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@themotherofhorses
Welcome to my blog!
VIC⋆˙⋆⁺₊⋆⏾⋆.˚ she/her. 20s. horse & spider enthusiast.
Hispanic | Diné | Nde | Coahuiltecan
All Content is 18+. Minors DNI.
⋆☀︎. CURRENT M.LIST ⏾⋆.˚ OLD M.LIST ✶ OHWITCHPLS
Current inbox status: open to requests.
dividers: @/sweetmelodygraphics, @/steviebbboi
okay so um how the fuck do I even begin to write handmaid/sweetling after *that* scene in ep7
Hello, everyone!
My sincerest apologies for the lack of content these past several weeks. It’s been a rough summer for me, to say the least :((
Aside from three hefty summer classes that’s been requiring most of my attention, my father decided to move his new girlfriend into our house without letting me know. In fact, I barely knew about her until a few days ago.
The house still has most of my mother’s and I’s things, much of which is incredibly sentimental, not to mention . . . expensive and worth a pretty penny, so I’m not all that comfortable with a complete stranger being around her stuff. He’s been slowly erasing her memory and presence, and pretty much wants everything gone for his new life . . .
. . . so guess who has to cancel my much-wanted vacation and rent a U-Haul!
Needless to say, I’m absolutely pissed and hurt, but oh well! I guess becoming an orphan—emotional wise—was always in the cards. 🙃
(I’m still publishing HHTs chapters, I just need to catch my fucking breath lol, my life has changed so drastically so quickly)
me and cat mama rolled into the distant fog (little did she know im a nasty dog)
chapter one | i’m still with it, dogs gotta get it
PAIRING: valko x reader
Summary:
Valko was doing just fine. Every Canvas assignment was submitted before 11:59 PM, even if metallurgy was an absolute bitch to study in a graduate program. The wound beneath his right sleeve was healing just fine, and he was still contemplating a tongue piercing even though his momma would probably wring him up like a dishrag. The senior dogs down at Astra Animal Rescue practically worshipped him on Thursdays. Life was good, predictable, and—unfortunately—still very, very fuckin’ single. Then cat mama wandered into life, and, oh no, there’s hot sauce in his dog chow. Now it's back to the kitty . . . . . . 'cause she's kinda pretty. And Valko doesn’t know what the fuck he’s gonna do.
WC: 8.5k
Warnings: Explicit content. Male masturbation. Valko is just horny
Notes: Beta-read. So excited to share this new Love and Deepspace series I've been quietly cooking up with a few mutuals since Infold stupidly nuked Valko's introduction. Since we know, like, absolutely nothing about Valko, I’m just gonna make up shit as I go and hope for the best. Let’s get this party started.
Posted first on my AO3.
AO3 Version
dividers: @/sweetmelodygraphics, @/steviebbboi
Black Mesa Ink, East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado.
Thursday, October 16, 2025 | 7:42 PM.
Valko Stoyanova has been doing fine.
Better than fine, actually. Life was always pretty good when he was getting paid for doing a tattoo.
The machine buzzed in his right hand with a steady brrrrrrr, needle driving pigment beneath the skin in clean passes, black first, then a diluted gray wash that pooled, soft as cigarette smoke, around the linework. The smell of green soap, latex gloves, disinfectant, warm skin, and old coffee had soaked itself into the walls of Black Mesa Ink so deeply that Valko sometimes smelled it in his clothes two days later, when he was sitting in a metallurgy lecture pretending he did not have eighteen unread Canvas notifications and a cranky old pit bull named Myrtle waiting for him at the rescue.
Tonight, though, he had a machine in his hand, seventy-five dollars an hour on the books, and a client lying still enough to make God jealous.
Maritza Ibañez was a forty-three-year-old restaurant manager from Aurora with a laugh like coins dropped into a glass bowl and the pain tolerance of a mountain lion. She had dense black hair pinned messily atop her head with a yellow claw clip, the loose pieces curling damply against her temples and nape. Her face was heart-shaped, with a strong nose, full cheeks, sharp brown eyes, and a tiny beauty mark under the right corner of her mouth. Her left forearm carried a faded rosary tattoo, her right wrist had a burn scar shaped like a pale crescent, and the skin along her ribs trembled only when Valko wiped it with a paper towel.
“You are doing good,” Valko mumbled.
Maritza snorted. “That means I’m doing bad.”
“No. It means you are doing good.”
“You say it like a doctor before he amputates somebody’s leg.”
He dipped the needles in the cap of black ink, tapped the excess with the smallest movement of his wrist, and bent back over the stencil. “If I take your leg, I charge extra for the trauma and time.”
Her laugh knocked the paper towel tucked beneath her side. “Mijo, you are too damn dry. Somebody ever tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“My mother and sisters, and sometimes my professors. Oh, and the cashier at King Soopers once.”
“Damn . . . even customer service got you.”
“She asked if I wanted a receipt. I said no because I am trying to live a life without more paper. She did not enjoy this.”
Maritza laughed again, then hissed through her teeth when the needle crossed closer to the tender underside of her rib cage. “Ay, fuck.”
“Breathe out,” Valko murmured, voice low and calm, almost bored except for the way his eyes tracked the skin. “Long breath, like you are tired of everybody.”
“I am tired of everybody.”
“Then it should be easy.”
She exhaled in a slow shudder as Valko pulled a precise line through the lower petal of the rose curling around her ribs, his gloved fingers stretching the skin firm. The tattoo was his design, drawn between a failed thermodynamics quiz review and a phone call with his third sister, Galina, who had needed him to explain why her Corolla sounded like a spoon in a garbage disposal:
A wild rose, open and thorned, with a black snake winding through the stems.
Maritza, during her first consultation, had asked for something feminine, mean, and ‘a little fuck-you, but classy enough that my daughter won’t roll her eyes at me during Thanksgiving.’
Valko understood that kind of request better than he understood half the American idioms people threw at him.
The studio’s front windows were fogged at the corners from the cold gathering outside. East Colfax blinked neon and headlights beyond the glass, red taillights smearing over rain-dark asphalt. Somewhere down the block, a bus braked with a hydraulic sigh, and somewhere closer, probably in the alley, a man shouted at nobody in particular about the Broncos needing an offensive line. Two girls in cropped jackets hurried past the windows, laughing around cigarettes.
Inside, Black Mesa Ink held its usual Thursday night shape: music from the overhead speakers played low enough to talk over, high enough to keep the awkward silence at bay; tonight, it was a shuffled mess of Judas Priest, Blondie, and whatever Japanese city-pop playlist Hiroto had bullied everybody into tolerating. The flash wall was crowded with daggers, saints, crying hearts, wolves, moths, skulls, and one cursed little cartoon shrimp wearing cowboy boots that people kept asking about as a joke until they learned Paola would absolutely tattoo it.
Paola Mancini owned the place, and she ruled it with espresso, gold hoops, and weaponized patience.
She was fifty-one, five-foot-two in platform boots, with silver hair cut into a razor-sharp bob that ended at her jaw like a blade. Her face was oval and beautifully lined around the mouth, with a Roman nose, green eyes, thin brows, and lipstick always in some shade of red that made men twice her size behave. A blackwork Madonna climbed the left side of her neck, a cracked porcelain doll covered her forearm, and her right hand had a faint L O V E M E tattooed across the knuckles in letters so old they had softened blue.
At station two, Hiroto Kenji was finishing a chrome koi on a finance guy’s calf. Hiroto was thirty, narrow and wiry, with straight blue-black hair falling to his collarbones and cut in blunt bangs that made his cheekbones look even sharper. His face was long, his mouth soft, his eyes dark and sleepy behind rectangular glasses, and his skin had the pale indoor cast of someone who lived on vending-machine matcha and spite. He wore a sleeveless black turtleneck that showed roped forearms, lean shoulders, a flat chest, a tight waist, and paint-splattered cargo pants hanging low on narrow hips. A tattoo of a skeletal fox wrapped around one bicep, and a tiny silver hoop pierced the center of his lower lip, trembling as he spoke.
“Yo, Stoyanova,” Hiroto called over the music. “You coming to Cervantes tomorrow?”
“No.”
“You always say no, man, what the hell?”
“Because I mean no, Kenji.”
“Punk show, cheap beer, and tall women.”
“I have a lab.”
“At night?”
“I have a lab and academic stress and a migraine planned at 11 pm.”
Maritza barked a laugh and immediately regretted it. “Ow, fuck, don’t make me laugh while you’re stabbing me.”
“I am not stabbing,” Valko said.
“You are literally stabbing me thousands of times.”
“With . . . art. Such cancels out.”
“Oh, with art. My bad. Continue, Picasso.”
“Picasso was a painter.”
“You know what I meant.”
He did, mostly, and when he did not, he had learned to keep his mouth shut unless the mistake was useful.
English had gotten easier over the years, then harder in stranger ways once everyone assumed he knew it completely. Technical English was fine . . . sometimes; he understood carbon diffusion, grain boundary strengthening, phase diagrams, and precipitation hardening. That shit was easy, clean, rational, and oddly human in a way he could not explain if he tried.
But . . . flirty English, where it falls off the tongue before the brain could catch it? That remained a room where someone kept moving the furniture in the dark.
He could write a materials characterization report at two in the morning with one eye twitching from bad coffee, but flirtation still landed in his hands like a wet fucking fish.
Tattooing was better because skin spoke the truth. It tightened when afraid, flushed when pissed, and went slick when adrenaline rose. Skin scarred, stretched, aged, softened, healed in ways that showed memories. It took damage and recorded it. There was nothing metaphorical about a needle entering the dermis at the correct depth. Too shallow, the ink fell out; too deep, the line blew ugly under the surface. You had to know pressure, angle, speed, when to push, when to stop, when the body had reached its limit . . . kinda like metal, in a way.
People thought Valko liked metal because it was hard.
He liked metal because it changed.
Heat it, hammer it, quench it, temper it, because a thing could always become stronger after being brought to the edge of failure. Too much force made it brittle, yet too much softness made it completely useless. Every structure had memory, and every fracture told a story. However, do not get it wrong, he did not say these things out loud because people already thought he was weird, and because his youngest sister, Mila, had once told him with brutal thirteen-year-old certainty that “girls don’t want to hear about grain boundaries unless they are also going to bite you in the right bicep, because girls like to munch down on biceps a lot, be afraid.”
Mila was often wrong about math and nearly always right about social survival.
He wiped Maritza’s ribs again. “Halfway.”
“Liar.”
“A little more than halfway.”
“Better.”
The rose was opening beneath his hand, with the snake’s head resting below Maritza’s breastbone, mouth closed, eyes blank and ancient. He packed the darkest shadow along the underside of a petal and felt that familiar pleasure, quiet and exact, settle behind his sternum. It was . . . mmm . . . work pleasure, competence pleasure, accompanied with a clean line, a steady client, and the money worth the hour.
His phone buzzed face down on his tray stand, its vibration making the bottles of ink tremble. He ignored it; it didn’t matter; the damn thing buzzed again, then again, and again.
Paola’s eyes slid toward him. “Family?”
“Probably.”
“Blood family or school family?”
“Both make the same amount of crying.”
“Check it after that pass.”
Valko finished the line, lifted the machine, and wiped. “Break,” he huffed, rolling his shoulder back.
“Thank fuck,” Maritza muttered, reaching for her own phone.
He stripped off his gloves, dropped them in the bin, and picked up his phone with the clean hand habit so deeply beaten into him by Paola that he now judged surgeons in movies. Six notifications: three from the group chat named STOYANOVA GIRL ARMY 🦇, one from Canvas, one from Astra Animal Rescue, and one from his mother.
The family chat was absolute chaos, which was nothing out of the ordinary for his five little sisters.
GALINA: if a car sounds like marbles does that mean oil change DANI: girl why is the car making any sound MILA: ask valko he loves suffering NADIA: VALKO do you think mom will notice if i dye my hair copper VESI: copper like wire or copper like hozier woman MILA: copper like she is about to make bad choices
His mother’s text came in a separate notification banner.
MAMA: You eat? MAMA: Do not say coffee.
Valko rubbed the bridge of his nose, the smell of green soap clinging to his knuckles even through the memory of gloves. He texted Galina to check the oil and stop driving if the sound got worse, told Nadia their mother would notice because their mother had eyes like a prison guard and God combined, and sent his mother a picture of the half-eaten burrito Paola had forced into his hand at six.
MAMA: This is not dinner, child. This is sadness in foil.
He smiled before he could stop himself.
Maritza noticed it almost instantly. “There he is.”
Valko glanced up, head tilting. “What?”
“You got dimples, scary boy.”
“No.”
“You do.”
“I do not have dimples.”
“You absolutely do. Little mean dimples, like the devil’s baby pictures.”
Paola hummed from the counter, toying with a pen. “She’s right.”
“Tragic. You should sue your face,” Hiroto added.
Valko put his phone down. “Everybody is very loud today.”
“You work in a tattoo shop,” Paola deadpanned. “We are not monks.”
“Some monks tattoo.”
“That is the kind of thing that makes people call you dry, sweetheart.”
Maritza shifted on the table, winced, and reached for her water bottle. “How old are you, Valko?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Mm. Baby.”
“I pay taxes?”
“Everybody pays taxes. Doesn’t mean you’re grown. You got a girl?”
Hiroto made a small, wicked noise from station two, and Paola’s gaze sharpened like she had been waiting for this ambush with maternal interest. Valko put on fresh gloves very slowly, his answer slowly trekking up his tongue: “No.”
“No like no, or no like it’s complicated?”
“No like no.”
“With that face? Those shoulders? That whole grumpy Dracula gym-rat thing you have going on?”
“My thing is not Dracula.”
“Bulgarian, right? Close enough.”
“First of all, Dracula is Romanian.”
“See? Dry.”
Hiroto laughed hard enough that his client looked nervous.
Valko adjusted the lamp instead of engaging, and the light poured over Maritza’s side, showing the redness rising around the fresh ink. “Ready?”
“No, but I’m a bad bitch.”
“This is a good attitude.”
“There’s the endorsement I needed.”
The machine started again with a sharp bzzzzzt, and for the next hour, Valko stayed inside the work. He liked that tattooing demanded enough of him to keep everything else outside the door: loneliness, homework, his bank account, the old ache in his right forearm under the sleeve of ink, the stupid idea of getting his tongue pierced even though his mother would cross the Atlantic with a wooden spoon just to threaten him properly.
He already had the appointment booked.
Technically.
Okay, fine, it was a consultation.
. . . mostly.
He had not told anyone except Hiroto, who had been unbearable about it.
The wound beneath his right sleeve pulled when he leaned too far, nothing dramatic. It was a half-healed slice from a shelter accident two weeks ago, when a scared shepherd mix with cataracts had panicked during intake and knocked a broken kennel latch into Valko’s arm. The dog had pissed himself afterward and trembled so violently that Valko forgot to be annoyed. He had then wrapped the wound, cleaned the blood off the floor, and sat beside the kennel for forty minutes, speaking Bulgarian to an animal who understood none of the words and all of the tone.
“Gorkoto momche,” he had murmured. Poor boy.
By the time he finished Maritza’s tattoo, the rose looked as if it had grown out of her body, and the snake looked ready to slide beneath her sternum. The skin was angry, glossy from ointment, bordered by faint purple stencil ghosts he would wipe away before wrapping. Maritza sat up slowly, hand hovering over the tattoo like she wanted to touch it and knew better.
“Mirror,” Valko said, straightening up.
Paola brought the standing mirror over, her gold bracelets chiming.
Maritza twisted carefully, and, for the first time all night, she went quiet. The tattoo curved with her ribs, flattering the softness instead of fighting it, with the petals blooming along the swell beneath her breast, thorns trailing toward her waist, the snake cutting a dark path through it all. Feminine, mean, and the perfect little fuck-you that she wanted.
She swallowed. “Oh.”
Valko watched her face more than the tattoo. He always did at the end, because, well, some people smiled, some people cried, and some people stared like they had finally found a way to make their bodies answer back.
“It’s exactly what I wanted,” she said, voice rougher now.
“Good.”
“No, I mean exactly.” She blinked hard, then laughed at herself. “Damn it, I said I wasn’t gonna get emotional.”
“Emotion is included in the price.”
Paola made a soft sound, and Hiroto glanced over before pretending he was not looking.
Maritza turned from the mirror and caught Valko’s wrist with two fingers, careful of the gloves. “You’re gifted, mijo.”
Gifted. Shit. Compliments had always entered him sideways, ever since he was a young boy, like a blade slipping awkwardly between his ribs. He could handle critique, pressure, deadlines, being called intimidating, and being mistaken for an asshole. Sincere praise, however, made him want to walk into Denver traffic.
“Thank you,” he said, stiffly enough that Maritza smiled.
“There. Was that so painful?”
“Yes.”
“Poor baby.”
He cleaned and wrapped her, explained aftercare in his usual blunt way, and ignored Paola mouthing poor baby behind Maritza’s back. When Maritza paid, she tipped him fifty in cash and two foil-wrapped empanadas from the restaurant she managed.
“For later,” she winked. “—since your mama knows that burrito was bullshit.”
“My mother has spies everywhere, it seems.”
“Good. Somebody should.”
When she left, the studio door opened into a gust of October cold, wet pavement, bus exhaust, and weed smoke from the sidewalk. The bell above the door clanged twice and settled, and Valko stood at his station for a moment with the cash in one hand and the empanadas in the other.
Paola sipped her espresso. “Don’t look so suspicious. People feed men who look hungry.”
“I do not look hungry.”
“You always look hungry.”
“For violence,” Hiroto sang from his side.
“For sleep,” Paola corrected. “For a decent meal. For someone to sit on him until he stops checking email after midnight. Maybe for someone to help him get laid.”
Valko’s head turned slowly toward her.
She raised both hands, innocent as a saint in a courtroom. “Spiritually.”
Hiroto wheezed.
Valko started breaking down his station with more force than necessary. “Everybody here needs a hobby.”
“This is my hobby,” Paola said.
“Harassing me?”
“Mentoring.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“In my culture, it is.”
He stripped the barriers, disposed of the needle cartridge, and wiped the tray, cord, bottle, and armrest until they went from clean to cleaner to clean enough to make the next thing possible. He had always liked resetting a space after work; it soothed the part of his mind that hated unfinished edges. By nine-thirteen, his client forms were filed, the cash was folded into his wallet, and the empanadas were tucked into his backpack beside a metallurgy textbook thick enough to kill a raccoon. Hiroto was still talking to his client about second-skin bandages. Paola counted the register with reading glasses low on her nose.
“You heading home?” she asked.
“Gym first.”
Paola looked at him over the glasses, unimpressed. “Of course.”
“It is back day.”
“Oh, forgive me. A holy observance.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand plenty. You boys lift heavy things because therapy has a copay.”
He slung his backpack over one shoulder. “Therapy does not make lats and rear delts.”
“No, but it might teach you to receive a compliment without looking like someone slapped your grandmother.”
“Excuse me, my grandmother slapped people back.”
He pulled on his jacket, black denim with the elbows worn soft, and tucked his hair under the hood for the walk. In the mirror behind Paola, he caught himself in pieces: six-two, shoulders filling the jacket, dark teal shirt beneath, neck marked faintly from the chain he always wore, hair a dusty rose-brown mess from running his hands through it too many times, thick brows drawn in his usual involuntary scowl, amber-brown eyes looking meaner than he felt. The tattoo sleeve down his right arm disappeared under fabric, but he could feel it as a second skin: blackwork, old family motifs, a wolf skull, a stylized firebird, geometric bands inspired by embroidery his baba had once stitched onto cloth in Popovo.
He looked like someone who had never once apologized gently in his life.
He apologized gently all the time, mostly to dogs.
“Lock the back when you leave,” Paola said.
“I know.”
“And eat the empanadas.”
“I know.”
“And call your mother.”
“I know.”
“And get laid.”
The silence afterward was so clean it deserved framing.
Hiroto dropped something metal while trying to muffle the ugly snort.
Valko stared at Paola.
Paola stared back, utterly unmoved, espresso cup steaming in her hand like a prop from a mafia movie.
“Goodnight,” Valko said.
“Goodnight, sweetheart. Get laid.”
The cold hit his face as soon as he stepped outside, needling through the heat of the studio. Colfax smelled like rainwater, gasoline, fried onions from the late-night cart on the corner, cigarette ash, damp concrete, and the sugary rot of spilled soda near the bus stop. Traffic hissed over wet pavement, a couple argued beside a rideshare with the door hanging open, their voices bouncing off the brick, and someone’s bass rattled hard enough to shake the windows of the pawn shop next door.
Valko walked with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, backpack thumping between his shoulders. He was aware, in the way men like him learned to be aware without thinking, of every person within twenty feet. The drunk man was leaning too close to the bus schedule. The two college guys were shoving each other and laughing. The woman in scrubs was power-walking with pepper spray already threaded between her fingers, and the older man was pushing a shopping cart full of blankets and aluminum cans. Nobody bothered him.
It used to bother him to be read as dangerous by strangers. Then it became useful, and then it became funny in a bitter little way, because he knew exactly how easily he could be bullied by a twelve-pound elderly dachshund with no teeth and a fleece sweater that said PRINCESS.
His truck waited in the lot behind the shop, a dented charcoal Toyota Tacoma with dog hair permanently embedded in the passenger seat and a Def Leppard cassette jammed in the deck because he had bought the thing used from a man in Lakewood who apparently lived inside 1987. Valko tossed his backpack in, climbed behind the wheel, and sat for several seconds without starting it.
The cab smelled like cold leather, pine air freshener, tattoo disinfectant clinging to his sleeves, and faint dog.
His phone lit up.
ASTRA ANIMAL RESCUE: Myrtle ate a full dinner!!! No growling today. See you Tuesday? MILA: valko answer important MILA: if a guy says he likes “females” should i bite him VALKO: yes MILA: thank you VALKO: metaphorically MILA: oh too late
He closed his eyes.
Then he laughed, once, low and helpless, fogging the inside of the windshield.
Fine. He was doing fine.
He started the truck and drove west toward the gym, Judas Priest grinding through the speakers, rain tapping the windshield in frantic little clicks. Denver slid by in pieces of yellow light and black glass. Tattoo money in his wallet. Empanadas in his bag. Homework waiting like a curse. His mother was unsatisfied with his dinner. His sisters were one bad decision away from requiring legal intervention. His arm was aching, his body was tired, and his head was too damn full.
Fine.
Better than fine.
The gym sat in a strip mall between a closed vape shop and a twenty-four-hour laundromat, its sign flickering blue-white against the wet night. IRON SAINTS, because apparently subtlety had died in Colorado around the same time everyone decided exposed brick counted as personality. Inside, the place smelled like rubber mats, metal, sweat, chalk, disinfectant spray, and the vanilla protein powder somebody had spilled near the front desk. Old-school rock blasted from speakers that crackled whenever the treadmills all ran at once.
Valko liked Iron Saints because nobody there wanted small talk from him.
Mostly.
“—Big FUCKING V!” hollered Rafiq Bell from the squat racks.
Mostly belonged to Rafiq.
Rafiq was thirty-four, six-foot-six, and built like somebody had stacked two refrigerators and taught them to deadlift before puberty. His skin was deep brown with warm undertones, his shaved head gleamed under the fluorescent lights, and his beard was cut sharp along a square jaw. He had a broad face, a wide nose, heavy-lidded eyes, and a chipped front tooth that made his smile look reckless, with shoulders enormous under a cut-off gray hoodie. His chest was thick enough to strain the armholes, belly solid and powerful, waist wide, thighs like tree trunks in black compression shorts, and calves round and veined above red lifting shoes. A tattoo of a phoenix covered one calf; a surgical scar ran across his left knee. He wore wrist wraps, chalk dust on his palms, and the perpetual expression of a man thrilled to suffer voluntarily.
“Oh, absolutely not,” Valko said.
“You don’t even know what I’m asking.”
“You are going to ask something stupid.”
“I was gonna ask if you wanted to hit deadlifts.”
“Yes. See? Stupid.”
“Back day, baaaaby!”
“It is also my back day.”
“Then stop flirting and get over here.”
“First of all, I do not flirt with men who wear red shoes.”
“Fuuucking coward.”
Valko changed in the locker room, swapping jeans for black shorts and his jacket for an old sleeveless band shirt cut so low at the sides that his ribs showed when he moved. Rafiq called it ‘whoreish.’ Maybe it was. The air in there smelled sharper: deodorant, mildew from the showers, foot powder, hot water, and old sweat baked into tile. He shoved his clothes into a locker and stood for a second beneath the ugly fluorescent light, rolling his right shoulder, testing the pull under his sleeve.
The healing wound tugged. Nothing opened. Good.
He ran a hand through his hair, making it worse, and some random guy at the sink glanced at him . . . and glanced away fast.
Valko sighed.
Okay.
Out on the floor, Rafiq had loaded a bar with an obscene amount of weight and was stretching his hamstrings with theatrical groans. A pair of women near the cable machines discussed a coworker named Brent who apparently microwaved fish in the break room, which should’ve been fucking illegal. Two teenagers in matching hoodies took turns filming bicep curls. An older man with white hair and a Vietnam veteran hat walked slow circles between sets, smelling faintly of Bengay and spearmint gum.
Valko warmed up with pull-ups. Bodyweight first, dead hang, then up until his chin cleared the bar. The movement pulled his shirt open at the sides, letting air cool the sweat along his ribs. His lats flared, shoulder blades drawing down, arms bending as his body rose in a clean line.
He did ten. Dropped. Added a belt and clipped on the weight.
Rafiq whistled. “Look at this Eastern European nonsense.”
“Shhhh, I am an American citizen.”
“Your pull-ups are not.”
Valko chalked his hands. “My pull-ups have a green card.”
The second set burned, and the third set scraped pleasure out of pain, that deep muscular ache that quieted everything else. He liked lifting because it turned the body honest, because weight either moved or it did not. Your excuses meant jack shit to iron. He could be tired, lonely, overstimulated, behind on coursework, worried about money, irritated by his own skin, and the bar would still demand the same thing from him.
Grip. Brace. Pull.
His breath came rough, hhhuh, hhhuh, through his nose. Sweat slid down his spine under the thin cotton. The gym lights shone over his shoulders while Rafiq shouted encouragement that would have gotten them kicked out of a nicer facility.
“Come on, Big V! Pull that shit like it owes your mama rent!”
The bar rose.
“Yeah, there you go!”
Valko locked it out, held it, and lowered it with control. His palms stung, and his back lit up hot and heavy. For a few seconds after the set, he stood with both hands braced on his hips, head tilted back, breathing through the burn while the music shifted into “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
“Your song,” Rafiq said.
“My song is my beloved silence that everyone seems to deny me.”
“Oh, bullshit. Your song is whatever plays while you look pissed and moisturized.”
Valko paused, glancing down at his arms. “ . . . I am not moisturized.”
“You should be. Colorado air is no fucking joke.”
They worked for a little over an hour, alternating between pull-ups, rows, deadlifts, face pulls, and dumbbell shrugs. Valko’s body moved from stiff to hot to fully awake, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt, hair falling over his forehead in damp pieces. His hands smelled like chalk and iron, calluses breaking with every pump. The bar knurling pressed diamonds into his palms. Every rep made the healing cut pulse beneath the bandage, a dull warning he ignored until the last deadlift sent a thin flash up his forearm.
He set the bar down with a heavy clank.
Rafiq’s grin faded. “Arm?”
“Fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It is fine.”
“Big V.”
Valko flexed his fingers. No blood. Good. “Shelter cut. Healing.”
“From that shepherd?”
“Yes.”
“Man, you gotta stop trying to cuddle the traumatized ones.”
“They need it the most.”
Rafiq’s face softened, which, on someone his size, looked like weather changing over a mountain. “Yeah. I know.”
That was the other reason Valko tolerated him: Rafiq talked like an idiot eighty percent of the time, but he understood certain things without having to be explained to. He had two rescue mutts, a dead brother, and a heart that kept showing through the cracks in his gym-bro performance.
They wiped down the equipment. Valko showered fast, hot water drumming against his shoulders, steam rising around him with the smell of cheap gym soap and wet tile. He kept the bandage mostly dry by angling his arm out of the spray, which made the shower awkward and did nothing for the ache in his lower back. Water slipped over the ridge of his collarbone, over the hard plane of his chest, and down his abdomen in narrow streams that caught in the hair below his navel. His skin overheated from lifting, and his breath was heavier than it needed to be. There was a dull, thick pull low in his pelvis that he tried to ignore by washing his hair. Ha. As if.
The gym shower curtain clung to his thigh.
He muttered, “For fuck’s sake,” under the water.
It was normal—annoying—but normal. A body did not care that he had homework due tomorrow at midnight and also midnight on Sunday. A cock did not care that his mother might call in fifteen minutes. His blood did not give a shit about thermodynamic modeling or whether he had clean socks for tomorrow. He had gone months with nothing but his own hand and occasional bad decisions he abandoned before they became worse decisions, and now the hot water touched him wrong—or right, fuck—and his body reacted with humiliating enthusiasm.
He braced one hand on the tile and breathed through his nose until the worst of it passed.
Mostly.
He was still so fucking horny.
The tile was cold under his palm, and the water beat down on the back of his neck. Around him, the locker room carried the muffled slam of lockers, the squeak of sneakers, Rafiq laughing somewhere outside about a fantasy football trade. Public place . . . thin curtain . . . oh, absolutely not.
Valko shut the water off hard enough to make the pipe knock.
At home, then.
He dressed in clean joggers and a black hoodie, damp hair shoved back, skin still radiating heat. The empanadas waited in his backpack, as if Paola and Maritza had conspired with his mother from three different points in the city. He ate one in the truck before leaving the gym parking lot, flaky pastry dropping crumbs onto his lap, beef and olives and spice filling his mouth with enough warmth that he groaned before he could stop it.
“Mmmh.”
He froze, mid-chew, then looked around the empty cab as if someone might have heard.
Rain tapped the windshield. The truck smelled like hot food, wet cotton, pine, and the faint musk of his own clean sweat rising from his hoodie. Okay . . .
He ate the second empanada at a red light with no dignity at all.
His apartment was in Golden, close enough to campus to make commuting tolerable and far enough from Denver that rent only stabbed him a little, instead of disemboweling him. The building was a square brick thing from the seventies with bad hallway carpet and a laundry room that ate quarters. The hallway smelled like old carpet, someone’s garlic dinner, laundry detergent, and the neighbor’s incense. Mrs. Okonkwo in 2B had left a folded note taped to the wall by the mailboxes reminding people not to leave wet boots on the shared mat. Someone had underlined please twice. Someone else had drawn a tiny frowny face.
Inside, Valko’s apartment was warm, dim, and cleaner than anyone would expect from a grad student who worked part-time and lifted heavy things. Books stacked on the coffee table: metallurgical thermodynamics, transport phenomena, failure analysis, a Bulgarian poetry collection his mother had given him, and he pretended not to read. A squat gray couch faced a secondhand TV, and nearby was a small kitchen that held three mugs in the sink, one pan on the stove, and a jar of protein powder beside a bag of rice. His desk sat by the window, crowded with notebooks, tattoo sketches, a half-disassembled mechanical pencil, and a tiny ceramic dog one of his sisters had made in high school art class.
The place smelled like sandalwood detergent, coffee grounds, graphite, warmed dust from the radiator, and the lingering spice of the empanadas.
He dropped his keys in the bowl, locked the door, and then checked the lock again because his mother had raised him properly paranoid. His phone buzzed before he made it three steps.
MAMA calling.
He stared at it for half a heartbeat before answering. “Zdravei, Mamo.”
“You sound tired,” his mother said in Bulgarian.
“I am always tired.”
“This is not a good answer.”
“It is a true answer.”
“The truth can still be stupid.”
He smiled, toeing off his shoes near the couch. “I ate.”
“The foil sadness you showed me hours ago?”
“Empanadas also.”
“From where?”
“A client.”
“A woman client, oh?”
“Mamo.”
“I ask a normal question.”
“You ask like the police.”
“You are twenty-six. The police should ask too.”
He rubbed his forehead and walked to the kitchen. The radiator clicked. Outside, rain whispered against the window glass.
“She is married and has a daughter. All I did was give her a tattoo.”
“Fine. You make beautiful tattoos. You send picture?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Now.”
“It is on ribs.”
“So?”
“I am not sending you ribs of a stranger woman.”
His mother made a displeased sound that contained Bulgaria, motherhood, and the entire history of Catholic guilt, despite them not being Catholic at all.
“You are difficult, Valko.”
“I came from you.”
“Ha. Eat the fruit.”
“I have one banana on the counter.”
“One banana is not fruit. It is monkey bread.”
“That is not . . . an expression, Mamo.”
“It is now.” A pause, and her voice softened by half a thread. “Your arm?”
“Fine.”
“Do not lie.”
“I changed the bandage. It is healing.”
“You work too much.”
“I am fine.”
“You always say this.”
“Because I am.”
His mother sighed, and Valko could picture her exactly: Elena Stoyanova at the kitchen table in Denver, hair dyed dark brown but silver at the roots, house slippers, reading glasses on a chain, one hand wrapped around tea she would forget to drink, because she worried like other people breathed. She raised six children in a country that first made her tongue feel clumsy, and then concern slowly turned into both a weapon and a prayer.
“You come Sunday. I make the kavarma.”
“I have an exam on Monday.”
“You study here. Your sisters will be quiet.”
He laughed. She did too, because the lie was too big even for maternal optimism.
“I come for dinner,” he said. “Then I go.”
“Good boy.”
“Mamo.”
“You are always my good boy, even with tattoos like a criminal.”
“I make money with tattoos.”
“Criminals also make money.”
“Leka nosht.”
“Eat fruit. Sleep. Do not get more holes in your face.”
His silence betrayed him.
“Valko . . .”
“I said goodnight.”
“VALKO—”
Valko hung up. Oops. The apartment went quiet immediately afterward—quiet enough for the refrigerator to him and the radiator to click. He could hear the distant rain pattering against the window and the faint bass from someone’s TV below. He stood in the kitchen with his phone in his hand and heat creeping up the back of his neck because his mother had absolutely sensed the tongue piercing through the phone like a witch.
Fine.
He washed the mugs and set rice in the cooker for tomorrow before putting the leftover burrito out of its misery. Then he checked Canvas and saw the metallurgy problem set blinking, due tomorrow at 11:59 PM.
Fine.
He could do two hours, maybe three.
He sat at the desk, opened his notebook, and tried to focus on diffusion coefficients, pencil moving for twenty minutes. Then forty. He solved one problem, half of another, crossed out a derivation so hard the paper tore, and watched rain distort the reflection of his own lamp in the window. The apartment grew warmer. His clean hoodie became too much, so he peeled it off and worked in his T-shirt. Then that became too much too, clinging across his back and shoulders with the leftover heat from the gym.
He checked his phone.
No new messages, except Mila sending a photo that appeared to show a dent in someone’s car door, along with the caption: "before you get mad, consider feminism."
Valko put the phone face-down.
The pencil rolled under his palm as he tried to concentrate, to no avail. His right forearm ached. His back felt heavy from rows—the sort of wonderful, deep soreness blooming between his shoulder blades—and his thighs felt loose and used. Every sensation had edges tonight, it seemed.
He lasted another seven minutes.
Then he stood abruptly, chair legs scraping the floor.
No.
He paced once from the desk to the kitchen and back. Opened the fridge, then closed it like a loser, before drinking water straight from the bottle. Oh, and then stared at the ceiling like the answer might be written in plaster.
He was not a monk. Paola had that part right.
His body wanted what it wanted, and, fuck, it wanted contact . . . weight, heat, maybe a pretty, glossy mouth against his. He could feel five soft fingers in his hair and nails down his back, belonging to some warm, willing body pulling him close instead of expecting him to always be the strong one. The wanting was not delicate, god no. It had teeth and lived low and hot under discipline, under school, under work, under being the eldest son who answered the phone, fixed the car, lifted the heavy thing, translated the document, and showed up on Thursdays for dogs nobody else wanted.
He pressed the heel of his hand against the front of his joggers.
The pressure punched a rough breath out of him.
“Hh.”
His cock was already half-hard, thickening against his thigh, and the contact made his abdomen tighten. Annoyance flickered through him first, then relief so sharp it felt almost like anger. He hooked his fingers under the waistband, stopped, listened to the apartment like he expected judgment from the radiator.
Nothing.
The only sound came from rain, the refrigerator, and maybe the distant TV.
He turned off the desk lamp, letting the room fall into a soft blue-gray sort of darkness, coupled with the city light and rainlight leaking through the blinds. It made him feel less observed, which was fucking stupid because he lived alone, but bodies were stupid in ancient ways.
Now in the bedroom, he stripped with none of the grace people probably imagined he had. The shirt was dragged off and dropped, and the joggers were shoved down. Boxers after, and socks saved for last, because nothing killed a mood like socks and nudity, and even sexually frustrated men deserved standards.
The bedroom smelled like clean cotton, cedar from the cheap blocks in his dresser, the sandalwood of his detergent, and the warm human scent of him. His bed was made . . . mostly: dark green sheets, a gray blanket, two pillows flattened from years of abuse. A stack of clean laundry sat on the chair, judging him.
He sat on the edge of the bed naked, elbows on his knees, head bowed.
For several seconds, he did nothing.
His cock stood hard between his thighs, flushed darker at the head, a bead of precum shining at the slit. He was thick and pale, proportionate to the rest of him, heavy enough to curve slightly upward when fully hard, the shaft veined along the underside, skin smooth over heat. His balls hung tight from the workout and the cold that still clung faintly to the apartment. Dark hair framed the base, trimmed carelessly when he remembered, ignored when he did not.
He looked down at himself with a flat expression.
“Ridiculous,” he muttered.
His cock twitched.
“Traitor.”
The laugh that came out of him was breathless and rough—it broke something, some last little barrier of embarrassment, maybe. He leaned back on one hand and wrapped the other around himself, and the first stroke made his eyes close.
“Ohh, fuck.”
His hand moved slowly at first, palm dragging over the head, fingers tightening around the shaft on the downstroke. He was sensitive from ignoring it too long, from the shower, from lifting, from being tired enough that every nerve seemed closer to the surface. He swiped his thumb through the precum and used it to slick the glide, jaw flexing when the pleasure sharpened.
Outside, a car passed through the rain with a wet shhhhhh. The stupid radiator knocked twice. His breathing filled the bedroom.
He spread his thighs wider, feet planted on the floor, shoulders slumped, head tipping back, the position opening him to the cool room and the heat of his own hand. His biceps flexed with each stroke, and his abdomen tightened, relaxed, tightened again, a faint line of muscle pulling from hip to groin. The tattooed arm braced behind him, fingers gripping the mattress, while his left hand worked his cock with increasing confidence.
This was the part he never admitted to anyone: he was good at being alone, and he hated how good he was at it.
His hand knew the exact pressure, knew the twist near the head that made his hips jerk and the slower drag down to the base, the firm squeeze that made his balls draw up, and his breath catch. He knew when to be cruel and when to give in. He could teach someone that, in theory. He really could.
“Mmh—da, fuck.”
This time, he imagined no face, only sensation.
A warm body in that abstract way, with some weight in his lap and a glossy mouth near his ear, perhaps even a bell-like giggle ringing through his eardrums. Hands sliding over his shoulders, down his chest, tracing the tattoos, squeezing the muscle there. Someone wanting his size instead of fearing it. Someone laughing softly when his English broke, then kissing him hard enough to shut him the hell up. Someone saying his name as if it belonged in a mouth.
. . .Valko.
His hips pushed into his fist.
“Ah—shit.”
He stopped abruptly, breath ragged, hand clamped around the base to hold back the rush. Too fast, shit, all thanks to months of discipline and one stupid shower that left him embarrassingly close already. He sat there, chest rising and falling, cock throbbing in his grip, precum wetting his knuckles. The restraint made it all so much fucking worse. Pleasure pulsed low in his spine, dark and demanding, causing his thighs to tremble once. Valko peeked down and watched his hand loosen ever so slightly, letting his shaft jump against his palm, and another clear bead gather at the weeping head. His mouth went dry at that.
Well. Shit.
He stood and went to the dresser, because if he was going to lose this particular fight, he was not going to do it like a teenager with a carpet burn and regret. The second drawer stuck. He yanked it open, found the small bottle of lube shoved beneath compression shorts, and returned to the bed with his face hot despite the empty room. The lube was cold when it hit his palm.
“Chh—fuck.”
Then slickness.
He stretched out on the bed this time, back against the pillows, knees bent, thighs parted. The gray blanket bunched beneath one calf. Rainlight striped his body through the blinds as one slick hand closed around the thickness of his cock. Shhk, shhk, shhk, each stroke slick from base to head, fingers twisting, palm cupping the swollen crown. His breath fell into rhythm with it, rough little exhales, hhh, hhh, hhh, that became groans when he stopped fighting them.
He was not quiet by nature. A man did not learn the art of quietness in an apartment full of sisters, in shared bedrooms, in thin-walled family spaces where privacy came in scraps. Now? Quietness was as far gone as his promise towards celibacy.
“Nnh—fuck, good. Good.”
He rolled his hips up into his fist, then slowed, using both hands for a second: one gripping the base, the other stroking over the head with maddening little circles that made his abdomen jump. His balls tightened. The inner thighs tensed. Meanwhile, heat quickly climbed up his neck and face.
His mind drifted to touch again.
Touch, or the concept of it, was vague and faceless, which felt . . . safer that way. But . . . shit, this time around, it had a pretty face, feminine and sweet, pretty doe eyes staring up at him like he hung the moon and stars, followed by a palm pressed flat to his stomach. Fingers curled around his chain; a wet mouth open against his jaw, leaving a trail of saliva he’d love too damn much. She’d straddle him, knees on either side of his hips, softness and heat held over him while he lay there trying not to grab too hard. He would grab too hard, then apologize, then be laughed at, then be kissed again.
His fist sped up.
“Ah, ah—mmmh, mamka mu—”
The curse rasped out of him. He arched, shoulders pressing into the pillows, muscles standing out in his neck. His hand moved faster, slicker, tighter, the wet sound filling the room. His cock was flushed deep now, head swollen, shaft rigid and hot in his grip. He dragged his thumb under the crown, and his hips kicked hard.
He did not stop this time.
He planted one foot harder into the mattress and fucked up into his fist with short, rough thrusts, chasing the pressure that had been stalking him since the gym shower. His free hand gripped the sheet beside his hip. The wound in his right arm pulled, and he ignored it. Sweat gathered at his sternum despite the cool room, mixing with the smell of detergent, cedar, and the musk of his arousal, sharp and warm beneath the rain-damp air.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck—ahh—”
His orgasm hit like something breaking loose.
His whole body locked as the first pulse tore a deep groan out of him, “Nnhh—oh, fuck.” Cum shot over his fist and onto his lower stomach in a hot stripe. Another soon followed, thick and white across his abdomen, then another weaker pulse that made his cock jerk in his hand. His balls drew up tight, thighs shaking, hips lifting through each spasm until he had nothing left but breath and heat and the slick mess cooling on his skin.
For a while, he lay there with his hand still wrapped loosely around himself, chest heaving, eyes closed.
Rain scratched softly against the glass.
The apartment smelled unmistakably of sex now, layered beneath the cedar and cotton and old radiator dust—something human, male, warm, and ridiculously horny, the kind of smell that made loneliness feel physical after the pleasure faded.
Valko opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
“Fine,” he whispered to no one.
His voice sounded wrecked enough that he laughed under his breath, then dragged a hand down his face. He got up before he could sink too deeply into whatever waited after and cleaned himself with tissues from the nightstand. Then washed his hands in the bathroom with too much soap, splashed water on his face, sighed twice, and checked the bandage on his arm. There he found a faint pink bloom under the edge.
“Idiot,” he told his reflection. “Idiot. You’re an idiot.”
The man standing in the mirror glared back with damp hair, flushed cheekbones, dark brows, and eyes softer than his face knew how to somehow carry. Naked, broad, tattooed, and exhausted. Mean-looking, despite being tender in inconvenient places. All alone in a warm apartment with soap and sex and rain clinging thick in the air.
“Idiot.”
With another sigh, he turned his attention to his bandage, changing it with practiced care—taping the gauze down—before returning to the bedroom for clean boxers and, perhaps, a crumb of dignity. His phone buzzed on the desk before he could pull on a shirt.
Canvas notification.
MTGN 573.703: Advanced Failure Analysis & Microstructural Forensics. Metallurgical Thermodynamics: Problem Set 03 - Stress Intensity and Crack Propagation Due Tomorrow.
He stood there, half-dressed, post-orgasm calm curdling immediately into academic hatred.
“Bitch,” he said, with feeling.
Ten minutes later, Valko was back at his desk, hair damp and shoulders loose, with a mug of tea steaming beside his notebook because his mother’s voice had infected him. The bedroom still held the faint scent of what he had done, simply softened now by peppermint tea and graphite shavings. Rain kept falling outside. His body felt wrung out and heavy in a way that made concentration almost possible.
He solved the second problem and then the third.
At 12:38 AM, he submitted the assignment with twenty-one hours to spare, which felt virtuous enough to be suspicious. He uploaded the PDF, watched Canvas accept it with confetti, and leaned back in the chair while the confirmation screen glowed smugly.
His phone buzzed again.
MILA: update: biting him did solve it
VALKO: metaphorically?
MILA: emotionally VALKO: okay acceptable MILA: love u scary nerd VALKO: love you menace
He set the phone down, scanning around the apartment. The tattoo sketches on his desk waited under the lamp, with one unfinished design showing a dog’s graying muzzle surrounded by marigolds. Another had a moth with wings patterned after Bulgarian embroidery. A third was only a page of rough lines, all sharp angles and soft shadows, the kind of thing he drew when his mind needed to move but had nowhere to go.
He picked up the pencil again.
Outside, Denver and Golden blurred together under rain and late-night traffic. Inside, Valko worked in the small pool of desk light, bare shoulders cooling, tea forgotten beside him, tattooed arm aching quietly, mind finally settled into that narrow, useful silence where shape became line and line became meaning.
He was doing fine—
—better than fine, actually.
Life was good when he was getting paid for a tattoo, when the dogs ate dinner without whining, when his sisters kept surviving themselves, when his mother worried loud enough to keep him tethered, when iron moved because he told it to, and when homework was submitted before midnight, and the room smelled like rain instead of wanting.
At 1:17 AM, Valko shaded the moth's throat with careful graphite strokes, slow and dark and patient, until the creature on the page looked ready to crawl out of its own skin.
His Handmaid's Tales [REWRITTEN]
MASTERLIST
PAIRING: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
For his twentieth nameday, Queen Alicent presented her second son with a handmaid of his own. “He is the only one of my children yet without such attendance,” Her Grace is reported to have said. “—let her be sweet and devoted, and quick upon her feet . . . a girl who will swear undying loyalty and service unto him, and to his needs.” We are told Prince Aemond accepted the gift with all due courtesy, to the queen’s evident satisfaction. Yet if Alicent had intended only to soothe her son’s temper, or to bind him closer to her through gratitude, she misjudged the matter. For what began as service did not remain so, and what had been offered as obedience took root, in time, as something perilously akin to love. So smitten was the prince with this girl, the pretty bastard daughter of a serving wench from Harrenhal (as Mushroom claimed).
By the end of 130 AC, Aemond had taken his handmaid to his bed and, in time, sired three children upon her. Any hour away from Vhagar was soon spent at the side of his “sweet girl,” as he took to calling her. These, then, are the tales of their love story.
I. Mushroom's Accounts:
Chapter One: Wherein a Handmaid is Chosen
Chapter Two: Wherein Prince Aemond Makes His Preferences Known
Chapter Three: Wherein Mercy is Given
Chapter Four: Wherein the First Mistake is Made (And Want is Named by No Honest Word)
Chapter Five: Wherein a Dragon Learns Restraint (and Succumbs to Desire)
Chapter Six: Wherein Misery Enjoys Company
Chapter Seven: Wherein a Prince Learns the Shape of Want
Chapter Eight: Wherein a Dragon Keeps What He Has Chosen
II. Scenes Set Down in Secret:
III. Fragments from the Bedchamber:
IV. Of Kisses, Caresses, and Other Indiscretions:
The Handmaid’s Privileges (handmaid!reader tag)
His Handmaid's Tales [REWRITTEN]
Chapter Eight | Wherein a Dragon Keeps What He Has Chosen
Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
Summary:
Prince Aemond Targaryen did not know how to court.
Warnings: Erotic undertones. Nothing too abnormal regarding ASOIAF/HOTD writing.
WC: 12.7k
Notes: Reworked my writing style a little bit. Hopefully it reads more like . . . I’m the one writing it? As an apology for the unplanned mini-hiatus, here's a juicy chapter with some courting, hehe.
Posted first on my AO3.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
The rain had gone on until dawn, needling at shutters and drowning the gutters, drawing filth down the steep streets in brown ribbons that emptied toward the Blackwater.
When the clouds thinned at last, the city did not shine but instead steamed. Every roof and alley and crooked stair breathed up a sour ghost of wet ash, horse dung, fish rot, and old smoke, and from the windows of the Red Keep the whole of King’s Landing seemed a great beast pretending sleep while one yellow eye remained open beneath its lid.
Sweetling had not slept enough to dream.
That was mercy, perhaps. Dreams might have been worse. Dreams would have given him to her without walls or warnings or Mistress Rylene’s sharp eyes. Dreams would have put her back in his chamber, back upon the bed with rain on the glass and the prince between her thighs, his hair pale against the dark folds of her robe, his hands pinning not cruelly, no, never cruelly, but with that dreadful certainty of his, as if every part of the world he touched must learn its place beneath his fingers. Dreams would have made a song of his mouth; waking made a sin of it.
So she was grateful for the little sleep she had been given, wretched though it was. A pallet beneath the eaves, a blanket that smelled of damp wool, one arm tucked under her cheek, the other folded tight against her stomach as if she might hold herself together by force. Twice she had woken with her hand between her thighs, fingers lightly damp from her wetness, before shame caught her wrist and dragged it away.
Once she had woken with his name behind her teeth, unsaid but warm, like milk kept too near the hearth.
Aemond.
Not my prince—not that safe little bridge of words built for servants and crossed by fear.
Aemond, bare and dangerous, a name without armor.
By the time Mistress Rylene sent for her, Sweetling had washed her face in water so cold it made her gasp and braided her hair tighter than piety. She chose the plainest gown she owned, which was not much of a choosing, for all her gowns were plain: pale wool, mended at one cuff, apron clean enough to pass beneath a stern eye. She tied the apron strings twice and tucked the dark ribbon deep inside her sleeve, where it lay against her wrist like a pulse that did not belong to her.
Rylene waited in the linen room with a basket of folded towels and the expression of a woman who had woken to discover the gods had not improved overnight. “You look pale.”
Sweetling lowered her eyes. “I am well, mistress.”
“That was not the same answer.”
“No, mistress.”
Rylene’s mouth tightened. “Good. You still know when you are caught.”
The linen room was cool after the closeness of the dormer where the younger maids slept, but even here the damp had found them. The folded cloths held the faint chill of rain, the cedar chests smelled sharper than usual, and the little water had crept beneath the western wall and darkened the stone in a crooked line. Rylene had placed a rag there to catch it. Even floods, in Rylene’s world, were expected to behave usefully.
She pointed to the basket. “Her Grace wants those taken to the sewing room. You will sit with the others until I call for you. You will sew what you are given. You will not look dazed. You will not smile at nothing. You will not touch your mouth.”
Sweetling’s hand had already begun to rise. She lowered it at once.
Rylene saw. “You will especially not do that.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“And if Jeyne speaks?”
Sweetling’s stomach tightened at the name. “I will answer little.”
“You will answer nothing that feeds her.”
“That may be hard. She feeds on air.”
Rylene stared at her.
Sweetling felt heat rise in her face. “Forgive me.”
“No.” Rylene turned back to the shelf and took down a packet of green thread. “That was nearly wit. Dangerous, but not hopeless.” She put the thread atop the towels. “Take this as well. Her Grace’s women are short of that shade.”
Sweetling reached for the basket. Rylene’s hand closed over the handle first.
The older woman did not soften. Her face was too skilled for that, all hard lines and housekeeper’s severity. Yet her voice, when it came, had lowered into something less easily named.
“Was he gentle?”
Sweetling’s fingers curled at her sides.
There were answers that might have pleased Rylene more: "Yes, mistress." "No, mistress." "He was as princes are." It meant nothing." "It will not happen again." Lies, each of them, neat as folded napkins and just as useful for hiding stains until someone lifted the cloth.
She thought of Aemond’s mouth at her breast through the linen, the hot drag of his tongue and the sharp graze of teeth that had made her clutch at his hair as if drowning. She thought of his hand covering her mouth when pleasure made her foolishly loud, his voice at her ear, low and rough with command. Quiet. She thought of him stopping, again and again, not because wanting had left him, but because it had not.
“He tried to be,” she finally managed.
Rylene’s fingers loosened on the basket.
For a time, neither woman spoke. Beyond the closed door, the Keep stirred into morning: footsteps in the passage, a boy coughing, the dull thump of a chest being dragged somewhere it did not wish to go. At last, Rylene gave the basket to Sweetling’s hands.
“That is something,” she said, eyes flicking to Sweetling’s sleeve, where the ribbon slept hidden. “—not enough, but something.”
The sewing room had already begun to sharpen itself by the time Sweetling entered.
Six women sat about the long table by the windows, their heads bowed over cloth, their needles flashing in the watery light. The room smelled of beeswax, damp wool, rosemary oil, and the faint sourness of too many women made to sit too near one another with too little affection between them. A brazier glowed near the hearth, not warm enough to banish the cold, only warm enough to make a person resent it. On a stool beside the wall, a heap of mending waited like the dead after battle.
Jeyne looked up first.
Of course she did.
Her gaze went to Sweetling’s face, then to her mouth, then to the basket in her hands. It lingered at her sleeve a heartbeat too long, though the ribbon could not be seen. Jeyne had a way of looking for hidden things that made one feel half-stripped before she had found so much as a loose thread.
“Sweetling,” she said, sweet as spoiled pears. “How rested you look.”
Sweetling crossed to the table and set down the basket. “You are kind to say so.”
Jeyne’s smile twitched. She had wanted embarrassment, denial, perhaps a blush, as courtesy displeased her. Courtesy gave little meat to chew.
One of the older women, Meredyth, glanced up from a torn cuff. “Sit, child. Her Grace has asked for the smallclothes sorted and mended before noon, and I have but two hands, whatever Rylene thinks.”
Sweetling sat.
Work saved her for a little while; it had always done so. Work asked the body simple questions and accepted simple answers. A torn seam needed closing, a missing hook wanted replacing, and silk wanted a gentler hand than linen, leather a sharper needle, wool patience enough to hide the mend. If one gave work what it asked, it did not wonder why one’s mouth felt tender or why one’s thighs pressed together beneath the table each time memory moved.
The first hour passed with the thin peace of discipline. Sweetling mended two undersleeves and a linen coif. She sorted ribbons by shade and width and helped Meredyth turn the hem of one of Alicent’s green morning gowns, the fabric soft enough to make her roughened fingertips feel clumsy. No one spoke much. Rain slid down the glass. Somewhere below, steel rang in the yard, and Sweetling’s needle paused only once before she made herself continue.
Aemond would be training—that was what he did when his mind disliked itself. He put a sword in his hand and made his body suffer order until thought eventually bowed to it.
Jeyne noticed the pause.
“Does the sound trouble you?” she asked.
Sweetling did not lift her eyes. “Steel seldom troubles those not standing before it.”
“How brave.”
“How observant.”
Meredyth made a small choking noise and pretended it was a cough.
Jeyne’s lips thinned. “You have grown bold.”
“Have I?”
“Some girls do, once they think themselves favored.”
At that, the room changed, though not loudly. Sewing rooms were not battlefields, though Sweetling thought women could have taught knights a great deal about bloodless killing. The needles instead slowed, and the older hens kept their eyes down with the careful innocence of those who wished to hear without being called witnesses.
Sweetling set her needle through the cloth, drew the thread tight, and only then looked up. “I have been warned against thinking myself favored.”
“By whom?” Jeyne leaned slightly forward. “The prince?”
Sweetling smiled, only a little.
Rylene had told her not to feed the girl. Aemond had told her shame invited pursuit. Alicent had warned her that wanting was a danger in both directions. There were too many voices in her head now, and all of them sounded certain. Sweetling was not certain. She was only tired of being eaten in small bites.
“By women wiser than you,” she said.
The room went very still.
Jeyne’s face colored, not much, but enough. Before she could answer, though, the door opened, and Queen Alicent stepped inside. The effect was immediate—needles stopped and backs straightened. Even Jeyne lowered her gaze so quickly that it must have pained her pride. Alicent wore dark green, as she often did, but no crown. Her hair was pinned beneath a veil, auburn and copper where the weak morning light found it. She looked neither angry nor pleased, and that was how one knew to be careful.
“Continue,” Alicent said.
No one continued.
The queen’s eyes moved over them and settled, inevitably, on Sweetling. “Bring the basket, Sweetling, and follow me.”
Sweetling rose, gathering the basket at once, though she could feel Jeyne watching with a look that had become narrow and bright. The queen turned without waiting to see if she would be obeyed, as queens did not wait for gravity either; it was simply expected to remember itself in their presence.
Alicent led her not to the solar, but to a smaller chamber adjoining it, where the windows looked down toward the inner yard. It was a room for quiet work and quieter conversations, furnished with two chairs, a narrow table, a carved screen, and enough candles to prove the queen feared shadows less than she feared being overheard. A little statue of the Mother stood in an alcove, hands outstretched in eternal mercy. Someone had dusted her poorly, and grey lay in the folds of her stone gown.
Alicent shut the door.
Sweetling curtsied. “Your Grace.”
“Do not perform obedience so quickly that it becomes another kind of hiding,” Alicent said.
Sweetling remained low, startled into stillness.
The queen sighed, one hand rising to rub at the corner of her temple. “Rise.”
She did.
Alicent crossed to the window and glanced down. Sweetling followed her gaze before she could stop herself.
The yard below was slick from rain. Ser Criston Cole stood near the sanded ring with his white cloak thrown back, dark hair damp at the temples. Across from him, Aemond moved with a practice sword in hand, black leather molded close to his lean body, silver hair tied back, the eyepatch stark against his face. He looked smaller from above and no less dangerous. Distance only made his precision clearer: each turn, each strike, each step placed carefully in the mud as if he resented the ground for being imperfect and meant to correct it with his feet.
Alicent watched him for a long moment. “He has always preferred the yard after he has done something foolish, I have learned.”
Sweetling’s hands tightened on the basket.
The queen glanced at her. “You need not defend him.”
“I was not going to.”
“No?” Alicent’s mouth curved without humor. “Then there is hope for you after all.”
Below, Aemond struck Criston’s shield hard enough for the sound to climb the stones and enter the room like a rebuke—again, then again, and again a third time. Criston said something Sweetling could not hear, and Aemond answered with another blow.
“He is angry,” Sweetling breathed.
“He is often angry.”
“This is different.”
Alicent looked at her then, fully, and Sweetling realized too late that she had spoken as one who knew. A servant might notice whether a prince wanted hot wine or cold, whether a cloak sat poorly, whether a tray came back untouched; a servant should not know the varieties of his anger. Yet, to her surprise, Alicent did not scold her. She only looked . . . tired.
“Yes,” the queen said. “It is.”
Sweetling lowered her eyes. “Forgive me, Your Grace.”
“I am beginning to despise that word from your mouth, child.”
Sweetling looked up, startled.
Alicent turned from the window. “Forgiveness is for sins. Mistakes are different. Dangers are different still. You must learn which is which, or every man in this castle will hand you guilt and call himself merciful for letting you carry it.”
The words settled too heavily to be only about Sweetling.
Below, steel rang again.
Alicent drew in a breath, folding her hands before her. The gesture was queenly, pious, perfectly composed, and Sweetling could see where the thumb worried at the side of one nail. “My son gave you a choice,” she added a moment later.
Sweetling felt the ribbon hidden in her sleeve as if it had heard its name.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And you used it poorly.”
Heat rose in her face, but not only shame. “I used it.”
Alicent’s gaze sharpened.
Sweetling nearly bent beneath it, nearly apologized, nearly became again the quiet thing everyone found easier to place. She did not. The ribbon in her sleeve seemed to grow heavier, a strip of cloth and a warning both. “He told me to understand the risk,” she croaked out. “—I did not understand all of it. I still do not, but I understood enough to know I was choosing.”
Alicent went still at that, and, oh, even the room seemed to hold its breath, and the rain seemed to quiet at the window.
“You speak like him now,” the queen said at last.
Sweetling did not know whether that was an accusation or grief. Perhaps both.
“No, Your Grace,” she said. “I speak because he listens. There is a difference.”
Something moved over Alicent’s face, too quick to name. Pain, perhaps, or memory. She glanced back toward the yard, where Aemond had lowered his sword and stood with his head bowed, listening to Criston. He did not look contrite. Aemond Targaryen, Sweetling suspected, would rather be flayed than appear contrite. But he did listen. Gods help her, he listened even when he disliked every word.
“Listening is not yielding,” Alicent said.
“No.”
“And wanting is not love.”
Sweetling’s fingers tightened on the basket handle. “No.”
“Do you know what love is?”
That question was worse because it was horribly gentle.
Sweetling thought of her mother’s hands at Harrenhal, red and split, tucking crusts into her pocket when she thought her only daughter did not see. She thought of Mistress Rylene bolting the door and asking hard questions so no softer lie could kill her later. She thought of Aemond’s mouth at her skin, yes, but also of his hand stopping when he had felt her fear sharpen. She thought of the way he had cleaned her fingers with grim care, as if dignity were another wound he could bind if he worked quietly enough.
“No,” she said. “But I know what it is not.”
Alicent turned from the window. “That may be the more useful lesson.”
Below, Aemond’s head lifted.
Sweetling could not have said how she knew he had found her. The window was high, the glass warped, the morning grey. Yet suddenly his face angled toward the queen’s chamber, and though distance blurred the detail of his eye, she felt the weight of it pass through rainlight and stone.
Alicent saw it too.
A bitter little smile touched the queen’s mouth. “Dragons notice when something has been taken from their hoard.”
“I am not gold, Your Grace.”
“No.” Alicent’s eyes remained on her son. “You are worse. Gold does not look back.”
Sweetling should have lowered her gaze. She did not. Aemond stood below like a black mark against wet sand, Criston speaking unheard beside him, the yard and castle and whole hungry court arranged between them. He did not move, and neither did she.
Then Alicent stepped aside, breaking the line of sight.
Sweetling blinked as if waking.
“You will return to the sewing room,” the queen instructed. “You will finish what you were given. Tonight, you will sleep where Rylene tells you to sleep. If my son sends the ribbon, you will bring it to me first.”
Sweetling’s heart lurched. “Your Grace—”
Alicent’s expression hardened. “Do not mistake protection for theft.”
Sweetling swallowed.
“Aemond will,” Alicent added, quieter. “That is why I say it to you.”
The truth of it burned. Aemond would see the queen’s hand in the matter and call it interference. He would call it worse than that, perhaps. He would think his choice had been made another leash, his restraint made a thing his mother could hold up to the light and judge for flaws.
“He will be angry,” Sweetling said.
“He is already angry.”
“At me?”
Alicent’s eyes softened just enough to hurt. “At wanting something that can be hurt.”
Sweetling looked down.
For a while, there was only the muffled sound of the yard and the small breath of candleflame. Then Alicent came closer and, with a carefulness that startled them both, touched the side of Sweetling’s face. Not the mouth, not where Aemond had marked her with heat and hunger, but the cheek, as brief as a blessing.
“I chose you for him,” she mumbled. “I chose him for you because I believed he was not like his older brother. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside me, I still believe that to be true. That is my sin, and my burden. Do not make it easy for the court to turn it into yours.”
Sweetling curtsied, because if she did not bend somehow, she thought she might weep.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And Sweetling?”
She looked up.
“If you love him one day, do not tell him first.”
The words struck strangely, like prophecy given in a sewing room by a queen who had learned too young what became of girls who handed their hearts to powerful men and waited for gratitude.
“Why?” Sweetling asked before she could stop herself.
Alicent’s mouth tightened. “Because Targaryen men like to believe love is another name for surrender. Make him learn otherwise.”
By evenfall, the Keep had become all corners.
Sweetling felt watched in every passage. Jeyne’s silence followed her worse than what speech would have done. The kitchen boys laughed too suddenly when she passed. One guard outside the eastern stair looked at her sleeve, not her face, and she wondered who had told him about the ribbon, or whether the whole castle had simply learned to look for whatever she wished hidden. Even Meredyth, who had been kind in a careless way, pressed a heel of bread into Sweetling’s hand at supper and said, “Eat, child,” with such pity that Sweetling nearly hated her for it.
Mistress Rylene took one look at her and sent her to the upper press room with a ledger.
“Count what needs counting,” Rylene said. “Write what needs writing. Do not think if you can help it. You do that poorly when tired.”
“Thank you, mistress.”
“That was not kindness.”
“No, mistress.”
Rylene’s eyes narrowed. “Now you are mocking me.”
“A little.”
For a moment, Rylene looked as though she might crack the ledger over Sweetling’s head. Instead, she thrust it into her arms. “Go before I remember how much easier you were when frightened of everyone.”
Sweetling went.
The press room was dim and cold, a narrow chamber of shelves and hooks and cedar chests, but she welcomed it as one might welcome an ugly old friend. Cloth did not pry, boots did not gossip, and spare sword belts did not wonder whether a prince had put his mouth on a handmaid until she forgot which gods she was meant to pray to. The rain had stopped entirely now, leaving the window glass filmed with grey. Beyond it, the sky lowered toward night.
She lit one lamp, then another, and opened the ledger.
For a while, numbers kept her sane. Three black tunics fit for council. Two for riding. One torn past repair at the inner sleeve. Four undershirts of fine linen. Six plainer. Gloves: two pairs court, one pair riding, one pair training stiffened at the fingers. She wrote in a neat hand, pausing only to warm her fingers near the lamp when the cold made the ink drag.
At the back of the second shelf, tucked where it should not have been, she found the dark ribbon. Not the one in her sleeve, no. This one was folded once around a small twist of parchment and tied in a plain knot. Sweetling stared at it for several breaths before touching it, her heart beginning to beat so hard she felt foolishly certain the shelves must hear.
The parchment bore no seal—that was the first thing. No seal meant no command, and no command meant choice. Aemond had remembered his own rule. That made her throat tighten more than a command would have.
She untied the ribbon with careful fingers and unfolded the note. The words were few, written in the sharp, severe hand she had seen on lists and labels and once on a correction he had made to a history book’s margin as if the long-dead maester might yet be shamed into accuracy:
Come if you choose. Bring the ledger. Leave if you wish.
Sweetling read it once, then again. By the third reading, she hated him a little.
Not because he had summoned her, but because he had not. Not because he had made it hard to refuse, but because he had made refusal possible, and possibility was its own cruelty. If he had sent his seal, she could have obeyed and blamed obedience. If he had sent nothing, she could have sat in the press room and blamed restraint. Instead, he had put the knife in her hand and asked whether she meant to cut bread or herself.
She folded the note, tucked it beneath the ledger’s cover, and remained where she was until the lamp burned low enough to smoke.
Before, Rylene had said. Decide before you leave whatever room you stand in. Not in the passage. Not at his door. Not after seeing his face.
Sweetling stood in the press room and decided . . . then she took up the ledger and went.
She did not go alone—that was the price of choosing with open eyes. At the stairs, she found a page half-asleep with a tray and gave him a look stern enough to borrow from Rylene. “You will walk with me to Prince Aemond’s door.”
The boy blinked. “Why?”
“Because I asked plainly and could instead ask Mistress Rylene.”
He stood at once.
Together they crossed the upper passage, the boy carrying his empty tray like a shield, Sweetling carrying the ledger, her sleeve closed over the ribbon. The guards outside Aemond’s chambers looked at her, looked at the page, and said nothing. That was better than a surprise and a smile. One of them knocked.
“Enter,” came Aemond’s voice.
The page fled the instant the door opened, though, to his credit, he did not run until Sweetling had crossed the threshold.
Aemond stood by the hearth. He wore black, because of course he did, the tunic unlaced at the throat, his hair falling loose over one shoulder. A book lay open on the table, forgotten. Behind him, the fire had sunk into a red bed of coals, painting one side of his face in warm shadow and leaving the other pale as carved bone. He looked first at the ledger in her hands, then at her sleeve.
“You found it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You came.”
“Yes.”
His eye moved over her face, searching for fear, obedience, resentment, anything he might name and therefore master. Sweetling stood still and let him look. She had chosen before the door; that did not mean she was not afraid.
Aemond seemed to know that too.
“Did you show my mother?”
“No.”
His jaw tightened. “You were told to.”
“Yes.”
A dangerous silence opened between them.
Sweetling held the ledger tighter. “You told me to come if I chose. I chose. If that displeases you, I can still leave.”
For a moment, she thought he might laugh—not with humor, but with disbelief, perhaps, or with anger. Instead, he looked at her as he had in the sept when she named him a prince, like it was both a wound and a warning.
“It does not displease me,” he finally said.
The room seemed to tilt.
Sweetling breathed once, carefully. “Good.”
Aemond’s mouth twitched. “You sound relieved.”
“I am not so proud as you.”
“No one is.”
The answer should not have warmed her. It did anyway, because there was dryness in it rather than cruelty, and because he had let her stand near the door without closing the distance by force of will alone. She brought the ledger to the table and opened it. “Rylene sent me to count your garments.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. One tunic is torn past repair.”
“I know.”
“Then why keep it?”
Aemond came to stand across from her. “Because it is mine.”
“That is not always reason enough to keep a ruined thing.”
His eye sharpened, and Sweetling looked down at the page too late.
“You have been speaking with my mother,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Many things.”
“Sweetling.”
The name held a warning. She looked up. “She said if I loved you one day, I should not tell you first.”
Aemond went utterly still.
There. She had done it. Found the tender place beneath armor and pressed her thumb to it, not gently enough. The air in the chamber tightened. Fire popped in the hearth. Beyond the door, a guard shifted his weight, leather creaking faintly.
At last, Aemond said, “And do you?”
“No.”
His face did not change, but she saw the blow land, and she hated herself for seeing it. She hated him a little for making the truth look like injury.
“No,” she said again, softer. “I do not know you enough for that—”
His gaze held hers, hard and bright.
“—but I want to,” she added.
The words seemed smaller once spoken, smaller and more dangerous. Aemond looked at her for so long that she felt the flush begin at her throat and climb. He saw that too, as his eye dropped, briefly, to the place where heat colored her skin above the collar of her gown.
“You came to discuss garments,” he mused.
“I brought the ledger.”
“So you did.”
Neither of them looked at it.
Aemond moved toward the hearth, where he took up the iron poker and stirred the coals with unnecessary attention. Sparks climbed and vanished. “My mother will think I have corrupted you.”
Sweetling’s hands rested on the open ledger. “Have you?”
He turned his head, and the look he had should have frightened her. It did, but not enough to matter.
Aemond set the poker aside. “Not yet.”
The words moved through her like heat under a door.
He crossed the room then, slow enough that she might step back if she wished, proud enough that he would not ask twice. Sweetling remained where she was. When he stopped before her, he did not touch her at once. That, she was learning, could be worse than touch. His restraint had become another hand upon her, invisible and patient.
“Show me the ribbon,” he said.
She drew it from her sleeve and laid it across her palm.
Aemond looked at it. Then at her.
“You understood.”
“That I could refuse?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“And yet?”
She closed her fingers around the cloth. “And yet.”
His breath changed. Barely. Enough.
When he touched her, it was only to take her hand. His fingers closed over hers and the ribbon together, the same as before, but this time he lifted her knuckles to his mouth. The kiss he placed there was so controlled, so almost formal, that for one foolish moment Sweetling might have believed herself safe from wanting.
Then his lips lingered.
Her breath caught.
Aemond’s eye lifted to hers over their joined hands. “There is the trouble,” he murmured.
“What?”
“You grow soft before I have done anything.”
Sweetling’s face burned. “You have done things.”
His mouth curved. “Not tonight.”
The lie of that was in his hand, his mouth, the space he had stolen between one breath and the next. Sweetling wanted to say so. She wanted to sound bold and clever. Instead, she looked at his mouth and forgot half her anger.
Aemond saw. He always saw. He released her hand only to touch her throat, two fingers beneath her chin, tilting her face up. “If I kiss you now, will you tell me it was your choice?”
“Yes.”
“If I stop?”
“I will hate you.”
That surprised him; in truth, it surprised her more. Then Aemond laughed quietly, once, a dark and low sound that felt dragged from somewhere he kept locked. It was not happiness. Sweetling did not think he knew what to do with happiness, but it was something near pleasure, and nearer still to wonder.
“Honest little thing,” he murmured, his gaze drifting down her body slowly enough to be indecent without a single touch.
The words undid her more thoroughly than praise.
Aemond bent and kissed her.
It was not like the corridor. Not that first mistake, rough with anger and surprise. It was not like the night before either, when hunger had opened beneath them and swallowed every rule whole. This kiss was slower, and because it was slower, it was more dangerous. His mouth took time with hers, and he kissed the corner first, where he had once begun, then the lower lip he had seemed to make his enemy, then the mouth entire, deepening by degrees until Sweetling’s hands had risen to the front of his tunic and stayed there, not pushing, not pulling, simply holding on.
Aemond’s hand slid from her chin to her cheek, then back into her hair, finding the pins there with swift impatience. One came loose, then another, until her braid slackened under his fingers.
Sweetling broke the kiss just enough to whisper, “Rylene will know.”
“She knows everything, my love. It must be very tiring.”
A laugh escaped her into his mouth.
The sound changed him. She felt it in the hand in her hair, in the sudden tightening of his fingers at her waist. His next kiss was harder—not careless, no, but closer to the edge of it, his tongue parting her lips, his body pressing hers back against the table until the ledger crumpled beneath her palms.
“My list,” she gasped.
“I know what I own.”
“Proud.”
“Yes.”
His mouth found her throat then, and Sweetling’s breath went uneven at once. He kissed as if learning an argument by heart: beneath her ear, the side of her neck, the tender place where pulse betrayed her. His hand came to her waist, then her hip, fingers spreading over plain wool as if it were silk made only for him. When his teeth grazed her skin, she shivered hard enough for the table to shift.
Aemond stopped.
She opened her eyes.
He was watching her with that terrible attention, his mouth close to her throat, his breath warm where his teeth had been. “Fear?”
“No.”
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Want?”
The word struck low, and Sweetling swallowed. “Yes.”
His eye darkened.
For a heartbeat, she thought he would lift her onto the table and make a ruin of the ledger and perhaps of them both. She wanted it with a suddenness that frightened her, wanted his hands beneath her skirts and his mouth where the memory of him still lived, wanted to hear the restraint break in his breathing again.
Aemond did not move. Then, slowly, he stepped back.
Sweetling stared at him, flushed and bewildered. “Why?”
His jaw tightened. “Because you said yes as if it surprised you.”
“That is cruel.”
“No.” He looked toward the door, then back at her, and the hunger in him had not lessened. It had only been leashed so tightly that she could see the strain of it. “Cruel would be teaching you too quickly to stop being surprised.”
Her throat tightened.
There were many kinds of want, and Sweetling was learning. Some had teeth, and some oddly had patience. This one, however, stood before her in black wool with her loosened hair caught on his fingers and chose, visibly, not to devour.
Aemond reached past her and turned the ledger right side up. His voice, when it came, was rougher than before but steady enough to be proud of itself: “Read me what needs replacing.”
Sweetling almost laughed. She almost wept. In the end, she looked down at the ruined page and smoothed it with both hands. “One black tunic,” she said, though her voice trembled. “Two hooks. One pair of riding gloves, if my prince can be persuaded that sentiment is not the same as usefulness.”
Aemond’s mouth twitched.
“Careful,” he huffed. “That sounds near to wit.”
Sweetling looked up through the loosened fall of her hair.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I shall try to be duller.”
This time, when he smiled, it was small and sharp and gone almost at once.
But she still saw it, and because she had chosen before the door, because the ribbon lay between them on the table, because want had not made him forget the shape of restraint, Sweetling smiled back and kept reading until the candles burned low.
Prince Aemond Targaryen did not know how to court.
That was not to say he knew nothing of desire. Desire was simple enough, or had been before Sweetling.
Men made it vulgar because men made most things vulgar when given enough wine, enough privacy, and enough certainty that no one weaker would be believed afterward. Aemond had seen desire dressed in silk and paint, in perfumed chambers where women laughed with practiced throats and men forgot themselves cheaply. He had seen his brother stagger toward it night after night with the appetite of a starving dog and the gratitude of one who meant to bite the hand that fed him. He had seen lords buy desire, boast of it, hide from it, name it sport, name it weakness, name it anything but what it was when it had teeth in them.
He knew that kind. It bored him. It had always bored him, even when his body had been young enough to answer before pride could forbid it.
Sweetling had made the matter insulting.
She had done nothing artful to manage it; that was perhaps the worst of it.
There had been no practiced glance through lashes, no painted mouth shaped for conquest, no little songs of false reluctance such as court ladies sometimes wore under their smiles when they wished to be pursued and wished everyone to know they had been pursued unwillingly enough to be flattered. Sweetling had come to him plain, frightened, dutiful, too honest when cornered, and too stubborn when warned. She mended seams, counted gloves, and kept his ribbon in her sleeve as if it were a live coal, and when he touched her, her breath went thin with want before she had the sense to hide it.
Aemond found, to his profound displeasure, that he preferred wanting when it did not know how to flatter him.
He discovered his ignorance of courtship on the third evening after she came to his chamber by choice and read from the ledger until the candles guttered low. He had not sent for her since, though not because he repented. Repentance was a word septons gave to men who feared the consequences of being themselves. Aemond did not repent wanting her, nor touching her, nor the exact memory of her hair loosened over his table while her mouth trembled between defiance and invitation. He did not repent the rain-wet night when he put his mouth to her until she forgot every careful title in her head and spoke his name like it had been pulled from somewhere beneath prayer.
He did, however, resent the court’s claim upon the meaning of it.
The Keep had begun doing what the Keep did best: scenting warmth and coming hunting for smoke.
Aemond heard the small changes before anyone was foolish enough to put them into words before him. The pause of the guards when Sweetling passed, the smothered laugh below the stair, and the way his mother’s eyes followed his hands whenever Sweetling stood near him, as though Alicent expected lust to leap visibly from his fingers and coil around the girl’s throat. Mistress Rylene’s shadow appeared in more doorways than usual, severe and silent, her keys announcing her presence like a gaoler’s warning.
Jeyne, the sour-mouthed little viper from his mother’s rooms, had learned to lower her gaze whenever he came near, which meant she was either frightened or waiting. Aemond distrusted frightened people less than waiting ones.
So . . . he did not summon Sweetling.
He made the absence deliberate enough that everyone could see it and no one could accuse him of hiding her. He sent his mending through pages, asked for warmed water from other maids, and received his supper with the door open and his guard posted in clear view. He trained until his body ached sweetly with exertion and his thoughts still returned, traitorous, to the way Sweetling’s thighs had tightened about his shoulders. He read histories of Valyria and remembered none of them, except that dragonlords had once taken what they pleased because the world had not yet learned to tell dragons no. He went to the sept twice, not to pray, but because the memory of her among the candles irritated him less than the memory of her in his bed, which meant he had perhaps grown ill.
On the fourth evening, he decided this was absurd.
A prince might not know how to court.
He did know how to conduct a campaign.
He began with territory.
Sweetling was in the old press room when the first order reached her, carrying with it the full weight of Prince Aemond’s seal and none of the mercy of the ribbon. She had been sorting a small heap of garments sent down from the queen’s rooms: two sleeves, one torn hem, a length of green silk that wanted cleaning, and a child’s glove so tiny it could only belong to some noble visiting brat who had already lost its pair. The room was quiet, blessedly empty save for dust, cedar, and the soft scrape of her needle through cloth. Quiet had become precious to her, as it asked no questions and did not smile like Jeyne.
The page arrived breathless, red in the face, and holding a folded note as though it might hatch.
“Mistress Rylene says this is for you,” he said.
Sweetling looked up. “From Mistress Rylene?”
The boy’s eyes darted toward the door. “From the prince.”
Her needle stopped.
For one foolish, heated instant, her body answered before her mind understood anything at all. A flush rose beneath her collar. Her fingers tightened around the child’s glove. The ribbon in her sleeve seemed to wake, though the note bore a seal and therefore no choice at all.
She took it carefully. “You may go.”
“I was told to wait.”
“By whom?”
He swallowed. “The prince.”
Of course.
Sweetling broke the seal and unfolded the note.
You will no longer mend for my mother’s household while my own work is unfinished. Report to my outer chamber at once, with needle, thread, and your ledger. The page will remain in the corridor. A guard will witness your arrival. If Mistress Rylene objects, she may bring me the objection herself.
The words were plain, severe, perhaps even practical, if one ignored the violence of their intent. Sweetling read them twice, and by the second reading, her mouth had gone dry.
He was not asking her to come to him in secret; he was not sending ribbon; he was not coaxing, pleading, or dressing want as gentleness. No. He was doing something far worse: he was making his attention official.
The page shifted from one foot to the other. “Are you coming?”
Sweetling folded the note. “Have you ever known Prince Aemond to enjoy being kept waiting?”
“No.”
“Then do not ask foolish questions.”
The boy looked offended enough to be human and frightened enough to be useful. Sweetling gathered her basket, tucked the note beneath the ledger, and followed him into the corridor.
By the time she reached Aemond’s door, the Keep had already begun to notice. It was impossible that it had not. Prince Aemond’s page leading his handmaid openly through the upper passage at dusk, with a guard stepping aside before she reached the threshold, was not a thing the walls would swallow quietly. A maid carrying rushes stopped too abruptly at the corner. One of Alicent’s women turned her head as if some sound behind her had called. Farther down the passage, Jeyne stood with a silver tray in her hands and her eyes narrowed.
Sweetling did not lower her gaze.
That was the mistake, perhaps, or the victory. In the Red Keep, they often looked alike until blood decided the matter.
The guard knocked once and opened the door.
Aemond stood inside near the table, dressed in dark green.
The sight of it struck Sweetling strangely. He wore his mother’s color seldom enough that it always meant something when he did. On him, green did not look gentle or pious; rather, it looked like war beneath torchlight, deep and rich and sharp at the edges. His hair was bound back with black leather, and the eyepatch cut its hard line across the ruined side of his face. The sapphire was hidden, but she felt it all the same, that cold blue absence beneath leather and pride.
His gaze moved over her once.
“My prince,” she said, curtsying.
“Sweetling.”
Her name in his mouth entered the room before she did.
The page remained in the corridor, exactly as ordered. The door was left open wide enough for a witness, though not so wide that anyone beyond could see more than the edge of the table and the prince standing still as judgment. Aemond had arranged the stage with infuriating precision.
Sweetling stepped inside. “You sent for me.”
“I did.”
“You sealed the note.”
“I wished to be understood.”
She looked up. “You were.”
His mouth curved faintly, not warm and not cold, but alive. “Good.”
On the table lay a dark tunic, a riding glove, a belt with one silver fastening loosened, and three shirts folded with such neatness that she suspected he had placed them himself for appearance rather than need. The ledger sat open beside them, already turned to a blank page. He had made the work real; that was like him. Aemond could build a snare out of honest materials and still look offended if anyone called it a trap.
Sweetling came to the table and set down her basket. “Which first?”
“The glove.”
She took it up, studying it for a moment. The seam along the thumb had split. It was a simple repair . . . much too simple for a royal summons under seal.
Aemond watched her face as she noticed.
“You object,” he said.
“I did not speak.”
“You object quietly.”
Sweetling threaded the needle. “Then perhaps my quiet is becoming too loud.”
“It has been for some time.”
Her fingers faltered only slightly. His eye still caught it.
The door remained open. The page stood beyond it, staring at some fascinating patch of wall with the strained determination of a boy trying not to die of curiosity. A guard’s armor shifted. There were witnesses. Safety, of a kind. Aemond had given her that. He had also put her in full view and made the whole court look where he wished it to look.
She began to sew.
“Your mother will hear of this,” she said.
“My mother hears of rain before the clouds gather.”
“And Mistress Rylene?”
“Will disapprove.”
“She does that well.”
“She has had much practice.”
Sweetling’s mouth threatened to betray her. She kept it down and pulled the stitch through the leather. The glove was stiff beneath her hand, warm still from wear, though that may have been her imagination making a fool of her. Aemond stood near enough that his scent reached her with the faint heat from the hearth: leather, steel oil, smoke, the clean severity of him beneath it all. She did not look at his hands, as looking at his hands had become dangerous. She saw them anyway in memory, pushing her robe from her shoulders, fitting over her breast, spreading her open with obscene care while his voice told her to be quiet.
The needle pricked her thumb. Sweetling hissed through her teeth.
Aemond’s hand closed around her wrist before the second drop of blood could rise.
The page in the hall turned his head.
Aemond did not look away from Sweetling. “Clumsy.”
“It was a needle, not a spear.”
“You bled.”
“It happens.”
“To soldiers and fools.”
“Which am I?”
His eye darkened with interest. “That depends on how often you intend to challenge me before witnesses.”
The page found the wall very fascinating again.
Aemond released her wrist but did not step back. He took the glove from her hand, set it aside, and reached for a cloth from the table, the movement so briskly practical that for a moment she almost forgot to breathe. He pressed the cloth to her thumb, not tenderly, not roughly, but with the exact pressure required— no more, no less.
“This,” Sweetling murmured, “—will also be spoken of.”
“Let it.”
The answer came too quickly.
She looked at him then. Aemond’s face was calm, but calm with him was rarely peace. It was a blade polished before battle. He held the cloth to her thumb while the open door yawned at her back and the corridor listened with every stone it possessed.
“You are doing this on purpose,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
No denial and no dance—only the word, plain as steel. Her pulse rose as a result. “Why?”
Aemond’s thumb pressed lightly over the cloth, feeling for whether the bleeding had stopped. “Because they have already decided there is something between us. I prefer that they understand they did not discover it first.”
The room tightened.
Sweetling stared at him, heat climbing up her throat with such force she wished she could blame the hearth. “You are . . . impossible,” she breathed.
“You came.”
“You ordered me.”
“You enjoy saying that as if it absolves you of appearing.”
“My prince—”
“Aemond.”
The correction slipped across her skin, and the page’s shoulders stiffened in the corridor. Sweetling’s eyes flicked toward the door. Aemond saw, his mouth tightened, and for the first time since she entered, impatience showed plainly. Not with her, no, but with witnesses, the necessity for all this, and with the world’s insistence on existing where he had not invited it.
He released her hand and took one measured step back. “Finish the glove.”
Sweetling obeyed because obedience gave her something to do with the heat in her body. She sewed with careful hands, aware of his gaze, of the open door, of the guard, of the little smear of her blood on the cloth he had laid beside the ledger. The mend took longer than it should have because he had unsettled her and because some traitorous part of her liked being unsettled by him in ways that made danger feel braided with hunger.
When the glove was done, she set it down. “There.”
Aemond inspected the seam. “Adequate.”
“High praise.”
“Do not grow drunk on it.”
She glanced up before she could stop herself. His eye held hers, and there it was again: the faint edge of satisfaction when he drew something honest from her. Aemond’s amusement often wore armor and carried a dagger like a usual Targaryen.
He lifted the glove. “You will keep this with my riding leathers. Not belowstairs.”
“That is not my place to decide.”
“It is mine.”
“Your mother—”
“My mother has many gowns and many anxieties. Neither governs my gloves.”
Sweetling bit the inside of her cheek to keep her smile from showing; it did not help, because her mouth curved before she could stop it.
Aemond saw, and the room changed around that small thing. His gaze dropped to her mouth with an intensity that made the open door feel both a blessing and a torment. He did not move closer, and yet, her body stupidly remembered too much of him; distance had become merely another way he touched her.
The guard beyond the door cleared his throat.
Aemond’s eye lifted, cold at once.
“Close it,” he said.
Sweetling’s breath caught.
The guard looked in. “My prince?”
“The outer door. Leave the page by the stairs. You will remain outside.”
The guard hesitated only the fraction of time required for self-preservation to argue with curiosity, then obeyed. The page was sent away with a whispered command, and the door closed with a soft, final sound that seemed to pass through Sweetling’s ribs. Aemond turned back to her.
“No witness now,” she said, and hated the unevenness in her voice.
“No.”
“You arranged them first.”
“Yes.”
“Then dismissed them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He came toward her slowly, and because the table stood at her back, she did not retreat. She could have moved aside. He left room for it, and that almost made the heat worse.
“Because courtship requires witnesses,” he said. “Want does not.”
The word courtship struck her so strangely that she nearly laughed. She did not, because his face held no jest. Aemond Targaryen had said courtship as though speaking of siege engines or weather signs, as if it were a practice he had studied from inadequate books and decided to improve by force.
“Is that what this is?” she demanded.
His gaze moved over her, unhurried and indecent in the restraint of it. “Poorly done, I gather.”
“Terribly.”
His mouth twitched. “You wound me.”
“I doubt it.”
“No.” He reached out and touched the loose end of her braid where it lay over one shoulder. He did not pull. He only held the tail between two fingers, rubbing the dark strands once as if testing the texture of silk, which he refused to name silk. “You do.”
The words were low; they found some foolish place in her and pressed there.
Sweetling’s hands rested on the table edge behind her. “You should not say things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because I will think you mean them.”
Aemond’s face stilled.
There were silences that hid things and silences that revealed them. This one was the latter. He looked at her as if she had shifted an unseen piece on a board he had thought entirely under his own hand.
“I mean what I say,” he said.
“No.” Her voice came softer than she wished. “You say true things when they are useful. That is not the same.”
His fingers tightened slightly in her braid. “You have grown bold indeed, love.”
“You keep listening.”
Aemond bent his head, and he stopped close enough that his breath warmed her cheek, but he still did not kiss her. “You accuse me of causing my own trouble.”
“You began that long before me.”
That earned a sound from him, low and almost amused, though the hunger beneath it ruined any claim to levity. His mouth brushed the corner of hers, so light it could have been withheld had her body not answered with a shiver.
“Aemond,” she breathed.
“There.”
He sounded pleased and angry at once.
His hand left her braid and slid to the back of her neck. The first true kiss came hard enough to make her fingers grip the table. It was not the polished sort of kiss singers lied about, all moonlight and sighs. It had impatience in it, and claim, and the rough edge of a man who had spent four days turning want into strategy only to discover the campaign ended the instant her mouth opened beneath his. Sweetling kissed him back before she could pretend wisdom. He made a sound against her lips, low in his throat, and pressed closer until the table bit into the backs of her thighs.
The ledger crumpled under one of her hands.
He lifted her onto the table in a single movement.
Ink jumped in its pot. A belt buckle slid to the floor with a dull clatter. Sweetling gasped, and he caught the sound with his mouth, one hand at her waist, the other braced beside her hip among needles and thread and his half-mended things. His body settled between her knees as if it had always meant to belong there. The green wool of his tunic brushed against her gown, and she could feel the heat of him through layers, and the knowledge of it went through her sharply enough that she clutched at his shoulders.
“Doors,” she managed between kisses.
“Closed.”
“Guards.”
“Outside.”
“Your mother.”
“Not here.”
“Rylene—”
“Very much not here.”
That startled a laugh out of her, breathless and ruined. Aemond’s mouth stilled against hers. His eye opened, fixed on her with something that made the laugh die into a softer sound.
“I like that,” he said.
“What?”
“When you forget to be afraid of me.”
The words struck through the heat and found the tender place beneath it.
Sweetling looked at him, close enough to see the faint damp shine his mouth had left on hers reflected in his own expression. He did not look soft—he looked hungry and pleased in a way that should have frightened her more than it did. He looked like a dragon prince who had discovered laughter might be taken from her the same way gasps could, and meant to become expert in both.
“I do not forget,” she said.
“No?”
“I remember and stay anyway.”
His face changed.
That was the thing about Aemond. He could be all hard edge and cold poise, and then a few words, rightly placed, would strike him somewhere human and make him furious with whoever had seen it happen. For a heartbeat, he only stared, then his hand moved to the laces at her throat.
“Say that again,” he said.
She should not have. The danger had teeth enough already. But Sweetling had begun to understand that fear did not always mean retreat. Sometimes it meant standing still and watching the dragon lower its head to your hand, knowing the jaw could close whenever it wished.
“I remember,” she whispered, “—and stay anyway.”
Aemond kissed her throat. He put his mouth to the place where her pulse had betrayed her and bit just enough to make her nails dig into his shoulders. The pain was small, and the pleasure that followed was not. It slipped under her skin like wine, hot and spreading, until she had to press her lips together to keep from making a sound loud enough for the guard outside.
Aemond noticed and smiled against her skin.
“Quiet,” he murmured.
The word should not have done what it did to her. It did it anyway.
His fingers worked the top laces of her gown loose, not fully, not enough for ruin, but enough for his hand to slide beneath wool and linen and find the warm curve of her breast. Sweetling’s breath broke. His palm closed around her with possessive care, thumb dragging once over the nipple until it hardened under the thin shift. Her head tipped back despite herself. He watched her as he touched her, and the watching was almost worse, that precise attention, the sense that he was learning the map of her reactions as seriously as he learned histories and battle lines.
“You are very easy to read here,” he said.
Her face burned. “Then stop reading.”
“No.”
His mouth came down over the place his thumb had tormented, cloth between them, heat soaking through linen. Sweetling’s hand flew to his hair. The first pull of his mouth made her arch; the second made her bite the inside of her lip hard enough to taste blood. Aemond felt the change in her and looked up, displeasure cutting through want.
“Do not hurt yourself to spare a guard embarrassment.”
“You told me quiet.”
“I did not tell you to bleed.”
He sounded angry. It should not have warmed her . . . and it still did.
Before she could answer, he kissed her again, deeper, his tongue pushing past her lips, and she realized the taste of blood had reached him. Something in him roughened at it. His hand tightened at her waist. He kissed her until her mouth softened, until the sharpness faded, until she clung to him not for balance but because the alternative was falling inward.
Then he drew back just enough to speak.
“I have decided something.”
Sweetling blinked, dazed. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“Must you?”
“Yes.”
His seriousness might have made her laugh if he had not still had one hand beneath her gown. “What have you decided?”
“That you will have a new gown.”
The words were so far from what she expected that she stared at him.
Aemond’s thumb moved again, slow and deliberate, and her body betrayed her with a shiver before her tongue could find sense.
“I have gowns,” she said.
“You have sacks with sleeves.”
“They are servant gowns.”
“You are my servant.”
“And therefore?”
“Therefore, you will not look as though you belong to any hand that happens to send you carrying towels.”
Sweetling’s breathing had not steadied. “That sounds very much like being seen as special.”
“It is.”
“Rylene will skin me.”
“She may attempt to skin me first. It will give her exercise.”
“Aemond.”
He liked it when she said his name in warning; she could tell that for certain. His mouth shifted, and his thumb stilled only to let his palm fit more fully to her breast.
“They will speak anyway,” he said. “If you are plain, they will say I hide you. If you are well dressed, they will say I flaunt you. If you walk alone, they will call you reckless. If you walk witnessed, they will call you managed. I am finished allowing cowards with baskets and keys to decide the shape of my intentions.”
“Baskets and keys,” she repeated. “You have named nearly every woman in my life.”
“Then they should be flattered by my accuracy.”
Despite herself, she smiled. He watched it bloom and then, without warning, bent and kissed the smile from her mouth with such focused hunger that she forgot to be clever.
This was his courtship, then. Not flowers, not songs, not ribbons offered in gardens beneath the lying mercy of moonlight. Aemond Targaryen courted like he fought: by claiming ground, naming threats, arranging witnesses, dismissing them, and putting his mouth exactly where restraint had worn thinnest. He would give her a gown because the Keep had given her rumors. He would make her visible because others had tried to make her shameful. He would touch her in secret and mark her in public, and gods help her, some part of Sweetling understood the dreadful romance of it.
Not sweetness. It was never that small, often faint, feeling. No. It, instead, was a dragon laying treasure at the mouth of a cave and daring thieves to count it.
His hand left her breast and moved to her hair, loosening the braid fully now. Pins fell, one striking the table and rolling toward the edge. He caught it without looking and set it beside the ledger.
“You are impossible,” she whispered again.
“You repeat yourself when disordered.”
“You cause disorder.”
“Yes.”
He kissed the side of her neck, then beneath her jaw. “You may refuse the gown.”
The words came against her skin.
Sweetling’s eyes half closed. “May I?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be unbearable if I do?”
“Yes.”
There it was. Truth, armed and unashamed. She laughed once, softer this time, and the sound broke into a gasp when his teeth found the tender skin below her ear.
“Then what choice is that?”
“The only kind most people ever have,” he said. “A real one with consequences.”
She drew back enough to see his face.
He let her. That mattered, because he let her look at him while his hand rested at her waist and her gown sat loosened at the throat and the ledger of his garments lay crushed beneath her. He let her see the wanting and the pride, the impatience, the anger at his own patience, the strange fierce care he would never call care because the word had too much softness in it, and softness made him suspicious.
“What color?” she asked.
His eye darkened with satisfaction.
“Green,” he said.
“Your mother’s color.”
“Our color.”
Sweetling’s breath caught.
Aemond heard it. “Yes,” he said, answering the sound rather than any question. “Let them choke on that too.”
The brazenness of it should have frightened her out of her senses. It did frighten her, oddly enough, as sense did not follow. Instead, heat gathered low in her belly, a terrible molten answering. His color . . . household . . . his name for her. The ribbon and the gown, to add. Witnesses arranged like pieces on a board, and behind every move, the same unspoken thing: he would not have her hidden like a shame he had visited after dark.
“You are making me a banner,” she said.
“No.” His hand slid down her side to grip her hip. “Banners are for men too far away to see the blood.”
“And what am I?”
His gaze moved over her, and when he answered, his voice had gone very low.
“Close.”
Sweetling closed the distance herself.
Aemond took the kiss as if she had handed him a weapon. His restraint went ragged at the edge, and he dragged her nearer until her body pressed fully to his, the table beneath her, his hips between her thighs, the hard line of his want unmistakable through cloth. She made a sound against his mouth, and this time he did not tell her to be quiet. His hand slid under her skirt, not high enough, never high enough, but enough that his fingers found the bare skin above her stocking and held there, hot and possessive, while his mouth worked over hers with an intensity that made the room seem to shrink around them.
Outside the door, a guard shifted again.
Aemond stopped with visible effort. His forehead rested briefly against hers, his breath rough enough to be its own confession. Sweetling’s hands were in his hair now. She did not remember putting them there.
“You should go,” he said.
She almost struck him. He saw that too, and the corner of his mouth lifted, cruel with satisfaction.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
“No.”
His hand moved once, higher under her skirt, thumb pressing into the soft flesh of her thigh—not where she ached, but close enough to make the ache sharpen. He held her there and watched her face as the shock of it took her.
“No,” he repeated. “You hate leaving.”
That was worse because it was true.
Sweetling’s lips parted. He looked at them. For a moment, the entire world balanced on the breadth of his restraint, and she knew if she said his name again in the wrong tone, if she shifted her knee against him, if she took his hand and guided it higher, the guard outside and Alicent’s warnings and Mistress Rylene’s keys might all become distant, irrelevant things.
Aemond knew it too.
He withdrew his hand.
The loss was sharp enough to make her feel foolish.
He set her properly on the floor and drew her loosened laces together without tying them fully, just enough to preserve decency. Then he gathered her fallen pins, one by one, and placed them in her palm.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “Rylene will take you to the seamstress.”
Sweetling looked at the pins in her hand. “You have already arranged it.”
“Yes.”
“With whose coin?”
His expression suggested the question was insulting enough to be entertaining. “Mine.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I will keep the cloth until you stop being foolish.”
She shook her head, but her mouth had betrayed her again. She was smiling. He looked satisfied in the grim, restrained way of a man who had won a small battle and was already planning the next.
“What exactly is your intention?” she asked.
Aemond reached past her and took up the mended glove.
“To ensure,” he said, “—that when they speak of you, they know whose wrath they invite by speaking poorly.”
“That is not courtship.”
“No?”
“No. That is a threat.”
“At court, the distinction is ornamental.”
Sweetling stared at him, then laughed despite herself, low and incredulous. He watched it with such hunger that the laughter faded into warmth.
Aemond came close once more, not touching now. He had made a discipline of not touching her, and it was intolerable.
“My intention,” he said, voice dropping, “—is that you understand I am not ashamed of wanting you. I am not ashamed that you come to my chambers. I am not ashamed that I know the sounds you make when you try to be quiet, or that you look at my mouth as though you have remembered it all day.”
Her face flooded with heat.
He did not spare her.
“I am not ashamed,” he continued, “—that I mean to have more. I am only displeased that the court thinks itself entitled to make a cheap little song of it before I have chosen the tune.”
Sweetling’s hand tightened around the pins until the points bit her palm.
Aemond took her wrist, opened her fingers, and removed the pins before she could prick herself properly. His eye narrowed in annoyance. “You are determined to bleed in my rooms.”
“You are determined to make me.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?”
His gaze held hers.
The air between them changed at once. Sweetling knew it, felt it in the softening of her own mouth and the way his attention dropped there like a blade finding the exposed seam. She had meant defiance; her body had translated it into an invitation.
Aemond leaned in until his lips brushed her ear. “Or the next blood spilled in my chambers will be on my sheets, and my babe in your belly.”
Sweetling shivered as he then stepped back before she could decide whether to curse him or pull him down.
“Go,” he said.
She stood there, breathing too quickly, hair half-loosed, gown laced poorly, mouth warm from his, and thought very seriously of refusing.
Aemond’s expression sharpened as if he heard the thought.
“Sweetling, love.”
It was a warning, a command, and, Gods help her, an almost plea, if one were foolish enough to seek tenderness in a dragon’s throat. She gathered the ledger to her chest. “Aemond.”
His name came out steadier this time, though not steady enough. He heard everything wrong with it and everything right.
He opened the door himself.
The guard outside straightened at once, then looked very hard at nothing. Sweetling stepped into the corridor with what remained of her composure arranged about her like a cloak after battle. Her hair was not as neat as it had been. Her lips were certainly not. The ledger was wrinkled, the mended glove lay in her basket, and there would be talk before supper and worse by morning.
Aemond stood in the doorway behind her, making no effort to hide that he had been close enough to ruin her.
“Guard,” he said.
“My prince?”
“Escort her to Mistress Rylene.”
Sweetling turned her head sharply.
Aemond looked down at her, face calm, eye bright with satisfaction and threat.
“And inform Mistress Rylene,” he added, “—that my handmaid is to be fitted tomorrow in green.”
The guard’s jaw tightened with the effort not to react. “As you command, my prince.”
Sweetling stared at Aemond. He stared back as though daring her to challenge him in the hall, before witnesses, with her hair undone by his own hand. She should have hated him more. She curtsied instead, low enough for obedience, slow enough for insolence. When she rose, his eye had darkened in a way that made her stomach turn warm.
“My prince,” she said.
His mouth barely moved. “Sweetling.”
Then the guard led her away.
The corridor seemed longer than before and twice as full of listening. Two maids turned at the far stair, a page saw her and nearly dropped the candles he carried, and somewhere behind a half-open door, a woman inhaled softly, savoring scandal before it had cooled. Sweetling kept walking. At the turn, she looked back once.
Aemond remained in his doorway, green-clad and pale-haired, one hand resting against the frame as if he owned not only the chamber behind him but the hall before it, the tongues within it, the fear moving through it, and the girl being escorted from it with kiss-warmed lips and a prince’s command draped over her like cloth not yet sewn.
By the time Sweetling reached Mistress Rylene, the older woman had already heard enough footsteps, enough silence, enough change in the air to look up from her ledger with murder in her eyes.
“What,” Rylene said, “—has he done now?”
The guard cleared his throat. “Prince Aemond commands that his handmaid be fitted tomorrow in green.”
The room went very quiet at those words. Rylene’s gaze moved from the guard to Sweetling’s hair, then to her mouth, then to the wrinkled ledger clutched against her chest. Her eyes closed briefly, as if she were praying for patience or considering whether murder could be made to look like a household accident. When she opened them, Sweetling expected fury.
Instead, Rylene sighed.
“Of course he does,” she said. “The boy has discovered courtship and chosen siegecraft.”
Sweetling pressed her lips together.
It was a mistake. Rylene saw the smile before it vanished.
“Oh, do not you dare look pleased,” the older woman snapped. “Green. Seven save us. He may as well hang a bell from your neck and call the court to supper.”
“He said they would speak anyway.”
“He would. Men adore creating disasters and then congratulating themselves for naming the weather.”
The guard wisely took his leave.
Rylene shut the door behind him and rounded on Sweetling fully. “Did he touch you?”
Sweetling’s face betrayed her before she answered.
Rylene made a sound of profound disgust. “That means yes.”
“Not—” Sweetling stopped. There were no safe distinctions. Aemond’s mouth at her throat, his hand beneath her skirt, the heat of him pressed between her thighs. Not enough to be ruined, perhaps, but more than enough to be true. “Yes.”
“Did you wish it?”
Sweetling peeked down at the ledger. “Yes.”
Rylene muttered something that was either a prayer or a wish for Aemond to fall into a well.
“He left the door open first,” Sweetling said.
Rylene looked up sharply.
“He had a page and a guard witness my arrival, then he closed the door. When I left, he called the guard and sent me here with an escort. He wants it seen.”
“Of course he wants it seen. That is the siegecraft.” Rylene rubbed a hand over her face, suddenly looking older. “A hidden girl can be called shame. A visible girl must be explained. He intends to force the court to explain you on his terms.”
Sweetling had understood some of that; however, hearing Rylene say it made it heavier.
“And the gown?” she asked.
“The gown is a banner,” Rylene said. “Oldtown levies green when it calls their banners to war, child.”
Sweetling thought of saying that Aemond had rejected the same word. She did not. Rylene would not care for the nuance, and Sweetling was beginning to suspect the two of them were both right in different, dangerous ways.
“Will Her Grace forbid it?”
Rylene’s mouth tightened. “Her Grace will hate it. That is not the same.”
Sweetling sat slowly on the edge of a chest. The ledger lay in her lap, its wrinkled pages full of counts that no longer seemed to matter. “Should I refuse?”
Rylene gave her a long, hard look.
“Do you want to?”
Sweetling had no answer that would save anyone.
The older woman’s face softened by half a degree, which on Rylene looked like surrender. “Then do not lie to me. We have too much trouble already.”
Sweetling touched the edge of the ledger. “I want to know what it is like.”
“To wear green?”
“To be wanted without being hidden.”
Rylene went still.
There were truths that belonged to girls and truths that belonged to women who had once been girls. This one crossed the room and settled between them like a candle neither wished to blow out. At last, Rylene said, “It is intoxicating.”
Sweetling looked up.
“It is also expensive,” Rylene continued. “And I do not mean coin.”
“I know.”
“No. You have been told. That is not knowing.” Rylene came closer, and her severity returned because severity was the shape her care knew best. “But perhaps you will learn whether I permit it or not. So you will learn with your eyes open, your laces tied properly, and your hair pinned like you have sense.”
Despite herself, Sweetling laughed once.
Rylene pointed at her. “Do not laugh. I am furious.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“And tomorrow, when that seamstress measures you, you will stand still. If Jeyne speaks, you will become deaf. If any man comments, you will become stone. If Prince Aemond looks pleased with himself, you will not encourage him.”
“That may be difficult.”
“I did not ask whether it would be difficult. I asked that you grow a spine somewhere above your hips.”
Sweetling’s face burned. “Mistress.”
“Oh, now you blush.”
Rylene turned away, muttering darkly about dragons, princes, and the general uselessness of men raised too near swords. But when she took the ledger from Sweetling’s lap, her hand paused briefly over the wrinkled page.
“He is being reckless,” Rylene said.
“Yes.”
“He is being arrogant.”
“Yes.”
“He is being possessive in a manner that will make half the Keep dream of being you and the other half dream of ruining you.”
Sweetling’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
Rylene looked at her. “And still?”
Sweetling thought of Aemond in green, of his fingers in her hair, of his voice saying I am not ashamed with such hard, vicious clarity that shame itself seemed to step back from him. She thought of the gown not yet made, the court not yet whispering, the danger not yet fully bloomed. She thought of the door opening first, closing after, and being opened again by his own hand.
“Still,” she said.
Rylene held her gaze a long moment.
Then the older woman sighed, deep and weary. “Gods help me, I liked you better when you had no courage.”
Sweetling smiled, only a little.
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His Handmaid's Tales [REWRITTEN]
MASTERLIST
PAIRING: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
For his twentieth nameday, Queen Alicent presented her second son with a handmaid of his own. “He is the only one of my children yet without such attendance,” Her Grace is reported to have said. “—let her be sweet and devoted, and quick upon her feet . . . a girl who will swear undying loyalty and service unto him, and to his needs.” We are told Prince Aemond accepted the gift with all due courtesy, to the queen’s evident satisfaction. Yet if Alicent had intended only to soothe her son’s temper, or to bind him closer to her through gratitude, she misjudged the matter. For what began as service did not remain so, and what had been offered as obedience took root, in time, as something perilously akin to love. So smitten was the prince with this girl, the pretty bastard daughter of a serving wench from Harrenhal (as Mushroom claimed).
By the end of 130 AC, Aemond had taken his handmaid to his bed and, in time, sired three children upon her. Any hour away from Vhagar was soon spent at the side of his “sweet girl,” as he took to calling her. These, then, are the tales of their love story.
I. Mushroom's Accounts:
Chapter One: Wherein a Handmaid is Chosen
Chapter Two: Wherein Prince Aemond Makes His Preferences Known
Chapter Three: Wherein Mercy is Given
Chapter Four: Wherein the First Mistake is Made (And Want is Named by No Honest Word)
Chapter Five: Wherein a Dragon Learns Restraint (and Succumbs to Desire)
Chapter Six: Wherein Misery Enjoys Company
Chapter Seven: Wherein a Prince Learns the Shape of Want
II. Scenes Set Down in Secret:
III. Fragments from the Bedchamber:
IV. Of Kisses, Caresses, and Other Indiscretions:
The Handmaid’s Privileges (handmaid!reader tag)
next chapter will be out tomorrow !! :D
feel free to ignore this ask if you find it too strange 😭
are you the author that wrote an aemond targ fic about the greens time traveling into the GOT timeline? it was an x reader too. i can't seem to find it anywhere on tumblr now, but i vaguely remember it having read it on your blog (that or im experiencing an insane mandela effect)
yes, that was me :D
that was the FIRST ever HOTD/ASOIAF series I posted on here: Last of Her House No More.
You fucking stole the presiden',s daughter fic didn't you💀 I read it over a year ago with someone else
that’s so crazy cause the og is well over three years old lmao
i’m sick oh jacaerys velaryon
Fandoms have a serious problem with how creators are being treated these days.
Fandom creators spend hours of their free time to create something to make fandom thrive...for free and for the love of the game.
And what do they get? A wholeass heap of fuck all. No reblogs, no comments, no nothing. And people are surprised that creators are dropping out left, right, and centre??
"Why is there no long fic anymore?" "Why did my favourite writer stop?" "Why is my favourite artist not posting anymore?"
I implore you to ask yourself: "What's the last thing I did to support my fandom? Does my favourite creator know they are my favourite? When was the last time I left a comment under something?"
Apologies for the lack of updates regarding my Aemond content, especially His Handmaid’s Tales and a few requests I’ve been sent.
I’ve received numerous AI-generated content accusations, both on here and on AO3, within the past several weeks, that’s led me to take a step back to reflect on my writing styles.
Comments like this are massive blows to a writer’s confidence. I cannot emphasize that enough. Now, I’m incredibly paranoid, which sucks because I love to write!
I love using italics, bold, em dashes, and semi-colons.
I do not love being accused of AI simply because AI has been fed so much writing content that it’s adopted common writing patterns and structuring.
I’m not vanishing again; I’m still here, but now I’m trying to figure out what the hell I need to do so that my writing doesn’t sound "really weird!"
Here is a list of some of my favorite writers on here, for HotD & AKOTSK ♡
For AKOTSK & HotD: @thenameswinter99 - @targaryen-dynasty - @happilyhertale - @novaursa - @venmondiese - @slaytheusurper
For HotD: @yoursweetheartsrevenge - @still-jon-snow - @inthedayswhenlandswerefew - @anjelicawrites - @thought--bubble - @ceoofglytchell - @zaldritzosrose - @aemondsbabe - @phantasyfictionist - @themotherofhorses - @sapphire-writes
For AKOTSK: @pacificheights - @targaryenwife - @sansaorgana
I'm also a writer myself in case you want to check my masterlist out, I've posted both HotD & AKOTSK stories ♡
sorry for the late reply but THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
shout out to these fellas, I've followed everyone!
Thank you @sylasthegrim !!! So many talented writers here
I feel called out. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 But I want to try being as accurate as possible.
s3 leaks about aemond and alicent said huh?
His Handmaid's Tales [REWRITTEN]
Chapter Seven | Wherein Misery Enjoys a Company
Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
Summary:
By the Hour of the Bat, the ribbon had not come. Sweetling told herself this was relief.
Warnings: Explicit sexual content (titty sucking & fingering; nothing regarding vaginal sex, we're building up to that).
WC: 9.3k (I think).
Notes: Smut. The bane of my existence. I'm not good at smut, particularly smut styled in an ASOIAF/medieval period. It's beyond difficult to make it work, because saying "—sheathe thy veiny sword between mine scalding loins" is just . . . not hot.
Posted first on my AO3.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
By the Hour of the Bat, the ribbon had not come.
Sweetling told herself this was relief.
She lay on her narrow pallet in the little chamber she shared with two other serving women, listening to rain skitter against the shutters and Bessa snore softly from the far bed. The air smelled of damp wool, lavender soap, and the onion broth someone had eaten too quickly before sleep. Her hands rested folded atop her blanket like a corpse’s.
The ribbon lay beneath her pillow.
She had hidden it there after supper. Then taken it out. Then hidden it in her sleeve. Then in the small pocket of her spare apron. Then beneath the pillow again, because apparently she had become the sort of girl who could not be trusted with cloth.
It had not come because he had not sent it.
Good, she thought.
Then: coward.
Then, horrified at herself: ungrateful fool.
He was doing what he had promised. He was letting her choose. He was not pressing. Not summoning. Not sending a seal that would force Alicent’s hand and hers together. Not making a spectacle of restraint so that she might praise him for it.
He was behaving honorably.
Sweetling turned onto her side and stared at the dark.
Honor, she decided, was extremely inconvenient.
Bessa snorted in her sleep and rolled over.
From the pallet nearest the door, an older maid muttered something about goats.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
Aemond’s mouth waited there.
She opened them.
“No,” she whispered into the dark.
Bessa snored.
Sweetling slid one hand beneath the pillow and closed her fingers around the ribbon.
It was cool at first. Then warmed quickly.
A choice.
That was the trouble. Choices were heavier than commands. A command could be obeyed while one kept some little injured place within blameless. A choice belonged to the chooser. It could not be set down later at a prince’s feet, or a queen’s, or a gods’. If she went to him, she would be going because she wished to. Not because of duty and not because of fear. But because she wanted the danger badly enough to name it.
Sweetling lay very still for a second more, then she sat up.
The room remained dark. Bessa breathed on. The older maid muttered again. Rain kept its counsel.
Sweetling slipped from bed and drew on her plain robe over her shift. Her feet found cold stone, and she stood for a moment with the ribbon clutched in one hand and her own heartbeat making war in her throat. Before, she told herself. Decide before you leave the room. She looked at the door.
“I choose,” she whispered.
No one heard.
That was just as well.
Sweetling tucked the ribbon into her sleeve and stepped into the corridor.
She did not go to Prince Aemond’s chambers.
Not yet.
First, she went to the linen room, because even foolishness required order. She lit one small lamp. She took up a basket and placed within it two clean cloths, a needle case, black thread, a pot of salve, and one of the prince’s shirts with a loose tie she had deliberately not finished after supper because some new, sly part of her had apparently learned strategy from dragons.
Then she stood in the warm little pool of lamplight and waited.
A corridor away, footsteps passed.
A guard coughed.
The castle breathed.
Sweetling took the ribbon from her sleeve and laid it atop the folded shirt.
Not sent by him. Sent by her. A warning—a question—a confession in cloth. She lifted the basket. By the time she reached the turn before his apartments, her courage had become a thin, bright thing, liable to snap. The guard outside Aemond’s door straightened when Sweetling stopped before him.
“The prince did not summon you,” he said.
“No.”
His eyes dropped to the basket. Then to her face.
She hated him for seeing the heat there.
“I bring mending,” she said.
“At this hour?”
“Yes.”
The guard’s mouth twitched.
Sweetling lifted her chin by a fraction. “You may announce me, or you may explain to Prince Aemond on the morrow why you turned away his handmaid with his linen unfinished.”
The guard stared. Then, very wisely, he knocked.
Aemond’s voice came from within. “What?”
The guard opened the door only enough to speak through. “My prince. Your handmaid.”
Silence.
Sweetling’s grip tightened on the basket.
Then Aemond said, “Send her in.”
The guard stepped aside, and Sweetling crossed the threshold.
Aemond stood by the desk, one hand braced on its edge, a letter open beneath his palm. His hair was loose. He wore no outer tunic, only a dark shirt unlaced at the throat and black breeches tucked into boots he had not bothered to remove. Candlelight made him sharper. Lonelier.
His eye went first to her face.
Then to the basket. Then to the ribbon lying on top. The whole room seemed to still. Sweetling shut the door behind her. Aemond did not move.
“You were not summoned,” he said.
“No.”
“You were told the risk.”
“Yes.”
His gaze pinned her. “And yet.”
Sweetling crossed the room on legs that felt much too mortal for what she asked of them. She set the basket on his desk, careful not to disturb the letter beneath his hand. Then she picked up the ribbon and held it out.
Aemond looked at it.
He did not take it.
“You send my own warning back to me?” he asked.
Her pulse beat everywhere. “No.”
“What, then?”
Sweetling swallowed.
Her mouth had gone dry. Of course it had. All her grand courage had carried her to the edge of speech and then abandoned her there like a faithless knight.
Aemond waited.
He could be patient when cruelty would have been easier. She wished he would stop proving that. It made everything worse.
“I choose the risk,” she said. “Again. I shall continue to choose the risk, again and again.”
Aemond’s face changed, enough that she noticed it. He came around the desk slowly, knuckles dragging across the wood. “Do not say that because you think I wish to hear it.”
“You do wish to hear it.”
His mouth tightened.
Sweetling held the ribbon between them. “But that is not why I said it.”
He stopped before her. “Why, then?”
Because I wanted to know whether you would let me come to you.
Because I wanted you to know I could.
Because all day I have been praying for gentleness and thinking of your hands.
Because I am frightened, and I came anyway.
She said, “Because I wanted to.”
Aemond closed his eye. Only for a moment. When he opened it, the hunger there had gone quiet. He took the ribbon from her hand and set it on the desk.
“Then we begin again,” he said, and then he kissed her as if he had been starving in silence.
There was no sweetness at first, no shy fumbling courtship such as girls whispered about over laundry tubs when the older women had gone. Sweetness came later in songs, polished clean by singers who had never stood in a prince’s chamber after midnight with a ribbon hidden in their sleeve and the door shut soft behind them. This was hunger made careful. This was a hand at her waist that could have bruised, and did not. This was his mouth taking hers with such deliberate restraint that Sweetling understood, with a sudden bright terror, that gentleness was not the opposite of danger. Sometimes it was danger held by the throat.
She had stepped into his hand, and he had taken that as an answer enough to begin, but not an answer enough to forget.
Even as he kissed her, even as his fingers tightened through the plain wool of her robe and drew her nearer until her basket pressed awkwardly against the edge of the desk, he kept a measured space between their bodies, no more than a breath, no less than a warning. Sweetling felt that space more keenly than she would have felt his weight. It invited. It asked. It made her choose again with every inch.
Her hands found his sleeves. Black cloth, warm beneath her palms. He wore no rings tonight, no jeweled ornament, nothing but the severe fastening at his cuffs and the leather belt at his waist. Somehow, that plainness made him worse. Less prince, more man. Less court, more body. Aemond Targaryen with his hair unbound and falling against her cheek, with his breath catching when she did not pull away, with his mouth hot and exacting and already learning the shape of hers.
He broke the kiss before she did.
Sweetling had not known she was clinging until his mouth was gone, and her fingers tightened as if to call it back.
Aemond looked down at her hands, then up at her face.
“You came here,” he said.
Her lips felt swollen. “Yes.”
“Not summoned.”
“No.”
“With that.” His gaze flicked to the ribbon lying on the desk where he had set it, dark against pale parchment. “And with mending.”
She remembered the basket then. The shirt inside. The needle case. The little coward’s excuse she had carried with her so she could pretend to herself that she had not crossed half the sleeping Keep because she wanted to be kissed again.
Her cheeks heated.
Aemond saw, of course. His eye sharpened with that cool, unbearable pleasure he took in every honest betrayal of her face.
“Were you going to mend my shirt?” he asked.
“If it needed mending.”
“It does not.”
“I thought it might.”
“You lie poorly after being kissed.”
Sweetling lowered her gaze, but he caught her chin before it could fall too far. His fingers were firm beneath it, not painful, merely refusing her escape.
“No,” he said. “You do not get to hide from the answer and enjoy the question.”
That made her breath catch, which was answer enough to darken his gaze.
Aemond bent, not to kiss her mouth this time, but the corner of it. Then beneath it. Then the place where her jaw softened toward her throat. The kisses were not hurried; he put them down one by one, as if each had a use and he meant to discover it. Sweetling stood very still under them, eyes half-lidded, fingers gathering black cloth at his sides. When his mouth found the pulse beneath her ear, her breath escaped her in a small sound she could not call back.
He stopped.
Not withdrew. Stopped.
His mouth remained against her skin. She felt the stillness of him before she understood it: the sudden lock of his shoulders, the halt of his breath, the hand at her waist gone fixed, as if he had taken himself by force and held.
Sweetling opened her eyes.
“Aemond?”
He lifted his head just enough to look at her. The candlelight made a blade of his cheek, a shadow of his scar, a dark pool of his remaining eye. His mouth was parted. Not much. Enough.
“Say it again,” he said.
She swallowed. “Aemond.”
The hand at her waist flexed once.
“Again.”
“Aemond.”
He kissed her then with something rougher in him, though still not careless. It was not the controlled lesson of the sept, nor the restrained answer at the threshold. It was hotter, deeper, his tongue pressing into her mouth as if patience had thinned and the taste of her had become an argument against every rule he had set himself. Sweetling answered without meaning to. Her mouth opened for him. Her hands slid from his sleeves to his shoulders, and when she rose onto her toes, chasing him, Aemond made a low sound against her lips.
That sound ruined more of her than any touch had.
It was not princely. Not composed. Not measured. A breath of want, caught too late.
Sweetling pressed closer.
This time, he let her.
The space between them disappeared. Her body met his through wool and linen and black cloth, softness against hard line, trembling against restraint. He was warm. Warmer than she expected. She had thought dragons might feel like fire, but he felt like a man who had trained until heat lived in his blood and then stood too long alone with it. His chest rose hard against hers. His belt brushed her stomach. One of his thighs came between the folds of her robe, not forcing, only there, and the pressure of it made her fingers dig into his shoulders.
Aemond broke the kiss with a quiet curse in High Valyrian.
She did not know the word, but she understood its shape.
“Sweetling,” he said, and it was nearly a warning.
“Yes?”
His mouth twitched, though there was no amusement in it now. “Do not answer me so sweetly when you know what you do.”
“I do not know.”
That was true enough to make him still.
Her face burned as she forced herself to meet his eye. “Not as much as you think.”
Aemond looked at her for a long moment, and the hunger in him changed again. It did not lessen. Gods, no. It deepened, became heavier, more dangerous because it had found tenderness and did not know whether to devour it or kneel before it.
“You came to my chamber at night,” he said.
“I did.”
“You brought my ribbon back.”
“Yes.”
“You told me you chose the risk.”
“Yes.”
“And still you would have me believe you innocent?”
“No,” she whispered. “Only not practiced.”
His hand rose to her face. The backs of his fingers touched her cheek, then turned, knuckles brushing down the side of her throat. The path was slow enough that she felt every place before and after it, each inch of skin waiting its turn. He reached the tie of her robe and stopped.
“Then we will practice honesty first.”
Her pulse beat hard against his hand. “Honesty?”
“If you want my mouth,” Aemond said, voice low, “you will say so. If you want my hands, you will say so. If you want me to stop, you will say that too. Not with frightened eyes. Not with silence. With words.”
Sweetling’s throat tightened. A fine thing, words. Useful things, in theory. She had spent a life learning which words to swallow, which to soften, which to bury entirely. The Red Keep had taught her that speech was dangerous, that a handmaid survived by becoming a shadow with hands. And now here was the prince, the most dangerous man in the room, demanding that she stand in the candlelight and name what she wanted of him.
It felt obscene before she had even spoken.
Aemond’s thumb brushed the knot of her robe. “Do you want my mouth again?”
Her lips parted. No sound came.
His gaze did not leave hers.
“Sweetling.”
“Yes,” she managed.
“Where?”
The word went through her like a spark dropped into dry rushes. Her hands tightened where they rested against him. She could have said on my mouth. That was safe. True. Already known. But his thumb was still at her throat, and his body was still against hers, and the want in her had become a creature with claws.
“My neck,” she whispered.
Aemond’s eye darkened.
He did not smile. That would have been easier to bear. Instead, he inclined his head as if she had answered correctly in some private lesson and bent to her throat.
The first kiss was soft enough to make her ache.
Then his lips parted.
The wet heat of his mouth closed over the place she had offered, and Sweetling’s head tipped back before she could stop it. He kissed her throat, then sucked lightly, enough to pull a gasp from her, enough to make her fingers slide up into his hair without asking. He allowed it. More than allowed it; she felt his breath change when her fingers tightened in the pale strands. Aemond’s hand came up behind her neck, supporting, guiding, holding her exactly where he wanted her while his mouth moved down to the hollow above her collarbone.
Her robe had loosened. She did not know whether by his hand or hers. The cord hung slack, the wool gaping enough that cold air touched the thin shift beneath. Aemond’s mouth paused at the edge of exposed skin.
“Hands?” he asked.
It took her a moment to understand.
Then the understanding nearly undid her.
He was asking.
Again.
Not because he did not want. She could feel the want in him, against her, hard and unmistakable. Not because he was gentle by nature, as his mother had said, he was not cruel by nature, both women speaking as if nature were a thing that mattered once power entered the room. He asked because he had chosen to make himself ask, and the effort of it showed in the set of his jaw.
Sweetling’s fingers trembled in his hair.
“Yes,” she said. “Your hands.”
“Where?”
Her shame rose up hot and useless.
Aemond lifted his head. “You came all this way to become shy?”
That should have angered her. It did, a little. Enough to give her spine back.
“My waist,” she said.
His hands went there at once, fitting over her through the robe, large and warm and sure. A simple touch. Almost proper, if one were blind and charitable. But there was nothing proper in the way he drew her closer, nothing courtly in the way his thumbs moved inward, finding the curve beneath her ribs, measuring the smallness of her against the span of his hands. Sweetling’s breath shook. Aemond watched it happen, then bent and kissed her again, as if her reaction had pleased him past patience.
The kiss turned hungry quickly.
This time, when he backed her toward the desk, she went with him. Parchment crinkled beneath the basket. A letter slid to the floor, and neither of them looked at it. Aemond’s hands remained at her waist until the edge of the desk met the backs of her thighs, then one hand shifted, palm pressing flat beside her hip as he leaned over her. The other slid up, not to her breast, not yet, but to the open edge of her robe.
“May I?”
The words were quiet. Roughened.
Sweetling’s heart knocked once, hard.
“Yes.”
Aemond drew the robe open.
Only that.
Only wool parting from wool, the plain garment falling wider over the desk behind her, leaving her in the thin shift she had worn beneath. Yet Sweetling felt more naked in that moment than if he had stripped her bare. Candlelight passed through the linen where it pulled over her breasts and waist. She saw his gaze move over her, not greedily, not at first, but with terrible concentration, as if he meant to remember the sight correctly.
Then greed came.
She saw it enter him.
His eye lifted to hers, almost accusing. “You wear this beneath your robe?”
“It is only a shift.”
“It is nearly nothing.”
“It is what I sleep in.”
Aemond’s gaze dropped again. “I know.”
The answer was too quick, too dark. Sweetling’s breath caught.
He had imagined it, then.
The thought of him alone in this chamber, severe and composed before others, imagining her in thin linen and undone braids, sent a shameful little heat through her belly. Aemond saw that too. His mouth parted faintly.
“What is that look?” he asked.
She shook her head.
His hand caught her jaw, not hard, but with enough command to halt the lie before it formed. “Words.”
“You thought of me,” she said, barely audible.
The pad of his thumb touched the corner of her mouth. “Often.”
No embroidery. No denial. Often.
Sweetling felt the room tilt.
“And how did my prince think of me?” she asked before she could lose her courage.
Aemond went utterly still.
For one heartbeat, she thought she had gone too far. Then his thumb moved over her lower lip, dragging it down a fraction, and his eye fixed on the small parting of her mouth with such heat that her knees would have weakened had the desk not been behind her.
“Do not ask questions you are not prepared to have answered.”
“I am trying to learn.”
His gaze snapped back to hers.
Ah, that pleased him.
It was there and gone, a spark beneath black water.
Aemond lowered his mouth to her ear. “I thought of you on your knees.”
Her breath stopped.
“Not like that,” he murmured, and now there was a trace of cruelty in his softness, not enough to wound, enough to make her feel the blade. “Not yet. I thought of you kneeling to mend a cuff. Kneeling to gather fallen parchment. Kneeling because servants kneel when told, and every fool in this castle thinks obedience is the same as surrender.”
His hand slid from her jaw to her throat, thumb resting just beneath her chin.
“I thought of how often you lower your eyes when you wish to look. How carefully you hold your tongue when you wish to answer. How still you make yourself when fear passes through you, as if stillness makes you safe.” His mouth brushed her ear. “And then I thought of making you less still.”
Sweetling’s hand closed around his sleeve.
Aemond kissed the side of her neck. “There. That was the thought.”
“You are cruel,” she whispered.
His mouth paused.
“Sometimes.”
The honesty of it chilled and warmed her both.
“Are you cruel now?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
His answer came against her skin.
“Hungry.”
His hand moved at last to her breast.
Over the shift first, palm settling with firm, almost reverent pressure. Sweetling gasped. Her body arched before she could command it otherwise, and Aemond caught the movement with his mouth at her throat, sucking once, harder than before. The ache that answered between her thighs shocked her into silence. She had known wanting in little ways, in flushed cheeks and restless nights, in the memory of kisses that made her press her knees together beneath blankets.
This was different. This was want with teeth.
Aemond’s thumb found the shape of her nipple through the linen.
Sweetling made a sound she had never heard from herself.
His hand stilled.
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Fear?”
She swallowed. “Some.”
His eye lifted. “Enough to stop?”
“No.”
The word came fast. Too fast. She blushed, and his mouth curved against her skin.
“And want?” he asked.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
His thumb moved again, slow over the stiffened peak.
“Yes.”
Aemond kissed her with a groan caught low in his throat. The sound was almost angry. His hand closed more fully over her breast, kneading through the linen, testing, learning. He was careful at first, maddeningly so, until she arched into his palm and his control slipped enough for his fingers to tighten. The sharper pressure sent heat racing through her. She clutched at him and heard herself whisper his name.
That did something to him.
His mouth dragged from hers to her jaw, then down. He bent, and for one dizzying moment, Sweetling did not understand what he meant to do until his lips closed over her breast through the shift.
She cried out softly.
The linen dampened under his mouth. Heat, pressure, the scrape of teeth barely there. Aemond sucked her through the thin fabric, one hand braced at her back to keep her from slipping off the desk, the other holding her breast to his mouth. Sweetling’s fingers twisted in his hair. Her head fell back. The chamber blurred to candlelight and rain and the obscene wet warmth of his mouth pulling at her like he meant to draw the soul out through her skin.
Aemond lifted his head only far enough to look at her.
Her hand remained tangled in his hair, fingers gone tense where they had caught and held him to her. The linen clung wetly to the shape of her, transparent where his mouth had worked it, and beneath the damp cloth her nipple stood hard and dark against the fabric. Sweetling’s eyes were unfocused, her lips parted, her fingers still twisted deep in his hair as though she had forgotten she could let go.
He looked at her hand first.
Then at her mouth.
He had had his mouth between her legs the night before.
“Sweetling,” he said, and her name came low, roughened against the edge of his restraint.
She swallowed. “Aemond.”
He had already made her cry out into the storm. He had already learned how she broke and how she trembled after, how quickly shame rose behind pleasure and how fiercely she tried to gather herself back into modesty once it was done. This was not the first opening of some forbidden gate. That gate had already yielded to him, and gods help them both, she had walked through it willingly. Tonight felt different because of that. Less discovery, more return.
Less accident . . . more answer.
“You pull harder when you forget to be ashamed,” he said.
Sweetling’s blush came at once, warm and furious, spreading from throat to cheek. “I did not mean—”
He bent again, but not to her breast this time. His mouth found the other through the thin linen, slow and possessive, and Sweetling’s head tipped back with a little helpless sound she tried too late to bite down.
Aemond’s hand slid behind her, broad palm braced against the small of her back to hold her where he wanted her. He did not rush—that, somehow, was worse. He sucked her through the fabric with lingering attention, dragged his tongue over the stiffened peak until her nails scraped lightly at his scalp, then caught her gently with his teeth and made her gasp his name again.
“There,” he murmured against her. “That one.”
“What?”
“The sound.” His mouth moved to the damp edge of her shift, pushing it aside with the bridge of his nose rather than his hands, as though he meant to keep the act slow enough for her to stop him if she wished. “You make it when you forget to be ashamed.”
Her face burned hot. “I do not.”
Aemond lifted his head.
The look he gave her was flatly disbelieving, and somehow that almost made her laugh. Almost. It died before it could become sound, smothered by the heat in his gaze.
“You are a poor liar after I’ve had my mouth on you,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep proving it.”
His hand slid from her waist to her thigh, gathering the thin shift upward by inches. He did not duck his head between her legs as he had the night before. He did not lower himself to his knees and feast until she came apart over his tongue, though the memory of it moved between them like a third presence in the room. She felt it in the way his eye darkened when her knees parted around him, in the way his mouth, still wet from her breast, curved with private knowledge.
“Do you expect my mouth to be there again?” he asked.
The wickedness of it stole the breath from her.
Sweetling’s gaze flew to his. “Aemond.”
“Is that yes or rebuke?”
“It is—” She swallowed, dignity in ruins. “It is your name.”
His expression sharpened, pleased despite himself. “So it is.”
His thumb traced the inside of her knee. Not higher. Not yet. The restraint of it was cruel because it was deliberate, because she could see how easily he might have moved differently and chose not to. He watched the place where his hand rested against her bare skin, then looked back at her face.
“I remember how you tasted,” he said quietly.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
“No,” he said.
They opened at once.
“There. That is better.” His thumb slid higher, slow as sin. “You do not get to hide from what you already gave me.”
“I gave?” she whispered.
His eye lifted. “Did you not?”
The question struck softer than a command and deeper than a kiss. The night before, he had asked. Again and again, in that severe way of his, as if words could make a wall strong enough to keep both of them from ruin. He had made her say what she wanted, made her answer fear and want separately, made her understand that surrender and permission were not the same thing.
Sweetling’s throat tightened. “I did.”
Aemond’s hand stilled on her thigh.
His eye searched her face. He brought her hand back to his jaw and held it there, as if the touch were something he had decided to endure and wanted more of in the same breath.
So she touched him.
Only that.
Only her fingers against his cheek, the slight rasp of new-shaved skin beneath her fingertips, the hard set of his mouth easing by a fraction he would have denied if she named it. He looked almost angry with the tenderness of it. Sweetling understood. Tenderness was not safe for either of them. It stripped more cleanly than desire. Desire could be called weakness, appetite, sin; tenderness asked what a person might become if they were held and not used.
Aemond turned his face enough to press his mouth to her palm.
Her heart clenched.
Then his teeth closed lightly against the tender heel of her hand. The softness vanished into heat. For a breath, the hunger in him changed shape. It did not lessen. It became more dangerous, more focused, as though the truth had given him something to hold and something to break himself against.
He kissed her then, not gently, not at first. His mouth took hers with the heat he had left on her breast, and Sweetling tasted rain, candle smoke, and the faint salt of his skin. She opened for him because she wanted to, because she had learned the shape of his kiss and wanted it deeper. His tongue slid against hers; his hand tightened at her thigh; her body, traitorous and honest, rolled toward him.
Aemond groaned.
It was low. Almost swallowed. But she heard it, and hearing it made her bold.
Her hands left his hair and lowered her hand to the front of his tunic, fingers brushing the dark cloth where the fastenings sat. “Last night, you stopped.”
“Yes.”
“You did not let me touch you long.”
Aemond’s jaw flexed.
“You said it would be another night.”
“I did.”
“And is this another night?”
The room seemed to still.
Rain whispered at the shutters. The candlelight bent in the draft. Beneath her fingers, his breath went shallow and controlled, each rise of his chest too measured to be natural. Sweetling’s own courage faltered beneath the weight of his stare, but she did not take the question back. It had cost too much to ask.
Aemond leaned closer, one hand braced beside her hip on the desk. “Do you know what you are asking?”
“No,” she said, because he had taught her better than lying. “Not wholly.”
His eye darkened with something more dangerous than desire.
“Then ask what you mean,” he said.
Sweetling swallowed.
Her hand slid lower, not to his belt yet, only to the place where his tunic ended, and the leather began. She could feel the heat of him even through the cloth. Feel how still he had made himself. The control in him was frightening. The wanting beneath it more so.
“I want to touch you,” she said.
Aemond’s mouth parted slightly.
For one breath, nothing happened. Then he closed his eye, just once, as if gathering the words inside him before they could come out as a command rather than an answer.
“When you touched me last night,” he said, “you did it because I guided you.”
“Yes.”
“If you touch me tonight, it will be because you choose to.”
“I know.”
“No.” His eye opened. “You know the words. That is not the same.”
Sweetling’s temper sparked, small and bright beneath the heat in her face. “Then teach me the difference, if you are so determined to lecture me half-naked on your desk.”
Silence.
Then Aemond laughed.
It was quiet, low, gone almost as soon as it came, but it was real. The sound caught Sweetling so wholly off guard that her own mouth softened into an answering smile before she could stop it. Aemond looked at that smile as if it were the most inconvenient thing in Westeros.
“You will be the death of someone,” he said.
“Hopefully not me.”
His amusement faded, but not into coldness. “No. Not you.”
The promise was too grim to be sweet. Still, it settled warm somewhere beneath her ribs.
He took her hand, the same hand that had hovered uncertainly at his belt, and placed it flat over the leather buckle. Sweetling stared at her fingers there.
Aemond did not help this time.
The difference was immediate. Last night, he had guided her through the first shock of it, taken her wrist, and shown her the shape, movement, and pressure that pleased him. Tonight, he made her reach for knowledge herself. It was cruel in the way honesty could be cruel. It was also exactly what she had asked for.
Her fingers worked the buckle loose. Slowly. Too slowly, perhaps, because Aemond’s breath grew rougher above her. The leather came free, then the ties beneath. Her hands trembled once at the threshold of it, and Aemond’s gaze snapped to her face.
“Stop there if you wish.”
The words made her look up.
He meant it. Again, curse him; he meant it. His pride hated the offer. His body hated it more . . . yet he gave it.
Sweetling shook her head.
His eye narrowed.
She remembered. “I do not wish to stop.”
“Good.”
The word sounded almost pained.
She drew him free with less surprise than last night but no less awe. The sight of his cock still stole the sense from her for a moment—the hard, flushed length of him, heavy in her palm, hot against her skin. He was pale in thickness and a bit darker at the tip, a soft pink that nearly matched her lips. Aemond watched her face so intently she felt the flush spread from her cheeks down her throat to where her shift hung loose and damp from his mouth.
“You are warm,” she said foolishly.
His mouth twitched. “Was I meant to be stone?”
“No,” she whispered. “Only you seem it sometimes.”
“That is because stone is rarely asked what it wants.”
The words came too quietly. Too bare.
Sweetling looked up.
Aemond seemed to regret them at once. His face hardened, the prince returning like armor drawn over skin, but she had heard the man beneath. She had felt his heart. She leaned forward and kissed the place beneath her palm.
Aemond’s breath caught.
Not much.
Enough.
His hand moved to the back of her neck with dangerous speed, not hurting her, but holding her there as if the kiss had struck somewhere he did not know how to defend. Sweetling pressed another to his chest, then another, her mouth warm against him through the open tunic. She did not know what she was doing. Not truly. But she knew what he had done to her: the deliberate learning of her body, the way he had followed every breath and tremor until she could no longer pretend she was not being known. Perhaps this was the same. Perhaps it could be.
Aemond’s fingers tightened in her hair.
“Sweetling.”
She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, mouth still close to his skin.
The sight seemed to undo something in him.
He bent and kissed her, hard enough that she had to brace one hand behind herself on the desk. His other hand returned to her breast, but no longer content with damp linen. He tugged at the neckline of her shift until the fabric slipped low, baring her properly to candlelight.
Sweetling sucked in a breath and almost covered herself.
Aemond caught both her wrists in one hand.
“No.”
The word was firm, but not angry. A command, yes, but one that waited on her face. His gaze moved down to her bare breasts, and this time there was nothing between his mouth and her. Nothing to soften the sight of his hunger. Nothing to save her from the way he looked at her, as if the court, the crown, the gods, the rain, all of it had become less real than the small, trembling lift of her chest.
“You are lovely,” he said.
It sounded almost resentful.
Sweetling’s eyes stung. “You say it as though it displeases you.”
“It does.”
That surprised a laugh out of her, breathless and shy. “Why?”
“Because I have enough trouble.”
Then his mouth closed over her bare breast.
The laugh broke apart into a moan.
Aemond’s hand released her wrists so he could grip her waist, holding her steady as his tongue circled the stiffened peak. The first touch was wet and hot and direct enough that her spine arched. He sucked slowly, then harder, drawing at her until pleasure pulled tight from her breast to the deep ache between her thighs. His teeth scraped with just enough edge to make her gasp his name, and when she did, he answered with a low sound against her skin that she felt more than heard.
He did not rush.
That was the cruelty of him—the devotion of him. He gave the same attention to her breasts that he had given to the rest of her the previous night, as if no part of her body deserved to be passed over simply because he had already learned another. He tasted one nipple until it was swollen and wet from his mouth, then crossed to the other with maddening patience, his hand kneading what his lips had left behind. Sweetling’s shift sat bunched beneath her breasts, her robe open around her, her thighs parted around the hard line of his body. She had never felt so exposed. She had never felt so held.
Her hands went to his shoulders.
This time, she did not ask.
Aemond’s mouth curved against her breast.
“Good,” he murmured.
The praise—if praise it was—settled low and hot inside her. She hated how badly she liked it; hated worse that he knew.
His hand slid beneath her shift again, over her hip, across the soft lower curve of her belly. Sweetling’s breath quickened before he reached where she wanted him. Aemond paused.
“Already?” he asked.
“You are being cruel.”
“I have barely touched you.”
“You know what you are doing.”
That pleased him.
Gods help her, it pleased him.
His fingers slipped beneath the edge of her smallclothes and found her wet.
They both went still.
Aemond shut his eye for one brief moment, as if some disciplined part of him needed darkness to survive the discovery. Sweetling watched his face while his fingers rested against her, not moving yet, only feeling the slick heat she could not hide. The night before, she might have died of shame beneath such attention. Tonight, shame still burned, but it no longer stood alone.
She wanted him to know.
That was the terrible part.
Aemond opened his eye. “You are not frightened of this now.”
“I am frightened.”
“Not of my hand.”
Her lips parted.
No answer came.
He was right.
The fear lived elsewhere now: in the door; in the whispers; in the queen’s quiet gaze, Rylene’s warnings, and Jeyne’s mean little smile.
Not here. Not exactly. Not with his hand between her thighs and his mouth still warm from her breast.
“No,” she admitted.
His expression shifted. Hunger, satisfaction, and something like wonder made darker by pride.
“No,” he repeated.
His fingers moved.
Sweetling bowed forward with a broken breath, forehead nearly touching his shoulder.
He stroked her slowly at first, parting her with the kind of care that made the intimacy worse. He knew her now. He knew what made her hips lift, knew where to press, knew that circling too softly made her impatient and circling too firmly made her clutch at him with both hands. He knew because he had learned it from her body the night before, and now he used that knowledge without the clumsiness of first discovery.
She made room for him.
That, too, he noticed.
His mouth brushed her temple. “There she is.”
The words were soft, almost fond, and filthy for all that.
Sweetling turned her face into his shoulder. “Do not say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“As though you have been looking for her.”
His fingers slowed.
For a moment, only rain spoke.
Then Aemond said, “I have.”
The answer entered her more deeply than his touch.
She lifted her head. His face was close, too close for either of them to pretend. His eye moved over her features as if searching for the line between what she could bear and what he wanted to take. His fingers were still under her smallclothes, slick against her, but his attention had gone to her mouth.
“I thought of you today,” he said.
Sweetling’s breath caught. “When?”
His mouth curved faintly. “Often.”
“Doing what?”
The question came before shame could stop it.
Aemond’s eye darkened.
“You ask dangerous questions after midnight.”
“You answer them better after midnight.”
That earned her a look sharp enough to cut silk.
Then he kissed her, and while he kissed her, his fingers slid lower, one pressing slowly inside. Sweetling gasped into his mouth. Not surprise, not the way she had the night before. Recognition. Her body clenched around him as if welcoming a known trespass. Aemond felt it and groaned softly, his composure slipping again, just enough for her to feel powerful and endangered all at once.
He moved his finger inside her with slow, deep strokes, his thumb working above in the rhythm he had discovered before. Sweetling’s hands found his open tunic, pushing it wider, needing skin beneath her palms. He let her. More than let her. He shifted closer, giving her access to the hard plane of his chest, the lean cut of muscle beneath pale skin, the heat of him. She touched him clumsily, greedily, while his hand ruined her. His breath thickened when her nails dragged lightly over his ribs.
“You like that,” she whispered.
Aemond’s eye flashed to hers.
The answering pride in her own voice seemed to surprise them both.
His fingers withdrew almost fully, then pressed back in with a second alongside the first.
Sweetling’s pride vanished into a moan.
Aemond’s mouth found her breast again, sucking hard as his fingers worked inside her, and the room turned molten. Desk beneath her. Maps crushed under her palms. Rain at the windows. His hair against her skin. His hand was between her thighs. His mouth at her breast. Her own hands learning the shape of him with growing desperation. She was not new to pleasure now, but knowing did not make it smaller. Knowing made it worse because she could feel where he was leading her, and she still went willingly.
Her hips began to move with his hand.
Aemond lifted his head.
He watched.
The look on his face made her burn hotter than the touch itself. Not because he seemed amused. He did not. Not because he seemed gentle. He did not. He looked fiercely attentive, almost reverent in the most dangerous way, as if her pleasure were a thing he had summoned and now meant to master without breaking.
“Do not stop,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened. “I had not planned to.”
A laugh almost escaped her, but his thumb pressed more firmly and it became a whimper instead.
Aemond kissed her mouth, her jaw, the side of her throat. “That is it. Let me feel it.”
The words were too much. His voice was too close. Sweetling clutched at him, body tightening around his fingers, pleasure coiling low and bright. She knew the edge now, and knew the terrible swelling rush before it. Her thighs shook around his hand.
“Aemond.”
“I know.”
He did not take her maidenhead. He did not push toward what he had promised would not be tonight. Instead, he made the denial into another kind of torment. He touched her where she was already swollen and slick, pressed and circled and stroked until she shook against him, all while he thrust into her hand with harsh, controlled movements that grew less controlled each time she moaned. His mouth returned to her breasts, dragging the shift lower now, baring one to the candlelight so he could close his lips over her skin without linen between them.
Sweetling cried out.
Aemond’s free hand rose at once to cover her mouth, but his lips did not leave her breast. The double claim of it—his hand silencing her, his mouth drawing pleasure from her, his body straining into her touch—sent her nearly senseless. She tasted salt and skin against his palm. Her eyes stung, not with pain, not with sorrow, but with the intensity of being held in so many ways at once.
“Quiet,” he murmured against her breast.
She nodded, though both of them knew obedience would soon fail her.
His fingers moved faster.
Pleasure climbed in her again, familiar now and no less frightening for it. She knew the crest. Knew the bright, impossible edge of it. Last night he had pulled her over it with his mouth. Tonight he brought her there with one hand while the rest of him trembled for what he had not yet allowed himself to claim.
Sweetling’s hand moved desperately around him. She wanted to give him that same loss. Wanted to see his control break and know she had done it. Wanted, with a sudden fierceness that startled her, to be the reason Aemond Targaryen forgot himself.
His breath caught against her skin.
“Sweetling.”
The warning in her name made her pulse leap.
She tightened her grip as he had shown her last night, twisting on the upward stroke, thumb brushing the place that made his hips jerk harder into her hand.
Aemond groaned.
It was not loud. The storm outside might have swallowed it. But she felt it in his chest, in his mouth at her breast, in the sudden rough pressure of his hand between her thighs. That sound undid her. Pleasure broke hard and sudden, wringing a muffled cry as her body tightened beneath his fingers. Aemond kissed the sound from her mouth, then dragged his lips back down to the breast he had dampened earlier, taking it again through the linen while his hand worked between her thighs. Sweetling nearly lost her grip on him.
His teeth grazed her, his tongue soothed the same place, and pleasure folded in on itself—his mouth at her breast, his fingers below, his hard length in her hand, all of it too much to keep separate.
Her release took him with it.
His head bowed against her shoulder. His hips drove once, twice into her hand, control shattering in tight, restrained pulses as he spilled over her fingers with a sound bitten nearly in half by pride. Sweetling held him through it, dazed and shaking, her cheek pressed to his hair, her own pleasure still moving through her in faint aftershocks.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Rain tapped at the window.
The candle guttered.
Parchment lay crushed beneath them, maps of kingdoms ruined by the weight of a handmaid’s hip and a prince’s poor restraint.
Aemond removed his hand from her mouth slowly.
Sweetling drew a breath that trembled on the way in.
He did not lift his head at once. That was the strangest part. He remained bowed against her, mouth near the bare curve of her breast, hair falling over her loosened robe, breathing as if the world required effort. Sweetling’s clean hand rose, hesitated, then settled on the back of his head.
He went still.
She stroked his hair once.
“Aemond?”
“Do not,” he said.
Her hand froze. “Do not what?”
His voice came low against her skin. “Make it gentle yet.”
The words hurt in a place she could not name.
Not because he rejected gentleness. Because he recognized it and feared what shape it might demand of him.
Sweetling resumed stroking his hair anyway.
Aemond said nothing.
After a moment, his hand closed around her wrist—not pulling her away, only holding her there.
Afterward, Aemond cleaned her fingers himself.
Sweetling protested at once, because there were limits to what a girl could survive with her dignity intact, and apparently having a prince kneel between her knees to tend to the evidence of his pleasure was very near one of them.
“I can do it,” she said, mortified.
“I know.”
He did not give her the cloth.
She sat on the edge of his desk with her shift pulled properly into place and her robe tied loosely enough to be a lie. Her hair was half fallen from its braid. Her mouth felt swollen again, though less from being taken by surprise than from being kissed too thoroughly for too long. Her knees still trembled whenever she shifted. Aemond stood before her with a damp cloth in hand, his own clothing restored with irritating efficiency, though his hair and breathing had betrayed him enough that she did not feel entirely conquered.
He took her hand.
The warm cloth passed over her palm, between her fingers, along each knuckle with the same grim care he gave wounds and weapons. He did not make a spectacle of it. That made it more intimate, not less. Sweetling watched his face as he worked. His expression was severe, almost distant, but the set of his mouth had softened in ways he likely did not know. Or knew and hated.
“You are thinking,” he said.
“I am often thinking.”
“Not always wisely.”
She almost smiled. “No.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “What?”
The question was too direct. She looked at their hands instead.
“Last night,” she said carefully, “afterward, I thought I would feel ruined.”
Aemond’s hand stilled around hers.
Sweetling felt the room tighten.
“And did you?” he asked.
“I felt frightened. And ashamed. And pleased.” She swallowed. “The pleased part frightened me most.”
His thumb moved once over her cleaned palm. “And now?”
She should have lied. Not because he would fail to catch it, but because honesty had begun to feel like undressing more thoroughly than desire had managed.
“Now I feel foolish,” she said.
Aemond’s face hardened.
Sweetling shook her head before he could speak. “Not because of you. Because I thought knowing what your mouth could do would make me less helpless to it.”
The corner of his mouth shifted.
Ah. There was that flicker of wickedness. He tried to hide it and failed poorly enough that, despite herself, Sweetling laughed under her breath.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “You find your helplessness amusing?”
“I find your pride amusing.”
“My pride?”
“You look pleased enough to start a war over it.”
“I have started no wars over your thighs.”
“Yet.”
The word escaped before she understood how bold it was.
Aemond went still.
Sweetling’s laughter vanished.
For half a heartbeat, she thought she had ruined the ease between them. Then his gaze dropped to her mouth, slow and dark, and she realized the danger was not anger.
“No,” he said softly. “Not yet.”
The heat that went through her was immediate and devastating.
He finished cleaning her hand, then set the cloth aside with more force than necessary. That, too, pleased her. Aemond Targaryen, undone by a handmaid saying one foolish word. She would have liked to keep that knowledge folded somewhere secret, pressed between the pages of herself like a stolen flower.
His hand came to her chin, tipping her face up.
“You grow bold after midnight,” he said.
“You told me you disliked half-courage.”
“I did.”
“I am trying to be obedient.”
His mouth curved.
“Liar.”
This time, the word was almost fond.
Sweetling did not know what to do with almost fond. Fondness seemed far more dangerous than lust. Lust had at least been named in warnings. Fondness came quietly, wearing no heraldry, and set itself beside a girl before she realized there was room for it.
Aemond seemed to sense the same danger, for he stepped back and turned toward the basin.
“You will return by the west stair,” he said. “Not the lower passage.”
Sweetling gathered the edges of her robe, pulling herself back into order piece by piece. “You said that last night.”
“And you remembered?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She slid from the desk, and her knees nearly betrayed her. Aemond caught her elbow at once.
They both looked down at his hand.
It should not have mattered after everything else. Yet this touch was different. Public enough in shape to be innocent, private enough in timing to undo her.
“I can walk,” she said.
“I did not ask whether you could.”
“No. You merely grabbed me.”
“I kept you from falling.”
“I was not falling.”
“You were considering it.”
That startled another laugh from her, softer this time. He watched it in the way he watched things he meant to understand and disliked needing. His hand remained at her elbow.
“Aemond,” she said.
The name altered the room again.
He released her slowly.
Sweetling reached for the basket she had brought, only to find that it had been knocked half beneath the desk. The shirt inside remained unmended. The needle case had spilled open, black thread looping over the floor like some little shadow-snake. She stared at it.
Aemond followed her gaze.
“The mending,” she said.
His mouth twitched. “Yes. That grave purpose for which you came.”
“I did come with mending.”
“You came with an excuse.”
She bent quickly to gather the thread, because if she looked at him her face would show too much. “It was still mending.”
“You mended nothing.”
“That is not true.” She tucked the needle case into the basket with unnecessary care. “Your patience was in tatters.”
Aemond stared at her.
Then, impossibly, he laughed again. This one lasted even less than the first, but it warmed her all the same. It made him look almost startled at himself afterward, as if she had somehow stolen the sound from him rather than earned it.
Sweetling straightened with the basket in hand, her smile small and traitorous.
“Do not look so pleased,” he said.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
He sent her away with one final kiss.
The corridor beyond was cold enough to make her shiver. She walked as he had told her, west stair, Maegor’s tapestry, eyes lowered but not blind. No one stopped her. No one saw enough to matter. Beneath her sleeve, the ribbon brushed her pulse with every step.
By the time she reached her narrow bed, the castle had gone quiet in the strange way living beasts went quiet before dawn. She undressed without lighting a candle and slid beneath her blanket with shaking legs and a mouth still warm from his.
Bessa snored softly from the far pallet. The older maid near the door muttered in sleep. Sweetling lay on her back and stared into the dark. She had crossed into his chamber as a handmaid with a basket; she had returned as something else. Not beloved, maybe, and not safe. Not ruined, though the court would name her so if it knew.
Not wife, not whore, not lady, not lamb.
His, if she gave it. Hers, if she chose it.
Between those two truths, sleep came for her at last, dark and deep and full of dragons.
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The long hair era should be studied
he’s such a loser i wanna bring him home to meet my grandmother
