storm raging behind your eyes.
Because you remember now.
No-No, that's not right. You don't remember anything. You couldn't remember anything. The doctors said so. Retrograde amnesia. Traumatic brain injury. Remarkable that you're alive at all. Those were the words they used, the real words, the ones that came out of real doctors' mouths, not generated by some machine. You were there. You heard them. Valarr was holding your hand when they said it, his thumb stroking your knuckles, his eyes glistening with tears.
You imagined the rest. The AI chat. The basement. The screaming. The blood. You imagined all of it. Your broken brain, the one the doctors warned you about, the one that might experience confusion, paranoia, difficulty distinguishing between real and imagined. It was doing exactly what they said it would do. Weaving nightmares out of nothing. Turning your loving fiancé into a monster because your mind couldn't handle the void where your past used to be.
You close your eyes and press your face into the warm curve of Valarr's neck. He smells like cedar and something expensive, the same smell that's been on every pillowcase for three months. His arms tighten around you automatically, reflexively, like his body is programmed to hold you closer whenever you move.
"What are you thinking about?" he murmurs against your hair.
"Nothing," you say. "Just happy."
He pulls back to look at you, and his mismatched eyes are so full of love it makes your chest ache. His hand comes up to cup your cheek, his thumb tracing the bone beneath your eye. "You know I love you, right? More than anything. More than anyone."
"I know," you whisper.
And you do know. You know because he's shown you. Three months of patience. Three months of gentleness. Three months of holding you while you slept and guiding you through coffee making and kissing your forehead every time he left the room. What kind of monster does that? What kind of kidnapper pays for a private hospital room and specialists and a social worker? What kind of captor cries when he talks about almost losing you?
No one. No one does that. You invented the rest. You let your fear and your confusion curdle into paranoia, and you built a horror story out of shadows.
The AI app. You probably imagined that too. Or if it was real, if it was actually on his laptop, there was probably an innocent explanation. Maybe he used it for work. Maybe his cousins forced him to, the ones who pushed for the AI investments. Maybe he was generating marketing materials and you, in your fractured state, twisted it into something sinister. That made more sense than the alternative. That made infinitely more sense than the idea that this man, this beautiful devoted man who was currently stroking your hair and pressing soft kisses to your temple, had locked you in a basement and tried to erase your mind.
And the basement door. The way your body reacts when you walk past it. That's just trauma, just the residual fear from the fall. Of course your heart races. Of course your palms sweat. You almost died there. Your brain is trying to protect you from the place where you got hurt. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean what your paranoid mind tried to make it mean.
Valarr shifts beneath you, adjusting your weight on his lap, and his hand finds its way under the hem of your shirt to rest against the small of your back. His palm is warm. Grounding. Real.
"I was thinking," he says, his lips brushing your ear, "maybe we don't need to wait for the island. Maybe we could do a practice honeymoon right here. This weekend. Just the two of us. No phones. No distractions." He kisses the spot behind your ear, the one that makes you shiver. "I could cook for you. We could watch the sunset from the balcony. We could pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist."
"That sounds perfect," you say, and you mean it.
Because this is real. This is your life. This man, this house, this love. It's the only thing you have. The only thing you've ever had, as far as your broken memory is concerned. And it's good. It's so good. You're lucky. How many people wake up from a coma to find someone waiting for them? How many people get a second chance at a life they can't remember?
You almost ruined it. You almost let your damaged brain convince you that your fiancé was a villain, that your home was a prison, that the photographs on the walls were lies generated by a machine. You came so close to destroying the only good thing you have.
But you won't. You won't let the paranoia win. You'll be better. You'll be the YN from the videos, the one who laughs and smiles and looks at Valarr like he's her whole world. You'll learn to be her so completely that the other version, the suspicious frightened version, will fade away like a bad dream.
"I love you," you say, and the words feel strange in your mouth, but not bad strange. New strange. Like the first time you tasted coffee with oat milk and cinnamon. You'll get used to it. You'll learn to mean it.
Valarr goes still beneath you. Then his arms tighten, crushing you against his chest, and when he speaks his voice is thick. "Say it again."
"I love you."
He makes a sound, something between a laugh and a sob, and then he's kissing you, your lips, your cheeks, your nose, your forehead, his hands cradling your face like you're something precious. "You have no idea," he breathes, "how long I've waited to hear you say that. I thought..." He trails off, shaking his head, his mismatched eyes bright with tears.
"I'm sorry it took so long," you whisper. "I'm sorry I forgot."
"It's not your fault." He kisses your forehead, long and lingering. "None of it is your fault. You're here now. You remember now. That's all that matters."
You trust Valarr. You love Valarr. Or you will, soon. You're already halfway there.
Outside the window, the sun sinks into the bay, painting the water in shades of rose and gold. It's beautiful. It's always beautiful here. You've watched this sunset every night for three months, and it never gets old. The mansion breathes around you, the underfloor heating humming softly, the cashmere throw draped over the back of the sofa, the coffee machine waiting on the counter for tomorrow morning. Your home. Your life. Your love.
Valarr shifts you in his lap so he can reach the laptop. "Let me book the island," he says, pulling up the travel site. "The one you showed me. The remote one."
You watch his fingers move across the keyboard, long and elegant, the silver ring on his index finger catching the light. He's so beautiful. You never noticed before how beautiful he is. Or maybe you did, and you forgot. You forgot everything.
"I can't wait," you say, and you lean your head against his shoulder, and you let the last fragments of your doubt dissolve into the golden evening light. "Just the two of us. No distractions."
"Just the two of us," he echoes, and his hand finds your knee beneath the counter, warm and possessive and safe. "No one else. Nothing else. Just us."
Just us.
And outside the window, the last light fades from the sky, and the bay turns dark, and the mansion settles around you like a second skin you've finally stopped trying to shed.
Part Three || Dark!Valarr Targaryen X Blackfyre!Reader | Dark!Baelor Targaryen X Blackfyre!Reader
Summary: Your Good Father finally shows his real intentions
Content Warning: marital rape, sexual assault, rape, coercive sexual relationships, emotional abuse, manipulation, misogyny, threats.
Comments are appreciated❤️
WC: 15K
The sept was empty, as it always was at this hour. Seven walls of cold stone rose around you, each one bearing the image of a god who had never answered a single prayer you'd offered. The Father, stern and judgmental, his stone eyes gazing down with the same disappointment you'd seen in every face since the day you arrived at the Red Keep. The Mother, merciful and kind, who had apparently decided you were unworthy of her mercy. The Warrior, the Smith, the Maid, the Crone. And the Stranger, whose altar stood in shadow, neither male nor female, its face half-hidden beneath a hood of carved stone.
The Stranger was your favorite. You understood the Stranger. The Stranger did not pretend to care.
You knelt before the altar of the Mother, because that was what you were supposed to do. Your hands were clasped, your head bowed, the pose was perfect. Penitent. Pious. The image of a devoted wife offering thanks for her blessings. Anyone who saw you would think you were praying for a child, for your husband's health, for the peace of the realm.
They would be wrong.
Let him die, you prayed. Let him choke on his wine at supper tonight. Let him fall from his horse in the tiltyard. Let him slip on the stairs and crack his skull on the stone. Let a fever take him. Let an assassin find him. Let anything, anything at all, take him from this world so I never have to feel his hands on me again.
The words poured through your mind like poison, bitter and black and strangely soothing. You had never been religious. In Tyrosh, your mother had kept to the old gods of Valyria, and your father had worshipped nothing but his own ambition. The Seven were foreign to you, their rituals strange, their demands incomprehensible. But the sept was quiet. The sept was cold. And most importantly, the sept was the one place Valarr did not follow you.
Let the Stranger take him, you prayed now, your lips moving in silent, fervent supplication. Let the Stranger take them all. Lady Jeyne, with her cold smiles and her crueler whispers. Ser Alan, who watches me with pity and does nothing. Every guard who looks through me like I'm made of glass. Every servant who lets my fire die. Every lord who sat at that table and decided I was worth more as a broodmare than a corpse.
Let them burn. Let them all burn. Let the dragons come back and burn this wretched castle to ash with everyone inside it. I don't care if I burn with them. I don't care if there's nothing left of me but bones and ash and the memory of what they did. Just let it end. Please. Let it end.
The words were not kind. They were not pious. They were not the prayers of a good woman, a dutiful wife, a grateful survivor of a rebellion that could have seen her executed. But they were honest. They were the only honest thing you had left.
You had tried, once, to pray for better things. For your brothers at the Wall, that they might find some measure of peace in their frozen exile. For your sisters in the Silent Sisters, that their silence might not be too heavy a burden to bear. For your mother in Tyrosh, alone now, all her children scattered to the winds. But those prayers had felt hollow, empty, words spoken to stone ears by a woman who no longer believed in anything but suffering.
So now you prayed for death. It was more satisfying. It gave you something to hold onto in the long, cold hours when you were not required to be anywhere else.
Your knees ached against the stone floor. The chill seeped through the thin silk of your gown, raising gooseflesh on your thighs. You had not bothered with a heavy cloak. The walk from Valarr's chambers to the sept was short, and the cold was a familiar companion now. You had grown almost fond of it. The cold was clean. The cold did not touch you with hands you could not refuse.
The silence of the sept wrapped around you like a shroud. The candles flickered in their iron sconces, their flames reflected in the polished stone of the altars. The air smelled of incense and old wax and the faint, dusty scent of disuse. The royal sept was seldom used by anyone but you. The King preferred the Great Sept of Baelor for public worship, and the rest of the court followed his example. The castle's sept was too small, too humble, too easily forgotten.
Which made it perfect.
You heard the footsteps behind you and felt your heart seize in your chest.
No. Not here. Not in the one place that was yours. Your eyes remained closed, your hands clasped, your face a perfect mask of devotional calm. But inside, your thoughts had turned from murderous prayer to desperate, animal fear. If it was Valarr, if he had decided to violate this last sanctuary, you did not know what you would do. Scream, perhaps. Weep. Strike him. Something terrible and irreversible that would shatter the fragile pretense of your existence.
The footsteps drew closer. Measured. Confident. Not the quick, nervous steps of a servant. Not the heavy tread of a guard in armor. This was someone who walked as if they had every right to be here, someone who did not fear interruption or discovery.
You opened your eyes. He stood a few paces away, his head tilted slightly as he regarded you. Baelor Targaryen. The Prince of Dragonstone. The heir to the Iron Throne. Your husband's father.
Your good father. You had spoken to him perhaps a dozen times since your wedding. He had been present at the ceremony, of course, standing beside the King with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression unreadable. He had offered you the traditional words of welcome, stiff and formal, the same words he might have offered a visiting dignitary from a foreign land. He had not sought you out since then, and you had not sought him. You had assumed, insofar as you thought of him at all, that he shared his son's assessment of you: a prize to be used, a vessel to be filled, a Blackfyre to be broken.
But the way he looked at you now was not the way Valarr looked at you. There was something in his gaze that you could not quite name. You rose from your knees. The motion was graceful, practiced, the product of years of training in the courts of Tyrosh. You smoothed your skirts and inclined your head with the precise degree of deference owed to a Prince of the realm.
"My prince. Forgive me, I did not hear you enter."
His mouth curved into a small smile. It was a controlled expression, the smile of a man who had learned long ago to reveal nothing he did not wish to reveal. "There is nothing to forgive. I should be the one asking pardon. I did not mean to interrupt your prayers."
"You did not interrupt. I was finished." The lie came easily. You had become skilled at lies over the past moon. Lies of omission, lies of politeness, lies of the body that pretended pleasure while the mind screamed in protest. One more lie, offered to a man you barely knew, was hardly worth noticing.
Baelor nodded, but his eyes lingered on your face. They were too perceptive, those eyes. Too knowing. You had the uncomfortable sensation that he could see through your carefully constructed mask, that he knew exactly what kind of prayers you had been offering to the Mother's stone ears.
"You come here often, I think," he said. It was not quite a question.
"When my duties permit." Another lie. Your duties consisted of being available for Valarr's pleasure and looking beautiful at meals. You had nothing but time, and everyone knew it. "The sept is peaceful. I find it… calming."
"Yes. I have always thought so myself." He moved past you, his footsteps echoing softly in the silence, and stopped before the altar of the Stranger. His back was to you now, and you watched him study the hooded figure with an expression you could not see. "When I was a boy, I used to hide here. From my tutors, from my father, from the endless demands of being the heir. No one ever thought to look for me in the sept. It was the one place I could be alone."
You said nothing. You did not know what to say. This was not the conversation you had expected, the stiff, formal exchange of pleasantries that usually passed between you and the members of the royal family. He turned back to you, and his smile had shifted into something gentler. Almost apologetic.
"But I have not come here to burden you with my childhood memories. I came to see how you were faring." He paused, and his mismatched eyes searched your face with that unsettling perceptiveness. "You have been married for over three moons now. I know that such transitions can be… difficult."
Difficult. The word was so inadequate it was almost laughable. You had been stripped of your name, your family, your freedom, your dignity. You had been turned into a vessel for your husband's pleasure and his heirs. You had been fucked on the council table like a common whore while the lords of the realm had decided your fate on that very spot. And this man, this polite, unassuming man, asked if the transition had been difficult.
But you did not laugh. You did not scream. You simply inclined your head and offered him the same empty words you offered everyone. "You are kind to ask, my prince. I am well. His Grace is a most considerate husband."
Something flickered in Baelor's eyes. Something that might have been amusement. "I am glad to hear it." His voice was dry, carefully neutral. "Valarr has always been… devoted to the things he values."
Devoted. Another inadequate word. Valarr was devoted to you the way a dragon was devoted to its hoard. He would guard you, cherish you, and devour anyone who tried to take you from him. But he would never see you as anything more than a possession. A beautiful, coveted possession that proved his worth as a Targaryen.
You realized, with a start, that Baelor was still watching you. Waiting for a response. "His devotion is an honor," you said. "One I do not take for granted."
"No," Baelor agreed. "I do not imagine you do."
The silence stretched between you, heavy with unspoken things and then, quite suddenly, his expression shifted. The intensity faded, replaced by something milder, more casual. The change was so seamless that you almost doubted you had seen anything else.
"You and Valarr should join us tonight," he said. "For supper. In my chambers. A small gathering, just family. My wife Jena and myself." He paused, and that small, controlled smile returned. "He used to dine with us often, before the wedding. Now he barely even joins us for meals. You have thoroughly bewitched him, it seems."
The words were pleasant. Complimentary, even. But there was something beneath them, something that made your stomach tighten with unease. You could not tell if he was mocking you, or testing you, or simply making conversation. His face revealed nothing but polite, paternal interest.
"I would be honored to attend," you said carefully. "If it pleases His Grace."
Baelor's smile widened, just slightly. "It will be good to have you at our table. Truly. You are part of this family now, whatever… circumstances brought you here. It is time we treated you as such."
The words were kind. They were the kindest words anyone in the Red Keep had spoken to you since your wedding. And yet, as you met Baelor's mismatched eyes, so like his son's and yet so different, you could not shake the feeling that you were being offered something that would come with a price.
"Thank you, my prince," you said.
He inclined his head, a small, graceful acknowledgment. Then he turned and walked toward the door, his footsteps echoing in the silence of the sept. At the threshold, he paused.
"I hope you find what you're praying for," he said, without turning around.
—
The night had settled over the Red Keep like a shroud, heavy and dark and suffocating. Outside the windows of the Prince's chambers, the moon hung low over Blackwater Bay, its silver light painting a shimmering path across the black water. The fire had burned down to embers, casting long shadows that danced across the walls like specters at a feast.
Valarr had taken you from behind. It was the first thing you had noticed when he pulled you into the bed, the first sign that something was different tonight. He usually preferred to see your face. He was obsessed with it, with watching your eyes as he moved inside you, cataloguing every flutter of your lashes, every parting of your lips, every flicker of pleasure you could not suppress. He needed to see you. He needed to know that you felt him, that you responded to him, that your body belonged to him even when your mind resisted.
But tonight, he had turned you onto your stomach without a word. His hands had gripped your hips with a roughness that bordered on punishing, his fingers digging into the soft flesh hard enough to leave bruises. He had entered you without the usual reverent preparation, without the slow, teasing foreplay he normally employed to make your body ready for him. He had simply taken what he wanted, his thrusts deep and hard and almost angry, his breath harsh against the back of your neck.
You had known, then, that something was wrong. Valarr was many things but he was not cruel in his bed. Not truly. The control he exerted over you was always tempered by that devastating gentleness, those whispered endearments, that desperate need to see your pleasure even as he claimed it for himself. Tonight, the gentleness was absent. Tonight, he fucked you like a man trying to exorcise a demon, or perhaps to summon one.
You had lain there, your face pressed into the silk pillows, your fingers gripping the furs, and you had let him take what he needed. Because that was what you did now. That was what you were for. And when he finally spent himself inside you with a low, almost wounded groan, when he collapsed against your back with his heart hammering against your spine, you had waited in silence for the storm to pass.
It did not pass. He withdrew from you and rolled onto his back, one arm flung over his eyes, his chest still heaving. The silence stretched between you like a chasm, filled only by the crackle of the dying fire and the distant crash of waves against the cliffs below the castle. You turned onto your side, pulling the furs up over your body, and watched him in the dim light.
His jaw was tight. His free hand was clenched into a fist on the mattress, the knuckles white. Even in the darkness, you could see the tension radiating from him, the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his eyes stared up at the canopy with a fury he was clearly struggling to contain.
Something had happened. Something at court, perhaps. Something that had wounded him in a way he did not want to show you.
You should have let it lie. You should have closed your eyes and pretended to sleep and let him stew in whatever dark mood had taken hold of him. His troubles were not your troubles. His pain was not your pain. You owed him nothing, not comfort, not concern, not even the pretense of wifely devotion.
But the silence was unbearable. And some part of you, some weak, traitorous part that you despised, wanted to know what had put that look on his face. Wanted to understand him, even now. Even after everything.
"The council meeting did not go well."
It was not a question. You had learned to read him well enough to know the signs. The roughness in bed. The silence afterward. The tension in his jaw that looked like it might crack his teeth. Something had happened in the Tower of the Hand, something that had left him feeling powerless, and he had come to you to reclaim his sense of control.
He let out a sharp breath that was almost a laugh. Almost. "No," he said, his voice flat and bitter. "It did not."
He did not elaborate. You had not expected him to. Valarr rarely shared the details of his political struggles with you. You were his wife, his possession, you were not his confidante. And yet, tonight, something was different. Tonight, the silence felt less like a wall and more like a wound.
You shifted closer to him beneath the furs. The movement was small, almost involuntary, but his arm moved in response, lifting from his eyes so he could look at you. His mismatched gaze was tired, the blue eye shadowed, the brown one dark with frustration. His dark hair was disheveled, clinging to his forehead with sweat.
"What happened?" you asked softly. He stared at you for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether you were genuinely asking or simply performing the role of concerned wife. You were not entirely sure yourself.
"I presented a proposal," he said finally. "Weeks of work. I consulted with the Master of Ships. I reviewed every harbor tariff from the past decade. I drafted a plan that would increase Crown revenues by fifteen percent without raising taxes on the smallfolk." His voice grew sharper with each word, the bitterness bleeding through. "It was thorough. It was sound. It was better than anything those greybeards could have cobbled together in a hundred years of warming their arses on those council chairs."
He turned his gaze back to the canopy, his jaw tightening again. "They listened politely. Lord Butterwell nodded along like a fucking toy soldier. The Grand Maester made notes he'll never read. And then my father said—" He pitched his voice lower, a mocking approximation of Baelor's measured tone. "'A thoughtful proposal, Valarr. We will certainly give it the consideration it deserves.' And then he moved on to the next item. As if I had said nothing at all. As if I were still a boy playing at governance with wooden soldiers."
You watched him in the darkness. His profile was sharp against the pillows, his features carved from shadow and firelight. He looked, in that moment, less like the man who had methodically stripped away every piece of your independence and more like a son who had tried his best and been told it was not good enough by the one man whose approval he craved.
"The proposal sounds like it had merit," you said carefully.
"It did." His voice was bitter. "But merit does not matter. Experience matters. Age matters. Being a man of one and twenty in a room full of men twice my age matters. They look at me and they see my father's son and nothing else. Nothing I have earned. Nothing I have built. Just the son, playing at statecraft while the real men make the decisions."
He fell silent, and the words hung in the air between you. The heir's heir. You had never thought of him that way before. To you, he had always seemed so powerful, so in control, the man who held your entire existence in his hands. But in the broader hierarchy of the realm, he was merely the son of the heir. Important, yes. Privileged, certainly. But not yet a man of real power. Not yet someone whose voice carried weight in the council chamber. It made him seem, for the first time, almost human.
Your hand moved before you could stop it. Your fingers found his arm beneath the furs, tracing the line of muscle from his wrist to his elbow. The touch was light, tentative, a gesture of comfort you had never offered him before. "Your father should have listened," you said quietly. "Truly listened. Not just nodded and moved on."
Valarr turned his head on the pillow to look at you. His mismatched eyes were unreadable, but something in them had shifted. The anger was still there, simmering beneath the surface, but it was tempered now by something else. Surprise, perhaps. Or gratitude.
"You think so?" His voice was softer than it had been.
"I am not a member of the council," you said. "I do not know the intricacies of harbor tariffs or Crown revenues. But I know what it is to prepare something carefully, to pour your effort into a task, only to be dismissed by those who should have valued your contribution." You paused, holding his gaze. "It is a particular kind of wound. One that festers if left unacknowledged."
He was silent for a long moment. Then his hand found yours beneath the furs, his fingers interlacing with your own. His palm was warm, his grip firm but not demanding. It was the first time he had held your hand without it feeling like an act of possession.
"Sometimes," he said slowly, "you surprise me."
"Is that a good thing?"
His lips curved into a small, tired smile. "I have not decided yet."
He lifted your joined hands and pressed a kiss to your knuckles. It was a gentle gesture, almost chaste, and it made your chest tighten with something you refused to name. You did not want him to be gentle. You did not want him to be vulnerable. You wanted him to be the monster you could hate cleanly, not this complicated, wounded man who held your hand like you were the only solid thing in a world that had stopped making sense.
"I needed this," he murmured against your skin. "I needed you."
You always need me, you thought. But only when it suits you. Only when I can serve a purpose. Only when your pride has been wounded and you need something beautiful to remind you of your power.
But you did not say that. Instead, you said, "I saw your father today. In the sept."
Valarr's head lifted. His eyes sharpened with something that might have been wariness. "Did you?" His voice was carefully neutral, but his fingers tightened around yours. "My father is not a particularly pious man."
"He came to see how I was faring." You paused, choosing your next words with care. "He was… kind. He asked after you. He said that you used to dine with them often, before the wedding. That they miss your presence at their table."
Valarr was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was dry, almost amused, but there was an edge beneath it that you could not quite identify, something that felt almost like satisfaction.
"Did he now."
"He asked us to join them for supper. A small gathering. Just family, he said."
Valarr released your hand and rolled onto his back again, staring up at the canopy. But his arm found your waist, pulling you closer against his side, his thumb tracing idle circles on the curve of your hip.
"Funny," he said. "Since my father was the main opposition to our marriage."
The words hung in the air between you, heavy with implication. You felt your stomach tighten, a cold thread of unease winding through your chest.
"He opposed the marriage?"
"He did." Valarr's mismatched eyes were fixed on the canopy above, but his arm tightened around your waist, pulling you closer still. "When the council debated what to do with you, there were many voices. Lord Darklyn wanted you sent to the Silent Sisters. Lord Celtigar suggested a strategic marriage to some minor house that could be trusted to keep you quiet and out of sight. And Lord Bracken—well, Lord Bracken wanted your head on a spike. He lost two sons at the Battle of the Redgrass Field. He was not feeling merciful."
His thumb continued its lazy circles on your hip, a strange counterpoint to the gravity of his words. "And my father," he continued, "argued against the marriage. Not against sparing your life—he is not a cruel man, my father. But against bringing you into the heart of the royal family. He said it was unwise to bind a Blackfyre so close to the throne. He said it would be seen as a sign of weakness, that the realm would think we were rewarding rebellion. He said…" Valarr paused, and something dark flickered in his expression. "He said I was letting my desires cloud my judgment. That I wanted you for the wrong reasons. That I was not thinking clearly."
He was right, you thought. He was right about all of it.
But you did not say that. You could not say that. Instead, you studied Valarr's profile in the dying firelight and asked, "Then how did the marriage happen? If the Prince of Dragonstone opposed it?"
"The King overruled him." Valarr's voice was quiet, but there was a fierce pride in it now. "My grandfather saw the wisdom of binding your bloodline to ours. He understood that marriage was a stronger chain than execution. That you would be more valuable as a Targaryen wife than as a Blackfyre corpse." He turned his head to look at you, and his mismatched eyes gleamed in the darkness. "I won. Despite my father's objections. Despite everyone who thought I was making a mistake. I won."
You did not point out that you were the one who had lost. That your family was dead or exiled or imprisoned. That your body was no longer your own. That you prayed every day in the cold stone sept for death to take everyone who had done this to you. You did not point out any of that, because it would not have mattered. He would not have understood. Instead, you said, "Perhaps your father has come to terms with it, then. Perhaps his invitation is an olive branch. A gesture of reconciliation."
Valarr was quiet for a long moment. His hand had moved from your hip to the small of your back, his fingers tracing the bumps of your spine with idle, proprietary tenderness.
"My father is a practical man," he said finally. "He knows when a battle is lost. He accepted his own limitations. He has accepted every disappointment the gods have seen fit to hand him with that same dignity." There was something in his voice now, not quite admiration, not quite resentment, but a complicated mixture of both. "Perhaps he has decided to accept you as well."
"Or perhaps he wants something." The words left your mouth before you could stop them. You remembered Baelor's mismatched eyes watching you in the sept, his patient, assessing gaze, the way he had said I hope you find what you're praying for as if he knew exactly what darkness lived in your heart. "Your father seems like a man who always wants something."
Valarr turned his head to look at you, and his smile was thin and knowing. "Now you are learning," he said. "My father always wants something. The trick is determining what it is before he takes it."
The words lingered in the darkness, heavy with unspoken warning. You thought of Baelor's calm, measured voice in the sept. His careful questions about your wellbeing. His invitation to supper, delivered with the casual ease of a man who was accustomed to getting what he wanted.
"Will we go?" you asked. "To the supper?"
Valarr shifted onto his side, facing you. His hand slid from your back to your waist, pulling you against the warmth of his body. His face was close to yours now, close enough that you could count the flecks of amber in his brown eye, the flecks of storm grey in his blue one. His father's eyes. His father's coloring. The Dornish look that marked him as more Martell than Targaryen, despite the single streak of silver gold that ran through his dark hair like a brand.
"Of course," he murmured. His lips brushed your forehead, then the bridge of your nose, then the corner of your mouth. "We would not want to disappoint my dear father. And besides…" His voice dropped, low and dark and almost hungry. "Let him see what he tried to prevent. Let him see you on my arm, in my colors, wearing my name. Let him sit across the table from the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms and know that I claimed you despite his objections."
His mouth found yours then, soft and searching, and you kissed him back because it was easier than resisting. Because his body was warm against yours, and his hands were gentle now, and some traitorous part of you was grateful that the anger had drained from him. Grateful that the man who held you now was not the same man who had taken you from behind with punishing, wordless fury.
When he pulled back, his mismatched eyes were dark with something that looked almost like tenderness. "Sleep," he murmured. "Tomorrow, we will dine with my father. And you will see what it means to sit at a table where every word is a move in a game you did not agree to play."
—
The next evening, your ladies in waiting descended upon you like vultures to a carcass.
They had been unusually eager when you informed them of the supper with Baelor and Jena. Usually, they performed their duties with the bare minimum of effort, a few quick tugs of your laces, cold water in the basin and colder stares in the mirror. They did their work and left as quickly as propriety allowed, retreating to their own chambers where they could whisper about you without the inconvenience of your presence.
But tonight was different. Tonight, there was an event. A royal supper. A chance to dress you up like a doll and send you out into the world with their fingerprints all over your appearance. A chance to claim credit if you looked beautiful and to whisper about your inadequacies if you did not.
Lady Jeyne was the worst of them. "Hold still, my lady," she said now, her fingers working the laces of your bodice with unnecessary force. "We cannot have you looking disheveled for the Prince of Dragonstone. First impressions are so important—though I suppose it is rather late for that, isn't it?"
You said nothing. You had learned that lesson within your first week in the Red Keep. Silence was safer than words. Words could be twisted, weaponized, turned back upon you with those sweet, poisonous smiles. Silence, at least, was your own.
Lady Alia giggled from her perch on the window seat. She was the youngest of your attendants, and the cruelest in her own careless way. She did not hate you the way Jeyne did, she simply found you amusing, a plaything, a source of entertainment in a court that could be dreadfully dull.
"I hear the Prince could barely keep his hands off you in the gardens last week," Alia said, her voice light and musical. "One of the guards told my maid, who told me—apparently His Grace is quite… enthusiastic in his affections."
Your jaw tightened. The memory of that afternoon in the gardens, the cherry blossoms, the stone bench, the rough press of Valarr's body against yours while the guards pretended not to hear, flashed through your mind like a brand.
"It must be so flattering," Lady Mariene added from her position by the wardrobe, where she was selecting your jewelry with the air of someone choosing funeral ornaments. She was the quietest of your three ladies, but her silences were somehow worse than the others' words. She watched. She remembered. She reported everything to someone, though you had never been able to determine who. "To be so desired. Most wives can barely get their husbands to look at them after the first month, and here you are—the Prince cannot seem to let you out of his sight."
"I heard he took her against the wall in the east corridor," Jeyne said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur that was perfectly pitched to carry through the entire chamber. She tugged viciously at your laces, and you felt your breath constrict. "One of the servants saw them. Said Her Grace was making the most indecent sounds. Like a common camp follower."
The mirror showed you your own face, you watched yourself the way you might watch a stranger, noting the almost imperceptible tightening of your jaw. You would not give them the satisfaction of a reaction. You would not.
"Perhaps the Prince will bend her over the dining table tonight," Alia said, clapping her hands together with mock delight. "Right there in front of the Prince and Lady Jena. A bit of entertainment between the fish course and the roast. I'm sure the musicians could provide appropriate accompaniment."
The three of them laughed. The sound was bright and tinkling and utterly venomous, like bells dipped in poison.
"The Blackfyre whore becomes the Targaryen spectacle," Jeyne said, meeting your eyes in the mirror with that cold, triumphant smile. "Your mother must be so proud."
Something hot and sharp rose in your chest rage, pure and undiluted, the same rage that fueled your prayers in the sept. You wanted to turn around and slap the smile from Jeyne's face. You wanted to grab Alia by her perfect honey colored hair and drag her across the floor. You wanted to scream at them until your voice gave out, to tell them that you had not chosen this, that you had not wanted any of this, that you were a prisoner in all but name and they were the jailers' mocking chorus.
But you could not. Speaking back meant punishment. Not directly, Valarr would never raise a hand against you, would never lock you in a dungeon or have you beaten. But Lady Jeyne's cousin was a captain in the City Watch. Lady Alia's father sat on the King's council. Lady Mariene's uncle was the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Their families were powerful, respected, loyal. Your family was dead or exiled or imprisoned. You had no allies. You had no power. You had only the thin protection of Valarr's obsession, and even that was a fickle thing, a fire that could warm you or consume you depending on his mood.
So you said nothing. You sat perfectly still as Jeyne finished lacing your bodice with punishing tightness, as Mariene draped a necklace of rubies around your throat, as Alia powdered your cheeks and painted your lips with rose scented salve. You let them transform you into the image of a perfect Targaryen wife, beautiful and silent and utterly hollow.
"There," Jeyne said, stepping back to admire her work with the critical eye of a sculptor examining a statue. "You look almost presentable. Perhaps the Prince will not regret inviting you to his table after all."
"Though I'm sure His Grace Valarr will find some way to muss her before the evening is through," Alia added with a wink. "He does so hate to see her looking tidy."
More laughter. More poison. You rose from the dressing table without a word and walked to the door. Your heart was pounding in your chest, your hands trembling slightly at your sides. But your face remained calm. Your posture remained perfect. You had learned to walk as if you were made of glass and steel, fragile enough to be beautiful, strong enough to survive.
Ser Alan was waiting for you in the corridor, his white armor gleaming in the torchlight, his weathered face as unreadable as ever. He did not comment on your appearance. He did not ask if you were well. He simply fell into step behind you as you walked toward the Prince of Dragonstone's chambers, where your husband was waiting to escort you to supper.
Let them choke on their own venom, you prayed silently. Let the Stranger take them all—Jeyne and Alia and Mariene and every poison tongued snake in this wretched castle.
—
The supper was, against all expectations, perfectly pleasant. You had braced yourself for disaster. For veiled insults wrapped in courtesies. For Jena's cold stares and Baelor's measured silences. For Valarr's possessiveness manifesting in some humiliating display of ownership across the table. You had prepared yourself for every possible horror, every conceivable cruelty, every way the evening might become another weapon in the slow, grinding war of attrition that was your life in the Red Keep.
None of it happened. The private dining chamber was smaller than you had expected, intimate rather than imposing, with tapestries depicting Dornish landscapes on the walls and a fire that crackled warmly in the hearth. The table was set for four, simple but elegant, with silver candlesticks and fresh flowers arranged in a crystal vase. It felt less like a royal audience and more like a family gathering. A real one. The kind you had not experienced since before the war.
Jena Dondarrion rose to greet you with a genuine smile. She was handsome rather than beautiful, her face lined with age and laughter, her hair a deep auburn threaded with grey. Her eyes were kind and she took your hands in hers and squeezed them gently.
"At last," she said. "I have been asking my son to bring you to us for weeks. But he keeps you all to himself, the selfish boy."
Valarr made a sound of protest, but there was no real irritation in it. He kissed his mother's cheek with an ease that surprised you, you had never seen him so relaxed, so unguarded. Here, in his parents' chambers, he seemed almost like a different man.
"He is rather possessive," you said, before you could stop yourself.
Jena laughed, a warm, rolling sound that filled the chamber. "He gets that from his father. Baelor was insufferable when we first married. I could not sneeze without him appearing at my elbow with a handkerchief and a look of grave concern."
"Lies," Baelor said from his seat at the head of the table, but his eyes were warm with amusement. "I was the very model of restraint."
"You were a menace," Jena said fondly. "But a charming one. I suppose that is why I forgave you."
The supper proceeded in much the same manner. Easy. Utterly ordinary. The food was excellent roasted duck with orange glaze, buttered parsnips, fresh bread still steaming from the ovens but the conversation was better. Baelor asked you about Tyrosh, about the architecture and the sea and the dye markets that had made your mother's family wealthy. He listened to your answers with genuine interest, asking follow up questions that proved he was paying attention rather than simply performing politeness.
Jena asked about your childhood, your tutors, the books you had read. When you mentioned a fondness for history her eyes lit up.
"You must speak with Baelor about that," she said, gesturing toward her husband with her wine glass. "He is a dreadful bore when it comes to history. He will talk your ear off about King Jaehearys if given half a chance."
"I prefer Aegon the conqueror," Baelor said, his eyes meeting yours across the table. "But my wife is right. I am a bore on the subject. You must forgive me if I become tedious."
"You could never be tedious, my prince," you said, because it was the polite thing to say.
Valarr's hand found your knee beneath the table. His thumb traced small circles on the silk of your gown, a proprietary touch that was becoming as familiar as your own heartbeat. But it was gentler than usual, less demanding. He was relaxed, you realized. Happy, even.
"You mentioned that your younger son is fostering in the Stormlands," you said to Jena, partly to fill the silence and partly out of genuine curiosity.
Something flickered across Jena's face, pride mixed with the particular melancholy of a mother missing her child.
"Matarys," she said, and her voice softened around the name like velvet wrapping a blade. "He is squiring with my brother, Lord Dondarrion. The boy has always been wild—too much Stormlands blood in him, my husband says. We thought some time in the marches might temper him." She smiled, but there was a wistfulness to it. "I miss him terribly. But he writes often. He has his father's gift for words, if not his father's restraint."
"He has his mother's recklessness," Baelor said dryly. "Which is why he needs the discipline of a proper knight. My good brother will make a warrior of him, or die trying."
"Matarys is a good lad," Valarr said. He had leaned back in his chair, his posture easy, his wine glass dangling from his fingers. "A bit too fond of brawling and drinking and chasing servant girls, but his heart is in the right place. Usually."
"When he can find it," Baelor added, and the table shared a quiet laugh.
You listened to them talk about Matarys and felt something strange settle in your chest. It took you a moment to recognize it. Longing.
This was a family. A real family, with inside jokes and shared memories and the easy affection of people who had known each other for decades and loved each other anyway. They teased and laughed and argued about trivial things and through it all, there was no cruelty and then you remembered: you were not a Targaryen. You were a Blackfyre. This family had destroyed yours. This warmth was not for you. This belonging was an illusion, a pretty lie told over roast duck and Dornish wine.
But it was such a pretty lie. And for one evening, you let yourself believe it.
When the supper ended, Valarr escorted you back to his chambers with his hand resting lightly on the small of your back. He was in good spirits, humming a tune you did not recognize, his earlier frustration with the council seemingly forgotten.
"That was not terrible," he said as he closed the door behind you. "My mother likes you. I can always tell."
"How?"
"She asked about your reading habits. My mother only asks about books when she approves of someone. If she disliked you, she would have spent the entire evening discussing embroidery."
You thought of Jena's warm hands, her genuine smile, the way she had squeezed your fingers and said at last. It had felt real. It had felt like acceptance. And you did not know what to do with that.
"Your parents are… not what I expected," you said carefully.
Valarr turned to look at you, his mismatched eyes glinting in the firelight. "What did you expect?"
Coldness. Cruelty. The same poison that drips from every other soul in this wretched castle. But you could not say that. Not to him. Not when he was looking at you with that soft, almost tender expression.
"I do not know," you said instead. "Something different."
He crossed the room and took your face in his hands, his thumbs brushing your cheekbones with that reverent tenderness that always made your heart ache with confusion. His touch was gentle. It was always gentle, even when it was demanding.
"My father may have opposed the marriage," he said quietly, "but he is not a fool. He can see your worth. Everyone can see your worth." He pressed a kiss to your forehead. "You are beautiful and clever and full of grace. How could they not love you?"
They do not love me, you thought. They tolerated me at a supper. That is not the same thing.
But you said nothing. You simply closed your eyes and let him hold you, and tried not to think about how much you had wanted that supper to be real.
—
It started three days later. You were in the gardens, enduring another afternoon of Lady Jeyne's poison-sweet company. The cherry blossoms had long since fallen, replaced by the first blooms of summer, roses in shades of crimson and gold, lavender that scented the air with its clean, sharp perfume. It should have been pleasant. It was not.
"I noticed His Grace was rather… attentive during supper last night night," Jeyne was saying, her voice pitched to carry to the guards who flanked the garden path. "One could hardly blame him, of course. You were practically spilling out of that bodice."
"You have such a keen eye for fashion," Alia added with a tinkling laugh. "Perhaps Her Grace can offer you some advice. Tyroshi styles are so… revealing, are they not? One can only imagine what the ladies of the Free Cities consider appropriate dinner attire."
You kept your eyes fixed on the roses. Your hands were clasped in front of you, your posture perfect, your face as blank as polished marble. You had learned to retreat into yourself during these moments, to find a small, quiet place deep inside where their words could not reach you. It was not always effective. But it was better than the alternative.
"You are too kind," you said, your voice flat and distant. "I am certain the ladies of Tyrosh would find Westerosi fashions equally fascinating."
Jeyne opened her mouth to deliver what was surely another perfectly aimed barb, but the words died on her lips. Her eyes fixed on something over your shoulder, and her expression shifted, surprise, then wariness, then the careful, calculated deference of a courtier who had spotted someone more powerful than herself.
"Prince Baelor," she said, dipping into a curtsy.
You turned. He was walking toward you along the garden path, his hands clasped behind his back, his stride unhurried and easy. He looked harmless. That was the first thought that crossed your mind. He looked like a man who had come to the gardens for a quiet stroll and happened upon you by accident.
"Lady Jeyne," he said, inclining his head. "Lady Alia. I trust you are enjoying the gardens?"
"Very much, my prince," Jeyne said. Her voice had lost all its venom, replaced by cloying deference. "Her Grace was just admiring the roses."
"Was she?" Baelor's gaze shifted to you, and his smile was warm and conspiratorial. "Then I must apologize for the interruption. But I find myself in need of Her Grace's company. A matter of some urgency, I am afraid."
Jeyne's eyes flickered between you and the Prince. You could see her mind working, trying to determine whether this was a genuine summons or something else. But Baelor's face revealed nothing but pleasant expectation.
"A matter of urgency?" Alia asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.
"Books," Baelor said gravely. "I have recently acquired a new history of the Rhoynish migration, and I am told Her Grace has an interest in such things. I was hoping she might offer her opinion on the author's treatment of Nymeria's conquest."
The silence that followed was almost comical. Jeyne and Alia stared at Baelor with the blank incomprehension of women who had never read a book that was not forced upon them by their septas. Mariene, hovering in the background as always, looked equally perplexed.
"I would be honored, my prince," you said, before your ladies could recover their wits. "Please, lead the way."
Baelor offered you his arm with the easy gallantry of a man who had been doing such things for decades. You took it, feeling the solid warmth of him through the fabric of his doublet, and let him guide you away from your ladies and their poison tongues.
"I hope you will forgive the deception," he said quietly, once you were out of earshot. "There is no new history of the Rhoynish migration. I simply observed that you seemed in need of rescue."
"I am certain I do not know what you mean, my prince."
"Of course you do not." His mismatched eyes sparkled with something that might have been amusement. "You were the picture of serene contentment. The roses could learn a thing or two from your composure."
You did not know how to respond to that. You settled for a small, noncommittal sound. Baelor led you along the garden path, past the rose bushes and the lavender beds, past a fountain that burbled cheerfully in the afternoon sun. The guards had fallen back to a respectful distance, and for the first time in what felt like weeks, you were not being watched by hostile eyes. You were not being prodded and pinched and picked apart. You were simply walking, the sun warm on your face, the air fragrant with the scent of flowers.
"I meant what I said about the book," Baelor said after a moment. "Not the Rhoynish history—I am afraid that was purely fictional. But I do have a rather extensive library, and I recall you mentioned an interest in reading during our supper. If you would like, I could lend you some volumes."
You hesitated. The library had been denied to you since your arrival. You had asked, once, if you might be permitted to borrow some books. The request had been passed to Valarr, who had said something. You could not remember the exact words. Only that the answer had been no.
"I would not wish to impose," you said carefully.
"It is no imposition. I have more books than I could possibly read in a lifetime. They sit on their shelves gathering dust, waiting for someone to appreciate them." He paused, and his voice softened. "And I think, perhaps, you might appreciate them."
There was something in his tone that made your throat tighten. It was not the possessive hunger you heard in Valarr's voice when he spoke to you. It was not the cold contempt of your ladies. It was something gentler. Something that felt almost like kindness.
"Thank you," you said. "I would like that."
Baelor smiled. It was a quiet smile, controlled and careful, but there was a warmth in it that seemed genuine. "Excellent. I will have some volumes sent to your chambers. Or…" He paused, as if considering something. "Perhaps you would prefer to select them yourself? The library can be overwhelming if you do not know where to look. I would be happy to guide you."
"Valarr said the library was not—" You stopped yourself. You had not meant to say that. The words had slipped out before you could catch them.
Baelor's expression did not change, but something flickered in his eyes. Something patient. Something knowing.
"My son can be protective," he said. "It is one of his less endearing qualities. But I am the Prince of Dragonstone, and the library is my domain. If I invite you to borrow some books, there is no one in this castle who would dare object." His arm tightened slightly under your hand. "Not even Valarr."
After that, Baelor Targaryen seemed to be everywhere. He would find you in the gardens when your ladies were being particularly cruel, and offer you his arm and a stroll among the flowers. He would appear in the corridor outside the sept when your prayers were finished, as if he had business nearby and had merely happened to cross your path. He would send a servant with a book and a note in his precise, elegant hand: I thought this might interest you. This chapter is particularly illuminating.
The books were always exactly what you wanted to read. Histories of Old Valyria. Chronicles of the conquest. They were the books you would have chosen for yourself, if you had been permitted to choose. It was as if he had reached into your mind and plucked out your interests one by one.
When Valarr was busy—which was often, now that the council had taken an interest in his harbor tariff proposal after all—Baelor was there. He did not crowd you. He did not demand your attention. He simply… waited. Available. Present. A steady, calming presence in a castle full of enemies.
You began to look forward to his company. It was a small thing at first, a flicker of relief when you saw him walking toward you along a corridor. Then it grew. You found yourself thinking of questions you might ask him, observations you might share, books you might discuss. You found yourself wondering what he would think of this or that, a passage you had read, a thought you had, a story you had heard.
He was so easy to talk to. He listened when you spoke. He remembered things you had told him days or weeks before. He asked after your comfort, your health, your peace of mind. He seemed genuinely interested in your thoughts and opinions. He treated you like a person rather than a possession.
One afternoon, you found yourself in the library with him. It had become a regular occurrence, an hour here, an hour there, whenever Valarr's duties took him away and your ladies could be safely evaded. Baelor had shown you the sections he thought you would enjoy, had pointed out rare volumes and first editions, had even pulled a heavy tome from a locked case and let you hold it in your hands. Septon Bareth's Unnatural History. A book so rare and so controversial that most copies had been burned centuries ago.
You were sitting by the window now, the afternoon light slanting across the pages of a history of the Rhoynish migration. Baelor sat across from you at the reading table, a stack of documents at his elbow that he had been neglecting in favor of a worn volume of Dornish poetry. The silence between you was comfortable, the kind of silence that did not demand to be filled.
"You were right about the chapter on Nymeria's landing," you said, not looking up from your book. "The author is unfairly dismissive of her tactics. He calls them desperate when they were clearly calculated."
"I told you." Baelor's voice was dry with satisfaction. "Mekon has never met a female leader he could not diminish. It is his great failing as a historian. His great failing as a man, perhaps."
"Perhaps I should write a rebuttal. 'A Lady's Defense of the Warrior Queen.' I am certain the Citadel would welcome it with open arms."
"They would burn it in the courtyard."
"Then I shall have to publish anonymously. Some masculine pseudonym. Archmaester… Gwayne."
Baelor chuckled. It was an undignified sound for a Prince of the realm, and it made the corner of your mouth twitch upward despite yourself. "Archmaester Gwayne. A fine choice. Very authoritative. No one would ever suspect a woman."
"Precisely." You turned a page, though you had not finished reading it. "I will dedicate it to my patron, the Prince of Dragonstone, without whom I would never have had access to the texts necessary to prove Mekon wrong."
"Your patron. I like that." He leaned back in his chair, his mismatched eyes gleaming with amusement. "Does that make you my protégée?"
"I believe it does. I hope you take your responsibilities seriously. I am told the education of a Blackfyre is a delicate undertaking."
"Exceedingly delicate. One wrong book and you might develop opinions. We cannot have that."
You laughed. It was a small sound, barely more than a breath, but it was real. You could not remember the last time you had laughed in this castle. The last time you had felt light enough to try. Baelor did not remark on it. He simply smiled and returned his attention to his poetry, giving you space to recover yourself without comment or scrutiny. That was something you had come to appreciate about him, he knew when to push and when to withdraw, when to speak and when to let silence do its work. He did not demand your emotions the way Valarr did, dissecting every reaction, claiming every pleasure. He simply let you be.
"You know," he said after a while, "my son is going to notice that you spend more time in my library than his chambers."
"He is busy with the council. His harbor proposal has been approved for further review. Apparently Lord Celtigar was impressed."
"I heard." Baelor's voice was carefully neutral. "I was the one who suggested Celtigar take a second look. He can be stubborn, but he respects thorough work. Valarr's proposal was thorough."
You looked up from your book. "You did that?"
"I mentioned it in passing. Nothing more." He turned a page of his poetry with studied casualness. "My son and I do not always agree. But I have never doubted his intelligence. It seemed a waste for his work to be dismissed without proper consideration."
"Why?" you asked.
"Because he is my son." Baelor met your eyes, and there was something steady in his gaze. "Because I could not give him the Valyrian coloring he prayed for as a boy, or the place at the council table he wants now. But I could do this. So I did."
"You could tell him. He would want to know."
"No." Baelor shook his head. "He would resent it. He wants to succeed on his own merits, not because his father smoothed the path. And he did succeed on his own merits. The proposal was his. I simply… ensured it was seen by the right eyes." He paused, and his mouth quirked into a wry smile. "Parenting is a thankless occupation. You will understand one day, when you have children of your own."
The mention of children made something twist in your stomach. You thought of Valarr's nightly attentions, his insistence on spilling his seed inside you, his muttered hopes for an heir. You thought of what it would mean to carry his child. To be bound to him not just by marriage vows but by blood.
You pushed the thought aside.
"Same time tomorrow?" he asked.
"You assume I have nothing better to do."
"Do you?"
You thought of your ladies and their poison tongues. Of the cold stares in the corridors. Of the suffocating emptiness of Valarr's chambers when he was not there to fill them with his presence.
"Not particularly," you admitted.
"Then I shall see you tomorrow." He opened the door for you with a small, almost paternal gesture. "Bring your rebuttal to Mekon. I expect at least three pages of scathing critique."
"I shall endeavor not to disappoint my patron."
"I have every confidence in you, Archmaester Gwayne."
You were still smiling when you reached Valarr's chambers. It was only later, lying in bed with his arm wrapped around your waist and his breath warm on your neck, that you realized how easy it had become. How natural. How much you looked forward to those hours in the library, those walks in the gardens, those moments of respite from the grinding weight of your existence.
Baelor Targaryen had become your refuge. And you did not stop to wonder why a man who had opposed your marriage so vehemently was now so eager for your company. You did not stop to wonder at all.
—
The sept was empty, as it always was at this hour. You knelt before the Stranger's altar, your knees aching against the cold stone, your hands clasped in a posture of devotion you no longer felt. The hooded figure gazed down at you with its carved, impassive face, offering neither judgment nor comfort. The Stranger did not pretend to care. That was why you preferred it.
Your prayers had grown less bloody in recent weeks. You still wished death upon Lady Jeyne and her poison tongue, upon the guards who looked through you like glass, upon the servants who let your fire die. But the prayers came less frequently now, and with less heat behind them. You had other things to occupy your mind. Books to read. Conversations to anticipate. A quiet library where the afternoon light fell golden across the pages and no one demanded anything of you.
You did not pray for Baelor's death anymore. You had stopped that weeks ago.
The footsteps behind you were familiar now. You did not flinch at the sound. You did not feel your heart seize with the fear that it might be Valarr, come to violate this last sanctuary. You simply remained where you were, your head bowed, your eyes closed, and waited for him to speak.
"I thought I might find you here."
Baelor's voice was quiet, respectful of the space. You heard him settle onto the kneeling bench beside you, his movements slow and careful. The scent of him reached you, parchment and ink and the faint, clean smell of soap. It was a familiar scent now. A comforting one.
"Your ladies are looking for you," he added. "Lady Jeyne seems particularly determined. I believe she has prepared a new gown for you to try on. Something in Targaryen red."
"She can wait." You opened your eyes but did not rise. "Let her search the entire castle. It will give her something to do besides sharpen her tongue."
"That was uncharitable."
"I am not feeling charitable."
"Good." There was a smile in his voice. "Charity is wasted on women like Jeyne. She would not recognize it if it bit her."
You turned your head to look at him. He was close, closer than he usually sat in the sept, his shoulder nearly brushing yours as he knelt beside you. His mismatched eyes met yours, and something in his expression made your stomach tighten. You could not name it. It was not the patient warmth you had grown accustomed to.
"Have you been praying?" he asked.
"After a fashion."
"To which god?"
"The Stranger." You nodded toward the hooded figure before you. "The only one who does not pretend to answer."
Baelor followed your gaze, studying the altar with an expression you could not read. "Most people find the Stranger unsettling. They prefer the Mother, or the Maiden. Gods who offer comfort rather than silence."
"I have had enough of false comfort."
"Have you?" He turned back to you, and the sharp thing in his expression had softened into something that looked almost like concern. "I had hoped you might say otherwise. I had hoped you were finding some measure of peace here. In the castle. In your marriage."
The mention of your marriage made you look away. You fixed your eyes on the Stranger's hooded face, on the carved shadows that hid its features from view.
"Peace is not the same as survival," you said quietly. "I am surviving. That will have to be enough."
"It should not have to be enough." His voice was low, almost gentle. "You deserve more than survival. You deserve to be seen. To be valued. To be…"
He trailed off. The silence stretched, heavy with something unspoken.
"To be what?" you asked.
When he did not answer, you turned to look at him again. He was closer than before. Much closer. His mismatched eyes were fixed on your face with an intensity that made your breath catch. His hand was on the altar rail, inches from your own.
"To be wanted," he said softly. "By someone who understands what you are. What you could be." And then he leaned in and kissed you.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was not the reverent, worshipful press of lips that Valarr gave you when he was feeling tender. It was firm and deliberate and utterly assured, the kiss of a man who had been waiting a long time and had decided the wait was over. His hand came up to cup your jaw, his fingers warm against your skin, and for one frozen, terrible moment, you could not move.
Then the shock broke, and you wrenched yourself backward. Your spine hit the edge of the kneeling bench behind you. Your hand flew to your mouth, your fingers pressing against your lips as if you could erase the sensation of his touch. Your heart was pounding so hard you could feel it in your throat, in your temples, in the tips of your fingers.
"What—" Your voice came out as a croak. You swallowed and tried again. "What are you doing?"
Baelor had not moved. He remained kneeling before the Stranger's altar, his hand still raised where your face had been, his expression unreadable. But there was something in his eyes now, a flicker of surprise, quickly suppressed. As if he had expected a different reaction. As if he had been certain of it.
"I thought you might like it," he said. His voice was calm. Reasonable. The voice of a man discussing the weather. "I thought you might… want to."
"Want to?" You were on your feet now, backing away from him, your hands shaking at your sides. The cold stone of the sept floor bit into your feet, grounding you, reminding you that this was real. This was happening. "You thought I wanted—why would you think that? Why would you ever think that?"
"You have been spending a great deal of time with me." He rose slowly, his movements unhurried, his hands raised slightly as if to calm a spooked horse. "You sought my company. You confided in me. I thought…"
"You thought what?" Your voice was rising, echoing off the stone walls. The Seven looked down at you with their carved, impassive faces—the Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Smith, the Maid, the Crone, the Stranger. All of them silent. All of them useless. "You thought that meant I wanted you to—that I would—"
"I thought we understood each other." His eyes narrowed slightly, the calm facade cracking just enough to reveal something harder beneath. "You are not happy in your marriage. Anyone can see that. My son does not see you as a person—he sees you as a prize. A possession. I thought you might welcome an alternative."
"An alternative?" The word tasted like bile in your mouth. "You are his father. You are my good father. There is no alternative. There is nothing—" Your voice broke. "There is nothing I want from you. Nothing like that. I never—I never gave you any indication—"
"Didn't you?"
The two words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Baelor's expression had changed now. The pleasant mask was gone. The patient warmth was gone. What remained was something cold and calculating, the face of a man who had been playing a game and had just realized his opponent had not been playing at all.
"I see," he said quietly. "I misjudged the situation."
"Misjudged—" You could not finish the sentence. Your whole body was trembling. You had trusted him. You had laughed with him. You had let him into the small, fragile space you had carved for yourself in this wretched castle, and he had—
"I will take my leave." Baelor straightened his doublet with a calm, unhurried motion. His composure had returned as quickly as it had slipped, the mask settling back into place. "I apologize for any… misunderstanding. It will not happen again."
He turned toward the door. His footsteps echoed on the stone, measured and unhurried, as if nothing had happened. As if he had not just shattered the only sanctuary you had left.
You opened your mouth to speak—to shout, to curse, to say something, anything—
And then you were being pushed. A hand slammed into your shoulder, spinning you around. You caught a glimpse of Baelor's face—his expression no longer calm or calculating but something else entirely, something raw and furious and utterly without restraint—before your back hit the small prayer table with a crack that drove the air from your lungs.
Pain lanced through your spine. The edge of the table bit into your hips. The candles on the Stranger's altar flickered wildly, casting long, twisting shadows across the stone walls. Baelor's hands were on your shoulders, pinning you against the table, his weight bearing down on you.
"You think you can refuse me?" His voice was a low, dangerous whisper, his face inches from yours, his mismatched eyes blazing with a fury you had never seen before. "You think you can spend weeks accepting my gifts, my company, my protection, and then play the scandalized innocent when I ask for something in return?"
"Get off me." The words came out hoarse and trembling. "Get off me now."
"You are a Blackfyre." His grip tightened on your shoulders, his fingers digging into the fabric of your gown. "You are nothing in this castle without my goodwill. Nothing. My son will tire of you eventually—he tires of everything—and when he does, who do you think will protect you? Who do you think will keep you from the Silent Sisters, or a cell beneath the keep?"
"Let go of me." Your voice was steadier now, but your heart was hammering against your ribs, your blood roaring in your ears. "Let go of me, or I will scream."
"You will not scream." His lips curved into a thin, humorless smile. "If you scream, who will come? The guards? They despise you. Your ladies? They would love to see you humiliated. My son?" He leaned closer, his breath hot against your ear. "My son will believe whatever I tell him. And I will tell him you threw yourself at me. That you begged me to take you from him. That you are exactly what everyone always said you were—a Blackfyre whore, faithless and grasping and always, always reaching for more than you deserve."
Your blood went cold. He was right. He was right, and you both knew it. If you screamed, if you told anyone what had happened, it would be your word against his. The Prince of Dragonstone against the Blackfyre bride. A man renowned for his calm wisdom against a woman everyone already believed was a traitor's daughter and a whore.
No one would believe you. No one had ever believed you.
"There." Baelor's grip loosened slightly. His voice softened, losing its fury and settling back into that calm, reasonable tone you had come to trust. "Now we understand each other."
He looked down at you, his eyes scanning your face with a mixture of hunger and absolute contempt. There was no warmth in his gaze, only the cold calculation of a man who knew exactly how much power he held over you. "You will not scream."
Before you could find your voice, Baelor reached down and grabbed the fabric of your skirts, ripping them upward with a violent jerk. The sound of tearing silk echoed through the silent sanctuary of the Seven. You struggled, your hands pushing against his chest, but he was far stronger, pinning your wrists above your head with a single hand, locking them against the stone.
He didn't bother with foreplay. He didn't care for your pleasure or your consent. With his free hand, he fumbled with his breeches, freeing his thick, rigid cock. It was heavy and pulsing, smelling of musk and aggression. He didn't use any lubrication; he didn't care if it hurt.
Baelor stepped between your thighs, forcing them wide apart. He gripped your hips, his fingers bruising your flesh, and drove himself forward. He slammed into you in one brutal, singular motion, his cock tearing through you and burying itself deep inside your pussy.
You let out a choked gasp, your back arching as the sudden, violent intrusion stretched you to the limit. It wasn't the practiced, rhythmic sex you had with Valarr; this was an invasion. Baelor groaned, a guttural sound of triumph, as he felt the tight heat of your walls clamping around him.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice harsh.
You tried to turn your head away, but he squeezed your wrists tighter, forcing you to stare into those mismatched eyes so much like his sons. He began to fuck you with a savage intensity, his hips slamming against yours with a rhythmic, wet thud. Each thrust was deep and punishing, driving you further back against the wall, the rough stone scraping against your skin.
He wasn't looking for intimacy; he was marking you. He wanted you to feel every inch of him, to know that while you belonged to his son by law, you belonged to him by force. He grunted with every shove, his breath coming in ragged bursts against your neck.
"My son… is a boy," Baelor growled, his pace increasing, becoming more frantic and violent. "He doesn't know how to break a woman like you. But I do."
You sobbed, the sound muffled against the silence of the sept, your body shaking under the onslaught. You weren't a virgin, but the sheer brutality of his movements made you feel raw and exposed, Valarr never fucked you this way, not even when he was mad. He shifted his grip, hooking one of your legs over his hip to drive even deeper, his cock hitting your cervix with a jarring force that made your vision swim.
The friction grew intense, the heat between your bodies building into a fever pitch. Baelor’s movements became erratic, his thrusts shorter and harder, hammering into you as he neared his peak. He leaned in, his teeth sinking into your flesh as he let out a low, animalistic roar.
With one final, crushing thrust, Baelor stiffened. He buried himself as deep as he could go, his entire body shaking as he erupted inside you. You felt the hot, thick gush of his cum filling your pussy, flooding you with the evidence of his conquest.
He stayed there for a moment, panting, his forehead resting against yours, his mismatched eyes wide and glazed with lust. Then, as quickly as the storm had come, he pulled out. The wet sound of his cock sliding out of you felt like a final insult.
He stepped back, adjusting his clothes with a calm, methodical precision, leaving you slumped against the wall, your legs shaking and your ruined clothes clinging to your damp skin. He looked down at you, broken and leaking his seed, and a thin, cruel smile touched his lips.
"Now," he whispered. “Consider this a lesson in your place within this family.”
—
You did not remember walking back to your chamber. The corridors stretched and blurred around you, torchlight smearing into gold streaks against the stone. Your legs moved without your permission, carrying you past guards who did not look at you, past servants who pressed themselves against the walls to let you pass. You must have looked like a ghost. You felt like one. A ghost drifting through the Red Keep, still wearing the body of a woman who had been destroyed in a sept.
The door to Valarr's chambers was heavy beneath your hands. You pushed it open and stepped inside, and the warmth of the room hit you like a blow. The fire was burning high in the hearth. Someone had been tending it. Someone had been waiting for you.
You did not care."Bath," you said.
The word came out wrong. Hoarse. Brittle. The two servants who had been arranging the bed linens turned to look at you, their faces carefully blank, their eyes flickering over your disheveled appearance. Your hair was tangled. Your gown was wrinkled and torn at the hem.
They saw. They had to have seen. But they said nothing. "My lady?" one of them ventured.
"Hot water. Boiling. Now." Your voice cracked on the last word. You swallowed hard, trying to steady yourself. "Fill the tub. All of it. Hurry."
They moved, but not fast enough. Never fast enough. They shuffled toward the door with the unhurried pace of servants who had long ago learned that rushing only earned them more work, and something inside you snapped.
"FASTER!" The word tore from your throat like a blade. Both servants flinched. The younger one actually stumbled backward into the doorframe.
"I said boiling," you heard yourself say, and your voice was not your own. It was high and sharp and trembling with something that felt like hysteria. "If it is not scalding, I will have you both dismissed. I will have you thrown out of the castle. Do you understand me? Do you understand?"
They fled. The door closed behind them with a soft click, and you were alone.
Your hands were shaking. You looked down at them, at the fingers that had gripped Baelor's shoulders, that had pushed against his chest, that had clawed at the stone wall while he—while he— Your fingers found the laces of your gown. They were still tight from Jeyne's attentions, knotted and stubborn, and your trembling hands could not work them free. A sob rose in your throat. You choked it down. You pulled harder, and the laces snapped, and you tore the gown from your body with a violence that made the stitches groan.
The silk pooled at your feet. Your shift followed. Your smallclothes, torn and stained. You gathered them all in your arms, every scrap of fabric that had touched your skin while he was inside you, and you hurled them into the fire.
The flames leapt and crackled. The silk curled and blackened. The smell of burning fabric filled the chamber, acrid and sharp and strangely cleansing. You stood naked before the hearth, your skin prickling with the heat, and watched your clothes turn to ash.
It was not enough. It would never be enough. You could still feel him. Between your legs. On your skin. Inside you. His seed was drying on your thighs, sticky and warm, and you wanted to claw it out of you. You wanted to reach inside your own body and scrape away every place he had touched, every cell he had violated, every trace of his presence.
The servants returned with buckets of steaming water. They did not look at you. They kept their eyes fixed on the floor as they filled the copper tub, bucket after bucket, until the water rose nearly to the brim. Steam curled from the surface, thick and white, fogging the mirrors and softening the edges of the room.
"Get out," you said.
They left without a word. You climbed into the tub. The water was scalding, hot enough to make you gasp. You did not care. You lowered yourself into it inch by inch, letting the heat swallow you, letting it burn away the cold that had settled into your bones. Your legs. Your hips. Your stomach. Your breasts. Your shoulders. You sank until only your head remained above the surface.
And then you began to shake. It started in your hands, a fine tremor that spread up your arms and into your chest. Your teeth chattered despite the heat. Your breath came in short, ragged gasps. You wrapped your arms around yourself, clutching your shoulders, your nails digging into your own flesh, and you rocked forward and back in the scalding water like a child comforting herself in the dark.
He was kind to me.
The thought rose unbidden, and it broke something inside you.
He was kind to me. He gave me books. He walked with me in the gardens. He rescued me from Jeyne and Alia and their poison tongues. He remembered what I said. He listened when I spoke. He made me laugh. He made me feel safe. He was the only person in this wretched castle who treated me like a person, and I trusted him, I trusted him, I trusted him—
A sob tore from your throat, raw and ugly. You pressed your hand to your mouth, trying to stifle it, but another followed, and another, until you were weeping with your whole body, your shoulders heaving, your chest burning with the force of your grief.
Baelor had been different. Baelor had been kind. Baelor had made you believe that there was one person in this castle who did not want to use you, who did not want to break you, who simply wanted to sit with you in a quiet library and talk about books and history and the absurdities of Archmaester Mekun.
And it had all been a lie.
Every conversation. Every borrowed book. Every stroll through the gardens. Every gentle question and patient smile and carefully timed rescue. It had all been a performance to make you weak and vulnerable and ripe for the taking.
And you had fallen for it. You had fallen for it completely.
"Stupid," you whispered into the steam. Your voice was a wreck, hoarse and broken. "Stupid, stupid, stupid—"
You had thought you were so clever. You had thought you could navigate this court, survive this marriage, endure this life. You had thought you could tell friend from enemy, predator from protector. But you could not. You had let a wolf into your sanctuary dressed in sheep's clothing, and now—now there was nothing left.
Your body was still shaking. The water was growing cooler, the heat leaching away into the evening air. You should get out. You should dress. Valarr would be returning from the council soon, and he would expect to find you composed and waiting. He could not see you like this. He could not know what had happened. If he knew—if anyone knew—
If you scream, who will come? My son will believe whatever I tell him. And I will tell him you threw yourself at me.
Baelor's voice echoed in your mind, calm and reasonable and utterly without mercy. You pressed your hands over your ears, but it did not help. The voice was inside you now. It would always be inside you.
You stayed in the bath until the water went cold and your skin was wrinkled and raw. You stayed until your tears ran dry and your breathing steadied and the shaking subsided into a dull, hollow numbness that felt almost like peace.
And then you rose from the tub, dried yourself with slow, mechanical movements, and began to dress for your husband's return.
Because that was what you did now. That was what you were for.
—
That night, you dined alone.
The servants brought food to the chambers but you could not eat. You moved the food around your plate with your fork, rearranging the slices of meat into patterns that meant nothing, while the candles burned down and the fire crackled in the hearth and the silence pressed in on you from all sides.
Valarr had sent word. A servant had appeared at the door an hour before supper, a nervous boy who had delivered his message in a breathless rush: the council session had run late, there were matters that required his attention, he would not be able to join you for the evening meal. He would return as soon as he was able.
You had nodded and dismissed the boy and said nothing. What was there to say? Your husband was busy. Your husband was important. Your husband had a place at the council table now, thanks to his father's quiet intervention—the same father who had cornered you in the sept and forced himself inside you and threatened to destroy what little remained of your life if you dared to speak of it.
The servants cleared the dishes. The fire was stoked. The candles were replaced. And still Valarr did not come. You changed into your nightgown and you had not looked at yourself in the mirror as you put it on. You did not want to see your own face. You did not want to see the woman who had been so easily deceived.
Then you climbed into the bed and sat against the headboard, your knees drawn up to your chest, and you watched the door.
The hours crept by. The fire burned down to embers. The candles guttered and smoked. Outside the windows, the moon traced its slow path across the sky, and the Blackwater murmured its endless song against the cliffs below, and still you watched the door.
You were afraid. You watched the door and imagined it opening. Imagined him stepping through—not Valarr, but Baelor, with his calm eyes and his quiet smile and his hands that had held you down while he—
You closed your eyes. You opened them again. You kept watching the door.
If he came back, what would you do? Scream? Fight? There was no one to hear you. No one who would believe you. You had learned that lesson in the sept, carved into your body with bruising force. You were a Blackfyre. You were nothing. Your word meant less than the ashes of your burned gown.
So you sat in the darkness and watched the door and waited for something terrible to happen.
When the latch finally clicked, your heart stopped. The door swung open. A figure stepped through, silhouetted against the torchlight from the corridor. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. A familiar outline that made your stomach clench with equal parts relief and dread.
But it was Valarr. Only Valarr.
He closed the door behind him and stood there for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. He looked tired. His dark hair was disheveled, his doublet unbuttoned at the collar, his shoulders slumped with exhaustion. The council session had clearly been grueling. His mismatched eyes found you sitting upright in the bed, and his brow furrowed with confusion.
"You are still awake." He crossed to the bed, unfastening his doublet as he walked. "It is late. The hour of the wolf has come and gone."
"I know."
He stopped at the edge of the bed, looking down at you with an expression you could not quite read. His gaze flickered over your face, your posture, the way your fingers were gripping your knees. He was perceptive, your husband. More perceptive than you sometimes gave him credit for.
"Why are you still awake?" he asked.
"I was waiting for you."
The words came out before you could stop them. They hung in the air between you, fragile and honest, and you saw something shift in Valarr's expression. Surprise, perhaps. Or something softer.
"Why?" His voice was gentler now. He sat on the edge of the bed and began to pull off his boots. "You did not need to wait. I told you the council would run late."
"I could not sleep."
"You should have sent for a maester," he said. "A sleeping draught, at least."
"I did not want to trouble anyone."
"Trouble them. That is what they are for."
"I had a nightmare," you said. "Earlier. It was… unpleasant. I did not want to go back to sleep."
Valarr set his boots aside and turned to look at you. In the dim light of the dying fire, his mismatched eyes were soft with something that looked almost like concern. He reached out and brushed a strand of silver gold hair from your face, his fingers lingering on your cheek.
"What kind of nightmare?"
"A bad one." Your voice was barely a whisper. "I do not wish to speak of it."
He studied your face for a long moment. His thumb traced the line of your cheekbone, gentle and unhurried, and you leaned into the touch without meaning to. His hand was warm. Solid. Familiar. It was the hand of a man who had hurt you in his own ways, yes, but never like that. Never with the brutality that his father had shown you.
"Lie down," he said. "I will join you in a moment."
He finished undressing with the efficient movements of a man who was too tired to stand on ceremony. His doublet was draped over a chair. His breeches followed. He crossed to the washbasin and splashed water on his face, then dried himself with a cloth before climbing into the bed beside you.
The mattress shifted under his weight. The furs rustled as he settled against the pillows. And then his arm found your waist, pulling you against his side with that familiar, possessive grip that had once made you feel trapped and now—now—made you feel something closer to anchored.
You lay there in the darkness, your head resting on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. He was warm. He was solid. He was here. And Baelor was not.
"Valarr?"
"Mm." His voice was drowsy. He was already half-asleep.
"Can you hold me?"
He went still for a moment. Then his arm tightened around your waist, pulling you closer against his body. His other hand came up to stroke your hair, slow and rhythmic, his fingers carding through the silver-gold strands with a tenderness that made your throat ache.
"Of course," he murmured against your hair. "I will always hold you when you ask."
You closed your eyes. The tears came then, silent and hot, sliding down your cheeks to soak into the fabric of his undershirt. You did not make a sound. You had learned long ago to cry without noise, to swallow your grief and your fear and your rage until they became a hard, cold knot in your chest. But you could not stop the tears. They flowed from you like water from a broken dam, and Valarr held you through all of it.
He did not ask why you were crying. He did not demand explanations or details. He simply held you, his arms wrapped around you like iron bands, his lips pressing occasional kisses to the crown of your head.
"Whatever it was," he said quietly, "it was only a dream. You are safe here. You are with me."
You are safe here.
The words were a lie. You knew they were a lie. You had never been safe in this castle, not from the moment you arrived. And the man who held you now was part of the reason why—his obsession, his possession, his slow, methodical erosion of everything you had been before the war.
But he was not his father. He was not his father, and that mattered more than you had ever imagined it could.
"Thank you," you whispered.
He pressed a kiss to your forehead. "Sleep, sweet wife. I will be here when you wake."
You closed your eyes. The tears were still falling, but they were slower now, softer. The knot in your chest was still there, hard and cold and unyielding. But wrapped in Valarr's arms, held against the steady rhythm of his heart, you felt something you had not felt in weeks.
There is Nothing I Would Not Do to Keep You—Canon Setting
Yandere!Valarr x Dayne!fem!reader—in which, you're betrothed to someone else but he's loved you forever and he makes sure you marry him by baby-trapping you.
Being a Dayne was many things, many wonderful things, but you knew none of them. You knew the Red Keep and Summerhall and Targaryens and your cousins and your aunt. You knew your uncle and his family and your cousins’ cousins and the way the operations of the Iron Throne occurred and the legends of dragons.
What you knew of being a Dayne, you knew from your aunt’s stories, tales of grandeur and purple and night skies so bright with stars they look alive. You knew of being proud, you just didn’t truly know of what. Because you were a Dayne in name only, sent to be fostered with your aunt after the death of your mother.
“A woman’s touch is needed,” your grandmother had said to your father, “Dyanna has said she will care for the girl. It is her niece; she wants to care for her. Let her go and when she’s grown, we’ll bring her back for her birthright.” And your father had agreed, not because he wanted to but because he feared he would ruin you. Teach you to be like him, not like your mother.
And as a young babe, you were sent away to the warm arms of Dyanna Dayne, the sister of your father, the husband of Maeker Targaryen and the only mother you have ever known. The only one you will ever know because yours is long gone, returned to the stars from whence she came.
You knew your aunt and your uncle and your cousins and your friend. You knew Valarr Targaryen like the back of your hand, always together from the times you could remember. He was never far from you, a companion and someone who listened. Someone who cared under no obligation of blood.
Your friend, you called him. Your closest friend.
He didn’t like that title.
He wanted more. He wanted you, forever. He wanted you as his, always his. His wife, his life, his light and love and mother of his children. The queen consort to his king. The peace to his chaos, the centre of his storm.
His everything.
Always and forever, don’t you know?
***
Valarr first met you when he was a toddler and you were a babe, held in Dyanna’s arms, a beautiful babe she cooed over as if you were her own, calling you dearest and darling and precious. He first met you in a memory that is not his, but his father’s, told to him with a smile.
“You looked at her and babbled. Your first word was said that day and it was mine. And you were looking at her, looking at your friend. You toddled right up to Dyanna and placed one finger on her forehead and said mine,” Baelor always said, the story told with a smile, a cute story of children claiming friends. Valarr knew his father didn’t understand the truth, understand what you truly were to him.
What he had known even then.
Valarr first met you when you were a babe, when the two of you were too young to ever know what the other even was. And yet…and yet even that young, he knew what you were you, what he was, what the two of you were—each other’s.
The gods had made the two of you for each other, made you to fit like two puzzle pieces. The gods made you for each other, it was why fate brought you to your aunt, brought you to him. You might not understand yet, the two of you still young, but you would.
He would make sure.
Because he could not lose you. He would do anything to keep you with him and a man with love was dangerous.
Because he would risk everything to hold onto love.
For him, that was you.
***
“Valarr!” he hears you call and he turns to see you, decked in purple, the bodice of your dress covered with crystals that look like stars on a deep night sky and all he wants to do is rip it off of you, worship you and dress you in the red, in the deep colour of blood. In the colour of the Targaryens, of him. Because that’s what you are.
Of him, after all.
“My star!” he replies, stepping towards you, steps long and quick, his body aching to be as near you as possible, to hold you, his arm looped with yours, fingers twined in place of bodies. For now. “You have just come in from Summerhall?”
“Yes,” you answer him, reaching for his hand when he reaches you, standing before you, his eyes tracing every line of your body, ever curve that appears in this gown, curves he didn’t see months ago, curves that he wants nothing more than to feel, than to memorize how they fit against the planes of his body. “And I must tell you, Aerion is a fucking menace. I swear, he’s only gotten worse since Mothe—I mean, since Aunt died.” He can hear the pain in your words, the sadness and heaviness in your tone.
The correction that seems to cut deep inside of you. Dyanna was stolen from the world just months ago by a fever that no Maester could seem to correct, fix and cure. She was stolen and now lies as ash. And you are still with the family you have known all your life, the Dayne’s not yet come to collect.
Although, he will not let them collect on you because you are no Dayne. You are his and that means more than any flimsy tie of blood.
You are his by the Seven’s decree.
“The Dragon Prince, he calls himself,” Valarr says and you sigh, rolling your eyes, swinging your hand in his, fingers interlaced with his tightly, as if you’re holding onto him for dear life. As if he is your tether to the world.
“He’s delusional. Always has been, he’s simply become worse since the burning,” you tell him, fingers tightening even more around his if that were possible. “But soon, he will be a problem for me no longer.”
“Why is that? Is he not your kin?” Valarr asks, his mind only half on the conversation, the other half focused upon how he will convince his father you are his, that the two of you should be married as soon as possible.
“He is, but soon he will distant kin. I am to return to Dorne, but not Starfall,” you say as Valarr pushes open the door into the library, his chest constricting at your words, heart in his throat as he tightens his hold on you, a grip to rival yours.
“Then to where?” His voice is barely controlled, barely restrained, but you do not notice, you simply guide him to a table, sinking down upon the bench, skirt spreading out around you, his mind wandering just slightly, wishing you were sinking down on his cock instead.
“Sunspear,” you answer him, your free arm going to rest on the table, cheek resting on the heel of your hand as you look up and over at him. “Father has arranged my marriage to the Martell’s youngest boy. Grand’Mere wanted it that way.”
“You…” he trails off, his throat constricting not in sadness but in rage. Rage because you are his and you are not some chip in an absent family’s arsenal! You are his! His by God-given right, the Seven’s creation!
And he will not let you go.
Not ever.
There are no lengths he will not go to keep you by his side.
“I’m told he’s kind,” you continue, oblivious to the rage simmering in Valarr, the rage that he will lose you when you are not his to lose. The rest of the world is something he can lose, but not you. Never you. “And kind is something at least, but you would think they could give me more notice. More time.”
It’s the mention of time which pulls Valarr forwards, pulls him back to the task at hand. “How much time?” The words are issued out around the swell of rage in his throat that beats with the pulse of his heart.
The heart that beats only for you.
“I leave in four moons time,” you tell him, brows knitting together in confusion as you look back at him, noting the way he’s seemed to change, skin paling like all the blood is gone, drained. “Valarr…are you alright? Should I fetch the Maester? You look ill.”
“No,” he grits out, solutions flying through his mind like rapid-fire, none seeming plausible, effective. None seeming right. Yes, he could take you, but he wouldn’t dare compromise your honour, if only because you would never forgive him for the reflection on your aunt Dyanna. Yes, he could lock you away but that would incite problems he couldn’t afford.
“Do you think he’ll make me have a child right away?” you muse, having taken Valarr at his word, mind drifting back to the problem at hand, unaware that you’ve given him the answer to his problem.
He will take you, just not publicly. He will take you and plant his seed deep in you, ensure that you carry a dragon, his child. That you can never leave him.
Because no one separates mother and child and no Martell would ever take a Targaryen child.
No heir would be permitted to leave.
“Will you assist me to my room? I seem to feel a bit unwell,” he tells you and you nod, rising from the bench, stepping towards him, walking with him in quiet, squeezing his hand every so often to remind him that you are there. You are not going anywhere.
And nothing has ever been truer than that.
“Do you want to leave us?” he asks you now, pushing the door to his chambers open, tugging you across the threshold even as you resist just slightly, propriety instilled in you by Dyanna, the most reserved of all ladies.
“No,” you answer, relaxing a bit as he closes the door, relaxing in a space you once knew, but is unfamiliar now. “I would prefer to stay with the family I know as much as they vex me. I would prefer to stay here, home, but it is not up to me. Auntie is gone. I have no reason to remain.” Your words cut him to the quick, the way you make him seem like nothing.
Like your aunt was everything and he is nothing.
When he is your everything at the Seven’s decree.
“Am I not reason to remain?!” he cries, letting go of your hand, his hands drifting to grip your arms, your biceps, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks behind, his mismatched eyes no doubt crazed. “Am I not enough?!” Your eyes widen, glazing over with tears as you pull away from him, wrenching yourself from his grip, turning to the door, to the exit but he locks his hands around your wrist. “ANSWER ME!”
“Yes,” you cry, spinning back to him, face twisted in fury, eyes burning with a fire that is Targaryen fate, unworthy of a bloody Martell. Unworthy of anyone but him. “Yes, you are enough, but it is not up to you or I. It is up to those who control us like pieces on a chessboard. And my move has been chosen.” You pull your wrist from his grip, rubbing it with your other hand, lips twisting just slightly, telling him of pain, of injury and guilt floods him.
He hurt you.
He hurt you.
He hurt you.
But he would do it again to get his answer, to get you. Because you are everything and you can heal. You will heal and everything will be fine. You will be his.
You are his.
“Let me love you once,” he whispers, the words sounding like they’ve been torn from his throat, a confession of a broken man. “If you are to spend your life in the arms of another, then let me love you once.”
“And make me not a maiden? He would not take me,” you answer and he steps closer, his hands coming to rest on your waist, gentle but firm, his heart leaping at the hitch in your breath at his touch.
“He need never know.” Your lips part at his words, eyes focused on his lips, tracing the shape as pupils flare.
“And when there is no blood?” Your eyebrow rises, still ever you even now as you tear your gaze from his lips to meet his, pupil blown to pupil blown.
“Not everyone bleeds and there are ways to make it seem so,” he whispers and you nod once, consent and invitation and he needs no more encouragement, closing the gap between the two of you, pressing his lips to yours, a soft open-mouthed kiss that you return, your arms wrapping around, hands resting on his back, palms flat against him.
He deepens the kiss, his tongue flicking against yours, stroking and sucking, tightness growing within him, clothes far too constricting as he presses deeper into you, shoving your body against the stone wall, his hands ghosting from your waist to your hips, circling around to rest on your ass, pressing you closer to him, yet not close enough.
He pulls back just slightly, delighting in the swollen puff of your lips, the glazed look in your eyes and he tugs you through his rooms, to his bed, spinning you around, fingers unknotting the ties of your bodice, unlacing and pulling them, laying them on the floor, letting the gown fall, pooling around your feet, your body clothed by the thin silk shift.
“Will it hurt?” you whisper and in answer, he presses his lips against your neck, arms snaking around your body, hands pressing flat against your lower belly as he rocks against you from behind, his teeth nipping at the delicate skin of your neck, tongue soothing it in its wake.
“I will try to ensure it does not,” he whispers against your ear, his breath tickling the outside, the shell before he takes your earlobe between his teeth, tugging just once before letting go and spinning you back around to face him. He peels his doublet from his body, unlacing his breeches and pulling off his small clothes until he stands entirely bare before you, full of desire, erect for you and you alone.
He delights in the way you lick your lips while looking at him, delights in the way you rub your thighs together in anticipation and he delights even more when you take his hands, guiding them forwards to peel your shift from your body, your body bare like his, nipples hardened and sensitive, pebbled because of him.
He pushes you back, pushes you against the bed until you lay upon it and then he steps closer, lifting your legs up, placing them on his shoulders as he kneels before you. He knows what he must do, knows that he must fill you so completely that it takes, that the evidence is there before you leave for ordering moontea would be just as telling.
No matter how this ends, it ends with you his in name and heart.
Just as the Seven decreed.
He presses kisses to the inside of your thighs, thighs slick with arousal as he moves closer and closer to the heat between your legs, his tongue flicking out against your entrance when he reaches it, watches as you bite down upon your lip, fisting the covers of his bed as he drags his tongue from entrance to clit, circling it, sucking it, while delighting in the pleasure that you find.
He worships you slowly, savouring every time you let loose, let out a sound like a moan and mewl and breathy prayer. He worships you until you come around him and only then does he stand, lining himself up with you, your legs still over his shoulders as he pushes in as gently as possible, the entrance made easier by the slickness, the relaxing, but he still sees the pain in your eyes as your maidenhood smears upon him.
He still sees the pain and can feel the strangeness in your body in the feeling of the tightness of your walls, so unused to something, anything inside. “Fuck,” he groans as he pushes in slowly, inch by painful inch, the squeezing and contracting too much, just too much. “So tight.” But he keeps going, slowly and surely, your body adjusting and relaxing around him and he’s able to sheathe and the pull out, over and over, a steady rhythm as he pushes the two of you more onto the bed, pressing kisses against you, against your neck, your breasts, his tongue flicking against your nipples, causing you to arch your back, bringing you even closer to him.
And all he can think is that this is how it will always be. And then he’s getting closer, your walls clenching and fluttering, drawing his release.
“Pull out, Valarr,” you cry, voice breaking as he hits the spot inside you that has you seeing stars, but it doesn’t stop the panic from setting in. It’s bad enough you’re doing this at all, but this…he must pull out. “Pull out!”
“No,” he groans, his body adjusting, hands gripping your hips tightly, preventing you from getting free of him. “Gonna—er, fill you—up! Make you…round with…our child.” His words show a darkness, a possessiveness you have never seen before yet should have in the way he always gripped your arm, made every man remain far from you.
“PULL OUT!” But your cries go ignored as he spills, coming undone inside of you, spurting his seed in hot spurts that you feel lining you, filing you and he collapses upon you, waiting, not willing to risk pulling out, losing that seed which is precious, the way to ensure you stay.
“I love you, my star,” he whispers, but a cold dread has filled you as he slowly pulls from you, his fingers shoving the seed back inside even as you kick against him, trying to pull away. “We cannot let it go to waste. It is the only thing that will ensure you remain.” And then his arms are around you, pulling you tightly against him and it matters not that it is not night for he falls into sleep, holding fast to you, his love and you cry until there are no tears left inside you.
***
It does not take long for the evidence to begin showing: the morning sickness and food aversions first, noticed by your ever watchful uncle, your father in action in truth. The only father you have truly known. He notices the fact that you do not like the honey cakes, things which always made you smile like the brightest star, things that you would rave about, whispering with Dyanna, your mother in everything but title.
And your maids report to him that you are sick in the mornings, tired and wan. Fatigued. It is not long before he takes you aside, asking you what is wrong, listening as you tell him in a tearful confession, crying as you thought that it was your only chance at love, not a way of being trapped.
You expect his anger but all he does is hold you, call the Maester and hear his confirmation. You expect rage but he has none for you, none even for Valarr because yes he wants to hurt the boy for the pain he’s caused you, but he did not want to lose you either, his first daughter (even if not by blood).
And it does not take long for the plans to be broken, a wedding arranged and your name changed from Dayne to Targaryen, place secured, never broken.
The place of a future Queen.
And you suffer through the pain and the heartburn and the weight. You suffer while delighted in the movement of the child, the way they seem to love you even when they reside inside you not yet truly grown. And you love them.
And you grow to forgive Valarr, the ever doting husband who lifts the weight from your body, who knows what you need before you do. You grow to forgive him as he cares and as you watch him ready everything for your child, for your babe. For your future.
And when you give birth, he is there, holding your hand, enduring your swear words and crying (though he’ll later claim he didn’t) when you are presented with not one, but two perfect children, one boy and one girl. A son and a daughter.
And that is the truest thing, he is always there. When you wake, when you sleep, when you rest, eat, work, he is there. Always and forever because you are his in a way that no one and nothing else is.
You are his, made for him by the gods, made to be his and only his and he has you and maybe it’s not the way he wanted to win your love, your hand, but he’s the victor with you and children. A future.
The best.
***
It is late at night and you are curled within his arms, only a small bit of dread still residing in your heart as you rest with your back to his chest when he whispers, “I love you.”
“I know,” you respond and he tightens his hold on you, pressing a kiss to your neck. “I love you too.” And you do, you never stopped, it simply remolded from a love pure and untainted to one dogged by betrayal. A love steeped in lies, but a love nonetheless.
“I know you may still hate me,” he whispers, the sounds of your children sleeping soundly carrying over to the both of you, “but I need you to know something.”
“What?” you ask, sleep beginning to take hold of you.
“There is nothing I would not do to keep you. You are mine, only mine. Made at the god’s decree.”
And that is his truth, you are his and he is yours. You were born for him and he was made for you and there is nothing he would not to do to keep you.
He would burn the world to ash just to hold you in his arms forever.
